GO Design in government, the not-for-profit and social organizations

Speaker A I'll have a few more remarks on the not for profit, but Ruth will now introduce the session.

Speaker B Okay, well, thank you very much. This is a session, as you know, about global organization and design in government and the not for profit sector and the social sector. We have until three. We promise to quit precisely at three. We're going to talk for a little while as an intro. I'm going to give you a little bit of background, a little bit of context, and then we're going to have some presentations. We're going to have three. I'm going to give one first about the public sector. Then George is going to talk about the example when he was the secretary General of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Society. And then Bob McPhee, if he gets here in time, will talk about his experiences in the passport Office. Otherwise we will dragoon Ken or Bob to talk a bit about that experience and others and what you might want to think about as we go through these presentations. We'll allow questions related to each presentation, but then we'll allow a discussion period at the end. Think about whether there are themes that you hear in common, whether there are differences that you see, whether there are questions that arise when you think about them kind of as a group. And we'll come back to that and we'll talk about that in the question answer session. And you might want to think also about whether there should be some next steps, whether in fact for the public sector. And tomorrow, I guess you're going to talk about the not for profit sector. There are things that people who are interested in that stuff and how Ro applies to it might want to keep going in some sense. So that's how we're going to play out this afternoon. I want to talk a little bit about the background and the context. It hasn't been used extensively in the public sector, that's government or the not for profit sector, but it has been used in a variety of countries in a variety of ways. And the people who have been involved in those experiences would say it takes courage, it takes persistence, it takes patience. I want to give you some sense of how broad the application has been in these sectors, in countries and in levels of government. These are not experiences that I know very much about. These are simply experiences that I've learned about since I've been here. Actually. In the US. We had a presentation yesterday about the military in the UK. There's a hospital in London which was made into a profit center and used requisite organization to make it a profit center. It is now being used, I'm told, in the UK, around high flyer performance in the government. In Ireland, it was used in the public health field. In Canada, it's been used at the federal government level. I've got some experiences I'll tell you about in my little piece, but also the city of Toronto, where we are today, before there was regional amalgamation, so the city got bigger. They tried to use requisite organization to make the city, the smaller city, work better. It got overtaken by amalgamation, but it nevertheless was there. It's also been used in Canadian defense procurement, borrowing, I think, a bit on the experiences in the US. It's been used in South Africa, it's been used in Australia with the Australian Post Office, it's been used in the Singapore military, it's been used in New Zealand government, and I'm sure you would know more about that and what's going on. And it's been used in Argentina with the tax authority, with a private company. So in terms of the variety of countries, quite a number of them, in terms of the kinds of applications, I mean, it's funny, I hadn't thought about it until I came to this conference. For me, it was more around my world, and my world is very much around an organization. But the levels of work part was used to sort out levels of work for volunteers at a Los Angeles hospital and to deal with the conflict that arose between the staff and the volunteers around, stepping on each other's toes, apparently with a great deal of success. I simply had never thought about it that way. It was used in terms of levels of capability in the mental health authority in Wales. How do you improve the lot of the mentally retarded in that area? And it led to the development of, I think, five levels of mental retardation. So nobody had ever thought about levels of capability being susceptible to that kind of treatment. And that in turn, led to a fairly elaborate booklet that basically says what do you need to know if you're a parent, if you're an expert, if you're a caregiver to try and understand the level of retardation with which you're dealing in the people you're dealing with or the kids you're dealing with. And what would be the appropriate way to deal with them? And what would be the appropriate way to try and get them to feel satisfied? Get them to feel better about themselves? And so a very important piece of work, but quite kind of unrelated in a sense, to what we normally think of. It's been used in churches. I'm told the Church of Scotland. I'm told the Church of England. It's been used in community work in Aboriginal communities in Australia, in WIPA, which is on the York peninsula, the northeastern part of Australia. Now, Ken Craddock, who's here, and you can probably buttonhole if you need to, has put together a bibliography of all of the examples, all of the experiences from academics, from private sector, public sector, not for profit sector. There's 500 or so entries in this bibliography and it's on your website, on the global organization website. So if you want to know more about them. I can't tell you very much about what they actually consisted of. They're not my experiences, but they show the richness of what's gone on. So if you want to pursue something a bit more, there are many of the people who are here today who have some knowledge of some of these things. So with that as kind of context and background, I'll hand it back to Dwight.

Speaker A The main point, additional point that I wanted to make was to link it back to a lot of the discussions we've been hearing already and the examples that we have been receiving have been around the private sector where there is the measurement that drops right to the bottom line. I consult now primarily in the private sector, so I relate to that. But I have a lot of interest in the not for profit sector. My first career was with the Canadian Red Cross Society where I spent 20 years in a number of different staff positions and then working with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva. And George is going to be giving us an overview of a project there that was related to that. So while I focus on the private sector and my consulting, I do have a great interest in the not for profit sector. We do do some projects with not for profits and I volunteer and as that I'm chair of UNICEF Canada. So that's how I scratch my humanitarian itch that I gained from my first career. I think the bottom line though is that the same drivers that are driving the private sector are, when you think about requisite organization terms, are the same drivers that we're interested in in the public and the not for profit sector in terms of employee satisfaction, client satisfaction and improved effectiveness of our organizations. So if you're private sector you can measure the dollar bottom line on that in terms of increased profit or return on investment. In the not for profit and public sector, we're looking at how effectively and efficiently we're using either the donor dollars or the taxpayer dollars to do the work that we need to do so in applying these systems and I have seen it in the not for profit sector and you'll be seeing a case study on it. You do see the uptick that you can get in not for profit organizations as well.

Speaker C So that's it.

Speaker A For my general remark, I would now hand it over to you Ruth, for the first presentation.

Speaker B Okay. Dwight has promised me that he's going to keep us under the gun so that we don't talk excessively. I don't think I'm within kicking region, but he can kick Ken and Ken can kick me. So I will try and keep my remarks to about 15 minutes and that'll give us or maybe 20, that'll give us a bit of time for questions about what I'm going to say before we move on to george? Absolutely. Requisite organization in other sectors. That's what we're here to do. Why is it difficult? Well, as I said, it's been successfully used, but there are some important differences. Are these handouts?

Speaker A Oh, I'm sorry. The job.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker D Thank you.

