'ANDERS, BETER, HORIZONTALER'

Achieving more with your organisation at lower cost. A smart design alone is not enough. The people involved must also work together effectively. With Horizontal Organising, Renco Bakker aims to bring that social perspective out of the shadow of the technical one. ‘It only truly works when you personally feel accountable.’

‘Quality is horizontal organising.’ With this concise statement, Renco Bakker summarises the book in which he, together with Teun Hardjono, argues for process-oriented working in organisations. Not only from the perspective of organisational design, but also from the perspective of collaboration between all parties involved. In other words, horizontal. In the conventional approach to quality, thinking in terms of processes is central, Bakker explains. The underlying idea is that if we control the production process, the product will naturally meet the specifications and the customer will be satisfied. At the same time, that process consumes resources, which implies that if we critically examine every form of waste, the process will also meet the expectations of other stakeholders, such as management, financiers, and the society in which the organisation operates.

The full potential

In recent years, we have achieved a great deal in terms of understanding how to design processes intelligently, such as building a tunnel or issuing a driving licence. From the fields of process and quality management, we have been provided with a wide range of tools to carry out the design or redesign of such processes effectively. Think of process mapping, process analysis, lean management and Six Sigma. “Plenty of reason to be proud,” Bakker believes, “especially when we consider that there is also growing societal support for sustainable working and responsible business practices.” Yet, according to Bakker, it would be a mistake to sit back and feel satisfied. On the contrary, he urges his peers: “If we take a critical look at ourselves, we must admit that we have been rather one-sided in our approach and that we are still far from realising the full potential of process-oriented working. It needs to change, it needs to improve, and above all, it needs to become more horizontal.”

Horizontal alignment

Process management as we know it is primarily a design discipline: system-oriented, technical and rational. It often takes place within a vertical, top-down organisation. What has largely been missing so far is the social perspective: viewing a process as the way in which people and organisations collaborate. This is precisely where horizontal connection becomes essential.

‘The relationship between those carrying out the work within the process is a crucial success factor,’ says Bakker. ‘No process design can compensate for that.’

This is why Bakker and his former mentor, now co-author, Hardjono, have in recent years shifted their focus from constructing processes to strengthening that social collaboration. In doing so, they do not shy away from addressing culturally shaped mental models that can hinder effective horizontal connection. ‘Take the tension often seen in hospitals between medical specialists and management: two professional groups who tend to see themselves as superior to one another and, from that sense of superiority, distrust any suggestion made by the other.’

The solution that Bakker and Hardjono advocate, and which their book explores, is to base organisational control on facilitating the flow of work within the organisation. At its core, this revolves around four key concepts, each given its own chapter in Horizontal Organising: horizontal design, horizontal collaboration, horizontal governance and horizontal thinking.

‘The challenge for the field of process and quality management,’ Bakker argues, ‘is to develop in such a way that these four concepts are continually enriched with new perspectives, approaches, tools and techniques, so that they become identifiable, analysable and adaptable. Only then can we achieve the breakthroughs needed to make organisations truly process-driven.’

Tinkering with mopeds

“I was the kind of boy who was always tinkering with mopeds,” Bakker says about himself. “Taking things apart and putting them back together again. That’s why I went on to study mechanical engineering. While doing that, I also developed an interest in people and organisations and how they get things done. That led me to explore business administration as well.”

In his work at Peugeot dealer Nefkens in the early 1990s, Bakker became familiar with process thinking, quality and quality systems. “At the time it was very much: we sell cars and you deal with quality. And I was the only one working on quality. That’s where my interest began in bringing those worlds closer together.”

From Nefkens, Bakker spent several years helping Peugeot dealers across the country improve the quality of their work processes and achieve certification based on ISO 9000. From there, his interest broadened, first to the management of those processes and then to organisational development. The INK model taught him to see the connection between processes, people and management. This led him to the work of Teun Hardjono and Steven ten Have, who were working at Berenschot at the time. Through them, Bakker moved into consultancy.

In 2001, Bakker became co-author of Hardjono’s book Management of Processes, part of a series covering all aspects of the INK model. At Berenschot, he first spent three years working in quality management and then five years in change management at The Change Factory. After that, he was ready for a new challenge. Although he was honoured by the offer to establish his own advisory group within the firm, he chose instead to start his own business.

He now leads BPM Consult, his own advisory firm specialising in Business Process Management, a role he has held for eight years. Together with five colleagues, he supports organisations in all aspects of their process management.

To spread the message further

“Because I am now an entrepreneur myself, I understand my clients much better. They are employers too, with all the responsibilities that come with it. They deal with the tax authorities, they manage vehicle fleets. Everything that comes with running an organisation in practice, I now experience myself. That also gives me more credibility as a consultant in the eyes of my clients.”

Bakker is not aiming to build the largest possible company or to make as much money as possible. His drive is to spread what he calls “the gospel of process-oriented working”. “I’m not particularly strong at commercialising it. I prefer to put my vision into writing and share it widely, in the hope of inspiring people.”

Because he works so closely with his clients, Bakker is constantly being fed with insights into what is happening in organisations today. “Today, for example, I have three consultants on-site with a client, and tomorrow they will come back with stories about what works and what doesn’t. That way we are continuously searching for the essence, for the most effective interventions.”

