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In our world of mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and “continuous” improvement have you designed a workplace that will keep up with the pace of change?

While your organisation might be far from a stagnant bureaucracy marred by red tape, too many organisations are clinging to yesterday’s success aiming to replicate it through compliance, consistency and control. But this comes at the expense of connections, ownership, innovation and the capacity to adapt and improve.

You cannot manage (control) for innovation and change. You can only create a space for it to happen!

Enter The Flying Starship Factory

The Flying Starhip Factory is a two day workshop engineered to help organisations or teams design workplaces devoid of bureaucratic fragmentation and alive with collaboration and community. It’s your opportunity to explore the way you would like your organisation to be and create the environment and relationships to make it happen.

The Flying Starship Factory can help your organisation or team achieve the following:

• Better internal relationships and engagement
• Brilliant customer results
• An innovative and flexible workplace culture

So why do workplaces resist change?

On a very basic level, your organisation is made up of 3 parts: People, Technology and Business Results (including your customers). Your success depends on the relationships between these 3 parts. In other words; ‘whole systems’ relationships.

Sounds simple enough right?

But it is very difficult to maintain whole systems relationship because people tend to work in only one of these 3 parts. Sure people know their job or ‘task’ within their ‘part’ but they cannot see the whole system. They view the system from their own perspective rarely checking in with or communicating with the other parts.

The result is a fragmented workplace. Once fragmented, your system will defy integration and therefore the ability to change or improve.

So why not just redesign your structure?

If you think your workplace is fragmented, of course you’ll want to redesign it. But, all too often, redesign efforts are premeditated by ‘experts’ and enforced by ‘mangers’.

You’ve probably experienced a few of these interventions yourself.

Again, ‘Experts’ and managers can tell people where they fit in the system, but not how their contribution fits in. Nor can they incorporate the insights and the wisdom of the whole system.

The result is often a return to fragmentation. Bureaucracy, hierarchy and silos prosper at the expense of collaboration and community. The business and your customers suffer.

But there is a way for you to design a workplace and it encircles everything that's affected and includes everyone who's affected.

It’s where The Flying Starship Factory comes into play

This unique workshop gets everyone, from senior management through to front-line staff involved in the process of change/workplace redesign. It demonstrated, in a very real way, the pitfalls of trying to achieve change or innovation without participation of all parties and a focus on the total system: People, Technologies and Business results.

It’s stepping away from thinking ‘tasks’ and ‘boundaries’ to thinking ‘relationships’.

The Flying Starship Factory:

• Allows you to explore how you would like your organisation to be with the input of everyone who will be affected. Involving everyone as you change or redesign your workplace gives people a sense of ownership. When they’re involved in the bigger picture people will go beyond issues of pay and profit and encompass things like pride, commitment and community.
• Gives you the opportunity to examine existing tensions and barriers and move beyond them. While tension might sound unhealthy, this workshop actually encourages it. Tension is the gap between where your organisation is and where you want to be. The Flying Starship Factory allows you to move toward the tension, discover common ground and move beyond it. Participants will discover that the various factions of your business are more alike than they are different.
• Develops a commitment to quality, improvement and innovation rather that feeling pressured to comply to imposed standards. If alignment is beginning to feel like a method of control in your organisation or team it might be time to let go a bit. The Flying Starship Factory is a chance to get a little bit of ‘push back’ and allow people to not just accept ‘what is’ but explore ‘what could be’ in your workplace. Only then can you start to innovate and improve.
• Gets everyone in the business to truly focus on the customer. This workshop gets participants to start viewing your customers as a partner to the system rather than focusing on ‘pushing’ your products or services. Also, by removing internal boundaries and silos the workshop frees people to put their energy into the customer rather than internal politics.
• Creates conversations and communication that encourage change. The Flying Starship Factory encourages the conversations in your workplace to move beyond data, reason and logic. It creates an environment where people can talk from the heart, with enthusiasm and passion about your workplace and how they can make it better.

Does this sound like a total loss of control to you?

This workshop might sound like a bit of a ‘free for all’ to you. How do you control a system where everyone is responsible for design, innovation and change?

The Flying Starship Factory will challenge your need to control. It will demonstrate that control can happen at a personal level not just from outside ‘experts’ or by managers.

When people know enough about the whole system and are involved in its design they can begin to take responsibility for it, their relationships within it, its outcomes and its customers. They can really be leaders!

