Listen to Jonathan Smart's conversation with Lauren Lance, Executive General Manager Enterprise Delivery at Suncorp to find out more about Lauren's key lessons learned when it comes to embracing better ways of working, the why for change and the journey Suncorp is on.
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Sooner Safer Happier is a podcast orchestrated to help you on your unique journey to improving ways of working. Hosted by Jon Smart, business agility practitioner, thought leader, coach, and author of Sooner Safer Happier. Jon is also the founder of the Enterprise Agility Leaders Network.
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Transcript:
Jon Smart: Hi this is Jon Smart welcome to the next Sooner Safer Happier podcast and I am really excited to be in Sydney in Australia and really excited to be joined by Lauren here at Suncorp so Lauren hi
Lauren Lance: Hi it's excellent to have you in Aus
Jon Smart: Great it's really great to be here it's like a summer's day in London yeah and it's the winter. So Lauren could you just say a bit about your role and what you're doing here at Suncorp?
Lauren Lance: Yes so my role here is part of the Enterprise Delivery practice so we're accountable for delivering value and change for Suncorp insurance as well as all of our technology teams as well as all of our corporate teams. I'm also the lucky person to sponsor our transforming ways of working so yeah on a journey across the organisation to yeah work differently
Jon Smart: That's great and Suncorp as a as a company what does Suncorp do?
Lauren Lance: Right we are a Financial Services organisation ASX listed around 13,000 employees we have three lines of business we have a bank, we also have a insurance company here in Australia, and we have an insurance company in New Zealand
Jon Smart: Great so Financial Services
Lauren Lance: Yep highly regulated
Jon Smart: Highly regulated
Lauren Lance: Lots of competition lots of change
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah so a and a large organisation so lots of usual headwinds I imagine and challenges and to kind of cut to the chase and to start with your kind of top three to five learnings yeah what would what are your at this moment in time what are your kind of top three to five learnings about ways of working?
Lauren Lance: Well you got five for me because the learnings are like as long as my arm and down the down the hill but my first one is you need to acknowledge the skills that you need to be able to partner with you to to you know transform. Don't high five too early is my second my third is think big but start small my fourth is metrics matter and then my fifth is learn from everyone but copy no one
Jon Smart: Awesome awesome did you copy that from someone
Lauren Lance: A guy called Will that works with us and you know Will
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah learn from everyone and copy no one all all you know all of that is music to my ears think big start small learn fast metrics
Lauren Lance: Metrics matter
Jon Smart: Metric matter not cookie cutter not one size fits all high five not too early
Lauren Lance: Celebrate but don't call victory
Jon Smart: Celebrate but don't call victory yeah and make sure you got the right skills yes awesome so we're going to come back to those we'll drill into them. So your context so let's kind of let's kind of wind back a bit and if you could describe your your kind of your context that you're in so what's the environment you're in and the you know kind of the constraints and the the headwinds and the situation you're trying to change in
Lauren Lance: So we had a change in leadership and we had a change in strategy. What our strategy was was that we were coming back to our core business we needed to invest in our bank and insurance lines of business and it was a just be good at the basics. We had a new strategy it did really reinforce the fact that we had to invest in our core businesses we were investing over four key pillars to make sure that our brands were well invested in digital first a digital first kind of ambition. We had a whole lot of focus on our core pricing and risk selection things that it bread and butter to an insurance company as well as then a strategy to be best in our claims so you can see it's just we're not thinking anything wild and crazy here we're coming back and investing in our core we knew that we need to deliver returns above cost of capital, we knew that we need need to get our insurance margins up, we had a challenge in our cost base we knew that we needed to be able to reduce our cost base and then we had a very ambitious target to move from a 80% either contact centre or manual processing in our in our our sales to and 20% digital we wanted to reverse it we sorry we wanted to achieve 80% digital and 20% human touch. Others in the industry we had a whole lot of headwinds that we knew we had to lean into as well inflation, supply chain supply chain issues we were to experience Covid and get through that we we knew that in insurance we will always have major weather events and that did happen over the course of the plan period three La Niña weather cycles here in Australia which caused a huge amount of natural hazard issues we have reinsurance costs increasing a reinsurance reset across the across the industry and then just other pressures around interest rate rises and market volatility, cyber you know all these things that are shared with with all of my peers and a fundamental kind of acknowledgement that if we kept doing what we were doing today we weren't going to be successful in addition we we're given a huge opportunity with a very sizable investment budget and investment in change to come back and to execute that strategy to come back and invest in our core and yeah it was kind of a we're given we're given a second chance here we need to absolutely make the most of it but we need to change as an organisation to be able to deliver to that