Speaker B It thank you. He needs one of mine. 91 of his. There you are. That's great. Thank you. So, slide two. What am I going to talk about? It has been successfully used. I'll mention the examples that I personally have been involved in, but there are some important differences, I think, between the private sector and the other sectors. I think the concepts are adaptable. I think some of the challenges are exactly the same. May have different names, but they're the same. And I've learned a few things. I guess we always learn. We learn more from what doesn't work the way we thought than what does. But I have a lot of learnings that I've gotten, and they may prove quite useful. So successful in the federal government in Canada, I talked yesterday a bit about GST administration. In the department that I was in charge of, there was a huge expansion. The government decided that we were to implement a certain tax administration. There's a 30% increase in the overall size of the organization, almost 100% for the part of the organization that had to worry about this. And requisite organization theory helped to decide how to structure the organization, how many regional offices we needed, how many district offices we needed, because we were frankly growing in an 18 month period. Enormously. And I hadn't thought about it. In fact, I didn't know about requisite organization, but that's when I first stumbled across it, and it turned out to be very useful. Another example that I don't know, I wasn't involved in personally, but I know the person who was the person who was the deputy minister permanent secretary of citizenship and immigration when she arrived in that department, she discovered that she was expected to give really very good policy advice on immigration policy and citizenship policy to her minister. But she had no direct report who could give her any advice. And her predecessor, who happened to be what I would have called a policy wonk, didn't mind. He liked to give it himself. He loved this stuff. When he left and she arrived, her interest was much more in management. I mean, she was by no means an unintelligent person. It just wasn't her interest. Her interest was people, that kind of thing. And so I suggested that she use requisite organization theory to get a look at was there, in fact, a missing level of work? And if there was, which she suspected, how did she defend it to these people who had just gone through the trauma of four years of adjustment to not having somebody do that job? And it worked really well. The evidence supported her intuition, but it was objective scientific evidence. It wasn't know here comes another wave, another person. The third example is the PSC, the Public Service Commission, where I was in charge, and it's an organization that has part of the HR management levers of the government. And I wanted to bring around some change to the Public Service Commission and I thought requisite organization might be a good way to do it. And I had been appointed to a ten year term, which I thought was fairly sensible. The people couldn't avoid what I was trying to do by outweighing me, which is what you can do in government if you think your boss is not going to be around long. It didn't work. We can talk in questions about why it didn't work, but it didn't work. We also use requisite organization under my suggestion for Central Talent Pool Management, not high flyer identification, but to accelerate high flying potential people through the executive ranks. Because like most other public services, when we looked at the demographics, we had a big bulge of people who were in there around 50 coming up to 50. We had a great kind of nobody and we knew that those people were going to be taking retirement and we needed to bring the next generation or the next generation plus one up with as much experience in the five years we had left. So we introduced what's called Accelerated Ex Development Program aextp, and the other one is what's called pre qualified pool. It was a pool of vice presidents, executive vice presidents, from whom people who needed them, leaders who needed them, go to the pool and take anybody out. Instead, just choose somebody who had a kind of pre qualified stamp on their head, if you like. And so we used the method to manage the pool. It worked, I think. Excellently. Well, it did not survive. That's another interesting conversation about why. So sustainability was an issue, but it certainly was effective. There are some important differences in the public sector particularly and the not for profit sector for three reasons, and I'll talk about the first one and the last one. Three reasons. I think the foundations of the public sector are in motion. I'll tell you what I think that means in a minute. But if I'm right, then trying to you either have to reframe everything or you have to take little chunks, because if you try to do anything else, you're dead. It won't work. Second, I won't spend any time talking about this, but it's true. I think the vocabulary in the context matters. So if you're trying to persuade as a consultant to persuade people in the public sector or the not for profit sector to use requisite organization, you have to be able to talk the language a bit. You have to be able to understand and market a bit differently. And I think thirdly, and I will talk a bit about this, I think you have to understand the sector givens like there's some things that are just different. If you don't understand that and take it into account before you start, then I think the advice doesn't really register very well. What do I mean by the foundations being in motion? Well, and this is all from the perspective of any particular country. So I'm not kind of sitting on the globe looking at it or a piece of the globe. I'm sitting in any country at all and looking at the world and saying well, there's globalization, there's deep diversity in most countries. There's citizens who want to be in the loop, citizens who are not prepared just kind of sit back and just let others decide for them. All of that means that the steering of the society of the country is moving from government, which is big g, if you like, to small g, which is governance. And that has some things that go with it. With new public management, which swept governments, certainly western democracies, there was a notion that the private sector knows better than the public sector and so we had to bring more of their methods into improve our efficiency and effectiveness. There's a drift which you see in some countries to some extent from rights to needs. Partly it's fiscal, partly governments can't afford to provide everything to everybody, partly it doesn't work. And there's a drift from kind of treating everybody the same to subsidiarity, which is really a word that says you do what you have the best ability to do as a level of government or as a sector and a shift from centralization to decentralization. This been called things like frag migration or power leaking down and power leaking mean. I think that's all true and I think that makes so much of the foundation in motion that it causes problems in the voluntary sector. You're going to hear a really good global example from George So. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, from the perspective of a country, the role of the organized voluntary sector. In any country, any western democracy, is changing. There's a demand for greater accountability, there's a demand for greater capacity. The voluntary sector itself is saying listen, you listen to the private sector, you should be listening to us too. We think our sector has needs that you have to meet. Well, to do that they have to have the capability, the experience they have to have the skills to be able to intervene. There's more government offloading. Now, I don't know about other countries, but certainly in Canada, one of the ways to get your debt down was to throw the responsibility over the fence. And the voluntary sector poor souls would pick it up. And you didn't ever give them the money. You just gave them the responsibility. And you tried to help them feel that they were honored to get it right. The voluntary sector wants respect and it wants leverage. It has always wanted that. But these days, it's becoming a bit more strident about it. So their foundations are shifting a bit too. So if we come back to what does that mean for government? Sorry, the role is changing. Why, in fact is the role changing? Well, think about it for a minute. 20 years ago, ten years ago, a government could make a promise to its citizens. It may not be able to keep it, but in theory it could. That it could protect its boundaries, that it could support economic development in poorly developed regions of the country. It can't do that anymore. You get things like SARS, you get things like terrorism, you get epidemiological threats, you get all kinds of things that come from outside that weren't there before. You have internal threats you can't afford, or even if you can't afford it, it doesn't seem to make any difference internally. So governments simply can't promise to do the kinds of things that they used to be able to promise. So that means the role of governments is changing. When the role of governments change, the role of the public service that supports them changes too. If you're thinking about the Canadian context, for example, a federal state, the federal government and the government for Canada as a whole is going to be less delivery and more the architect, more the enabler, more the failsafe. So if something goes wrong, we'll step in. And relatively little of what we would call the old role. If you were to summarize that, you'd say that the welfare state that we saw rise up in western democracies after the Great Depression and after World War II because of the horrors of those things, that's declining now. It declines in different ways, it declines in different rates. This is not about ideology. This is about what's going on underneath ideology, if you like. So what are the consequences of that? Well, that means you really have to reframe if you want to use the language of one of the speakers before you have to think about the role differently to find creative ways to be more effective. Or you don't worry about that stuff. You don't change the paradigm. You just say, well, I'll worry about this bit, this little bit. I'll do it in a little step at a time. I think if you try to be too try to apply too whole system thinking to it without doing the paradigm shift, it won't work. You just get deep frustration. At least that's my own view. So that was my first message about change. My third message is about incorporating the sector. Givens the theory has to be different, why does it have to be different? Well, if I give you an example for a country like Canada, for the federal government, we factored accountability at the bureaucratic top. Now, I've had conversations with Ron Cappell about this and he keeps saying to me, but Ruth, that's not perfection, that's not how it should work. And I keep saying, well, no, but that's how it does work. And it's not a criticism of Ron. It's just that you have to understand that when I was told I was accountable for implementing the GST, I also knew I couldn't hire. I couldn't hire. I could not choose where to put, I could not choose the location of my facility. The people who gave me legal advice didn't work for learned. I learned partly at the Harvard business school and partly I was reminded when I came here, if you work in government, it's like swimming in mud. And after a while you forget that there are people who don't have to swim in mud. They actually swim in clear water. And it's not that I can't swim in mud. It's just that you learn to swim effectively in mud. And so if you're going to take a kind of how does requisite organization theory apply? How does it apply in a muddy stream? Not in clear water? It's really, really important. The political boss of a deputy head. I mean I was a deputy minister. So I mean some people would say I was a CEO. Some people would say I was a COO in the theory. And in practice, I'm accountable to a minister who's a political person. But the truth is I'm only accountable to that minister for some things under the law. For some other things, I'm accountable to the courts. For some things, I'm accountable to the prime minister. So either have no boss or too many bosses. I certainly don't have one boss. And Ron and I would have this conversation about, well, I need to talk to somebody about your role. Well, okay, but who are you going to talk to? There is no manager once removed. There is no manager, actually. So that's just reality. So you have to kind of adapt for that. And all the work in the public sector, it's true, I think, to some extent in the voluntary sector, certainly in the area that George has worked and also in the private sector it's done in a fishbowl, but in government it's done in more of a fishbowl. You can't make mistakes and you cannot defend yourself. In fact, there was a famous case of a private sector company coming, very well respected company, Canada, making an investment to put a system in place, to put information technology system and train, all for a certain amount of money, all for a certain price. And one thing you know in the public sector is every time you do these things, there's bound to be questions in the house of commons about this always. And people always say you're spending too much money. I mean you're wasting you're drinking gin and you shouldn't be, or whatever the heck it is. This company lived on its reputation and it could not defend its reputation in the house of commons because it didn't have a seat. And so instead of the government getting bashed, the poor company got bashed. And they said they would never bid on another contract like that ever again because they simply didn't want to work in that kind of fishbowl. So working in a fishbowl makes a difference. What kind of a difference? Not entirely sure. Does it have to be taken into account? Absolutely. The concepts are really adaptable. Some of the challenges are similar. I found it very useful as a way of thinking, a kind of conceptual model. I found it useful for the overall performance of my organization or for specific problems. I found a lot of opposition from in house experts, the not invented here syndrome, so we didn't think it up. And I had in one of my jobs, I had people who were supposed to be experts in HR. They were actually, and I'm not. And they would say, well, we don't use this. Well, frankly, Scarlett, I don't care if you use it or not. It seems to make sense to me. Well, no. And they would give me 45 pounds of material about why this wasn't sensible. So I did have some opposition and I also had some colleagues and subordinates who were opposed. And they were opposed primarily, I think, because they were afraid. What were my learnings? I have a couple of slides of learnings. It's useful as a frame, even if you don't do it visibly. And the bank of Montreal presentation, I thought was superb and it was very visible. I didn't always use it visibly because I couldn't or I wasn't there long enough. I learned not to forget the soft side. I learned that you can have the most brilliant kind of rational way of doing things. But if you don't worry how people feel and you don't know what it's like to walk in their shoes, you can't get very far. I learned that human capability goes hand in hand with level of work. There are people who look at one or the other. For me, as a manager, getting the level of work was right. But I had to be thinking all the time about the capability of the people, including myself. I learned more about what my capability made me look like and act like in my organization, and that turned out to be very useful. It takes patience, it takes persistence. It really does pay to be stubborn, and it takes determination. You have to get a little bit of support, at least tacit support, from your boss, assuming you have one. But I also learned some years ago, I discovered an article, I can't remember the title of it from the Harvard Business Review, which was really about the people that are opposed to you are going to be opposed to you regardless. The people who support you are going to support you because they think it's a good idea. The trick is to go up the uncommitted middle. I have never forgotten that because it turns out to be very good advice. You don't worry about your supporters, you try not to turn your back on the people who are going to stab it. But you design your strategy around the uncommitted middle, which is kind of a neat idea. And lastly, a few more learnings. It's harder to find the missing levels of work than to find the compression. In my experience, it looks like the performance problem of subordinate, but it isn't. Now, the trick is to distinguish between when is it a missing level of work and when is it genuine performance problem of subordinate. But the really easy thing to do is to say, well, it's his fault or her fault and not ask the question wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe what I'm expecting in terms of level of work isn't what this person thinks they're supposed to be doing. They may in fact be very capable to do their job. It's just that in between there's a level of work that I'm unwilling to do or unable to do and that needs to get done. And so I found a lot of that the mismatch at the top of an organization, it has a huge ripple effect. If it's too high, then you can rip the top off the organization. If it's too low, then the level of work will sink, as somebody said yesterday. The other thing is that if you're in a job where you're responsible for an organizational unit or an organization for more than a few years, four or five, you have to watch for whether people's capability has improved because theirs can shift or yours can shift. And all of a sudden you're having problems you never had before and you don't understand because you know the person why you're having them. And they may be around that, they may be around capability. The last piece of advice is thin slicing. Now, there's a book out that talks about thin slicing and thick slicing. Thin slicing is the kind of intuitive leap you make, the judgment that you make without all the evidence. And people do it all the time. Sometimes they do it well and sometimes they do it poorly. But what I learned was after I'd been through the requisite organization, which I could have applied by people who knew what they were doing to hire people with the right capability, I figured out that if I knew what level of work I wanted done, I could sit in on an interview for a direct report. To hire a direct report. I could pose an open ended question. If I listened carefully, I could deduce whether the person had the capability. Now, I'm sure people like Ron or Ken or others would probably have a hemorrhage at the idea, but it actually works. I used it and I hired. I mean, I discriminated quite effectively between people who were very good but couldn't work at that level and. People who could. And the consequence was, in fact, excellent. So that's my little story about what I've done. Now. I don't know how to shut this off. So Dwight, you're going to do whatever it is.

