Restructuring the Swedish Police, Prison and Probation Services

Speaker A You all know Wolflinberg I'm assuming he needs no introduction.

Speaker B No but I would like to tell you that first of all I'm a very impatient person. I also like to tell you that I've been working for many years in industry and I've had leading positions for a long time always since I was starting basically and was in the executive committee of the global pharmaceutical company in the end of the 80s. After that I've been a CEO for several companies and therefore I look very operationally at things and when I met Elliot I started to work with this. Then in 98 I went a lot together with the private equity guys so I've been thinking very much like an owner so I want to do things fast and very simple and I will try to focus now on things. I mean I'm using the same science that you were presenting this morning Sadram we've been taught the same way, I haven't been trying to if you have an X ray why should you transform the X ray into something else? It works and it's basis and you shouldn't try to use a photocopier when you need an x ray and therefore been using the science in the same way as you. So I will not comment on that but I will comment on a few things that is a little bit more marketing oriented also and selling oriented and in 2008 we got our first contract outside of the industry because we had worked for the private equity companies and other owners and boards and top management and we've done several hundred top management and we have the largest database of top management I think where we have the time spanning for top management in all kinds of companies. But then we got our first contract within the public sector. We got the contract from the heavy guy that was not politically appointed. We got a contract to do an investigation if the Swedish police were operating in the correct fashion and we parallel to us there was another consultants company that got the same assignment exactly and we had the same time and we got access to the headquarter police, we got access to the largest police department that was Stockholm and we got one local authority also that we had the possibility to interview and we did the time spanning and everything and when this was reported about a year later it was going on for only a few months but when it was reported a year after to the minister of justice in Sweden the competitor got 30 minutes and we got one and a half hour and the ministers stayed for another half an hour because it was so interesting and of course there was a reason for that. The year after they decided in the Swedish police to merge two of the authorities, they were separate authorities and two local authorities were to be merged and we were involved in that as well. And then nothing happened. And then nothing happened. And then there were two public tenders, one from the guy that brought us in. He was then appointed as head of prison and probation in Sweden, 10,000 people. And then one of the guys that worked in the Justice Department. That was then by the chief of police. And it had at the same time as those tenders were concluded in January last year, it was also decided by the end of that year that they were going to merge all the different 21 authorities in Sweden into one. So it was basically run like a holding company with no authority for the holding police. And then now it was going to become one authority. So this was a political decision, it was going to be implemented. So in January 2013, a boutique consultants company gets two major contracts. The police is 28,500 people and the prison approvation and 10,000. And what I would like to describe is how can you do that with a very limited number of people and with a very high speed? How do you go about to do it? And I don't think it's different from what you others are doing. But when you look at the prison approvation, they are like 20 people in the management team. It's a high number, but they were 20. We interviewed all them and of course the new manager of the prison probation and then reporting to them were 180 people. Okay? By interviewing them and having a calibration exercise, we had covered the top 200. Okay? What is a prison and probation? It's a Yale, it's an arrest and it's a probation where people are being handled outside of the prison. So what we did, we did three prisons, free arrests and free probations and we went all the way down. So we did drill downs like you're describing. And by doing that we had covered the whole thing. I mean we hadn't include everybody and we didn't know the capabilities of everybody, but we had full picture of how the structure was put together and the same thing goes for the police. That's the way to handle it. But now I'm going to show you a picture that was done several years earlier in a casino because the reason why we got the contract was that we had this picture. So I'll show the first picture. This is the tasks, the way we define tasks and it's similar to what you do. But I will show you a task a little later. This is the task for the heads of the casino and then it's the management team in the casino. And then for those of you that know this well, you see that there is a compression over there and that's the operational part on the right side there and there's the guys down there on the bottom is the groupie and the dealer. But why is this interesting for the police? Because this one is not ready. This is his work in progress at the time it was made, but I showed it to this guy that made the decision, or was part of making the decision. It's because this is a master for how to run the casino. How many people work in this casino? 450. But how many rules are there? Less than 40. So by doing the 40 rules in a casino and writing the tasks and defining what it ought to be, then you have a master for all casinos in the whole chain. So this is what they wanted. They wanted to have this for the police and relate back to all the other presentations. You understand that this is a way to move really fast. Implementation is another thing, but getting to what the strategy needs to be, what the design needs to be, and what the tasks are, and what the delegations are, and also even covering part of the cross functional, it's possible to do really fast. And then we'll take the next slide. This is the result from the Swedish police, and we try to make this simple, but this is that the chief of police is the gray. And then you have compression on level four and you have free compressions on level three, and you have compression on level two. And then parallel to this, the Swedish police and this is publicly presented, sorry, it's not any competent documents. Parallel to this, they made a cultural review. We weren't involved in that, but they made a cultural review and they figured out that there was a negative part of the culture that was overruling the manager's decision. So if Ron is my boss, so he tells me, I do something else, I allow myself to do something else, and then how can you handle that? And this is when I say, why do you use methods that are not useful and try to look at symptoms? Whatever they do in the police, if they don't correct this in the structural meaning? I mean, if I'm a first line manager and you're my boss and you're a first line manager, we all know this, it will not work. That culture report can't be addressed in any other way than to correct the structure. And what has happened now is this is going to be implemented. So it's not yet implemented, but it's going to be implemented by 1 January, and that is a political decision as well. By 1 January coming year, yes. If I could just ask a question.

