INSIGHTS

Challenges

Remote engagement once again proved to emerge as a barrier - but unlike our process design efforts, opportunities for informal ‘friction’ and ‘touches’ were limited due to strict protocols.

Ideally, OSO Leaders would have opportunities to collaborate and literally ‘bump’ into one another to share progress, ideas, challenges, etc. Culture is defined by what you consistently do. It shows up in your language, your 1:1 interactions (both scheduled and informal), your meetings and communication, and the quality of your work.

Spatial Recommendation: Whenever possible, OSO Functional Leaders and their +1 leaders should have designated space adjacent to one another. This would further cultivate relationships, collaboration and positive friction.

Successes

From day Ø, the reception from ConocoPhillips to coaching support was one of “pull”. In our lexicon, “pull” means that leaders and their teams were asking for coaching and welcomed our assistance. Our Client Openness metric was benchmarked at 8.3, and rose to 8.7 over 12 weeks (+4%). This was the highest score within our Coaching metrics.

Secondly, we saw rapid adoption of the Learning Sessions shared within OSO. For example, within days of the Design Thinking concept being introduced amongst the OSO, multiple teams adopted prototyping, embraced creative confidence, and began to rapidly future-cast, design and test concepts.

In another example, the simple concept of, “saying no” (to stay focused) went from an ice breaker to a tool for managing expectations. The exercise helped the OSO leadership understand the difficulty and necessity of focusing on less to achieve more .

Table 01 summarizes metrics from our Governance, Meeting, and Coaching KPIs. Detailed metrics are found in Appendix D

Meetings starting on-time improved by over 30% (41% to 71%); however, meeting finish time remained a challenge, with 57% of meetings running long.

Based on our observational data, each OSO team member was spending an extra 30 minutes/week in meetings that ran longer than scheduled. Additionally, each leader spent about 15 minutes waiting for meetings to start. Lack of meeting time management resulted in ~45 minutes/week of waiting time + meeting overrun.

The lowest scoring metric was Accountability. The main driver for low Accountability scoring was Action Item Quality.

Actions were taken in about 37% of the observed meetings. Even when actions were taken, 69% of the time, action due dates were missing. The complete breakdown of items measured are in Appendix D.

Consistently good governance/cultural behaviors we observed:

• Involving the right people (90% of observed meetings), indicating a very inclusive team environment.

• Asking questions that allowed others to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, or abilities (82% of observed meetings)

• Aligned and supportive of decisions reached (96% of meetings where decisions were reached). This was the most impressive behavior observed. We did see plenty of disagreement and strong opinions, but when a decision was reached, teams would be aligned and supportive. Not every meeting reached a decision, but when one was reached it was almost universally supported coming out of the meeting.

(0.75 hours/week/person) x (170 OSO team members) = 127.5 hours/week (127 hours/week) ÷ (1 FTE/40 hours/week) = 3.2 FTE

The time equivalent of 3.2 Full Time Employees is spent waiting for meetings to start and meetings running over their scheduled time.

RECOMMENDATIONS + RISKS

Some of the risks and recommendations described in the previous section (Process Design) are relevant to Organizational Governance. We will not repeat them. Our recommendations for continued development of effective communication, governance and high performing teams are:

1. Any new interactions or meetings, should make use of Terms of Reference(s), and pre- and post-meeting coaching/feedback. The Calgary-based OSO team have been coached and scored for 12-weeks; maintaining this momentum would be prudent to the goals of change sustainment.

2. A clear and consistent value proposition to engage the field-based personnel does not exist. We have heard various value propositions in dry runs. This only serves to confuse the audience. Development of a Communication + Stakeholder Alignment Plan(s) by OSO leadership should address a fieldengagement strategy. See Appendix H for initial reference.

3. Continued use of prototyping and dry runs (or rehearsals) when implementing a new process. As detailed in Appendix B, consistent rehearsals are one of the five elements present in high performing teams.

Within OSO, we were able to test processes and ideas earlier. This allowed participants to provide candid feedback and course corrections much earlier than if the dry runs had not been done.

Our philosophy is that go-live should not be the first time that we try something.

4. Score your meetings. The metrics are simple to look at, they trend, and they give impetus to change behaviors.

For instance, in week 7, we shared results on meeting timing: 77% of the meetings in OSO went over their allotted time. You can imagine that this cascades, with back-to-back meetings running long because they started late. When meetings start late and end late, this begins to normalize within a group. However, with weekly scoring and associated coaching, you can measure and refocus the group towards better behaviors.

5. Capture action items more thoroughly. Quality action items were captured less than 31% of the time. This metric continues to improve (relative to the baseline), but reminding participants that quality actions are written down, have a single owner in the meeting, have a due date, and have general agreement from meeting participants. Our research shows that lack of the aforementioned leads to false promises, forgotten actions, and a general culture of ineffective communication.

6. Evaluate and decrease time spent in meetings. We translated the recurring meetings within the OSO Organization’s calendar into the abstract diagrams below.

For each asset’s busiest week, each ‘bubble’ represents a specific meeting, with the diameter reflecting the duration. Each subsequent block, moving from left to right, represents the days of the week from Monday to Friday, and the subtle horizontal split representing morning and afternoon. Lastly, the coloration within each day’s block represents the relative intensity (meeting time commitment), with red being most intense and green being least intense.

The conclusion from this ‘high-level’ view is that little time is available for non-meeting work. We recommend a ‘meeting audit’ to course correct towards specific days being recurring-meeting-free, and creating space for critical thinking and innovation.