Cut-through to Break Through

Creating innovative solutions to business problems and reliably embedding changes to capture benefits

By Matthew Rogozinski

Do you have a hard time engaging the people in your business to provide more valuable products to your customers and to enhance the services they offer them?

Are your customers telling you that your business is missing many opportunities to deliver on their expectations? 

Despite trying to tackle these strategic issues, are you unclear on why your business hasn’t addressed them as yet?

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Inhance Partners has found that business leaders answer these questions with a ‘yes’ more often than not. 

Our experience with our clients has uncovered a wide range of seemingly intractable issues. In each of these cases, individual business areas have typically set to work on finding solutions through their continuous improvement programs within business-as-usual, or through their regular strategic reviews.  In these scenarios, senior leaders tend to report progress on specific initiatives; but, somehow, it is never very clear what concrete changes are going to be made…and when…to fix poor customer experience. It seems that in most of these cases, individual team leaders are rarely supportive of each other’s proposals. This makes decision-making protracted and creates an ongoing process of re-litigating what has already been seemingly agreed. 

Commonly in these situations, business leaders find themselves asking are we going to kill this problem off for well and good this time - or is this going to be ‘same old, same old’ for the foreseeable future?

Obviously if these were trivial problems, they would have been easy to address with simple, one-off initiatives. But they are problems that often cut across all parts of a business, and have touch points in many organisational silos.  Frequently, there isn’t a single person who owns and is accountable for every one of these processes or issues.  Not to mention the fact that everyone is busy trying to deliver on the next quarterly target on a daily basis.

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What’s needed is the ability to break through these endless cycles of makeshift solutions and workarounds; a corporate culture that identifies a problem at every level that it is experienced, and calls it out (full ownership and accountability); that is equipped to develop the best solution (fact-based problem-solving); and can set it in place so that it works (executional ability). 

But people need to be empowered to behave in this way – something that is often not actively supported and expected of employees in many companies currently. When this behaviour is ingrained within the culture of an organisation, it becomes a source of competitive advantage. The business becomes extremely agile and can respond very quickly to the challenges that today’s rapidly changing, uncertain business environments present. 

From our experience, a quick way of building a culture like this is through engaging your people to call out problems and opportunities and actively address them themselves. We call the process ‘Cutting-through’. 

Cut-throughs are an ‘organic’ way of changing the culture in an organisation. Individually, Cut-throughs address specific problems; collectively they transform the culture of a business and embed new behaviours. 

Specifically why is it then that Cut-throughs can deliver tangible business benefits immediately and transform a business into an agile competitor for the future?

• The solutions are innovative, not incremental in nature;

• The team is aligned behind them and owns them;

• The team then makes them happen within a short timeframe; and

• As the benefits become apparent, the momentum for change is ignited.

If you are interested in knowing more about this technique in achieving breakthrough change for your business, please contact Inhance Partners.