It’s what we know for sure that
gets us into trouble!
Richard Moir
Vanguard Consulting Ltd
www.vanguard-method.com
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Connect all nine dots, with just 4 straight lines,
without lifting your pencil once you start.
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3
2
4
1
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The Perspective Trap
• Our view of how things work
• Conditions our view of why things aren’t
working (the problems)
• And conditions our view of the solutions
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Here’s a real life problem……..
If staff worked
faster then
queues would
not build
Queue
disappears
Queue
builds
I shout at the
staff
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Here’s how it is appears in organizations……..
Thinking
System
Performance
Service
Efficiency
Revenue
Morale
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How to be more productive?
• Volume of demand
• How long it takes to do things
• How much resource is available to do things
“I can save you
£1.5m by knocking
30 seconds of the
AvHT”
Create a standard
for an optimum
transaction
Introduce a front
office, back
office split
Get a supply of
cheaper resource
that can be flexed
against demand
Introduce
an IVR
How do these changes affect the users of the service?
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Implicit belief is that all demand is
work that needs to be done
In order to take an alternative perspective
in service organizations you need to
understand them from the outside-in.
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Don’t start here!
change
action
…act on the
improve
Thinking
System
analysis
Performance
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Broker Personal Lines Insurance
• 44% of the contact from customers was because
the system had failed to do something for the
broker or to do it correctly
• Only 75% of the ‘automated’ transactions flowed
through without problems
• Once a problem occurred the average time to fix it
was 192 days
• For quotes provided by telephone less than 1%
converted to a sale
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Demand – Value – Expertise
• Failure Demand was reduced from 44% to less than 10%
Learnt how to do things better
• Value Demands increased by over 100%
• For quotes provided by telephone the conversion of quotes
to sales increased to 23%
• As a consequence revenue increased 20 fold
Learnt how to do better things
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Studying demand from service users perspective in the
local context reveals opportunities to do better things
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In summary…
• Our perspective shapes our reality
• Finding the big opportunities to improve
means challenging that perspective
• Base your decisions and actions in hard data
and not opinions
• Designing your activity and expertise to meet
demand will lead to things being done better
• Understanding demand will help you identify
opportunities to do better things
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