So how does The Flying Starship Factory work exactly?

You’re probably wondering how a two day workshop can possibly limit fragmentation and create cultures of commitment and community in your organisation.

Of course a workshop alone won’t do this for you. What it does do though is create the space for change to happen. It gets your whole system in the same room and allows people from all parts to explore together how they would like their workplace to be. It is only then that you can start to move forward.

The workshop actually creates a state of confusion!

This might sound strange but it takes ‘confusion’ to create change in the workplace. If you’re too content or worse still, in denial you’ll never achieve change in the workplace. You’ll stagnate and have to watch the competition chew up your market share.

Confusion is where people can start asking questions of the system and what might be possible if everyone collaborates to improve it.

That’s why, the centrepiece and key learning component of this workshop is a simulation. Participants become part of – you guessed it – ‘The Flying Starship Factory’ manufacturing products known as ‘Flying Starships’ (actually origami stars) for its discerning customers. The simulation creates the confusion necessary for learning and renewal to occur!

It's all about learning from the mistakes of the past

Initially, participants become part of a very traditional ‘production run’ divided into teams, each with a very specific task. After the first production run the output is assessed by the customer and the people, technical and economic/business results are analysed.

The results, under this ridged and traditional structure, are often disastrous with poor product quality, low job satisfaction, little or no profitability and conflict across the different teams in the production line. It's an environment of compliance and consequences. Blame for the poor results is passed back and forward between the different teams. Sales and customer satisfaction suffers.

This first simulation allows participants to experience first hand the problems with traditional, change resistant, organisational structures. But most importantly they will discover that no individual, team or department can affect overall results.

In the video below you will see participants being initiated into their roles in the first simulation. Let the confusion begin!

The productive possibilities

With their learning’s from the “production run” participants reform to create a new system comprising several cross functional teams each producing its own product. Each team can choose how to design and manage the way they work, free to implement changes to job content, production sequence, training, policies and protocols. They then complete a second production run to test their new collaborative, self designed systems. The outcomes are astounding with better products, more satisfied customers and employees and overall profitability. A great sense of belonging and community is achieved.

Sure it’s ‘theatre’ and maybe a little exaggerated compared to your regular workplace. But this simulation creates the necessary ‘confusion,’ setting the scene for robust discussion where we relate these learning’s back to your business.

In a facilitated environment you’ll get the chance to get the ‘issues’ out on the table and move toward the tension exploring ways to bridge the gaps in your organisation and get that sense of collaboration and community you’ve always wanted.

Why do most efforts to change our organisations fail?

Having most likely experienced many interventions or workshops in the past you’re probably thinking you’ve seen everything that there is to see. But, most initiatives ignore the fact that people’s behaviour is shaped by their environment. They discount that everyone in the organisation may be doing the best they can in the context of the system that surrounds them.

Changing an organisation or workplace is purely cosmetic unless there is a focus on the whole system!

The Flying Starship Factory is different?

Here’s 4 reasons why:

1. It creates a safe learning environment where your people can experience the pitfalls of change initiatives that do not involve the whole system. You can identify and eliminate any problems upfront and get all the issues out on the table. This means you won’t fall into the trap of not getting fully aligned before taking your organisation in a new direction.
2. It’s gives participants a first hand experience (simulation). This is more than a role play. Your participants will be involved in a live simulation where they feel at a ‘gut’ level (as opposed to theory) the experience of workplace redesign done with and without whole systems involvement.
3. It Involves people at all levels of your organisation. By involving all parties this won’t just be another ‘top-down’ initiative designed by experts and imposed by managers. Participants, no matter their position or title, will realise their contribution to making your change initiative a success. In other words The Flying Starship Factory emphasis the responsibility of each individual for delivering incredible, customer focused results.
4. It gives you results long after the workshop. You’ll get simple but effective take-away tools for measuring engagement, tapping into customer needs, costing results and analysing process improvement. Additionally, as with all The Human Enterprise development workshops participants come away with a whole new language and conversation skills to describe their business and develop your culture.

Is it time for you to take action?

Enthusiasm, ideas and good intentions only last for so long. If they don’t lead to concrete actions it will hard for people to avoid becoming sceptical about organisational change.

First steps are actions, not intentions. The Flying Starship Factory is a first step and while it might be small step, if the whole system is behind it the possibilities are out of this world!

Take a small step now toward a better workplace by talking to us about conducting The Flying Starship Factory in your organisation.

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