Jon Smart: So that's a very clear why that's a very clear you know never waste a good crisis
Lauren Lance: Oh totally
Jon Smart: That's a that's a very clear why
Lauren Lance: My boss tells me that all the time
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah and that's a clearer why than than a lot of other organisations or a lot of other organisations it might be because it's kind of my perception is because it's fashionable because other companies are doing it because they're being advised to do something around ways of working so that that's a that's a very clear business situation around return on capital margin cost becoming an investable business as a public listed company, changing leadership so that that's a super crystal clear set of goals and problems to overcome now most organisations at that point would keep on working the way they're working harder rather than smart exactly rather than smarter and think well we just need to do what we're doing but just we just need to really buckle down now and we need more deadlines and drop dead dates and to to force our way through the situation and maybe even go out and hire more people to get the problem solved in exactly the same way of working which often happens is what I see so how how how did it happen then that there was this light bulb moment of doing you the recognition that doing the same thing the definition of stupidity doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome. So it it's great that that was in your in what you just described then how did that how did that realisation happen because it doesn't always happen
Lauren Lance: No it doesn't and I hear I hear you you see the Sooner Safer Happier you talk about this a lot it starts at the top and we had change in leadership we've we had some some some of our executive leadership team come in from other organisations and a clear a clear vision that this is what we want to be doing and this is where we want to move to really really did help and yeah there was a huge acknowledgement that the way we are working is slowing us down it's like we know what the what is we know what we need to do it's how we're doing it which is which is what we want to focus on and and that was at the heart of our mission it was a transform our ways of working we are fundamentally agile yeah yeah but we're going to make it fit for us it was a how do we work together how do we organise ourselves what what are the how do we measure ourselves you know ambition at its core
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah yeah is there and it sounds like I just want to double check this that there is an incentive coming from the the executive committee the senior leadership team the top table there's
Lauren Lance: Yeah absolutely
Jon Smart: A a clear incentive from the from the senior most leadership team
Lauren Lance: Absolutely yeah I I feel incredibly supported by the leadership team and and it's important we haven't we haven't spoken about agile with the leadership team right because you got to get these glazed these glazed eyes like and and there's a bit of hype that comes with agile which can sometimes create a bit of disbelief right but we have focused on the core things we need to do to change our ways of working to make us work better together we anchored we anchored this to some really clear objectives and we've said to the teams number one we have to be chasing higher customer satisfaction and how do we build that into the way that we work 50% faster we want to be faster 50% faster we we need more engaged people you know so happier people more engaged people and more productive so 10-20% more productive 100% transparency of work but anchoring a conversation around what we want to achieve like what is the clear outcomes that we want to achieve versus talking about agile is a different shift there for them
Jon Smart: That resonates that resonates with the Sooner Safer Happier narrative
Lauren Lance: Yeah yeah yeah
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah this yeah this is this is such an important learning and it's so good that you're doing this yeah yeah I couldn't agree more with what you just described in terms of if you use the a word the A word is a turnoff agile it's like why is this person talking to me about scrum and Kanban and actually you're using language that resonates with people which is customer satisfaction time to value
Lauren Lance: Happy people
Jon Smart: Happy people so you can't argue with that
Lauren Lance: No and they're core metrics that any executive team will look at and want to improve on and if you can anchor it there and make sure that your metrics matter and you underpin that then yeah you will get the buy in
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah and a reflection where I have a view over you know lots of organisations you'll be surprised how many organisations actually don't have a focus on that or maybe surprised not surprised a large degree of organisations have a focus on the what you know so at the at the most senior leadership team level typically there's four or five strategic pillars and typically they're all what rather than how
