A manufacturer, culture diagnostic
They asked for a culture programme. The diagnostic said the culture was a symptom and the shift-handover process was the cause, so we recommended they spend the budget elsewhere.
- 34
- Interviews
- Two
- Sites
- 6 weeks
- Diagnostic
- None
- Programme recommended
A 400-person manufacturer with a safety-reporting problem: near misses were being logged at about a quarter of the rate the industry benchmark suggested, and management read that as a culture of not speaking up.
Six weeks, 34 interviews, two sites. People spoke up readily and told us at length about the problem. What they did not do was log it, because the logging system sat on a terminal in the shift supervisor’s office, the shift handover was 12 minutes, and logging a near miss meant staying late unpaid.
This was not a culture problem. It was a fifteen-minute problem with a form and a handover window, and no amount of psychological safety work would have touched it. We said so in the report, recommended a mobile logging route and a longer handover, and declined the follow-on programme that had been provisionally scoped at £90,000.
Reporting rate at six months was up 3.4 times. We would like to claim that; we cannot. They changed the form and the handover. Our contribution was six weeks of interviews and the willingness to write down an answer that lost us the larger piece of work.
Other engagements
Three written up, including the one where we recommended the client not proceed.
A water utility, executive team
Eleven directors, one unnamed disagreement about capital priorities, and 40% of meeting time going to status reporting. The disagreement surfaced in session two.
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An NHS board, leadership cohorts
Four cohorts, 62 clinical and operational leaders, and a manager-contracting requirement the client initially wanted to remove from the design.
Read the case →Start with the diagnostic, not the programme
Six weeks of interviews and a baseline measure, and a written finding — including the finding that the problem is structural and a development programme will not touch it. We have delivered that one twice.