Speaker C About that while you got the slide up. In looking at police, we found that there's an issue because the titles in terms of superintendent and inspector and so on and so forth have meanings and linkages, and some of them are legally embedded and it's difficult to change that. Was that an issue for you in terms of this?

Speaker B It's still not totally handled, but it is an issue. But those issues have to be addressed. Has to be addressed. But you're right, we have the same. But the interesting thing here now is that what they have decided is and now it looks like there are four compressions, but it's altogether nine. But I will show you on the next slide how we determine the task for the super police, what they have decided based on this illustration. Because this one is easy to see. I mean, we have many of these. I mean, it's not only this one, we have a number of these and sometimes it's not four in compression, it's three and sometimes even two and so on, but it's always all the way through it's compression. And then they've now decided that in the structure they are implementing by first of Jan, it's going to be six levels instead of nine. So they are taking away three levels, but they are also upgrading like you are describing. So it's going to be a level six organization. And how did we come to that this would be a level six organization. And now I'm also talking about doing things fast. We brought together the 16 most skilled and high level people in Sweden, knowing police, of course, the top management of the police and some others were brought into a room and we were sitting in a room for a full day. And this is what we do all the time. We've done hundreds of these. We do the workshop, we start to talk about the long term perspective. We were guessing ourselves that this would be a level six. So we talked about 2025 and we address crime 2025, and we talk about that and then we talk about technology 2025, we talk about all the kind of legislation 2025, and we continue for several hours to talk about 2025. And we never allow discussions in these workshops. These are brainstormings. We tell people to think and then we pull the brains of the best people. We call these executive generated content, also the time spanning and developing the tasks and all that, that is executive generated content. And then by doing that, you create the common picture of how the future will look like from this perspective. And it's the better picture than any of the management consultant would come up with because they could do external analysis and trends and everything. But now you're pulling the brains of the best people. Then what we do is we do the SWOT analysis, as we all do, but it's going to become a much richer and a much more accurate SWOT because you've been thinking so much about the outside world until you do the swap analysis and now you do this in the same way. But then after that we have a specific format for what a task is. It is a piece, but we have a special format and I will show you that soon. And then we have learned through doing all these workshops we have learned that we have to force them into a format. We can't just ask them to write task because they will translate into different things. So we put them into a format and then for the first time they are able to discuss and they do it two by two. They write the task for the chief of police. How will it be like 2025? What is the desired future position and what is the strategy to get there and what are the targets or the objectives? And we don't talk about vision. We think that that is the mission or the task. We don't use those words but it doesn't matter what words you use but we definitely think that if you don't know where you're going how the hell can you define how to get there? You need both those dimensions as you were also talking about you need both these dimensions and you also need the targets. But the common belief is that you can manage by objectives. You can't do that. It's impossible. You need to understand what you need to do to get there and you can't also only delegate accountabilities because it's accountability for something and something that is what you need to get done. And the only thing that should be in a task that is the most long term task, the most long term thing that you need to accomplish. And the reason for that is some of you heard me say that before. But since we know that companies in very competitive industries, those are the ones that improve productivity the most and the fastest because they are forced to and they have somebody to compare with, so therefore it goes faster. But the most competitive and the most competitively forced organization, that is the military in war. Because you will die if you do it wrong. And they have learned something that management has never learned and is not part of leadership training. It is they have to learn how to delegate and if Ron is my boss and he tells me what he wants me to do that's not a delegation, it's not good enough. He needs to tell me what his task is and what his boss task is. This is the context we're talking about. But to be able to do that in ordinary business you threw me your 20 page business plan and I'll see your boss 30 page business plan and how do you see the context? It's too much. So therefore a task need to be very concrete and it need to be very condensed. It should basically be a one liner. The one you're going to see is not a one liner, but we call it a one liner anyway. And now you have to turn the camera off for a short while because I'm going to show it's a Swedish text, but some people will be able to read this on the video, so you have to turn it off for only two minutes. I'm going to show you the task for the Swedish police chief of police. Now, when you have that, and I know you do these similar things, but based on that one, we do the same thing for the management team. Just as an example then, if you look at the head of legal in the Swedish police, is that a role that needs to be working with the laws that come out of EU or internationally or in Sweden and ensure that the police is operating in line with that bullet? Or is it so that they need to impact law and try to be proactive and change rules so that the work for the police will make Sweden a more safe society? The one is a level four rule and the other is a level five rule because the time span is different and then we can have that intelligent discussion then with them. And also when we did the task that it takes more than ten years to accomplish that, that was very obvious. But it was also obvious when you looked at the delegation on the next level, if you have It systems like they do, and they need to transport that, it's not within five years, it's beyond the five years. And then legal is the same. And there are also other standards. So we could do it bottom up and from top down. This is all connected. So when they read theirs, they will see the automatic link to the top guy and then you click the next and here you see all of the boxes. But we've been going through and done all the boxes all the way through and the fun thing with the casino was that there were 400 people but only 40 rules. How many rules do you think there are in a police organization of 28,500 people? It's less than 300. So now you can develop a masterpiece where you have all the test. But Phantom puts when you come to implementation and adjusting all the present systems and there are many things and part of the text is horizontal alignment is part of this in the task. But there will be other things also that needs to be added when you go through the process and come more into detail. But this is the overall and if they do this right, if they create this structure and if they only work through with these tasks, it's going to become a major improvement by itself. That is what my belief is we can take the next and this is another slide that we've developed that is in a way something that we use to explain the importance of this. And you have all shown different kinds of slides that are very important, but everything has to start with the clarity and farsightedness in the task. But what people are spending their time is on the left side when they try to improve horizontal process and systems and technology and so on and you can accomplish a lot of results but we all know the importance of the vertical axis and then it's a lot of talk, especially from private equity companies and boards. They talk a lot about the compliance side and they believe that the governance that is being applied, that is the way you direct and lead companies. But that is hygiene factors. You can let the auditors handle that most of it. That's not where you're competitive and the competitiveness is in this one and that is effectiveness while on the left side is efficiency and it's important to understand that. And for me then also culture, that is part of the task. But you can state it separately and some of the customers we have want to have that. So then that's fine. But in many companies that's written in into the task and then of course in the bottom end then you have the results.

