The Leonardo Blog

Change is changing. The demand for change remains, in many ways such demands are increasing in both scope and frequency, but the nature of organizational change is also mutating. ‘Transformation’ is the increasingly common aspiration of contemporary organizations of all types and sizes. The same idea is also heard in discussions about the development and change of entire nations.

BPM is a journey that a lot of us aspire to take. It is one that we're convinced brings about value. But is that the case really? There are so many instances where we get asked at conferences and at our client's about the actual benefits of BPM.

BPMN is a well-known modeling notation. It stands for Business Process Model and Notation. Much has been discussion about this notation, however many people aren't aware of how to use this notation, and more importantly, when to use this notation. In this chat we talk to Stephen White who was involved in development of this modeling language.

As we model and analyze business processes seeking to improve them, we often look for common failure modes, circumstances where many instances of the process execution show a common problem. Pareto is our friend, and we hope to find just a few causes of many problems. Our focus is on problems and their causes. We focus on what normally happens and put aside the variations. We concentrate on the common and statistically significant, since that’s where we have the most information and understanding, and where we will find the major performance process improvement impacts. That all seems fairly logical doesn’t it? Yes it does, and sometimes it’s also the completely wrong approach; sometimes the focus on the significant and common occurrences blinds us to the powerful insights to be gained from the insignificant and the exceptional. What if, as well as looking at problems and their causes, we also looked for opportunities and their constraints? What if, instead of dismissing the exceptions for lack of statistical significance, we embraced the exceptions because they are exceptional? If we look outside of the ‘normal middle’ of the performance curve, what can we learn from the outliers? In his book of the same name, Malcolm Gladwell1 defines an outlier as “a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in the sample.” He analyzes the circumstances in which people, and groups of people, achieved exceptional success, ie how they became outliers. Covering a very wide canvas – millionaires, communities and law firms to cultures, hockey stars and plane crashes – Gladwell shows that success has a context, and that this context can often be described, analyzed and replicated. From his many examples, he clearly demonstrates that exceptional performance is not an accidental occurrence, and if we study the outliers we can find the cause of the exceptional effect. Gladwell focuses on successful people in his ‘outliers’ thesis. His premise, that success has a context and is not random, can also be applied to business process performance. If, in a particular circumstance, process performance is exceptional (positively or negatively), what can that tell us? Can we learn to avoid the negative and replicate the positive conditions? What arethe “vital behaviors” 2 that cause a process to work really well? (Patterson et al model the circumstances that have caused ‘outlier’ performance in difficult change management contexts. Their work has important implications for business process change – but that’s a subject for another time). If we could isolate those success factors that create the rare exceptions, could we use them to improve performance across all instances?