The point of no return

When will we get to the point of no return?

That’s the point in a flight where the only option is to keep on keeping on, towards the destination, because there is no longer enough fuel to return to the place of departure.

It took thirty years for America’s largest car maker, General Motors, to reach that point. And by then it was too late. Too late to circumvent the biggest industrial bankruptcy in US history.

The story of General Motors preventable downfall, as told by Frank Longfitt for This American Life, isn’t just another tale of corporate America excess. It’s also a more humdrum story of how great practice – the kind of practice that might have saved the company – remained the exception, rather than the norm. For three decades.

Understanding what keeps great practice peripheral has started to interfere with my late night sheep counting. We’ve managed to kickstart some pretty great practice over the past nine-months, but how to make it stick and spread? 

Here’s three glimpses of that practice:

Jonathan might be British Columbia’s best bus spotter. It’s his favorite pastime. As our newly minted transitologist, Jonathan rides the bus with folks less comfortable using transit, solving one of our many logistical nightmares: getting people to their Kudoz learning experiences. 

Frane has got so many talents that she doesn’t often use. But, as a host for Kudoz, she’s shared her love of botany with Ben and painted at her kitchen table with Evan. It’s reinvigorated her passions, and made the day-to-day a lot less boring.

Bobae, John, Hayley and Irena had never met, but were perturbed by the same reality. Too many of the adults with a disability whom they supported had big misperceptions about dating, sex, and relationships. So they came together, in the 20% of their work time dedicated to bottom-up innovation, and developed Ask a Dude: short videos to lubricate a different kind of male-to-male conversation.

We think what makes all of this practice so great is that it unleashes and replenishes human ingenuity. Great practice need not be new or trendy. Great practice just must elicit and elevate people’s capacities.

That’s what happened from 1984 to 2010 in one car factory named Nummi in Fremont, California. Thanks to a partnership between GM and Toyota, Nummi became an example of what happens when workers, union, and management flip the focus from quantity to quality. No longer would number of years worked and the number of cars rolling off the line be proxies for performance. Instead, team work and production quality would constitute doing a good job.

It’s strikingly similar to what we’ve tried to do in one R&D lab called Fifth Space in the greater Vancouver area. Thanks to a partnership between InWithForward, the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion, posAbilities, and Simon Fraser Society for Community Living, Fifth Space is an example of what happens when social sector staff come together to flip the focus from quantity to quality. The number of service hours delivered isn’t a proxy for performance. Instead, staff have had explicit permission to re-think what is being delivered, for whom, and to re-define good outcomes with the individuals they support.

But, it’s early days. And there is a higher likelihood that our nine-month R&D experiment will succumb to the status quo rather than permanently disrupt it. Ultimately, that’s what happened to Nummi.

How Nummi managed to shift behaviors within its four walls tells us how quickly cultural change can be internalized. Why Numi failed to shift behaviors outside its four walls tells us just how many conditions have to be in place for cultural change to be externalized.

Let’s start with three of the many how-to’s:

To see is to believe. Starting in the 1980s, small groups of frontline workers got their first passports and traveled to Japan to work the Toyota line. There, they lived a different philosophy. On the line, they worked as part of a team. Not as an individual employee. If they noticed a fault during assembly, they could stop the line. Rather than be penalized for slowing production down, they were rewarded for rapidly problem-solving.

We too have attempted immersive learning. After all, if you want to pick-up a foreign language, the best thing to do is move to where it’s spoken and imbibe it. Why wouldn’t the same be true for picking-up another way of working? So every Tuesday in the Fifth Space, 27 individuals worked as six interagency teams. Teams were rewarded for failing fast, and iterating quick. Our #failforward award was given to the team that best exemplified failure.

Nothing kills team work quite like pulling rank. In Japan, managers and frontline staff perceived each other as on the same side. There wasn’t endemic animosity or distrust. That wasn’t the case at Nummi, where before 1984, staff grievances against management were at an all time high. As Nummi started giving staff more control, and removing divisive practices (e.g ending parking privileges for management), grievances dramatically dropped. The union became an ally.

