At several periods during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during successive waves of rising infection rates, organizations in many sectors have gone into crisis operations mode to them get through. For many, their crisis operations structure addressed not only the needs made urgent by the crisis but also exposed the profound unmet needs and major gaps in their normal operating structure. Astute leaders are recognizing that the crisis has revealed the potential for greater levels of excellence in their organizations than existed before the pandemic.
The reality is that crisis operations aren’t sustainable indefinitely. More than a year and half into the COVID crisis, most organizations are now desperately seeking ways to rebuild resilience for both leaders and teams.
Those challenges can be met. Leaders can begin to move toward that path of “sustainably better than before COVID” by converting the most important elements of their crisis management structure, processes, and behaviors into a sustainable standard operating structure, with improvements. The Shingo Guiding Principles offer a powerful framework to help leaders accomplish this. These principles help leaders understand why elements of crisis operations worked so powerfully for a time, and how those elements can be successfully converted, embedded, and sustained in the work system, improvement system, and management system of their organizations.
Fundamentals of Shingo Principles
Before we can talk about how to do that, we need a bit of background. First, what is a principle? And second, what are the Shingo Guiding Principles? The Shingo Institute teaches that a leader’s fundamental role is to bring the Shingo principles to life in the culture of the organization, so it’s important to understand exactly what they are.
The Shingo Institute, which is based at Utah State University, serves as the anchor of one of the world’s great learning communities committed to the principles of organizational excellence. It derives its guiding principles from academic research of the world’s measurably best performing organizations across sectors and time.
The Shingo Model booklet define principles as “foundational rules that govern consequences,” whether we want to believe in the rule or not. That last part is really important: whether we want to believe in it or not. The principle is always operating in the background, and when our behaviors align with it, good things happen. When our actions don’t, bad things happen. We say principles are timeless and universal—meaning that they apply everywhere, always, and to everyone—and are evident, which means that they can be discovered, researched, and proven.
Stephen R. Covey taught that values govern our actions, but principles govern the consequences of our actions.
A good analogy is gravity. You do not need to believe in the law of gravity for it to govern consequences. If you jump down, you will fall. A long fall may lead to injuries or even death. If you instead choose to take the stairs and hold the handrail because you accept gravity as a universal force, you are more likely to avoid injury and death.
The Shingo Guiding Principles are the “gravity” of organizational performance, and they can explain at a fundamental level why certain aspects of crisis operations mode have exposed deep, pre-existing unmet needs, and how we can create sustainable systems in our organizations to carry forward the best of those insights.
Now it is time to get concrete. I will use two specific examples from the healthcare industry, which I am most familiar with. To do so, I am going to:
Example #1: Create Value for the Customer
In March 2020, as the first sudden, disorienting shutdowns were ordered, hospitals and healthcare systems immediately set up Command Centers or Incident Command structures anchored by a “top tier” daily or twice daily meeting led at the CEO/C-suite level. In these meetings, critical organizational priorities were determined and deployed, and learnings were shared amidst profound uncertainty and danger.
One of the first great urgencies they faced was determining how they could continue safely seeing patients who didn’t have COVID. You may recall that most healthcare organizations immediately shut down all elective surgeries, a major source of revenue and profit margin, and that patients pulled back on most discretionary ambulatory care. Setting up telehealth platforms, so that doctors and patients could interact over video, became a priority. And most organizations, who had dabbled and struggled in prior years to get telehealth going, were able to create and deploy fully capable platforms within one or two weeks and were amazed that they could do it that fast. The government also alleviated payment barriers at the same time. Over time, these organizations made some important discoveries. It turns out that many patients and their family members preferred telehealth visits, particularly the elderly who no longer had to struggle with transportation and exhaustion. And rapid studies found that for many types of care, quality was not affected.
One of the Shingo Guiding Principles governing here comes from the Enterprise Alignment dimension of the Shingo Model, Create Value for the Customer. This principle dictates that creating customer value should be an anchoring constant drive of any organization that wishes to sustain itself, and certainly to be excellent. What was happening prior to COVID? The truth is that we in healthcare are not usually anchored to creating value for customers. We use the fact that we are engaged in the healing arts as enough value creation, and we don’t push deeper into what patients’ value and need in their overall experience. Unfortunately, the great potential benefits of telehealth for many patients and providers alike, for many types of care, were not recognized or acted on at any kind of scale pre-COVID. It was only when it became a business imperative that healthcare organizations acted in record speed.
Looking past COVID, the lesson to learn is that a fundamental role of leaders is to focus organizations on the most important “big dot” goals rooted in Creating Value for the Customer, and they should encourage aggressive alignment to rapidly achieve them. This means that strategy development is not going to be a yearly academic exercise that leaves 300 organizational priorities limping along. Instead, it will be a dynamic process that provides relentless clarity about where the organization is going as well as the most important immediate targets to get there.