Lauren Lance: How yeah
Jon Smart: So even the fact you've been using the word how is is a key a key success factor here and the fact that the any senior leadership team are as interested in the how we do the what as the what obviously means you're more likely as you said to achieve the what
Lauren Lance: To achieve the what yeah and the what might change
Jon Smart: It might
Lauren Lance: Well it might right so you can't well totally right and you need a way to be able to pivot around that yeah yeah
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah yeah so I think there's a there's there are already there are from what you' said there are a lot of key patterns and takeaways here for other organisations senior leadership support, focused on the on the how as well as the what, not only that but you've articulated very clearly how you're measuring the success customer satisfaction time to market happier and productive more more transparent work I'm assuming that strategy to execution alignment making your work visible exactly just the fact you're able to say those as well makes Suncorp an exception rather than the norm you know and this is what other organisations should be doing and I think I know the answer to this question so I presume you're measuring customer satisfaction, time to market, happier more productive, I presume you're measuring those
Lauren Lance: We are we are we are we measure them we measure them at a team level, we measure them at a value stream level, and we are embedding them into what I call our it's our conversation that we have with our teams as well as executives and our board about you how are we going on these you know I we call flow metrics it's taken me a while to get the board and the our executive team to understand what that is but you know now this is part of our conversation when I go and I talk to them I'm not only talking to them about benefits and costs and kind of how well our delivery is going but I'm talking to them about the the efficiency in the in the model and our flow metric, our throughput, our lead time, how happy our people are, and we are starting to build our maturity around our value as well so what value are we driving on a quarterly increment and you know and my hope is that over the course of this financial year we will shift to being able to have a very mature conversation about how do we optimise that value. We're not quite there yet we are at a team level we're definitely at a function level and then how we kind of get to get our executives thinking that way as well
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah yeah and the you were telling me earlier like the first page you put in front of people so do you want to tell that story about what's on what's on the first page of the status reports
Lauren Lance: Yep so what is on the first page of the status report is our outcomes, our key results, and our flow metrics. Yeah the team the team's done know excellent job at kind of working it in with our value streams and in with our platforms to make sure that we've got robustness around our mission definition, outcomes, key results we can track them we're making we're making commitments quarterly then we can understand how we've gone towards those commitments and then our flow metrics so that combined how are we generating value and how well are we generating that value is a real is is the heart and you know the heartbeat of our portfolio management conversation and it's still important that you measure your benefits, that you track your costs, and that you know how your overall delivery is progressing but that's just further down that's just further down you know and it's about focusing the conversation on the incremental value and like I said you know over time it we will then get to an ability to be able to have executives pivot the capacity maximise value yeah
Jon Smart: That's super impressive because it's it's a culture hack it's an engine move by by making that page one the attention goes straight to the outcomes and the flow of value which is a great culture hack
Lauren Lance: Yep
Jon Smart: So that people fixate and in you know in my experience if you have an individual who tends to be command and control and a bit controlling it's great for them to fixate on on the key results and the flow metrics and and you know obviously not command and controlling to the point of telling people how to do things but actually let's get people to fixate on the key results so the conversation is not you know have we delivered have we built solution X by the 31st of March and why is this a red rag status but rather why aren't the key results moving
Lauren Lance: Why aren't they moving
Jon Smart: Why aren’t well well we've run these experiments and it turns out the hypothesis was wrong and it turns out that actually we don't need to cross the river we need to turn around and go backwards over the hill instead to achieve the outcome we want dear leader can you help us with that so it drives the right conversations so I think that is that's fantastic you're doing that