We certainly were not starting with the same hierarchical antipathy; and yet, many felt a separation between management and staff. In the Fifth Space, there has been no separation. Most teams include a mix of frontline, mid-level, and senior level folks. All fellows are equal collaborators, with the same decision-making authority. We surely haven’t erased tensions, but we have demonstrated that robust ideas come from mixed teams.

What you count suggests what you care about. At Nummi, before 1984, it was all about the number of cars made. Your bonus depended on it, even if the cars you produced had missing parts and expensive errors. There were entire lots of mutant cars. After 1984 and the Toyota partnership, the incentive structured changed. Rewards focused on the number of well-made cars.

Whilst there is a big difference in measuring the number of cars made versus the number of well-made cars, both are still readily observable phenomenon. One of the big challenges in the social sector – and the disability sector, in particular – is good outcomes are not so readily observable. Or at least using the tools we have available. How do you know if somebody with an intellectual disability, who cannot speak, is fulfilled? Rather than ask that question, we often infer that a lack of behavioral challenges or an absence of complaints means things are good. In the Fifth Space, we create a space for critically questioning our inferences and for developing alternative ways of observing outcomes. There are no simple answers, but there are lots of things to try.

If what Nummi tried was so successful, why didn’t it catch-on? How come it remained an anomaly within GM’s North American plants? There’s at least three reasons.

Outside of Nummi, GM invested in 16 ‘commandos’ to learn the Toyota way. They too traveled to Japan. They too left transformed. Only when they returned, they no longer had strength in numbers. Back at their individual plants, they lacked allies and senior management backing. There was no master plan for how to move from personal to organizational transformation. Nor was there a way to call out organizational practice that was contradictory with the Japanese way.

How, then, can we ensure our Fifth Space fellows don’t return to disillusionment? How do we support them back in their jobs? And how do we articulate our transformative intent to their colleagues and managers?

GM leadership did want to replicate the Toyota way, only they failed to replicate the behind-the-scenes systems so critical to success. GM put the focus on the factory floor – on the physical layout and organization of space. And yet it was far more than the setting that enabled Toyota workers to produce better cars. It was how they worked with other parts of the business. At Toyota, frontline workers had the remit to make suggestions to designers & engineers. When they needed a special part, they could directly order. At GM, departments remained compartmentalized. The parts department did not take orders from the frontline.

In the social sector, there’s not a parts department. But there are human resourcing departments, which supply training, tools, and supports. Typically, these departments take requests from managers – not from the frontline or from the individuals & families they serve. If we want to replicate R&D practices like Fifth Space, then, we cannot myopically focus on the physical ‘lab’ spaces. We have to change how all the departments within an organization interact, and enable ground-level needs to influence system functions.

Nummi was a partnership between GM and Toyota. Not only did Nummi workers benefit from immersive learning in Japan, their learning was reinforced by consistent modeling back on their home turf. But when GM tried to take the approach to other plants, it did so without Toyota by its side. Why would Toyota share it’s approach with GM? Perhaps they knew that partnership was critical for ongoing success, and felt confident GM would not be able to embed the approach without them?

Partnership has also been the not-so-secret sauce behind the Fifth Space. Unusually, we at InWithForward have been equal partners with three service delivery providers. We are not fly-in, fly-out consultants. And whilst the three service delivery providers are competitors, they’ve come to see that they can put their differential strengths (and weaknesses) to better use, and get to better outcomes by working together. To spread the Fifth Space approach, then, we have to spread true partnership working. That’s the kind of partnership that’s a heck of a lot more than convening meetings and slapping logos on reports. It’s sharing resources, intellectual property, risks, and rewards. And it’s the foundation upon which everything else is built.

There’s big pressure to spread Fifth Space and scale solutions like Kudoz. Spread and scale are social innovation’s rallying cry. Typically, at the end of an innovation project, we look to codify the steps and turn it into a toolkit, a training manual, a franchised business. But, what I take from Nummi, is that none of these things were all that important. What was important was investing in a cross-section of people – frontline, managers, and union representatives – and enabling them to first find their personal point of no return.

Can we do the same?