Dr. Meg Hooper: Breaking Down Silos

Hello and welcome to another episode of Transforming AM. Today we're talking about one of the biggest topics in asset management, and that's organizational barriers, and silos. And there's no better guest to discuss this topic than doctor Meg Cooper. Meg's their principal psychologist and founder here at Carousel Consulting, where they specialize in helping organizations, transform those barriers, and silos into more collaborative practises. So it's real privilege to have you on the show. Thank you. Thanks, Rory. Thanks for having me, and welcome to Ipswitch. Thanks. Thanks for that. It's, good to be here. And Carousel Consulting, so you focus on organizational psychology and change management. And I think the change management piece in asset management is just such a critical piece in the AM improvement process. I think for most practitioners who have experienced a scenario where we've progressed our own AM objectives or improved our own processes, but ultimately, we need that organizational buy in or or stakeholder buy in to progress things further. And often that's when we run into those cross functional barriers or or what we call silos. And they can be really quite hindering and and quite impactful on our businesses, can't they? Yeah. That's absolutely right. And one of the reasons we love working with asset intense organizations and asset management in particular is because it's so complex. And, the we have to accept now that asset management is no longer a technical discipline. Yes. There's a technical component, but, now we have to think of it as an enterprise discipline because if we're gonna realize the benefits of asset management for our assets, then we need perspectives from across the business, and we need buy in, as you said, from across the business. So we have to stop thinking about ourselves in a silo and start to think of ourselves as actually we cross across the organization. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. No. It's so critical. So for our practitioners and organizations as a whole, once we've appreciated is that enterprise, approach, yeah, how can we start to break down those those silos that exist in our businesses? I think the first thing is to just really be aware that if, that implementation is the name of the game now. So if we are going to be built building frameworks, if we're going to be building, strategic asset management plans, whatever they might be, implementation is now the name of the game. We can't we're especially in regulatory environments, we can't get away with those frameworks sitting on shelves or those strategic plans sitting on shelves anymore. So implementation is so important. When we're implementing things, we're effectively making change. And if we're making change from an enterprise point of view, it means that we're making change not just in our own backyard, but we're making change in other people's backyards, and we're coming up against other people's processes, and other people's priorities. And I like to say whipper snipping other people's backyards, even if they don't want the whipper snips. So, yeah. So it's it's really important that we can get under the skin of our stakeholders, and that means understanding what they value, understanding their discipline itself, understanding their priority from an asset management point of view. You know, data, for example, is the greatest example. Like, what data do they need and what data do we need? That conversation alone can be the start of a really, important relationship from an a cross functional kind of implementation point of view. Yeah. And what about those key steps, I guess, really really on that change implementation process? How how would you approach that? I guess the conversations that we're having most at the moment are around how to build those collaborative practices because at the end of the day, collaborative practice or collaborative behaviours are what is going to drive cross functional implementation. And we know that we can send people into a collaborative setting or or, aspire to collaborate in a setting, and they can have the really positive attitudes towards collaboration. They can have all the skills for collaboration. But if the environment doesn't reinforce or enable collaboration, then then they're gonna be up against it. And it's really the the environment or the context is so powerful. It's also probably the thing that organizations have most control over. So we work with organizations to say, what are the things in the environment that are getting in the way? One of the most common that we've been working with, and it comes to the top of my mind at the moment because it's a common thing at the moment, is when we use reporting to try and improve practices in an asset management sense, but the report itself becomes a way becomes a weapon. And so it becomes a way of pointing fingers or, telling people how terribly they're doing. That in in and of itself inadvertently then creates, barriers to collaboration. People are so much less likely to collaborate under under those settings than they are in in ways that we report use reporting to improve things and to look for root cause and problem solve together, just as an example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. And I guess it's because it's it's an enterprise approach, it really impedes everyone's kind of responsibility from from top to bottom, horizontal as well Yeah. Of the involvement of the process. Absolutely. And I think organizations, have to acknowledge the role of leaders in this space as well. If, one of the things in my environment is the role modeling that my my leader does for me, and if my leader is not role modeling collaborative behavior, then that it's really hard for me to then go, well, I'm gonna collaborate in spite of it all, if my leader's showing me that's actually not how we do things around here. So leaders focusing on their own behavior is a really good start as well. Yeah. Oh, well, great insights, Meg. Thank you. Thanks for joining me on the show. Yeah. We hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you're interested in the topic, do check out Carousel Consulting, and their new CM2 collaboration model on their website. And we'll see you back here for the next episode of Transforming AM coming soon. See you.