Speaker E We're going to take some questions.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker E Ruth was speaking, I believe, as a manager in the government at level five, six, seven. And I have a little short story about supporting a director general at four from a consulting role. And the short story is this the director general, finding problems in his agency, came to a strategic planning course where there was requisite organization. He says that's scientific, my doctors will like that. Come and talk.

Speaker C We have problems.

Speaker E And putting the people side together with the structure. We started just with three groups, the chronic disease, what do you call it, the epidemiology or the contagious diseases, and the laboratory, which was very different cultures. And we just had group meetings and looked at why they were having trouble communicating. In that we drew some structure diagrams and this happened over a period of about three years. But to show where the leverage is here as we looked at what people were doing, even though cancer is one of the leading causes of cost and death in Canada, the highest level full time person working on the cancer file was at level two, less than one year. Using our maps of depth charts and levels, we found that there were a number of these things that were totally misplaced and there was a chance to raise them at least one level because the DG was at four, there had been directors at three and managers at two. So we made a bureau of cancer at three, and we separated it from some other serious chronic diseases. Almost immediately, with a more capable person released, the federal person serving on national committees of cancer planning was able to infuse better capability, some federal money, and it started taking off. That same person, because of capability in a reorganization, was later promoted to a level four position and retained the interest in cancer file. And you can see cancer planning and what's being done nationally in Canada directly related to that intervention. So I wanted to tell that short story of how a director general with a more limited number, several hundred people, actually could improve the organizational health and the cross functional relations between his bureaus. And look at the levels. Here's another thing. There were people it's in 300 people. There were several people who had gotten away, they were somehow misfits, had gotten away with murder, meaning acting out, not doing their job, absenteeism anything, and had not been managed for ten to 15 years. And with the regulations the way they are, for any manager to take on in discipline with no personnel file that's up to date, basically would give up their ability to do any other work because it was so burdensome. And by the way, we mapped out the HR processes and what it took to hire and fire and do things. I went over and showed them to Ruth. And you had someone assigned to map it out federally. That was extraordinarily difficult. Here's what we did with the Calibration sessions. We pulled the director general and let's say eight reports, and we brought in a table using capability value, the work skills and knowledge, and assessed I've forgotten the exact numbers, but basically all the managers in a 400 person shop, I would say 40 to 50 managers, a fairly thorough discussion. The only people who could talk were people who knew their work directly. In 4 hours, we had assessed and assessed capability. And just for interest, we had the two assigned HR people sitting there. When it was over, we asked them. They hadn't said a thing. What do you think they said? We were gassed. They didn't miss a single problem and they didn't overlook a single talent. And we asked them the question because we had identified these four bad actors. And I asked them a question does it make a difference that nine assembled managers have discussed and made this judgment and want to take personnel action versus one manager trying to take on? He said it'll go through like that. You'll have no problems with your hearings, your discipline or anything as long as you have this amassed. Now, I was astounded at how a four hour session now granted good planning and a conceptual framework, but Joelos was a very, very capable DG who went on to become Adm and then left the Federal Service. I think he was above level in capability even at four. I think he was more capable than that because he had the years of deputy ministers and many people and got funding into that area, while other parts of Health Canada were being cut during some very draconian times. So we were doing this restructuring while it was really tough during the 90s. So I guess that's a story. It may be a fishbowl at five and six, or certainly at seven. At four, we found no interference, had supported the Adm, and some of the problems you mentioned didn't seem now it took about three or four years. But I would say that the reports there were that there were substantial gains from relatively modest efforts, and it was sustained. It was three or four years. They put money into it, and there was quite a bit of training. There was interpersonal skills training. There was some Myers Briggs differences. But there were also one other thing we found in government. There's a lot of interagency coordination or coordinating with a lot of non governmental associations. And what we would do, and I think we did it when we worked together, is we looked at on the committees the level of people in your own unit and what level the people that you were working with. And to see how bad the mismatch was. Well, there were some federal provincial health committees that had been going absolutely nowhere for years. I'll give you one example. The supply and doctors and doctors and nurses in Canada, and we did the depth charts of the people doing this, and we found that there were people at level two trying to plan out 20 years in supply and projections. We said, if this is a crisis in Canada, it has to be addressed at four and three and it has to be staffed at that level. We got it changed. It was and all the committees just started working. So the time horizon concept I have one more story. It's about the match between this level two cancer person and informing policy. This is health candidate level six and political level should be six and seven in policy, if you're going to reduce mortality from cancer and morbidity. What do we know about the incubation of cancer? How long does it take? Isn't it 1520 and more years. Exercise and diet today are going to have impacts in 20 years since we know the population numbers. They're all alive now, right? In 20 years, if you know certain exercise and diet rates, you should be able to say something about cancer, right? Or smoking rates or things like that. I was a strategic planner, so cancer planning. I said, Give me every report you've written in the last ten years. I went home and they were stacked this high. Scientists and doctors had written these reports, right? All of them were rear view mirror, statistical correlation studies. You're trying to support policy, people projecting. Where are your projections? Where are your population projections? Where are your rates? Where are your don weigel a very bright doctor. Oh, here you go. So I can a very bright doctor. The next thing he did was to go hire the statistician and no report went out after that without the projections and without the projections of morbidity, mortality and the various things that cause cancer. So I would say a Jax based analysis turned enlightened in such a short time, it gave extraordinary effect. So anyway, I just wanted to say.

