Focus on excellent processes, not lastminute fire-fighting, says Steve Doswell

“Are process-efficient heroes the stuff of storytelling?”

How much of our ideas about right and wrong are driven by the corporate culture we’re in? There are organisations where legends abound of rabbits pulled from hats, of initiatives rescued from the flames. But tales of heroic rescues - of projects, of profits – all add to the sum of stories that shape and sustain a culture that celebrates – and no doubt rewards – fire-fighting.

Of course fire-fighters – real and metaphorical - are universally admired, and surely that’s rightly so. At least, my cultural conditioning leads me to believe that it is. However, that raises a challenge. What if there are organisations where folk don’t sit around the camp-fire singing songs in praise of feats of corporate derring-do. What if there were no fires that required heroic intervention in the first place?

Global power engineering giant Rolls Royce has spent several years focusing on process excellence. A key principle is that if all involved in a particular process do their job by complying fully with the process, there will in theory be zero defects. In practice, Rolls-Royce and other employers that strive for process excellence recognise that pure perfection is unattainable, and many of them instead strive to achieve ‘six sigma’ which effectively means near-asdamn- it perfection, or (returning to our metaphor) the art of not having fires in the first place.

The question then arises, if the corporate camp-fire songs weren’t fuelled by feats of fire-fighting, what would the company minstrels have to sing about then? Are process-efficient heroes the stuff of storytelling? Is the person who quietly goes about their work, getting things done, delivering results as expected, likely to be lionised? How would this play in an internal communication perspective?

London Underground produced a compelling billboard campaign several years ago on the theme of ‘Nothing happened’. It told the story of a pensioner travelling on the tube who was taken ill on the platform, her plight spotted by a sharp-eyed employee, assistance immediately given and an ambulance summoned. Within minutes she had been taken to safety, recovered and was able to continue her day. Meanwhile, the employee’s quick thinking and action had avoided delays to hundreds of other passengers’ journeys, meaning that, for those passengers and for the smooth running of the service, nothing happened.

It was a clever campaign (it stayed in my mind) in that it produced a story from an example of process compliance, of trains running on time.

The lesson for internal communication is that a ‘news’ driven agenda will tend to look for the exceptional, the unusual, the rabbits rescued, the fires fought. But internal communication is not journalism; it is part of the management of people – crucial people pivotal to the success of an organisation – and an influence on corporate culture, which is the way an organisation does what it does. We therefore have it in our power to mould the way an organisation thinks and talks about itself.

At the risk of sounding simplistic, if we make myths of fire-fighting, we help to reproduce an environment in which ‘fires happen’ and it’s part of the stuff of our organisation that heroic employees put them out and enjoy the resulting glory. Conversely, if we highlighted and gave star billing to ‘quiet acts of process compliance’, we might enable the organisation to see that kind of act as the preferred behavioural norm. It may not sound very exciting – but pepping those stories up to make them palatable is all part of the creative challenge for IC. 

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell