In the first article, we reviewed how Alliances have become a significant form of contract partnership and management within the New Zealand health industry yet do not play a major role in Australian health management.
Chris:
What is the most important part of the
Alliancing Model?
Anthony:
The essence of alliancing is the principles, rather than the legal
documents. It’s about the underlying
philosophy. We could go into a hospital
right now and say that we’re going to create the whole concept of an
alliance. The legal structure is an
upfront cost to an outstanding result, but will still have the vision of
creating something with you and for you.
This is a structure and a process that we would be able to do, without
the big set-ups that have built in New Zealand.
Some
of the example principles that were held within Alliance I have been involved
in include Equality, ‘best for project’ decision making, integration, open and
honest conversation, a culture of ‘no-blame’ but accountability for action,
trust, respect and integrity, proactive pursuit of innovation, mutual support
and collective responsibility.
Anthony:
Most organisations that don’t have an alliancing capability will bring a
consultant in to fix the problem. The
problem doesn’t get fixed, so they sack the consultant and get anther one
in. In reality, its not the consultants
job to fix these types of problems its the consultants job to facilitate a
process so that the organisation can heal and grow.
Chris: Do Alliance members
ever come into alliancing groups with pre-conceived notions of how problems
should be solved?
Sandra:
Of course! Yes, everybody comes in with
his or her beliefs and what they usually ask those around them is ‘what’s this
got to do with [expletive] anything!’
People
come in thinking that this meeting is going to be like every other meeting they
have attended. That is will be
structured in a particular way and immediately focused on the project or on
brainstorming ideas or whatever the usual format that is followed in the
business. When this doesn’t happen,
people can get annoyed. They can ask
that we stop this nonsense and get down to business. All sorts of stuff like this.
A
good example of this was with an alliancing project for a huge multinational
oil company. It was a safety project
for the tanker drivers and high crash incidences. In the group they talked about family issues
and home life and all sorts of seemingly unrelated topics. But it worked. In the end their safety issues were cleaned
up because all sorts of ‘supposedly’ unrelated systems were improved like
roster scheduling for example.
You
see the problem in this situation was not the obvious one of ‘wearing hardhats
or boots or having driver training’. The
real, underlying issues was ‘why are the tanker drivers angry and therefore not
concentrating and losing control of their vehicles’. Well it turned out that they were angry
because the schedules were poor and nobody had ever listened to them. They were being sent into peak hour traffic
at 8am in the morning with an excessive number of runs to do.
But
until we have the opportunity to really explore these issues to get to the
bottom of them, people will ask on the surface ‘what has this got to do with
safety?
This
is why I always ask upfront ‘what is it what would get in the way of people
speaking openly and honestly today’.
Sometimes, this is enough to open the dialogue and get productive
conversations started.
Chris: Are there health
organisations that are not ready for alliancing?
Sandra:
Yes, there probably are. Lets consider
those organizations, whose leader is very autocratic and who has only one way
of doing things. I would doubt that this
leader would even want to talk about alliancing. I know that there are plenty of those
managers out there.
But
there will be somebody who is a leader in the industry who is prepared to take
a risk, because an alliance is a risk.
But there will be somebody out there who is a leader who wants to do
something really different. But once
that happens, as it happened with a Victorian Government Transport Authority
that took a leap of faith and trialed it for the first time all those years
ago, is that everybody watches it and they see the success and they become
curious.
Anthony:
The leader needs to be open to new ways of being and doing things. They might not know what alliancing is, but
they are open to new ways of doing things.
Sandra
– As an example, one of the pioneers of alliancing in Australia had been a
manager at this Victorian Government Transport organisation for years. He’d
always had a dream that work could be done a particular way and he just
happened to be talking to someone about alliancing, and it fitted with his
dream.
He
didn’t know how you could get people working together and working for something
bigger than them but he knew intuitively that this was his goal. So he just needed to come across somebody who
was able to introduce him to alliancing.
Now the risk to him, and I remember him saying it, was that it would
define his career. He said ‘I am either
going to go out as a hero or my reputation will be gone’.
Anthony: You see the normal model is that you contract
out the job to somebody, and they’re an independent person doing the job for
this government department so you immediately have conflict and an adversarial
relationship, underpinned by an official contractual relationship. So if anything goes wrong, people immediately
point to the contractual relationship.
The different with alliancing, is that the partners come into the group
and become an intimately connected part of it and what it does.
Most
people don’t want to go to work to argue and fight. There are some, but I believe that they are
few and far between. I believe most
people want to work together to be productive and do something great. People who go into the health sector generally
go into the industry because the want to help and have an underlying commitment. If you look at an A&E department in a
hospital, when things go wrong people take it very seriously because they are
so committed.
If
you just give them the opportunity to work together they will want to make it
work. And importantly, they will know
how to do it. You think about how
innovative you have to be when you have to make split second decisions.
Further,
if you look at the highly demanding health and safety minefield that healthcare
workers have to work within. Working
constantly under the threat of being sued, while also focusing on saving a
persons life managing an ailment. Health
and safety rules, when done poorly, can be the biggest block to innovation and
creative thinking that there is. And yet
managers sometimes impose health and safety systems without consulting the
workers.
What is it about the
alliance model and process that allows projects to succeed where they haven’t
in the past?
Firstly,
it’s about bringing the people together.
If you have systems that cross over three different departments in a
hospital, its about bringing the people in those departments together to ask
how can we design a new system that works for all of us. It may be re-working the
If
I think back to the alliances I have been involved in, one might involve three
different companies but they will work together to decide what is the best
system for this situation.
It’s
got nothing to do with the division or department that the individuals may have
come from. Divisional power struggles
are not allowed. What has to happen is
for people to talk about what is best for project irrespective of what is best
for their department?
It’s
the way that they come together that is key in how they work together. The success largely relates to how this
process is facilitated. From our
experiences both facilitating and working in alliance groups, people need to
come in with an attitude that ‘we’re going to find a solution to a
problem.
Every
alliance requires a neutral facilitator because otherwise some participants
wont speak up. A facilitator has to be
able to help people see what they are not currently aware of because they are
caught up in the process of it. A
facilitator therefore needs to have a neutral perspective. They need to be able to stay ‘outside’ of the
process.
If
a facilitator is not neutral, they also become part of the process because of
their background. This affects their
ability to stay outside. Participants
will think that the facilitator has some bias.
For example, that they are aligned with the Doctors group or the Nurses
group or have some bias towards the administrative component. A good way of describing it is like coaching
in a group setting.
INTRODUCTION TO SEEDS OF
POSSIBILITY
Seeds
of Possibility are a business performance consultancy. They bring a wealth of experience in alliancing across different industries and Sandra
has also worked closely with a Key consultant to a New Zealand District Health
Board, who pioneered Alliancing within the New Zealand Health system. What Seeds
of Possibility do differently is that they work
with clients to improve systems and engage people both at the same time.
As
Anthony highlights ‘ I saw a recent Gallup poll that revealed over 70% of
people in the workplace are not engaged with the work they do which astounded
me. ‘But it’s no use engaging with your
people if your systems are no good, because if your systems are no good, the
people disengage”.
When
you get those elements right and include how you align everybody – the
alliancing component - the organisation becomes powerful and strong and make a
difference and get great results. Their contact details are:
Conscious Leader
anthonyosborne@seedsofpossibility.com.au
Mobile +61 413663360