Speaker F On a lower level, it may be easy.

Speaker B You're absolutely right. Well, and that may go to part of what I'm saying about you can't do it like the bank of Montreal stuff because it's too difficult. You can do it in pieces, you can do it in stages. You can take a piece of the requisite organization theory and use it at a high level, but you can't do it kind of from one end to the other, except in the kind of level you are, which is underneath the radar screen of some of the consequences or some of the challenges that they just disappear. Some diet, of course.

Speaker E It's been wonderful being here. I noticed bogman to you is here.

Speaker C Good afternoon, everyone. And I want to talk a little bit about a global not for profit and the application of Ro principles and methodology to a global organization. And I'm very fortunate today is that if you have any tough questions, I have my former project director with me so he can answer them. I guess two opening comments I would make is that it does work for a global not for profit organization, but it also has, as Sabutha said, it has some limitations. And it really is like swimming in the mud because everything is very, very public. And some of the things we did landed up in the press, in the Geneva press, and we had a media crisis for a week while we were dealing with the change. So everything you did was public. And while we applied it at an international organization, I can also say that I can apply for a national organization, national not for profits, because I'm currently the CEO of the Canadian Dental Association and when I came back to Canada in February 2000, we also applied it to a national professional membership organization. So it does also work at a national level also too. So those are just two differences. When I was dealing at the international level, unlike some other private sector changes where they were maybe delayering, we had a problem with management depth and we had to add a layer. So we added a stratum. So this has a little different story that we're going to add a stratum as I walk through the story. So there are four aspects I'd like to deal with and highlight some of the salient points. I'm going to spend a little extra time on context so that you can understand the variables that we had to deal with secondly, and then what and how we did it. I'm going to talk a little bit about results and like Ruth, I'd like to talk a little bit about some of our learning points and the points that if I had to redo it again in the international level, what I would have done a little better, so to say. So taking on to the first slide, let's talk to you about what the organization, the context. The International Federation Red Cross Red Crown Society is the largest humanitarian network in the world. And these are some of the statistics from 1994 because that's when we started the process. I took over in December of 92, but it was 1994. The overall organization assisted 233,000,000 people using 105,000,000 volunteers, just under 300,000 permanent staff, annual expenditures collectively $24 billion. And we operate it nearly in some element in every country in the world. There's approximately over 190 nation states and there was some element of the Red Cross or Red Crescent, which are the equivalents in every nation state in the world today. The purpose really had a threefold purpose. In addition, in not for profits, there's always a section dealing with support to governance, as it would be support to the elected. But I won't get into that because that's kind of the back room as opposed to front room action. Fundamentally, it was to improve the situation of the most vulnerable people through coordination or direction of disaster relief and rehabilitation. Disaster relief after, like, for example, the tsunami that hit on December 26. It hit Southeast Asia. Earthquakes, refugee operations or displaced people after armed conflict. People that would have fled the conflict in Rwanda went to Tanzania. A couple of million people left. So it had to be taken care of also through the development of National Red Cross Red Crescent societies and what we mean development both their institutional capacity and their service capacity enable to give them the capacity in terms of their people, training the facilities, the tools to be able to cope with local emergencies and to take care of vulnerabilities in their own country. And then the third role was a representational role to represent the collective interests of all the national societies in their dealings with intergovernmental bodies such as the UN, European Union or the African Union, other groups and to act as a permanent body of liaison. I should say to you that the National Red Cross Red Crescent societies were multibillion dollar operations like the Japanese Red Cross, with 90,000 employees down to the islands of Una, two that had a couple thousand volunteers spread over about 150 islands in the South Pacific. So the range of capacities were quite different. And they all the societies were the owners or the shareholders of our organization but also the payers, but also the recipients of services and materials. So they wore all three hats. The engine of the organization was really the secretariat with people in Geneva and in our field operations around the world. We had 16 regional offices in key areas around the world covering groupings of countries and national societies. A New York office permanently aisoned with the UN and 50 plus country offices. And country offices were set up in countries that had been affected by major disasters and they would change. We'd go anywhere from 50 to 70 depending upon the month and the number of disasters that were occurring at any one time. 5000 plus Secretary of Employees we had 92 different nationalities working for us and we operated in four languages english, French, Spanish and Arabic. Padding Complicating so you had to translate and get things translated or interpreted. So it wasn't always so clear. Always. Although English was one of the main working languages you still had to take care of those other sensitivities. Out of the 5000 plus staff, there were about 300 at headquarters of which 10% were on loan from national society. So he didn't really own them. He borrowed them for a period of time. So their allegiances and loyalties were different at times. You had 400 field people that were 80% on loan from national societies and 20 20% were people that specialists that we had to find from other parts of the world that didn't belong to a Red Cross or Red Cross Society and 4300 that were local hire. So our staffing situation was constantly fluid, constantly changing like that. And people working for us for a couple of weeks, taking out an expert on war surgery out of a downtown hospital in Stockholm to go to Monrovia to deal with war surgery for a couple of weeks, to people on loan to us for a couple of years. So it varied. And of course, you had to mobilize resources not only to pay for your relief and development project, but to pay for those staff. 50% of the staff at Geneva were covered by membership or membership or what we call statutory payments. The rest we had to mobilize raise from voluntary contributions from a variety of sources. The organization was governed by a General Assembly. All the national societies had one vote, about 800 people in the room in terms of delegations that met once every two years, unlike the UN, which meets yearly. And we had an executive council, sort of a semi board that met twice a year to undertake activities in the absence of the General Assembly. And we were governed our work was governed by a strategic work plan that had been approved in 1991, but my predecessor left in 91 and hadn't put in the systems in place to execute the strategic work plan. Work plan consisted of four major areas and 16 tasks. So the organization itself in 93, I arrived in December 92. At that point we were mobilizing about $410,000,000 for relief and development projects. We were assisting about 15 million people and there were about 149 National Red Cross Red Crescent societies that were members. They had reached a certain threshold of competence to be admitted to the members of the federation and there were another 30 in information that we were working with to bring them up to the threshold to be admitted into the federation. Well, I had arrived in December 1992. I had been involved because I'd been the chief executive officer of the Canadian Red Cross for a chunk of time. So I had been involved with federation activities morely at the governance level. So I understood what we were getting in with, getting into during a one year period during most of 92, because my predecessor had left in early of 92, we had an interregnant period for a whole year. We had a little bit of organizational drift. There was a person who was acting. So that was one element, an organization that hadn't had senior leadership for a whole year, but it still had to maintain operations. Secondly, there was the increasing demand, so called humanitarian gap, more and more need and ability then to assist them and the complexity of operations. And I would describe four situations. There the gap itself are some of our studies had shown at the time that there were about two and a quarter of a billion people that were affected by natural calamities. And we saw that was going to raise through our studies to anywhere from 350 to half a billion people by the year 1999 2000. Secondly, we were still dealing with the effects of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 89 and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. There was pent up demand for change and that's why all the focus of operations early 90s went back to exhugoslavia dealing with the Caucasus in Europe, whereas we hadn't worked heavily in Europe since World War II or post World War II. So that changed a little bit of dynamics. We also had Rwanda, that was starting up 93, 94 and of course then we had the mess in Rwanda to deal with. And the third point that made the environment slightly different and complexity of operations was security issues. For up to about the early 90s there had been very few people that had been killed, relief workers and our operations in the early 90s that all changed with everything changed, the security situation changed around the world and it became much more dangerous to work. So caught it to the complexity gain we had increasing numbers of strength of national societies, more leading for more demand for services that they were given better, they wanted more services, they wanted more timely receipt of services and they were no longer waiting a couple of months for a service. They wanted it yesterday, they don't want it now. And of course different types of services assisting the American Red Cross versus the North Korean Red Cross were different domain, different needs and wants gain a need for review the volumes of information requiring specialization. For example, dealing with Ebola fever that came out in the early 90s that manifests itself needed specialized people to kind of deal with that and stronger call for more accountability and transparency. Ruth mentioned that already governments were offloading and that was a time and asking for more accountability. And if you were going to raise funds from governments you had to be accountable in their format and all the rest of it. And since we had 30 different governments and each had their own systems, you had to customize all the reporting and accountability to take care of their system. We could see that coming up and growing and an increasingly competitive, challenging and fast moving environment. A lot of extra competitors coming on place. Governments setting up their own agencies