In this episode, Jenni talks about the three phases of The Field Model, why she devised it, and gives examples of what the many faces of chaos can look like. She shares tips on how to understand what’s really going on, why it’s important to diagnose root causes, and how to fix things for the long term.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
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Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today, I’m going to be talking about the field model, which is my model that helps organisations go from chaos to calm.
In the next 15 minutes, I want to talk about the three phases of the model. Why I came up with it, and also what chaos looks like in the broadest sense in organisations. I’m also going to share some tips on how you can diagnose the root cause, and we’re also going to look at how you can fix things for the long term. Some of those things that often come up with the organisations that I work for.
So what is chaos?
Well, within an organisation, chaos can manifest itself in lots of different ways. Sometimes it’s when we are focused purely on the financial aspect, and that can be to the detriment of others. Sometimes it’s our inability for teams to work well together or productively, or it’s when people are experiencing stress or frequently off on sick leave. Sometimes there might be a merger and acquisition, or there might be high growth inside the organisation. All of this can lead to some imbalances and some elements of chaos. Now, chaos, left unchecked can become toxic, but there’s always a way to find order in the chaos. Now, for an employee, chaos can feel like ineffective management structures where there’s lack of decision making. It can feel like there’s no induction. It can feel like there’s ancient hardware, and the technology just isn’t fit for purpose. And it can also sometimes feel like there’s a bit of an atmosphere of fear. Now, most of us will have experienced this at some point in our careers, so chaos really is that disorder. It’s that turmoil, and it’s where things just feel really messy
In comparison, when we get to calm, that’s when things are flowing well and seamlessly. It’s when there’s better productivity, increased profitability, there is growth, there is employee satisfaction, business longevity, and there’s agility.
So, what is the field model?
Why did I decide to create a model and a framework and how does it help? So the field model really is a framework that seeks to understand, diagnose, and fix issues that happen inside an organisation. It has those three phases of understand, diagnose, and fix, and it’s all about going through those three phases to help you address things with a long-term view. So it’s making sure that where you understand what’s going on. You are diagnosing a root cause and you are fixing things with a long-term lens. Quite often when I’m talking to clients, there’s been previous attempts to solve the problem. However, some of those attempts are short-term fixes, and that’s because we are not looking at the root cause and without looking at the root cause, real change can’t happen. Now, when I explain the field model and I explain the three phases, I often use a medical analogy, so you’ll often hear me talk about having a headache. If you have a headache, you might decide to take a painkiller. So, if you look at that map to the model, the understanding element is, I understand I have a headache. Now what we traditionally do is go and take some kind of pain relief. So we fix things by just taking some kind of pain relief to stop the headache. What we don’t do is diagnose the root cause. The reason for that headache could be that there’s a need for new glasses. It could be stress-related and a need to take a break, and maybe go and do something to relieve some stress.
It could be a need to drink more water. There could be lots of different reasons for that headache, and by identifying that root cause. The fix or the solution or the treatment in this case would be different. The painkiller simply just masks the issue but if it’s the fact that you need to have new glasses, the fix is going to be to go for an eye test and get new glasses, and that’s what I’m trying to bring into organisations is if we can understand some of the symptoms, then we can get to the root cause of to why those symptoms are happening, and then we can fix those.
Now if I apply that to an organisation, just to give you an example, this might be something like people experiencing a lot of stress. So you might have people going off on, on sick leave. You might have people being absent from work. Now sometimes the solution is to create a campaign around wellbeing and to do something that’s going to help people with either their mental health or their mental resilience or whatever it might be. Now that is one solution, but that’s not really going to address the root cause as to why people are having time off. Are there systemic issues inside the organisation that are leading to people feeling like this or experiencing burnout? Are there specific managers that are causing some of these issues? if we don’t ask those questions or have that conversation, we are not dealing with the root cause and any fix we put in place like a campaign isn’t going to really address things for the long term. So we really do have to understand there’s a problem, diagnose why it exists, and then fix it.
Now, one of the things that we struggle with when it comes to understanding the problems inside organisations is that we are often hampered by assumptions. So assumptions will be coming from the symptoms that we’re seeing in the organisations. The assumption that if people are off on stress or if there’s high employee turnover, the reason for that is X, Y, or Z. We will always make assumptions, it’s natural for us as human beings. We have this habit of telling ourselves a story to make us feel better about things when we don’t have an answer, and it’s the assumptions that we have to look out for. So we have to make sure that we are really listening and understanding what’s going on and what the symptoms are that exist to help us go into the diagnosis phase.
Diagnose
Now, once we know what’s going on, once we know what those symptoms are, we can start to look at how to diagnose things and the diagnosis is really important. So, if you are an organisation that’s going through, maybe a merger and acquisition, or you’re going through high levels of growth, then doing a survey, for example, to help you diagnose things won’t necessarily work. It might give you a bit of a snapshot, but if people are feeling particularly uncertain, there’s a lot of ambiguity inside the organisation taking the time to listen and to have some conversations will be much more beneficial in terms of you getting to the root cause of the situation. It can also often make things work much quicker so if you’re looking to work at pace, and quite often when I’m working through the field model with clients, we are looking at three to six months for a project, then to have some conversations is often one of the quickest ways for us to address the root cause. Now you can diagnose in lots of different ways. We’ve just talked about surveys there and listening interviews. You can also do focus groups and you can also do kind of polls and different snapshot types of surveys as well. There’s lots of different ways, but it’s finding the right one for you based on your situation. So if you want to get in touch with me and let me know what your situation is, and you can do that through the links in the show notes to either Twitter or LinkedIn, I’m really happy to help you understand or think about what might be the right diagnosis tool for your situation at the moment.
