About Timothy

More about Timothy

How did you get into improving organisations?

I took on many delivery roles, and when I found things broken, I was often too busy to help people properly. Knowing how to fix things but not having the capacity to sit down with them and work through issues was deeply frustrating. To affect complex change takes a lot of time. You need to provide training and considerable one-to-one support. More than this everyone has gaps in their own knowledge, sometimes you need the time and space to study to be able to help. Being able to support people with diverse organisational challenges is very rewarding.

What drives you?

I love learning and improving things. When I see something that isn’t optimised, I have a real desire to improve it. There are a large number of thought leaders who have freely shared material on the internet, and I find this invaluable. I use this to weave together multiple perspectives to create new material and processes.

What frustrates you?

One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was not appreciating the appropriate pace of change. People need time and space to practice what they have been taught. You have to make changes slowly, as pushing really complex processes too quickly can cause failure and poor morale. This usually means you must apply incremental improvements and accept that the early stages may not be optimised. You need to be very careful with short timescales. This will seem like you are being efficient, but if the change doesn’t stick, then a lot of effort will be wasted.

How do you get people to change?

To start with, you need senior sponsorship. The leadership team must be fully behind what you are trying to achieve. This starts with them aligning on the expected benefits. Mostly, these are obvious, but it helps to make them clear. Senior sponsors are the glue that will hold things together. Let’s say we are deploying OKRs, we start with training, then an initial rollout. Excitement is high but it is very challenging. Over time the leadership team stop asking for OKRs, and worse and worse quality starts coming through until they are quietly dropped. Change fails over a period of time, not immediately. Next, you need to provide continual support and encouragement. You will often find champions for change who are really bought in and can use these people to promote success.

Why write a book?

There’s always a balance between providing condensed versus detailed information. When you want to understand something, you’re often trying to simplify what you’re reading to understand it. On the flip side, when you want to gain deeper insights, detailed information is very valuable. A few bullet points will be insufficient. In addition, telling stories can help people remember things, and you can’t do that with bullet points. Writing a book allows for a vast amount of information to be passed. As it is a book, people expect to read a lot, so the expectations are set, and you can pass on detailed information without complaint. From my side, you really learn how much you know about a subject when you have to write about it.

Why work with you?

There are a lot of change agents out there, and I’ve worked with many good ones. Few of these specialise in target operating model creation, and even fewer combine expert product and business skills with delivery. Having this capability means I can work across a business, joining together many senior stakeholders together to create an optimised way of working.