to become field operational. The UN getting stronger at a time other international organizations, other NGOs coming up. And so there was sort of a competitive field in order to be able to mobilize resources. And again, a desire to maximize the effectiveness within available a better ROI people. And those that were funding you were looking at well, how effective and how efficient were you in terms of your use of funds for relief operations? So those were kind of the stage, the context in terms of pressing for review. It was clear at that time that a minimalist approach was not going to work, that it was going to have to be something a little bit more radical to be able to prepare the organization to deal with what we could see down coming down the horizon. So we had a little bit of an interesting process. We started pulling the manage all, anybody who managed anybody off to half day sessions trying to probe. And we set up effective leadership leadership workshops. And we introduced 360 feedback systems at the time, which was a real shock to 92 different nationalities. It was real shocking for all I can tell you that it was mainly the western Europeans that were more resistant than some of the developing European people that were there. They were willing to learn, but the western Europeans were a little more resistant to somebody coming in from Canada showing them some of this stuff. So it was interesting. But anyways, that led to setting up a formal task force, all these different workshops that we had led to a formal task force setting up that did some data gathering. Then they put together a report on the operating systems in order to link back to the strategic work plan, how are we going to get it going? And they came up with twelve critical areas with 103 recommendations that needed to improve the effectiveness of the organization to be able to meet the challenges now going forward. And that out of the review of the operating systems. That led to two studies. So in the first year we were able to create a climate ready for change, for major change to take place to the organization. And so that led to two further studies. One was dealing with the review of the organization design because there were a number of multiple recommendations that all really led to that. And a second group that was going to work on the federation priorities and working methods linked back to the strategic work plan to do the review of organization design. Dwight was on staff and both of us had worked with Stafford Beer back in the Canadian Red Cross. So we knew something about systems and that wasn't really totally satisfying in the 80s when we did some other reorganization. And Dwight had identified Ron Cappell who was using Ro. And so we hired Ron to come over and to help us in working with a task force led by a project director and a project team. Then we started to take a look about putting together a new organizational design and doing methodology related to Ro and federation priorities and working methods led also to some other recommendations. And when looking at the results in terms of an organizational design, working down to the federation. Working as a federation was a concept that in order to be able to deal with the challenges in the future, we have to realize that we couldn't do it all ourselves and that we had to use more of our national societies to be more an architect of cooperation as opposed to the doers. And that was what meant working as a federation. Moving on just to the organizational design and the organizational review. We took a traditional approach back in 94 with Ron literature review, the interviews with all the employees and field people. Geneva and the field did task analysis and task analysis. What happened is we set up a nomenclature of 137 tasks and all the employees both in Geneva and the field allocated 5% of their time. So then we costed out based on the salary. So we knew what percentage people were working on core and what percentage were working on support. We found that we had only people working only 30% core and 70% support. So we had to do something about that. That was kind of how we're going to deal with that. Workflow process analysis we took a mapped ron helped us map a number of key processes to try to take work out of the system. How are we going to do that? How are we going to deal with the greater volume of business coming along? So we had to try to take work out of the system. And of course related to the organizational design, we did time span analysis, key findings. It was clear that we needed greater management depth and a restructuring was required. When the time span analysis showed that of all our managers only 45% were aligned properly, 55% were not aligned properly, 36, we had 36% of the 55 that were compressed and a 19% gap. So we clearly had to do something with the structure and the different levels. Clearly we had to improve the systems and procedures. If we had 70% people were working on 70% support areas as opposed to core. Big issue in terms of improving our effectiveness and our performance was to get the field geneva relations needed clarification and strengthening who were the boss of the field people and there was some very very gray get to that in a moment. A better balance between relief, raising money for relief and dealing with relief. And that's a different type of personality. People that are gun hole ready to break all the barriers to get the relief to the people versus people who work on development and capacity building. Trying to build additional capacity takes time and adding capacity people so that they cope locally better than having international intervention. And of course our planning systems needed refinement because every manager was doing their own thing in terms of their own formatting, in terms of results. As a consequence of the new organizational design, we felt that we should implement a stratum six organization to take care of the compression. And I can tell you what we did is that we had everybody resign, all staff resign and we rehired everybody, some within an hour or so and others a little longer. But there were about 45% of the managers that were floating out. And that's of course, when the press got on it in Geneva that how could this it was unheard of that an international organization had fired all its staff and it caused kind of a diplomatic growl. And I was the talk of the diplomatic community in Geneva for about a couple of weeks. So some interest in horror, how could you do that? And others saying, hey, show us how it can be done. So it's very interesting. Increased management depth. We moved up to have our undersecretary generals, which is one level below the Secretary General, to stratum five. So we only had two. And we had management depth add two additional ones because there was a missing layer of work in the larger regional departments. We had regional departments under our operations group. And regional departments were heads of regional departments who had desk officers who managed our country and regional delegations. And the heads of the regional departments in Geneva would be traveling six to seven months of the year. So there was never a boss in Geneva taking care of the desk officers. So they became running the field, whereas the heads of the field operations country and regional litigations really reported to the head of the regional department, but they were never around. And so the desk officers with their certain personalities started acting as the boss. And that kind of caused a lot of conflict that had to be fixed. And so we created deputy director positions in the larger regional departments, geneva support departments like the finance people, while they'd have line accountability to the head of the country delegation or regional delegation, they'd have a cross functional accountability to the finance department or health or whatever in Geneva. And business planning was enhanced to reinforce these vertical and cross functional. We changed the performance of you and compensation systems to achieve that kind of behavior. Results. Well, I gave you the 193 and 99. Six years later we had increased our appeal or mobilization of resources on 54%. That's both for relief and development and a higher percentage for development. We had doubled the amount of beneficiaries we were able to assist. And we had an 18% increase in the number of national societies that we'd helped reach the threshold then to be admitted as members. And I can tell you that the staff stayed steady or was reduced. So there was a level of productivity and we were able to handle a greater volume of business. And the surveys on staff when it got going and three, four years later, by 97, 98, and it took that long, the staff were feeling good about the changes and the donors, the customers that had also provided us with funds were feeling much better in terms of our effectiveness and efficiency change process. So we. Had these two parallel process worked together. When the software dealing with the people and the hardware, we had to balance that off in terms of how much effort in both areas. But you had to spend a lot of time dealing with the people issues. We involved everybody, all staff, including the switchboard operators and the chauffeurs and everybody, everybody was involved and consulted, the whole staff community. Extensive communication throughout weekly bulletins, emails, meetings of smaller groups, larger groups, people moving around the field, visiting and talking this up over a period of time. And Creek thing is having a full time project director to keep the project on track, extensive use of task force and implementation. And the senior management team along with me were totally committed to making this work. Some lessons learned and some of this is a little bit ABCs. It was clear we couldn't have done this with only our internal team. Only it was important to have an external ron Cappell and his people help us with the methodology and pushing us, pushing the internal group and pushing the senior management to go as far as you could with the change. The second point is particularly an international level with 92 different nationalities. It takes much longer to change an operating culture and five to eight years is not unreasonable to change an operating culture when you're dealing with so many different culture groups. And I can say that maybe a couple of the couple of the medical doctors, the really well qualified medical doctors who had spent 15 years in getting there where there were surgeons and heads of departments, I don't think we ever convinced them about the time span. And we had to use other methods to get them to comply. And that was very difficult with particularly well qualified professionals and neatly to constantly re energize the process. It would start to wane because we were dealing with emergencies all the time and other things. You constantly have to re energize the process. And so Ron came back two years after and two years after again to help us re energize the process. Anorequisite organization can be used in a global not for profit while fighting fires. And I say that my analogy at the time. To the staff it's like painting a destroyer at full battle stations in the middle of a hurricane. That's what was trying to do. That kind of change with an emergency gain was the importance of man stratum three for us in terms of the regional country delegations in Geneva, that was a critical point between the headquarters and dealing with the field operations and one filling key positions as soon as possible. I think if I look back at it, I took three or four months too long to fill one critical position that could have made a difference. We could have probably optimized the organization.