Lauren Lance: Yeah it's it's also interesting watching the maturity of the leader over the course of it you know the last 12 months that we've been doing this you know historically leader says the what we need to do right and the leader goes this is what we're doing now go forth and do and what I've witnessed over the year is that the leaders have been more hands off you know going set the direction and I'm empower the team to figure out the what and and then empower them to pivot as they learn through experiments and that's very different to the way that most organisations work and it just takes time and practise it also takes confidence and that's where the metrics come in
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah yeah
Lauren Lance: That's where the metrics come in right leaders like data they like to have confidence that things are they can see with data and as soon as you can provide that to them all of a sudden they feel confident the hands come off the street steering wheel and they start to empower the teams
Jon Smart: Yeah and I think it's it's like you know any human any human wants to know that that there are there are responsibilities and accountabilities and you know the the goal here however the however the behaviour is expressed the intent here is that I feel in control and we're going to achieve our our desired goal whatever the goal is and usually the goal is expressed as output so that that's when you then as you said you know that's when you then get the more prescriptive behaviour of I'm going to tell you what bridge to build yeah but yeah if you can do this ninja move where the where control all you like on the outcome and the key results but you're not saying but you're leaving to the team to decide how to achieve that then there is a key for the unlock there which which then leads to more empowerment and autonomy in terms of how you achieve the goal plus I think another key for the unlock here then is the is one of is your other one of your other outcomes is minimising time to learning because if you've got the outcomes but you've got a long time to learning then well the key results are never going to move and actually there isn't a feeling of like we're in control that's so what are you learning so far about minimising time to learning and getting that fast feedback loop which gives you your genuine business agility
Lauren Lance: Yeah so we have we've acknowledged that this changing the way that people work is the processes the the the the way that they break down the work it needs close coach and continuous feedback to change the thinking so one of the things we did do with our with our value streams is we formed a program that we called Brilliant at Basics this is one of the many things that it focuses on just how have you defined the work, how do you break down the work, so that you can have smallest increments, smallest smallest time to value test and learn and then and then kind of replan it looks at that but it also looks at what are the mindsets that you've put in place how well do you assess those mindsets it's a self assessed survey which then our coaches help provide some guidance on and then it looks at the rituals so like yes you've been able to break down your work to the minimal kind of smallest time to value but then have you reflected, what have you learned, have you celebrated your your learnings, have you have you applied that to what you do next having the team having a process that the team is able to self assess themselves against these dimensions, having a coach that can give their perspective than allows us to build a really purposeful plan around how do we help how do we support and what we found is that breaking down the work was really hard for people right got to do all this but having this in place allows them to pinpoint that as a focus area and then the coaches help them break down the work further and further and further you know and then and then having the data. So this is how well you think you're going but then how how well is the data telling us that combined is really powerful for teams because you're giving them all the information for them to be able to then you know make it better
Jon Smart: And are you finding that it's surfacing impediments
Lauren Lance: Absolutely yeah and the impediments for you know they can either be different for the tribes and then how do we as a core kind of leadership team look for the common impediments and fix it in the system
Jon Smart: And how are you doing that how are you catching the common impediments and solving them
Lauren Lance: So the way that we've done that is we we we have them bubble up so all of the coaches are are embedded into either their tribes or their platforms the the coaches consolidated on a quarterly cadence that then feeds into our you know we call we call it momentum that's our kind of name for transforming ways of working into the COE the COE prioritises the so we we use the ways of working principles to be able to make sure that we've got active listening and then that feeds up into a quarterly backlog of work for us to make the system better you know and and focus on the systematic issues that we need to lean into
Jon Smart: Yeah so that that my my my view on that is what you just described there that's another pattern for pattern for success so for anyone that's listening to this I highly recommend they do everything you've been talking about so far Lauren because impediment are not in the path impediments are the path this is about going from impediment to impediment to impediment and what you just described is that kind of catch process solve them at the lowest possible level as you just said throw it up you need to have someone who can catch it so I'm guess you’ve you've organised yourselves so that there are people that can catch it and solve it and then what I heard you say is you're prioritising those impediments
