There are times whey you look at your organization, and while you may have visions of a rose garden, you have a weed patch on your hands—your first order of business has to be site clearance. For these situations we offer “Bureaucracy Busting.”
Bureaucracy Busting is a companion of whole-system organizational improvement; it is not a rival program. Truthfully, Bureaucracy Busting goes after the low hanging fruit, whereas whole-system organizational improvement goes after the bigger, higher hanging fruit.
Bureaucracy Busting is actually nice effort to run in parallel with whole-system organizational improvement because it is not nearly as resource intensive, and it will produce immediate and tangible results—all of which goes a long way in an organization where cynicism is high.
Our Bureaucracy Busting Approach
First and foremost, for our Bureaucracy Busting approach to be successful it needs to be apparent to people that the effort isn’t wired, that there’s nothing pre-determined by management—transparency is key.
A Bureaucracy Busting workshop consists of three all day, offsite sessions. At the heart of the workshop is something we call the “RAMMPP matrix.” Each workshop is preceded by some preparatory work, and is followed by the projects necessary to implement the results of the workshop.
We want the group for each workshop to be a cross-functional, diagonal-slice of the organization (i.e., nobody is in the same room with their boss). We will also lobby hard to include the front line folks—especially administrative assistants—because they know stuff.
The ideal group size for a Bureaucracy Busting workshop, and the number of workshops needed, are a function of the size, lifecycle stage, and condition of the organization.
Bureaucracy Busting Benefits
Compared to other change efforts, Bureaucracy Busting gives you a bunch of good stuff. It gives you employee ownership. It gives you leadership’s public commitment. It gives you change management infrastructure (e.g., progress reporting, champions, coaches, etc.). And it gives you a higher probability of successful completion because it is just easier to follow through on the change items than it is to neglect them.
We like it because it gives you a revolution created at the top, carried out by the people at the bottom, but protected by the people at the top. It is culturally congruent with the highly political, neurotic, time-starved, resource-poor organization. It also empowers the people—you wind up with a lot of turned-on people and change agents prowling your organization.
Engagement Structure
A Bureaucracy Busting engagement is anchored by a 3-day workshop, at the location of your choice, in which we lead your cross-functional team through our Bureaucracy Busting process. There is a bit of pre-work required by your team prior to the workshop. After the workshop, of course, there is the payoff work of implementing the workshop’s results.
Multiple workshops may be required depending on the number and location of the teams. And while the amount of pre-work is relatively fixed, the amount of implementation work will be driven by the size and complexity of the workshop results.
Windward will assist you in staging the workshop pre-work. We will facilitate the workshop itself. And we will assist you in the resulting implementation work to the degree you desire.