He intends to keep writing about process management. “Perhaps not every year, because to observe and properly describe fundamental changes, you need a longer period of time, but certainly at regular intervals.”

In the meantime, Bakker will continue developing as an entrepreneur, for example by bringing in strong consultants who believe in process-oriented working. He is also considering opening a second office of BPM Consult to better serve the north of the country. He does not see the economic crisis as a barrier at all: “On the contrary, you can clearly see how much improvement is still needed in the Netherlands when it comes to process performance and focus. There are significant cost savings to be made and gains to be achieved by investing in the quality of processes and in their management.”

Excessive functional specialisation

When Bakker looks at the day-to-day reality of organisations, he concludes that there is still significant room for development, particularly in how processes are understood. “Twenty years ago, Michael Hammer and James Champy published Reengineering the Corporation, their manifesto for business revolution. At the time, it was not truly understood. People failed to see the underlying thinking about process-oriented organisational structures. By now, the climate has become much more receptive to horizontal organising. Dominant leadership and positional thinking are no longer accepted; there is a growing need for coaching leadership and a focus on transactions. The crisis is only increasing the urgency to truly change. So we have the wind in our sails.”

At the same time, we are still dealing with the consequences of excessive functional specialisation. “When a municipality issues a building permit, you easily involve five or six different departments. Or think of buying a kitchen as a private customer: how many different professionals are involved? We learned from Taylor, in his Principles of Scientific Management, to break work down into as many small units as possible. The idea was that everyone would become increasingly proficient in their own specific task, that fewer errors would be made, and that this would improve efficiency. But in doing so, we have also continually created new handover points, where one specialist passes the work on to the next stage.”

Handover points

What Taylor failed to fully recognise, Bakker argues, is that with each handover, ten to twenty percent of the information is lost. “If you have five handover points, the chance of getting the entire process right in one go is therefore less than ten percent. As a result, in many organisations, half of the employees are busy correcting the mistakes made by the other half. If you can reduce that complexity, you can immediately redirect the time, attention and money previously spent on that towards quality and performance.”

That is an appealing prospect, and it is easy to imagine that it works in practice in sectors such as construction and industry. But what about fields like education and healthcare, where Bakker also works as a consultant? Don’t people there sometimes say: ‘Processes? What are you talking about?’

“Sometimes,” Bakker acknowledges. “But more often than not, there is a second issue underlying that response. Every sector has its own barriers that make it less straightforward to focus on improving workflows.”

Interdependence

“In education, for example, the key challenge is how to balance managing your processes with managing your professionals. Teachers want as much freedom as possible. To a certain extent, that is justified, but not without limits. The organisational system must be able to support it. If, on 1 December, students are to receive their reports, then a grade list must be available a certain number of days beforehand, and before that, the professional must submit the grades in the agreed format. But that professional might say, so to speak: that’s administration, I dislike it, so you can forget about your grades. That is absolutely unacceptable, in my view. Delivering that grade list correctly and on time is also a matter of quality.”

To overcome such resistance, you need to challenge the underlying beliefs. This requires strong leadership: someone who makes it clear that such behaviour is not acceptable and who helps people realise that they are part of a chain. They themselves are affected if someone earlier in the chain fails to do their job, and the next person is affected if they do not fulfil their role. That interdependence and the handovers must be made visible.

Often, people have no real understanding of the chain they are part of, who else is involved, and what happens within it. In those cases, Bakker helps to map out which processes exist, which process someone is part of, and where they fit within it.

Mental models

Once the process, with all its links, has been mapped out, attention turns to the relationships between those links. “If people are not willing to cooperate, you still have very little to work with. Just like the tension between management and professionals, certain mental models underlie this unwillingness to collaborate. Hierarchy and status play a major role here. Many people feel they are not equal to others in the same chain. They believe their work is more important and that others should simply adapt. As a result, collaboration fails to flourish, and at the ‘bottom’ of organisations, at the start of the chain, a great deal of social capital often remains untapped.

According to Bakker, as a manager you are entirely justified in challenging this attitude. “Look at the primary process. The organisation has a customer, and that customer wants something. To deliver that, four or five people in the organisation need to carry out, one after the other, the work they are paid to do. Surely they can agree on how they hand over their work to one another?”

An obvious solution in such situations is integration. “Bring all the functional specialists you need together in a process team and appeal to their ability to solve problems collectively. That activates the social capital in your primary process. It doesn’t have to cost anything, because you already have the people in-house. All you need to do is connect them and give them the space to operate as a team.”

Responsible leadership

Organisations today, far more than in the early years of quality thinking and process-oriented working, experience pressure from society to operate sustainably. Citizens and politicians expect organisations to be transparent and to account for how they use the resources entrusted to them. Are they using their resources optimally? Is there no waste?

According to Bakker, this external pressure helps, but it is even more powerful when the drive comes from within. “It only truly works when you stand for that change yourself, when you personally feel accountable.”

From his Protestant upbringing, Bakker has retained the conviction that as a person you should use the talents you have been given, and that you must be accountable for them. He believes the same applies to organisations. “It does not matter to me what inspires you, whether it is rooted in Christian values or another perspective, as long as you honour the principle. Because only then can we speak of responsible governance and responsible leadership.”

And ultimately, that is what matters most to him.