Lauren Lance: Yes
Jon Smart: So you've got the you know the theory of constraints, you've got the the biggest impediments at the top of the list
Lauren Lance: That's it
Jon Smart: And then you're following up then to make sure that they are alleviated yes so they're no no longer the bottleneck
Lauren Lance: Yeah and it's a never never ending mist of opportunities that that we need to focus on but yeah one thing that you've just said there Jon this isn't a program anymore it's part of my team, it's part of our mission we have our we have our business agility centre of excellence it's a permanent team it's there it's part it's the coaches there it's it's it's acknowledged within our structure, within our purpose, within our my team's kind of service offering that that we are here to help this evolution ongoing and then it's built into our ways of working so that we then have the continuous feedback look with our mission to just keep growing the the business ability
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah and when you say our can you just explain what you mean by our our way of working
Lauren Lance: Suncorp’s way of working
Jon Smart: Yeah okay the whole company
Lauren Lance: Yeah yeah
Jon Smart: And and the reason I asked that question is the journey from PMO to VRO. So value realisation office or project management office to value realisation office can you tell me a bit about you know what you're what you're doing on that topic
Lauren Lance: I'll start with the why that was kind of our focus our initial focus was how our mindsets how do we need to think differently how do we have to organise ourselves around any model organising ourselves getting ourselves into value streams and our core system of work how do people work what do where they plan work ceremonies we focused initially on that we got our value stream set up we went straight down to Brilliant at Basics lots and lots of coaching lots of active listening and the biggest impediment that kept coming up was that our systems, governance processes, and practices was the biggest blocker to flow we were hearing it through our retros we did an external assessment of our business agility number one and then interestingly Suncorp did we we completed culture assessment across the organisation and that was talking about prioritisation and prioritising value as being a real blocker for our culture so lots of data points that came in to say this is the this is our kind of next big unlock to take our take our ambition to the next level so what we did is we said look we have a very traditional PMO our front page was always about cost and benefit it had lots of red RAG statuses in it and we had you know a very very traditional heavy governance processes you know lots of documentation, lots of ask for requests, and we acknowledge that we needed to understand what does this look like in the context of a a kind of a function a support function that's going to enable flow enable value excuse me versus yeah holding it back and that's when we we said well what does this look like we don't know we need to we need to design it which is where your company really helped us and and the core principles that we we took forward is we are a highly regulated organisation there is controls that need to be put in place so let's make sure that we're clear on what they are and it's not like we're throwing business case benefits and cost to the wind there is an element of that that has to remain tick let's just understand what is minimal viable there for that number two how do we enable a conversation that is just relentlessly focused on value and what does that look like in a process versus yeah what does that look like in process what are the data we need what's the capabilities we need to build and then how does that have to flow into well the conversation is what I call it the conversation we're having with our people the conversation we're having with our executives how does it flow into that and off the back of it what we've done is we've reshaped our traditional PMO to one which is our value partners working in with our tribes and our platforms helping coach and embed a focus on value do we have work aligned to strategy how do we measure how have have we defined outcomes and how do we measure value they then take that and they turn it into the artefacts the bits and pieces that we need to be able to have the right conversations to optimise value
Jon Smart: That's great so more of a servant leadership supportive coaching stance as opposed to a please submit your gantt chart type stance
Lauren Lance: Absolutely yeah absolutely we we did have a culture of a PMO being a police police force of of an organisation and you must abide by these rules and that's a hard cultural perspective to change which was why I felt very strongly about relabeling as well yeah rebrand have a different perspective in place and through the process we have we have reorganised ourselves we've gone through a operating model change to make sure we've got the right roles the right capabilities I think that's important to to start off with and now we're we're focusing on the work processes and you know the how they work what they do on a monthly on a quarterly basis yeah
Jon Smart: Yeah and values so how are you measuring value how are you articulating value
