Will: Yes, I think we've got a few. So we got a question from David here. It says, what was the hardest part in getting leaders to unlearn and let go of what had been their core beliefs for so long?
Jenny: It actually comes down to trust and it comes back to experience. In some ways, it comes down to telling the stories of other leaders that have seen these things work that comes down to small steps. You can't just say to somebody who's been taught to lead and manage in a particular way that that's wrong, because it's not as they've been quite successful in their lives. What you need to do is you need to show them that there are things that can be different. We actually used some simulations, to have them experience what that different might look like outside their business, so they could then take that mindset back into their business.
Will: Great, thank you. Obviously in an organisation the size of RBS, the pace of transformation is not uniform across the whole organisation. So what is your advice for people dealing with that, and particularly the people that maybe feel left behind as things evolve and change?
Jenny: Yeah, I think the challenge is to give people enough tools to know that they're improving. If you think about what a learning organisation is, a learning organization is one that reflects it understands what needs to be different and it changes what needs to be different and things change at different pace. Our big structural regulatory programs that were underway for two or three years are unlikely to have turned dramatically in the work that they're doing. But there are pieces of tooling that they can use to improve their mindsets they can use to reflect and improve. What we did was we actually put the emphasis on reflection and improvement, as opposed to everyone must reach level four on your agile maturity index by tomorrow. One of the things I've been adamant on and I still am adamant on, although sometimes I lose the battle but we don't count scrum teams, because that's actually not the outcome. The outcome is that we get time to value faster, and we do it in a safe, secure, stable way for our customers. I don't care what methodology you use, provided you've got the reflection and learning about what could be better built into it.
Will: Great and when you showed us that process map, I think particularly early on in the journey, there must be a level of uncertainty around what is better, when it will return and the level of investment is hugely unpredictable in those early stages. How did you handle those early conversations, particularly when it comes to planning and budgeting and everything else.
Jenny: So some of these journeys are journeys of faith. We actually found a measure that gave us a productivity measure that was something tangible to measure that was the number of people doing work versus the number of people watching work for our projects. If we could get more people actually in the work doing the work, then we were making a shift in the delivery efficiency of our teams. So we focused on that as the metric to show that we were making a difference. There are positives and negatives around that as the single metric. We also tracked things like cycle time and some of the dora metrics that come through but in reality it was about do we have more people doing work, and are they doing the right work? That gave us the permission to do things at a more granular level that you might otherwise have to business case, in individual areas, if we had to business case changing that by better process, not a hope in hell, you just couldn't do it, the outcomes are too uncertain. In reality, you actually don't know whether that's what's slowing your work down. It might look like it's slowing us down but it might not be the thing that's slowing the work down. What we can tell you over the last three months is speed of decision making is a is a big factor.
Will: Perfect, I think we are at the end of the time. That just leaves me to say massive thanks to you Jenny, and thanks everyone who joins. I'm going to put up a slide which kind of gives you a pointer to how to continue the conversation. Massive thanks again Jenny that was a great talk.
Jenny: Thank you.