SCOTTISH WATER CASE STUDY -   Inverness Leadership Team Transformation

BACKGROUND

Scottish Water wanted to understand the challenges, behavioural root causes and relationship issues that were impacting trust and the progression of business needs in its Inverness region. Initiated in 2019, the objective of the project was to both identify and resolve these challenges.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES 

VISION Consulting’s (VISION’s) VISION diagnosis of the challenge ahead began with assessments that managers made of each other in VISION initial workshops and one-to-one meetings. These assessments showed that the team was in an early stage shared mood of resentment. 

Members of the team had two fundamentally different views of how to manage projects:

1. Some thought that good management was about consistency and good process – setting timelines and meeting them.

2. Others thought it was about hitting admirable outcomes that show quality engineering, working around processes that lead to standard outcomes.

VISION likes to encourage people who tend to one side or to the other to become open-minded enough to admit that sometimes consistency and good process is really important – and sometimes going full-out for engineering excellence (within budget) is also good for the company and the customer, even if it doesn’t follow the standard process.

VISION believes that enabling people to acknowledge such fundamental differences and build bridges is the way to address the differences.

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

VISION APPROACH

VISION introduced the leadership team in Inverness to Commitment-based Management (CbM) principles and developed a new meeting practice to resolve ad hoc issues between Water and Waste Operations and the Managed Delivery teams (Scottish Water’s in-house delivery vehicle).  

VISION’s approach builds a meeting practice that acknowledges differences and deals with these differences respectfully.

PROJECT DELIVERY

The new meeting practice that VISION introduced required that each meeting should be attended by just three or four people, all of whom would be required to participate in a spirit of careful listening and respect. The following methodology is then followed:

Building understanding

1. Identify the positions and who is going to speak for each position.

2. Each side gives its position and its reasoning.

3. An elected/appointed ‘wise person’ in the room gives advice to both parties. This person says what he or she thinks is important in the argument and how it should be changed (if necessary).

4. Each side either accepts the advice of the wise person, or not, and makes the change to the argument.

5. Each side then summarises the other side’s argument. 

Beginning to care

1. If one position or course of action is selected then, who is placed in jeopardy? (And this jeopardy can be either personal, or a threat to Scottish Water.)

2. How do we mitigate the jeopardy?

• Who do we need to support?

• Who do we need to thank?

• Who do we need to apologise to?

Resolution

1. How do we reshape our positions in the light of what we have heard?

2. Does the wise person see the positions converging and, if so, how? 

3. Do the others accept the converged position? If yes, then the issue is resolved.

4. If the positions are not converging, the wise person gives the reasons why and describes why it is a hard choice.

5. The wise person then gives his or her recommendations, and all parties enter into discussion with the following commitments:

• They are going to come to a resolution.

• They are going to take care of whoever gets hurt in the process.

CONTRACT PERFORMANCE

OUTCOME

The project successfully changed the mood from teams that argue and disagree to teams that listen, collaborate, and agree decisions for moving forward.