Lauren Lance: Well we we have our outcomes and key results and those key results we look at over several different kind of dimensions we have our kind of obvious our financial kind of outcome key results that we measure we have our customer key results that we measure and then we have regulatory and risk key results that we measure as well what is super fascinating is when you map them all together you can see the golden thread and where it might be broken but you also see big gaping holes and it won't surprise you and I'm sure everyone that goes on this maturity journey of focusing on value we have a lot of value in our financial we have a lot of not about you and our customer we need to be better at defining that and measuring it because yeah it's it's a it's a muscle that we need to build yeah yeah
Jon Smart: And and the the aha moment there is you're able to say that and you know it
Lauren Lance: We can see it
Jon Smart: Yeah you figured it out like most organisations wouldn't be able to say what you just said because they wouldn't know because there isn't an alignment there isn't a golden thread of value with an alignment from execution to strategy yeah
Lauren Lance: Well I think you hear me say the data is really important right and and having it there and being able to mapping in a way where you go ah okay this is where we need to focus and we're a financial services organisation we've we've got a lot of we got a lot of CFOs that work with work here with us so you we feel comfy in the revenue and cost that's what we put in there where we are really trying to shift a culture where we say well hang on how are we measuring customer value how are we measuring customer value yeah yeah
Jon Smart: Yeah yeah yeah that's that is fantastic so I want to come back now to your top five learnings okay and and maybe drill in a bit more so the second one the high five you know celebrate but don't call victory can you tell me a bit more about that one
Lauren Lance: Yeah I think our executive team's a bit sick of me saying this because every time I go and speak to them which is quite often I say we're doing really well like we all of the data is going in the right direction but we are not calling victory and the reason why I say that is because every organisation has so many different priorities so many at any one time if you call victory you don't become a priority and then the risk of backslide is there and that's real right you know this transformation takes continuous investment and continuous focus and if we high five call victory we risk taking our eye off the prize and going and and going backwards so I to be successful need the support of the executive team and the focus of the the executive team and this hasn't got an end destination it doesn't have an end destination you know we need to be focusing on it so I'm not calling victory we have a long way to go you can hear in my conversation around you know definition of we have a long way to go so let's make sure that we really celebrate everything that we've achieved but if we call victory it's highly likely that we go backwards
Jon Smart: Yeah yes and as you said you're never done improving
Lauren Lance: Totally yeah never done improving
Jon Smart: And human systems entropy the weeds grow yeah yeah. So related to that and related to your third point think big, starts small, learn fast behaviour and so think big starts small and celebrating so that means you know people when you start small you're running you obviously you want to get to more an experiment mental type mindset of we've got outcomes we're trying to achieve we want to run we want the cheapest cost of failure we don't want an expensive cost of failure reducing time to value so one thing that we haven't yet really touched on is behaviour and in particular leaders at all levels and you know the more senior leader you are the bigger your shadow so this does require a shift in terms of psychological safety, empowerment, autonomy, celebrating failure, Flearning I think you called it you called it earlier today
Lauren Lance: You’ve learned it, I did that’s our new word
Jon Smart: Which I'm gonna copy you going to copy you on that Flearning kind of there's no such thing as a failed experiment just learning so kind of failure learning
Lauren Lance: Yeah
Jon Smart: Can you tell me tell me a bit more about that and behaviours and and you know whatever you're doing to help try to shift behaviours
Lauren Lance: Yeah well I think the the first thing to note there is before we even thought about like how do we have to reorganise ourselves what's our system of work look like we focused on defining our mindsets because mindsets going to drive your behaviour right and those mindsets were at the start of every meeting they were at the end of every meeting they were there to remind everybody about how we need to shift the way we think which is going to shift the way we behave so we had a couple Pace over Perfection was our first, Trust and Transparency, empowered teams, and customer obsession so just four punchy mindsets that were anchored against everything and when I say like we started every EOT board EOT every every level of the organisation we anchored our transformation around these four mindsets that was the first thing we did from that drives the behaviour change and yeah part of that was putting some other sort of hacks into the the way that we think so good example we we had two of our value streams that we set off first they were called our pioneer tribes when they showcased they just showcased about their flearnings that was all they showcased right