Now when we come through to fixing things. What we are looking at is what we’ve seen in the diagnosis phase. So we are looking at trends and themes through that diagnosis. We’re not looking at really specific things that are sort of one-off. We are looking to see where those trends and themes are coming through. We are looking for conflicting information, but we’re also making sure that we are really listening to what people are saying. And if we’re having listening interviews or conversations, we are really delving into the detail. We’re really listening to the words people are using, the tone, the passion, the language, everything that’s coming through in that communication, we have to tune into all of that in order to make sure that we are really listening and really diagnosing.
Fix
Then we can start to fix some of the real issues and really fixing some of those root cause pieces helps us move forward as an organisation. Now, this is the bit that gets quite uncomfortable, and when I’m ever presenting back the fix report, which I always do in a workshop or in a face-to-face environment where that’s possible. It’s important to, to kind of preface that with the fact that this is a bit uncomfortable sometimes there are things here that we know exist, but we’ve swept under the carpet. Sometimes there are things that we don’t know about and that they’re just quite uncomfortable things to deal with, whether it’s people’s behaviour, whether it’s people that have been in the organisation a long time, some of that’s quite introspective looking at ourselves as a leader. Making sure that we’ve got that vulnerability and courage to really step forwards and make changes. It’s easy to go through the motions of looking at what might be wrong inside an organisation, what’s causing that chaos. It takes real bravery and courage to step forward to really fix those things and make a proactive effort to make those changes inside the organisations. And quite often when we are looking at the fix, it’s looking at everything in an organisation. So, while I specialize in communication, I’m often looking at organisational design. I’m looking at policies and procedures, and I’m looking at the communication. That doesn’t mean that I fix everything. I have a team that work with me to do this and a team of experts in different areas that help us make sure we can support all of our clients. Now, the fix can take anything from a few months to a few years, and I mentioned there it’s often sort of three to six months. Sometimes you’ll go through the field model process, you’ll make some changes. Then you might want to come back and have a look at that again in six months, 12 months. What’s important is that you are continually looking at the root cause of the symptoms. Symptoms will bubble up all the time. Doesn’t mean that needs to be a really big project to solve them, but it’s being able to tune into, okay, this is a symptom of chaos that we’re seeing here. What’s the reason for that happening, and let’s address that rather than just addressing this symptom that’s bubbling up to the surface.
So how do we fix things for the long term and how do we create calm?
Now there are around about five, four or five things that often come up when I’m working with organisations. It’s always different, so there’s always going to be specific things in your organisations that are causing chaos, but there are usually four things that will come through in the conversations.
Leadership
The first is leadership, so there’s always a need to address leadership skills, and that’s from line managers right the way up through to more senior people in the organisations.
Blockers
We can also have blockers inside the organisations. Now, blockers are sometimes referred to as toxic people, which feels very loaded as a term, but quite often there are individuals who are trying to block any kind of transformation inside an organisation. They might be people that have been around for a long time. But they might also be people that it’s just time for them to leave the organisations. Not everybody is going to stay with you forever, and the end of a relationship needs to be managed no matter how that might feel. It needs to be a managed conversation, and if someone is starting to block progress, we have to have that conversation and talk about that.
Culture
The third is culture. So the way things work around here is how I define culture, and it’s thinking about whether the company culture is what people think it is. So does it align with how everybody feels and thinks about culture? Is it also being done for the sake of it, or a tick box exercise? Are there social events or things happening that are just ticking a box? Is there a group of people responsible for culture because nobody else really wants to be? And is it what it needs to be in order to help you grow and thrive?
Strategy
And the fourth is strategy. So, this is often in there because it’s a lack of understanding. There’s often a lack of understanding in terms of the direction of the organisations, why things are happening and where decisions are made. So, it is really important to think about the direction. Why things are happening and decision making when you’re starting to look at how you fix things for the long term. Some of this is very process and procedural, but it’s important to get some of these right so that people feel psychologically safe at work, they understand why they do what they do, and all of this links us in to purpose. So I said there were four or five things to look at they are leadership, your blockers or your toxic people, culture strategy, and then there’s purpose that really overarches all of that. Now, there will be different things that will come up for you as you go through this process. You can go through this process on your own. You can go through this process with me and my team, but it’s a process. Once you start to delve into that curiosity of the diagnosis that you can start to work through quite quickly. Now you can apply the model to organisations as a whole. And we’ve worked with organisations where they’ve gone through mergers and acquisitions, or they’re going through growth. We’ve also used it with teams who are trying to work better together, and we’ve also used it with communication functions who are looking to make changes around their communication strategy and also in the more broader sense of the function and how it fits in the organisations. So, it’s wherever change is needed really, and wherever there’s a need to look at things a bit differently.
So, I hope that helps. I hope that helps you think about how you can really get to the root cause of issues inside your organisations. The things to look for, the different ways you can diagnose things as well.
Now in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about. Employee engagement, employee experience, and internal communication, and the importance of alignment for all of those for an efficient organisation. So, I’m going to talk about the difference between them, how they play out in organisations and why as a leader, it’s really important for you to understand them and how they work together.
Thank you for listening. As I said before, if you’re going through any kind of change and want some support around the diagnosis, then just message me with what’s going on, and I’ll let you know the best way to do the diagnosis for you as well. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn as always, so always connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and there are details in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
