There is some horror, and not a little cynicism, surrounding the announcement that central government departments are being asked to look for 40% savings. “They’re softening us up”, the media cry – but perhaps there’s more creativity in this method than might first appear. Experience tells us that the more you can stretch people’s thinking, the more achievable the unimaginable becomes.
The political and public sector context makes this kind of thinking uncomfortable for many of us. So how about a few less contentious examples – what if:
- …Martin Luther King hadn’t spoken about his dream that inspired the civil rights movement in the 1960s?
- …Alec Issigonis hadn’t thought about putting the engine in sideways – thus creating the Mini – the world’s most popular small car?
- …Dick Fosbury had just kept on straddling like everyone else?
Each of these was an innovator, driven by the desire the challenge orthodox thinking, and make something new and exciting happen.
At Ignite, we’ve also been successful in helping our clients achieve major breakthroughs by setting challenging targets. When a large infrastructure provider came to us with concerns about how long it took (and how much it cost) to deliver major projects, we challenged the team to think about it in a different way. It was clear that incremental change wasn’t going to deliver the revenue growth they had been tasked with achieving. Radical change often needs a radical approach, and our sponsor committed to what was, effectively, an eight-week workshop involving taking eight people totally off-site so that they could focus on the challenge. Following this workshop (which included an extended trip to Whipsnade Zoo to observe and learn from animal behaviour) robust plans were in place to cut the average length of their major projects by 90% (from nine months to two weeks) and average project cost by 80% (from £150-200k to £25k).
We use this kind of stretch in all our work – a bit like yoga exercises, it makes you more supple, and asks you to question some of your underlying assumptions about what you can do. We’re not advocating 40% cuts in public services, but it’s not a bad place to start the thinking.