Jon Smart: Showcased their Flearnings
Lauren Lance: We were like we just want to know what you learned what what were the failures that you learned from and Flearnings is now part of a it's a Suncorp we all talk about it how is it yeah how do we how do we celebrate it from there you know we were then able to once we had the data be able to marry the data up against the mindsets and the behaviours that we were seeing it wasn't just the team like I said this Brilliant at Basics concept were able to have the team self assess themselves on their mindsets and behaviour so you know those that maybe weren't getting it as well were able to show it in a in a really safe environment then we could marry it up against the the metrics and they always correlate
Jon Smart: They always correlate
Lauren Lance: They do
Jon Smart: So the the better data as in quicker time to value, happier people, better quality, etc lines up to where the the behaviours are better where you would better yeah
Lauren Lance: Absolutely absolutely right and then that's really powerful because that's a conversation that I'm I'm really I can have with my peers and sit down and go right
Jon Smart: So it’s not subjective it's
Lauren Lance: It's not we have we have we have you know the flow up of info from the teams of how they're assessing themselves in the mindsets as well as the leaders in their mindsets and behaviours and then I have the real proof in the putting data here which is how well you're doing
Jon Smart: Yeah so my last question then is in terms of the benefits you're seeing so far so first of all can you just just like a reminder of how long you've been on this journey first of all and then what are the what's the what and and bearing in mind it's a never-ending journey you know what are the what are the sorts of benefits you're seeing so far
Lauren Lance: So how far are we in we spent about a year designing and so designing the way that we need to design our value streams we went through a total you know restructure around how we organise ourselves into platforms and chapters and then we've been in like launched and in for almost a year we will have our first birthday in September and it'll be a big party so kind of a year plan a year in so two years I'd say of us working through this journey. So firstly like metrics don't lie we have seen a 60% increase in our throughput
Jon Smart: How much sorry
Lauren Lance: 60%
Jon Smart: 60% wow
Lauren Lance: Increase in our throughput, our lead time has has improved by 10%, and our overall team health is up by 12%. I'm super proud of that Jon like and you know there'll be a bit of noise in the data because not every not every widget's the same but I keep saying to the team it doesn't matter about the specific number it's the trend it's the macro trend and it's all going in the right direction which is excellent but the thing that I kind of am most proud of is that the way that we do work here at Suncorp feels differently, smells differently, it's different it's just different you know and the company's winning we are no longer an underperforming company we are absolutely an investable business and we are going great guns as well so you know it just it feels different and that's when you know yeah that's when you know it's working the data is great but it feels different
Jon Smart: That is incredible that is a great that is a great beginning and end you know we were underperforming and that was public knowledge you said and now your results were announced two days ago
Lauren Lance: Yep
Jon Smart: And you're winning
Lauren Lance: We're winning yeah we are we are
Jon Smart: And people are happier
Lauren Lance: Yeah and we haven't stopped right nobody’s going winning, high-five
Jon Smart: Just like you said number two you're not declaring victory
Lauren Lance: Yeah yeah it's good
Jon Smart: and and also the fact you're able to answer the question I asked about data and the benefits where you're actually able to give me you know yeah numbers numbers is is is rare and and really good as well so is there is there any question that you wish I asked you that I haven't asked you is there anything else you want to share Lauren Lance: Ah I could sit here and talk to you about this
Jon Smart: Likewise likewise
Lauren Lance: There’re hours I think we covered most of it I think we've covered most of it
Jon Smart: Awesome thank you very much Lauren and as I've said a number of times today already having spent some time with you and a number of other sessions I really do think that Suncorp are way ahead of other organisations in only really one year I think forget the forget the one year of being in a room personally you know being a bit tongue and cheek but the real learning starts when you actually start doing the doing so I think really you've kind of been on the journey for one year and everything you've described and was like you know do you do you want to write a book right Sooner Safer Happier two or something no yeah you're I think an an an example of awesomeness
Lauren Lance: Thank you Jon
Jon Smart: And everything you're doing is I think is spot on and clearly the proof of the pudding is in the eating and you're getting better results and happier people so I think you're doing an amazing job and keep going and I look forward to a chat that we're going to have again in 6 months or 12 months time and see see where you're at then
Lauren Lance: Love it
Jon Smart: So thank you very much Lauren
Lauren Lance: Thank you for the invitation