Speaker A And this is where culture is what people do.

Speaker B When the job is, when you are working as a dealer in a casino and you see that the head of the gaming monopoly in Sweden, when he sees that if it's a guy, if he sees the task of the gaming monopoly and he sees his own task, then he understands how it fits together. Because it's obvious from the text. And when the policeman sees his text, what is his task? He will automatically be able to relate to the chief of police. And in a very simplistic way it's really this picture from the casino that is the core of leading a company. Everything else has to be brought out of that core. That's where the essence of the strategic thinking is put together and broken up and cascading out like we're saying. But the important thing here is when we're trying to convince people, I'm not talking about only the public sector, but also the private, it is that the focus is on the bottom line there. And they don't even understand that in this diamond the whole core is what we are trying to deal with and to bring some order into. And they don't even understand that. That is something that is dynamic. I mean, change management, what the hell is that? That's part of ordinary leadership. What is performance management then? What is innovation management for God's sake? That is what we create with the tasks that we're delegating. That's what it is. My feeling working with this now more than 15 years is that we have an enormous opportunity. We have seen very good data here and a lot of good examples. And the guys last afternoon also have proven that even some people that are not consultants can bring this into reality. Look at the financial community. They could benefit dramatically from this and very few have understood the beauty of what this is. So my conclusion is the next picture that's what we have, this is an innovation, it's a dramatic innovation. And when I talked to Ron about the book, I think the only problem with his book, that's not the content, that's not the importance. It is how it's being perceived that is more important than good to great or In Search of Excellence or Blue Ocean. It's much more powerful and it's based on science as compared to what you see in those books. And the methods that are being even methods being presented here on this conference that are methods that study symptoms and doesn't care about the causes of the disease and what we are after those that have understood this with the Babbles that is the cause of disease. And for those of you that are interested, some of you have already seen it on our web page you can access Twelve Myths about Leadership that are 1 minute videos and they are published in Sweden. We have the oldest technology science academy in the world. It's also the fourth largest in absolute terms, it's not in relative terms and they ran a huge innovation project for the government to help the government to develop their innovation strategy. And I wrote The Twelve Myths About Leadership and it was extremely popular than Swedish and was distributed all over the place. So then we've decided that we have made these twelve 1 minute videos that talks about the mercenary leadership and when people see that, they say it's good marketing, but for God's sake, it's not good marketing. It's the essence of something that you can only get to if you know levels. So thank you very much.