Speaker E A little bit more.

Speaker C That's my story. Thank you. No idea.

Speaker E Well, we got a lot of tape.

Speaker F Yeah, maybe I'll work with Ken now.

Speaker A Based on the video and then if we give you a graph then maybe.

Speaker F Edit the graph.

Speaker E Sure.

Speaker C I'd be more than willing to.

Speaker B I'm.

Speaker D Wondering how much this is shared.

Speaker C There's no question all NGOs are in competition with each other.

Speaker D But the lesson that you just talked about just as a national level rather than just absolutely and it seems that they learn the same lessons. So you know, you're kind of public knowledge so that we.

Speaker C Thank you. Well, if they're going to put something together then.

Speaker F You have asked for can't.

Speaker A Ask me to write some things. So I sort of have this.

Speaker D It shows the depth and the emergence need so that it's not about putting into a static organization. But you're saying this is an accelerated group identified six will probably go to seven because at some point there will be a federation. They have to work together so that those components right.

Speaker C I said, well, we did have coordinating group, we did coordinate there's level at the country level, normally at the crisis level, at the country level and at the international level there is coordination. But when I call coordination, it works best. At the field level where that happens. At the country level, then you start getting interests and people start protecting turf. And at the international level the coordination meetings was everybody just saying what they're doing? There was no occasionally there was people. That happens in the UN. Too. I can assure you. I've been in many where UN heads were going at each other. Thank you.

Speaker A Thank you very much.

Speaker F Well, a slightly different context. For the next presentation we're going to talk about the Canadian Passport Office, which is a part of foreign affairs and international trade and its mandate is to provide passport and related services to Canadians and legally landed immigrants. It's a special operating agency. It was one of the first of the special operating agencies created in Canada and it's headquarters in the Ottawa Hall area and has 26 offices across the country. At the time we're talking about here, it had about 550 employees and an annual budget of about $50 million. It in terms of why the review? There were several reasons for it. The driving force behind it was the fact that the government had recently created six or seven special operating agencies and basically said to the organizations we want you to run in a more business like fashion. So that caused the Passport Office management to sit back and say well, what business are we in and do we have the right organization to deliver those kind of the products and services that we're mandated to provide and do we have the right business processes in place? So the focus of the discussion this afternoon is did we have the right organization in place? However, the others were as important as that. There was a general concern with the operation of the offices, the procedures and practices that were in place had been there for many years. The people were very isolated in the sense that many of them were regional employees. And when you're in Ottawa, there's lots of opportunity to change jobs and move from one organization to another. But when you're in Saskatoon, there isn't. So you tended to have people who had spent most of their career within the passport office, and so they weren't necessarily exposed to other ways of doing things or other styles of delivery. And in particular, we had a concern with office managers because when I spoke with them about their jobs, some I found were very hands on. They were involved with the day to day operations, and some of them basically didn't leave the Rock. It's going into hibernation. Oh, is that what that is? Okay.

Speaker B Should he be wearing the mic?

Speaker F Should I be wearing a mic?

Speaker C No. Where are the mics?

Speaker B The mics are hidden in the flag.

Speaker F Well, the mics are hidden in the.

Speaker B Flag, just in case you're used to working.

Speaker A So much for my two hour guaranteed battery. Don't worry, no problem. I'm sorry about that, given the background.

Speaker F Yeah, sure.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker F Of whose flag? Canada.

Speaker D Well, that's perfect.

Speaker A Or we could just move the whole thing over to that corner.

Speaker E Actually, you know what?

Speaker F I'll stay on this side with you, and then I can just stand here.

Speaker B And.

Speaker F It'S not hooked onto anything.

Speaker B And.

Speaker F We'Ll just put it on here somewhere. Okay, great. So what I found as I visited each one of the offices across the country, is that there was a real range of management style of the people. Some were, as I said, out there serving customers and working right along beside the passport examiners. And others were very isolated and in a closed office and didn't come out very much. That shows you the organization structure. When it became a special operating agency, there was a Chief Operating Officer position appointed to oversee it. Then the country was divided into three operating regions eastern, Ontario, and Western. And there was a group called Central Ops in Canada. Is everybody here a Canadian or from Canada? No. Okay.

Speaker E Well.

Speaker F In Canada, you can apply for passports either in person or by mail. If you live within 100 passport office, you must apply in person because the controls are better. We get to see you, we get to look at your documentation, and we're able to deal with your application while you're there. But that doesn't work very well when you've got 26 offices across a country as large as this. So the alternative is people send their applications in by mail. When they send them in by mail, they go to what's called Central Operations, and that's a mail operation similar to the US. And similar to Australia. Taking Ontario as one region. We have several offices in Ontario. Each one has a manager. And then there was a supervisor with workers reporting to the supervisor. Doesn't look like when you look at that, you say, well, we can see what the problem is, right? You've got two levels of management, but in reality, there were others reporting to the manager. There was the front desk where people made their application, and they were processed. And then there was the back room where the passports were produced. The people in the back room reported to the manager. The people on the front desk reported to the supervisor. So he or she had a broader span of control than the diagram implies. And you found that kind of organization structure in many of the offices of the 26, there's approximately eight or so that are very small. There are four or five that are very large from Ronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Hamilton, and then the rest are medium sized offices, medium being from eight to 15 employees. And so that's kind of the organization structure. Now, we knew that we had to look at our organization and see if we were properly set up to deal with our new mandate and to provide effective services to our clients. So we undertook a study that was done by Capell Associates where we agreed on the scope of work, which was to consist of a document review, some interviews with myself as chief operating officer and senior managers, and then a sample of positions throughout the organization where there appeared to be potential structural issues. And the third component was a time span analysis. The findings were that the manager level, which was a stratum two level, the individual accountable for running the office, there was variability in the work done. Many of them were doing too much routine work that could have been delegated. Some were doing casework where they were actually going out and serving people on the counters. That's not necessarily a bad thing if it's a three person office like St. John's, Newfoundland. But if it were Hamilton, that would be a concern, right? And they were not doing their manager work. People have a natural tendency, me included. I do the things I'm comfortable doing rather than the things that I I necessarily am supposed to do. As you can, my wife can attest because of the frequency with which I pay the bills.

Speaker B Right?