Therefore, your Command Center should not go away. Instead, you should transform it to anchor the entire organization so that it is moving in the same direction every day. Evolve it beyond a COVID focus and keep honing relentlessly on the few most critical customer-centered goals for the organization. Then, leverage the essential crisis lesson: the power of full organizational alignment to pursue, advance, and achieve the big dots using the principle Create Value for the Customer (plus other principles described below).
Great organizations tie linked management system huddles for each level of the organization to a Visual Management Center on a daily, weekly, and monthly cadence, weaving together these focused strategy cascades and information flows.
Example #2: Create Constancy of Purpose, Seek Perfection, and Embrace Scientific Thinking
Now let’s add a related example to illustrate how multiple Shingo Guiding Principles can and must be woven together to achieve the most powerful results.
The principle Create Constancy of Purpose also falls into the Enterprise Alignment category. Create Constancy of Purpose is defined in the Shingo Model booklet as “an unwavering understanding of why the organization exists, where it is going, and how it will get there.” It “enables people to align their actions, as well as to innovate, adapt, and takes risks with greater confidence.”
When a leader creates these powerful conditions for the organization, good things will happen, because principles govern consequences. If leaders don’t create these conditions, less positive outcomes for the organization will naturally occur.
The COVID pandemic revealed that those organizations who had lived by principles long before the crisis began did the best and are now accelerating past their peers, many of whom are still in great crisis. Following is an illustration.
A chief safety officer and two peers at a large healthcare system began to prepare for COVID, recognizing that they would deal with both great fear and great uncertainly. Accordingly, they established three key principles: 1) Everyone, including every level of leader in the organization, both medical and operational, has autonomy to take action as long as they follow the principles. 2) Do not send a caregiver into harm’s way. Zero harm to caregivers is the standard. 3) Maintain the best care for every patient so long as it can be maintained. The system will decide when protocols must change.
Explicitly tied to these three imperatives was another: when you are at risk of not fulfilling one of these three, get help. This explicit principle-anchored framework was implemented to keep people from freezing or fleeing and helped them to focus instead on the fight. It worked because everyone simultaneously had been given agency to act—a key point—within the guardrails offered by the principles.
This is one of the key powers of harnessing universal principles of excellence so explicitly. They simultaneously guide everyone in a complex organization in very positive, aligned ways, while unleashing every individual’s freedom to act within those guidelines. And, of course, you have to implement.
At this particular healthcare system, the cascaded huddles facilitated turbo-charged problem solving. More than 600 solutions (and counting) were delivered, tested, refined, and re-refined based on escalations from the front line. This scientifically structured, rapid problem solving was guided by leaders who were very clear that they didn’t have the answers but would help their teams discover them by providing support and systems to do so. These leaders thus applied three other Shingo Principles: Lead with Humility, Embrace Scientific Thinking, and Seek Perfection. This healthcare system’s safety outcomes were far better than other systems, both for patients and caregivers.
In contrast, organizations where principles weren’t applied have seen negative consequences. At healthcare systems, both before and during the crisis, where safety has not been raised to the level of Creating Constancy of Purpose for everyone in the organization, a vicious cycle has taken hold. Where leaders continue to act “top down,” do not work to prevent all harm, and do not embrace scientific thinking, there is greater mistrust, more call-offs, more resignations and retirements, and less effective problem solving. All of these negative consequences compound the pressure on remaining staff and lead to increased safety incidents and poorer outcomes.
It’s Time to Improve
As we begin to think post-COVID, what are the lessons that these interconnected principles teach? There is no better way to create the constancy of purpose that we all crave from our organizations than to lead with safety—always—not just in a safety crisis. Leading with safety as a precondition and seeking perfection as the strongest foundation for your much more dynamic improvement and management systems are the ways to create constancy of purpose. A focus on safety for team members and patients alike will start everyone’s day with what is most important, and it will focus everyone on learning to be excellent at solving the problems that make a fundamental difference to all, scientifically. Leaders who are committed to safety help to build culture and belief in the organization, a belief many organizations desperately need to rebuild.
I could continue to give anecdotes that illustrate the application of the ten Shingo Guiding Principles. Instead, the chart below will provide brief examples that are tied to many of the principles to show how you can pursue greater levels of excellence in your own organization.
To do this effectively, you and the leaders of your organization need to learn the principles and how to build systems that embed the principles in connected ways across the organization. Then you need to practice. Get in the habit of applying them in your organization. To gain this knowledge and capability, start with the foundational and powerful Shingo Workshop series (see https://shingo.org/education/) and seek out help and coaching from certified Shingo Affiliates (see https://shingo.org/affiliates). You will find that the COVID crisis has indeed revealed the potential for greater levels of excellence in our organizations, and that the Shingo Guiding Principles offer the most powerful framework to help us in that pursuit.
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