Getting Buy-In to Targets

Bids & Proposals are collaborative by their nature. That means getting 'buy-in' is vital for their success. This could be buy-in to a range of things (e.g. leadership, strategy, a price etc). The example in this blog comes from outside the world of Bids & Proposals. However, the principals are perfectly applicable to our entire organisations, as well as Bids & Proposals. A recent BBC documentary following South Yorkshire Police provided an excellent opportunity to see people grappling with the problem of buy-in! 

At Amplio, we specialise in Price to Win, which itself is a target that requires buy-in. When we undertake a Price to Win assignment there are three broad challenges:

1. Getting the target correct so that if achieved, our customer wins the bid at the highest price possible
2. Communicating the target Price to Win so that it can be peer reviewed and iteratively improved
3. Getting buy-in so it gets acted upon and actually delivers value to the organisation

We teach all three of these skills on our 4-day advanced Price to Win training course. The case study presented by South Yorkshire Police is a spectacular example of people struggling with all three. It's rare we get to see these issues on film. The BBC’s Police under Pressure documentary provided recorded evidence of the difficulty navigating a bureaucracy. In the first clip, South Yorkshire Police are at risk of an intervention from Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) due to their perceived under-performance.  Having set a an initial target and failed to achieve it; management decide to double the target. Yes, you read that correctly. That's like the reverse of doubling-up on a lost roulette bet. We’ll tackle these points in reverse order.

Getting Buy-In

It’s not relevant to this blog what the target is. This commentary regards the way it was set and whether it got buy-in. When your given reason for setting a target is: “What I wanted to do…was to demonstrate that, you know, we had ambition”  it’s not exactly a rallying cry people are likely to leap up out of their chairs for. As for the buy-in, these are quotes from people charged with implementing the target;

“We’re just trying to do our job, but it feels like the people above us have got unrealistic demands”

“If we’re trying our hardest now, where’s this other percent going to come from?”

“My sector target has been brought down from 6 burglaries a day to 4 burglaries a day…  Does that affect the way I’m working by having that change in target? I’m not sure it does.”

The last quote is the most damaging. If you change a target and people aren’t doing anything different as a result, it’s time wasting. Also we should consider that these are quotes from people willing to speak out on national television. In many organisations the worst resistance comes from people who won't even speak out in a private meeting. Passive resistance is harder to deal with than the people who tell you their concerns. 

Fundamentally, you can’t ask a competent person to take the same amount of resources, apply them in the same way and get a new result. Ironically, there’s probably a lot that could done to improve productivity in the Police. A book called ‘Wasting Police Time’ lays out many examples of Police inefficiency. PC David Copperfield (pseudo name) writes:

“I ended up with a stack of handwritten forms about half an inch thick, all of which I pinned together and handed to a supervisor for checking before they were sent off to the CPS”.

Handwritten forms! You can’t demand efficiency from people using biblical forms of communication. The simple fact is good target setting comes with some degree of help. If the target was accompanied by some new ways of working or new technology then it’s possible.

Communicating the Target

One of the skills we teach on our advanced Price to Win training course is recognising, and dealing with, good and bad objections. In simple terms, ‘good objections’ are logical, well-intentioned challenges that you should listen carefully to.Price to Win involves more assumptions than the human brain can hold in its short-term memory. Good objections may well be guiding you to a bad assumption that you should fix and doing so will improve your accuracy.  Bad objections are pretty much the opposite. Likewise, an analyst can give good and bad responses to objections. Good responses lay out the logic and information that led to your conclusion. This allows people to help, by giving you new information or a better interpretation. This clip shows exactly what not to do. The Head of HR has listened to the people he represents (those people with no buy-in from the first clip). He does his job and challenges the targets:

Head of HR: “it just seems an unrealistic target, that were never going to achieve”

Response 1: “I absolutely agree with you, that, you know, really challenging, you know, bordering on unrealistic targets, but that’s the message that they are giving us”

Response 2: “whether we like it or not, we are where we are, and those are the targets that we need to achieve if we are going to come off the radar and the intervention that’s looking, looming ahead, so those are the targets that we have to achieve”

To paraphrase that circular logic; 'we have to achieve the targets because we have to achieve the targets'. Any analyst that ever stands up and says ‘that’s the Price to Win because that’s the Price to Win’ was not trained by us. You don’t need to be an expert in body language, distancing language or cognizant dissonance to see what’s going on here.

Getting the Target Correct

Some things are difficult to forecast and crime is one of them. For example, looking at the USA murder rate per 100,000 between 1960 – 2010, there are some massive swings. There’s no real consensus on why the murder rate doubled between the mid-60’s to mid-70’s. Nor is there any real consensus on why it halved in the 90’s. There are lots of theories. The UK has its own share of swings too. It follows a similar curve as the USA, but starting from 1980.

Source: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2012/12/6-timelines-explain-americas-persistent-gun-culture/4181/

The theoretical explanations include gun control laws, legalised abortion, crack cocaine and zero-tolerance policing. There are lobbyists on each side of all those issues so finding an objective view-point is tough. The real answer problem lies in the best bits of each, plus some other factors that aren't as popular to write-about. So in summary, there's no consensus on why the past happened. Unsurprisingly then, there's even less consensus on what the future should look like. Therefore, we should really question how HMI (who set South Yorkshire Police’s targets) are really measuring them. The only real test would be to determine the amount of crime there would be in South Yorkshire, if everything about their performance was average. Then compare the actual performance to that.

These targets are not the kind of thing that can be set lightly with back-of-an-envelope calculations. For example “let’s double the target”. In the absence of doing this, there’s no real evidence HMI were setting the right target in the first place.  Inconveniently, there’s also a very low correlation between the number of Police Constables and levels of crime. Probably because the productivity of a 120,000+ work force matters much more than a 5-10% change in its size. Handwritten forms.

Conclusion

This is not an anti-targets blog post! It is an anti-bad-targets blog post. As Albert Einstein said “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”. In that way, few things sap moral and make organisations a miserable place to work than bad target setting. There’s an excellent book called ‘How to measure anything’ by Douglas Hubbard. The clue is in the name. So next time someone suggests that it’s all too difficult to measure something, please contact us. Next time you are setting a target, please remember this blog.