Speaker F The supervisor role was one of up to two layers of management between the first line manager and the workers, which insulated the manager from the workers. And the conclusion was that that supervisor role should not be a direct line responsibility, but instead it should be a lead hand role, not a layer of management. The production process for passports was fragmented. There was a lack of I'll explain fragmented in the sense that multiple people handled the same application. And so you had an accountability problem because if something went wrong, who was at fault? There was a lack of authority at required levels. People weren't sure whether they could do certain things and so they would turn to their supervisor or their manager. It was paper oriented. It took too long, there was too much work rework, particularly in the mail in portion that we talked about, that central operations where applications come through the mail. In fact, the productivity through the mail is half the productivity when people come into the counter. And I really didn't understand that at the beginning. But as I learned more about the organization, I realized it's because they handle the same file multiple times. You receive an application form, it's missing something. So you write to the person, you stick it in the filing cabinet because you're not going to leave it sitting on your desk because it couldn't be gone three or four weeks by the time it comes back, somebody else deals with a file because you've gone on to something else. And so they repeat all the work that you've done up to that point, and on it goes. And there was no statistical review, there was no sampling, nobody was checking to see. Of the 100 passport applications that we processed last week, nobody was going in and doing an audit and making sure that everything was functioning as it should. So as a result of this, we had several things that we ended up doing. One of them was we strengthened the stratum three roles that's the director role and clarified the manager's role. We had eliminated the layers of management between the manager and the worker. And we aligned the supervisor positions to be the lead hand positions. And that positioned us so that we could then start on improving the passport production process, which is a total different exercise.

Speaker B Right?

Speaker F How did we go about implementing it? First, we shared the results of the study with everybody in the organization. The workers, the supervisors, the managers, the directors. Everybody got to see it. We held an annual manager's conference where we spent that conference talking about what should the role of the manager be, what should they delegate, what should they do themselves, how does the role relate to their supervisor, the director, and so on. And we reached an agreement on the core roles and responsibilities of that level. We redefined the roles of the directors to reflect changes in the manager's position. Basically, it freed them up to focus on more strategic initiatives. We systematically reinforced the new vision by encouraging people whenever we could to understand what the changes were that we were implementing, why we were implementing, and the effects that they were having on the organization. And we followed up with an accountability framework. The accountability framework was an annual contract between the CEO and the directors wherein there were specific roles and responsibilities documented and the deliverables for the upcoming year clearly defined. Then the directors in turn rolled that down so that the managers that reported to them had an accountability agreement with them as well. What was the effect. The managers were very positive. They now had a real role to play and the workers had unambiguous direction. This doesn't need any clarification. The director's focus expanded from one of downward transactions to broad strategic direction and contact setting. We created a management committee for the organization that consisted of the CEO and the directors it met once a quarter. We talked about strategic issues. We developed a strategic plan for the organization multi year cash flow, resource predictions, volume predictions and so on. The surveys that we conducted following the restructuring indicate that the workers approach to their customers improved. One of the byproducts of this was we dealt with the dual role of service and control. As you can imagine, when you're issuing passports, part of your job is to ensure that the right people get them. But 99.9 something or other percent of the people who apply for passports are legitimate and they deserve to be served well and properly. And we were in a position to reengineer the passport issuance system. Lessons learned. The design of the organization is a key enabler to good service, delivery and change management. Managers must have the authority if they're to be held accountable and some examples are to control appointments to ensure that tasks are properly assigned to perform, give employees performance appraisals and to initiate removal of direct reports if there's a performance problem within the context established by the manager or lead worker. Assigned work now assigns work, gives feedback, acts as a coach and provides technical support to the worker and also schedules their work, recommends actions to the manager and can positively impact and facilitate the work of the office. So basically what we did was we took the supervisor position and made it a lead worker and gave them a functional role in terms of assigning tasks and supervising the work of the passport examiners. But it made it clear that the manager of the office was the one to whom they reported and to whom they were accountable.

Speaker A Can I ask how the supervisors reacted to that?

Speaker F Mixed. Some were comfortable with it, some weren't. Ultimately it worked as we had intended it to. There were some personalities at play as you would find in any organization. Some of the supervisors were very strong and typically those were the offices where the manager spent their time with the door closed doing paperwork. But when we clearly said we're going to hold you, the manager, accountable and we want you out there on the floor and we want you making sure that your workers are doing their job effectively and efficiently. Once they had that mandate they renegotiated their working relationship with the lead worker supervisor. And I don't think anybody chose to move on. People need time to mourn the passing of the old way of doing things. As I said at the beginning of the presentation, most of the people that worked in the passport office had spent their entire careers there and they had a lot of ownership with the existing organization structure and the existing practices, the existing ways of doing things. And we were very careful not to say that was wrong, here's the right way to do it. But times change, people change, needs change, and the organization has to evolve with them. Given the chance, most, but not all of the employees will welcome new ways of doing things if they believe the change is positive. And would I do it again? Absolutely. Certainly would.

Speaker B Okay.

Speaker D Ask a question.

Speaker C Sure.

Speaker D Changes volatility work on match and capability to the level of work once you've established what the level of work should be?

Speaker F Yes. Jobs were classified. Governments have very structured job description and job classification. So all of those jobs were reviewed. In fact, in many cases the level of the job increased. The working level were clerical. And the fundamental difference between clerical work and officer level work is making decisions. Hear these people every day serving people, customers, where they're deciding whether or not they're entitled to a passport and they're classified as clerks, then that's a management or a professional decision. So the title was changed and the classifications changed as well as the supervisor lead hand job stayed the same level and in some cases the manager level went up.

Speaker D Did you find that between the level where they'd now been raised and the actual incumbent, between the capability to do the work? You said a lot of the managers were very pleased with the change, so obviously there must have been a match of capability role. But did you find any differences?

Speaker F There were a few. The majority of them there wasn't an issue, but there were some where there was a mismatch.

Speaker D Did you have turnover then?

Speaker F Yes, we held competitions and appointed the most qualified person to the job.

Speaker D So you had the same approach?

Speaker F We didn't tell everybody they were fired. Was it fired? No, we didn't have everybody resign, which is pretty neat. I don't know how you managed to do that. We had transition plans for anybody that we knew was not going to be able to perform at the level of the job that we needed. And we worked them into a job that they could perform effectively.

Speaker D And perhaps of all the group then the next question was what was the highest span of control from the level two manager with the worker that you actually put in place? I'm interested in all the regulations.

Speaker F It was about 60.

Speaker D That was textbook.

Speaker F Yeah, it was the upper end, from what I've read.

Speaker D That's about the limit.

Speaker F Yeah, it was about 60, but but the work is homogeneous. Actually, what we did was we changed the process. As I said during the presentation, the job was fragmented. There was an examiner at the counter who received the application and did the preliminary qualification. And then it went back into the back room where somebody else manufactured the passport. What we did was we changed that to say, you spend part of your time on the counter receiving the applications, and then you go back in manufacture. And then we had an independent quality control, but we had end to end responsibility for the transaction. And because of that we had homogeneous jobs.

Speaker C Um.

Speaker F There are exceptions, but I won't go into them. And so the span of control could be quite large.

Speaker D I guess my next question is I'm interested in if you've got 60, how you manage to bring about the manager subordinate relationship of 60 people, even though they're homogeneous jobs. There's a significant effort to get the manager to talk to each employee for a period of time and to be able to be close enough to.

Speaker F Yes. In the environment where I'm describing where you had that broad span of control, it was in the regional offices where the people that worked there didn't have a significant turnover. And because of that, the managers tended to know them quite well anyway. For example, here in Toronto, there's an office with about six, but the manager has been in the office 20 years, was an examiner before becoming the manager, and so on. It's a very tight community. Unfortunately, it worked out.

Speaker B Service which wouldn't.

Speaker D Be as high as it could shift.

Speaker E Work.

Speaker B It would probably be one relatively large office.

Speaker D For one shift.

Speaker B So that might be 30, maybe 20. Again, it's been historically true that the cosmic inspector does everything currently at the front line and the whole booth where they wave people through. They're currently doing their secondary examination vehicles, they're currently doing commercial, they're currently doing some days it's commercial traffic, some days individual. So it's very generic, and I would say mostly it probably averages about 20 to 30. Now, not all parts of the guns can be the same, but that's a kind of classical line operation compartment.

Speaker A As a customer, I'd say, I noticed something happened at the passport office by surprise. I got my last passport fixed here. I mean, I didn't know it was broken before when I saw how good it was.

Speaker F I have great pride in it. Of course, today we scan everything, scan all of the application forms and the proof of citizenship, whatever it is, your birth certificate or your citizenship card or documentation. And then we actually OCR optical character recognize the documents that are scanned so that there's no keying of information. We scan the photos and we can generate the passport while you're standing there. We don't because in that 1% where there's somebody who wants their passport and isn't entitled to one, we don't want to put our examiners in a position where the person on the other side of the counter knows that they can get it if they're just insistent enough. We've gone from taking close to a week to produce a passport to instantaneous.