Speaker A What kind of metrics? Because this is like a prime system to be able to have metrics from.

Speaker B Over we have our software than the one you saw with the delegations and software.

Speaker A So because I'm thinking the state of California could probably use a requisite police force given its history, for example. So there must be data you're going to watch over time to know that this requisite organization for something so important as a country's, infrastructure, a police force and social justice around those things, you must be gathering data what the impact of this is.

Speaker B We have done the finance police in Kazakhstan as a consequence of this and then the topic is corruption, anti corruption and it's the chief of Finance police that brought us in based on knowing that we have done this work with the Swedish police. And I think one of the things that we can do in this community is that when we have certain areas and I, for example, said yesterday to you, we need to do hospitals, we have enough documents from other countries where it's been proven already, and we have a master. And we can figure out how you handle doctors and nurses, where it's special in this industry. It's the same in the prison and probation, it's the same in the police, and it's the same in many industries. And we could take advantage of that and move forward to spread the understanding of what this is. Just coming in from a whole other angle here.

Speaker C Elliott had been thinking at one point.

Speaker B About the army who is its customer? And he was saying the customer is the enemy.

Speaker C It's a negative service, marketing is camouflage.

Speaker B And I'm thinking the police have that. And on the other hand, they have a positive service. Yes, absolutely. Does that add a complexity to this? It is definitely included in the task because the reason why they exist is to create a society where people feel comfortable to live and dare to do things and it's safe and all that. To be able to do that, they need to cooperate with a lot of organizations and so on to be able to be proactive. And they have programs for that. But in, for example, the prison and probation, we needed in one of the areas. I don't go in specifically to them, since it's been paperwork, but in one of the areas we needed to have one layer because decisions were taken on to a whole level. But in the police this ended up with upgrading the strategic thinking totally for the whole management, but at the same time taking away layers. But I agree it's a complexity. This is why it's so fascinating to work with. It's been extremely interesting. And of course, we haven't seen the results yet. It depends on how it works. When they start to push the button and start to implement. This 1 January and we haven't seen that yet. Did you work with Betsy Watson or see any I have met her and we have talked to her throughout the process a few times. Not lately, but we have talked to her.

Speaker D In the people intensive areas such as the prisons. What did you find in terms of the level two to level one ratios of staff? And where did the prisons come out?

Speaker B Actually, it was pretty well organized. It's like when you go to retail chains, they are normally if you go to stores, they're pretty well organized. They've done it so many times and they can compare with so many. So they found out how distracted.

Speaker D But that might suggest that a prison is a level three headed entity, depending on the number of people and prisoners. What did you find?

Speaker B Yes, but there are a few that are also level four. Depends on.

Speaker D The retailers have extremely part time staff and they'll have perhaps people in level two with 200 staff because they're extremely part time. So it's antirequisite in many cases, and it's the people intensive parts of the business that seem to follow the requisite principles. I'm just thinking the prison probably be the one in the area that you described as more routine work.

Speaker C The flip side on that is it's not surprising that the turnover is so high.

Speaker B Exactly. I mean, we did a cleaning company that do cleaning in houses. And their major problem was people turnover, and they never meet the people who have worked for them. So the first line manager is never meeting them. If you are in a call center and you have everyone in the same room, you can have a high number of people reporting to you. But there you have to reduce the number to be able to maintain the people there, because the worst thing against the customer is when people leave.

Speaker A Okay, well, thank you so much. So.