Speaker B There's a neat example. It's not a federal government example. And I haven't had anything to do with the provincial government in Canada in the motor vehicle license offices which give out driver's license, basically, and registration for cars, they decided in one office. That way the work was and they made it. I don't know if they used requisite organization theory, but they in effect did that and they got the time to get a driver's license reduced from about 45 minutes wait if you walked in, to about 25 minutes, which is an extraordinary improvement. The regrettable problem was that when they surveyed the people who wanted these things, the people thought they shouldn't have to wait more than 15. So the fact that they'd made this extraordinary improvement in productivity had virtually no impact on their level of satisfaction of the people at the other end. And it was at the time of surveying attitudes and being very proud of how much people who came for your service thought it was better. And they got slammed, of course, because even though they'd done extraordinary things in their office and completely rethought the work and redesigned it and used technology, they didn't ever look at what the level of satisfaction would have to be either to manage the expectation down or to move up to where the expectation was. And so all of that improvement went for nothing.

Speaker F You could almost say the same thing for the passport office because after 911 the demand has doubled. So even although they can process the application faster, the wait time to get called up to get served at the counter has increased dramatically.

Speaker D And manufacturing organizations, the three T and Unity is really important. Manager, did you implement that as well?

Speaker F I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

Speaker D The manager.

Speaker F Manager once removed no, we didn't implement anything specific in that. Only the recognition that it's the manager once removed who should decide who gets promoted. Not decide, should have some say in who gets promoted. It's the direct manager who has to be held accountable for their subordinates.

Speaker B And if I were to, I think, comment on the GST implementation, they probably aren't as systematic about that manager once removed conversation as they might have been. The other aspects, the requisite organization they have brought in, but that particular one they probably haven't done as systematically. I mean, I don't know, I'm not there anymore, but I would be surprised.

Speaker C Well, it's all changed. That's one of the issues in terms of when I left, everything, kind of everything, because when I left, I resigned and left and they brought in my successor who tore the place apart and he was fired in two years time after. But in my current job with the Canadian Dental Association, they do that. Manager once removed in terms of the does have a say in the hiring, the performance review and in the training.

Speaker D There's a question I had was about sustainability.

Speaker C Yeah, that's a big issue.

Speaker B There's so much effort, so much it.

Speaker E Was a major tragedy as far as.

Speaker C I'm concerned for the organization. I'm still an emeritus, so I go back to see the people. I just messy, but it's now back. But my success completely different orientation and difficulty when you have another chief executive that comes up from a completely different area and they want to make a name for themselves and they kind of rip it apart. They had McKinsey in there that volunteered and they came up with a whole different design and all the rest of it. And then two years later he was removed. And now they're kind of trying to get back to what they had.

Speaker B And I guess it's not particularly realistic to be able to include in the new candidate while you're doing them because you don't know.

Speaker C No, didn't know.

Speaker B I think it depends on how visible and how sensitive. So I would guess, I'm guessing but the example that Ken Shepard talked about the cancer research and stuff, getting that more requisite which produced significant improvement in terms of forecasting, in terms of federal provincial relations and all that stuff, I would be very surprised if that wasn't sustainable. But your kind of thing or the kind of thing, though one of the reasons for proceeding stepwise or sneakily is precisely because there is a kind of tendency especially the more visible it is, the more pressure there is, the more fishbowl like it is, the more the pressure is to be seen to be doing something.

Speaker C That's correct.

Speaker B Because there's always a crisis. It may have nothing to do with how the organization I mean, the crisis is just the cris. If it isn't this, it's going to be that. But somehow there needs to be seen to be a response. And the knee jerk response, especially of a newcomer, unless you're very well trained like me, to resist that kind of change and do something else instead is to when did you out reorganize?

Speaker C That's exactly what happened. And the thing is that the governance changed too, you see. And the thing is that was another issue in terms of the governance wasn't the governance had not been so called board at that time, had not been totally they were aware of it, they were happy with it and all the rest of it. But that also changed along the way. And so you had a kind of a double effect coming in and well, got to do it a different way.

Speaker B So the board was not able to.

Speaker C No, as a matter of fact, in my level too, the only time the board got involved was the nominations of the undersecretary generals because they could be on an interim basis. They replaced me. That was really their only and they would approve the outline, the general outline of just the four divisions and myself. That's what they approved. And any individual upon my recommendation or my successor's recommendation for a. Senior undersecretary general. That's all. Everything else, what was used there was not a lot of interest because generally speaking, the board was elected by the General Assembly or Executive council and most of them were interested in what there were 26 representatives and represent nationalizing. Most of them were interested in what they could gain more from the secretariat in terms of advantage as opposed to how they were going to make the pie bigger for everybody. So that was a political dimension on that small p inside. So there were a lot of other different pressures in terms of even also to the amount of people the Constitution said that I could only hire I had to take into account mainly competency, but I had to take into account fair geographical distribution. So while I could have the top people hired, I could never hire all Americans or all Canadians or all Australians for the senior pin. I had to make sure that there was diversity from around the world. There were other interesting pressures.

Speaker B I think the issue of sustainability is an issue across sectors. I think it's a private sector issue too because the propensity to want to put your own stamp on something exists is a kind of human propensity. The pressures for doing it may be a bit different and it may be a bit more frequent in the public sector and the not for profit sector, especially in your kind of operation. If you're not in the limelight, if you're working at a low enough level under the radar screen, you being invisible as you go along.

Speaker C But sustainability was the big issue when we had Ruth, you and dinner on Thursday. What day is today?

Speaker B Monday night.

Speaker C Monday night. That was the big discussion. How do you get a board involved to deal with sustainability once you put all this effort in and how do you make it sustainable?

Speaker B And can you educate a board feel that organizational responsibility for good organizational design is a responsibility that one should demand as a board of a CEO? Exactly. It may be good in theory, but is it practicable? And the CEO would do get the work done, but that the CEO would be expected to have an organizational design and to keep it fresh was the essence of the conversation. And it seemed to me that most of the CEOs there were thinking, well yeah, but it's kind of pie in the sky.

Speaker E That's right.

Speaker C Unless you engage the board in some way. And that's why the next morning that there was a discussion about sustainability. When Larry Tapp talked about that, I wasn't there. Okay. There was a discussion about that because.

Speaker B That was probably the issue that came out of that CEO dinner. I just have one little weeny follow up question. You've been talking about under the radar. I mean, I understand starting where the organization is and what's doable I mean, I'm a realist. But you also made a little comment going by that I thought was interesting, really quick. You said marketing needs consistency. So I didn't understand. Can you say a little bit more? Because to me, if you're going to have marketing consistency and you're going to have a big visibility, which was what marketing is, to me you meant outside, inside. Well, I guess what I'm saying is that if you're talking from the outside about trying to consult to the public sector, then you have to be reasonably consistent. You have to understand the context. If you're inside, it depends what level you're working at. I mean, for some kinds of interventions, for some kinds of things that I wanted to do, I needed to be a bit more visible and I needed to be less sneaky because that was what I was doing. Other things, I tried that and I wasn't going to get anywhere. That didn't prevent me from looking at the world, my world of leadership and management, the way I needed to look at it for it to make sense to me. In fact, I rather like the conversations today that said, conceptual forms are really ways to make sense out of reality. Well, we all need ways to make sense. This happened to be a very intuitively, congruent for me, way of making sense. I didn't need to share it with anybody. I mean, I could try it out and if they looked at me when their eyes glazed over or they tried to attack me, I knew I wasn't going to get very far. And sometimes I didn't, sometimes I didn't. But I always used it myself because it seemed to make sense and I could do little pieces and so the consistency is more how much consistency and marketing can I use with whom? It's not really a different story for different people. It's that you don't necessarily take 100% of it. I wasn't no, but that's just an explanation. Thank you. I appreciate it. I just want to say quickly that I appreciate being here. I feel very fortunate to be here in such a small group to get such high quality presentations from you all. Thank you very much.

Speaker A Thank you very much.