In this episode, I chat with Paul Reid, CEO of Trickle, about two powerful business improvement concepts: GROSS (Get Rid Of Stupid Stuff) from Singapore and the Broken Windows theory. Paul shares how he discovered these ideas, their practical applications, and the significant impact they can have on organizational efficiency and employee morale. Listen in to learn how these concepts can create a more joyful and productive work environment, especially for mid-career professionals seeking continuous improvement. 

Speaker Links:

Check out Trickle: https://trickle.works/trickle-explainer-video

Employee Engagement Health Check: https://trickle.works/employee-engagement-healthcheck/

Learn More:

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy my Life Satisfaction Assessment. It's a 30-minute program where I guide you through a deep dive into 10 areas of your life to assess what's bringing you joy and what's bringing you down. I call it Derailed and it's a fabulous place to begin a joy-at-work redesign.

https://www.midlifeunstuck.com/derailed

Paul Reed, the CEO of Trickle, introduced me to a business

improvement concept from Singapore that I'd never heard of before, but I've

recently become rather obsessed with it.

It's gross!

G R O S S.

Get.

Rid.

Of.

The stupid stuff.

We might have big personal or career goals, but if we're not getting

rid of this stupid stuff in our work life, then we're reducing

our capacity for joy at work.

In this conversation, Paul explains how he came across the concept and

the sister concept of broken windows.

I'll let him explain that one.

Once you hear the tangible results of this concept, I guarantee you'll feel compelled

to take action in your very next meeting.

Let's dive in..

Paul, can you tell me a little about how you came across the idea of gross

and why it had such an impact on you?

Okay.

So I can't take any credit for it.

First of all, it's attributed to the Singapore General Hospital.

And we do a lot of work at trickle with healthcare organizations.

So the NHS and another medical kind of organizations.

And one of my GP customers sent me a link to an article

in the British medical journal.

I think it was, and it was actually to do with the politics in the UK.

So one of the MPs had been over to Singapore.

I'd come across this gross, which is get rid of stupid stuff at Singapore

General Hospital and thought, actually, we should be asking this within the UK NHS.

So it resonated with this colleague or friend of mine because I'm a

bit of an improvement geek, right?

Continuous improvement is my thing.

And he'd heard me rabbiting on previously about a thing called broken windows.

And the two are very similar.

I'll touch on those later, but that's where I first heard about gross.

It was very recently, actually.

Fabulous.

And okay, so what frustrations do you see in your work that

the idea of GROSS helps solve?

So I'm lucky, right?

Because I've worked in the startup scene like most of my life, most of my career.

And I think in the startup sector, we do a lot of test and learn.

So it's Hey, let's try this thing out.

It didn't work very well.

Let's learn from it.

Let's change, right?

It's iterative.

It's agile.

So I've been lucky in that respect, but in my previous business where we worked with

lots of big organizations where, thousands and thousands of employees, our experience

of that is that the status quo just it's like you can't challenge this, right?

This is just the way that we work.

So what I love about gross and broken windows is that they're

about having everyday conversations.

So gross is simply.

What are we doing that's stupid, right?

Can we talk about the stupid things that frustrate us?

And can we just understand if there's anything we can do to change it, right?

Because a lot of the ways that we work were recipes that were

made up at a point in time.

It may have been a year ago.

It may have been five years ago.

And, people come, people go, and we train around them.

And we just do them.

And what I love about Gross is, it's that challenge.

It's that everyday challenge.

It's okay to say, Is this sensible or is it actually silly and

could we do it a lot better now?

So one of my first businesses, my previous business we were a software

organization, so we created a product for the utility space and

we transformed that organization.

Really positively by using the broken windows approach, which is similar to

gross, but instead of saying, get rid of stupid stuff, it's based on a criminology

study in the States, which said, if you take a derelict building and it's

secured and in another derelict building and you deliberately break a window.

If you go back a week later, the building that's secured will be fine,

but the one with the broken window will be practically demolished.

And the theory there is that, people look after the things in their

neighborhood if they look like they're kept, and the desire and the intention

is to keep them in a good condition.

So I use this analogy as the workplace, right?

What are the broken windows within the workplace that really we should make

sure number one, ideally they don't get broken in the first place, but two, if

there are things that are broken, what can you do to improve them quickly?

And we did that across this organization and it meant that we had like over

90 percent of people recommended that as a great place to work.

And we used to continually win contracts against organizations that literally

had thousands of times more staff.

And the reason for that was that people, number one, were happy to speak up.

Number two, they knew that we weren't going to stand there and

say, Oh, that's a stupid idea.

And number three, when you show that you're listening and you make change,

then people will get a sense of trust.

They speak up more.

And you start to innovate in a speed and a pace that other

people find it difficult to match.

So that, so my experience is do that and you'll have a really

happy progressive organization.

Fabulous.

And, but let's be a bit more practical about it.

So what practical ideas have you implemented or seen implemented in

organizations that you work with that might inspire someone, an

individual listening today to engage a little bit more in GROSS thinking?

Yeah, okay, cool.

So our platform actually helps organizations speak up, right?

And to capture ideas and capture suggestions.

And one of my favorites from the last year is one of our customers in NHS Scotland.

And one of their junior doctors raised a frustration about the time it took to

receive the results of an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound scan of the heart.

So they would perform the scan, and then it would take around 30

minutes to get the results from that.

So there is it as a frustration, our platform prioritized it.

They discussed it at their biweekly leadership team meeting, and then seven

weeks later, after a whole load of discussion and anonymous suggestions, et

cetera, they've created a workaround and they got it down to pretty much real time.

And that one example.

Hey this is a relatively silly thing that we've just been doing for a while,

when really there was a workaround and we reckon it saved them about

25 thousand pounds a year just that one and that was one of about 183

things that they completed that year.

So they're not always easy to quantify like that financially, right?

But in this case it was because it was a a time saving and you can

equate that to how much more efficient they were based on salaries, etc.

It can be anything.

It can be small things, but in that case, that was something that really

improved the employee morale, but also improved the patient outcomes, right?

Because the doctors are actually doing more.

With the time that they've got available.

So the creation of time, the saving of money and the

allocation of whatever the long list of many broken windows allocating

the energy to do that makes a big difference on the impact that has.

Massive.

So some people would call it micro transformations.

And our platform, we call them trickles, but essentially they're conversations.

And you know that you're talking about the most important things.

Therefore, if you can really reach solutions on those, then

they tend to have big impact.

Especially if you're doing that, every couple of weeks

over time, they accumulate.

And your efficiency improves.

And generally your happiness across your people improves as well.

Because they all have a voice, they can say this is a

broken window in my area and it can either move up or down the priority

list, but it gets acknowledged

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

and then actioned at, if it's at the top of the priority list.

That sounds absolutely fantastic.

What's really interesting though.

Lucia is that it's not always about fixing things, right?

It's about talking about things.

That's a really important part because I think a lot of organizations think

if we listen to our people and what they find frustrating, they're going

to expect us to fix everything.

And that's not where the value comes, right?

Oftentimes people are just happy to hear Why something can't happen because if you

take the traditional approach to engage in people, especially in large organizations,

it's an annual survey, right?

Answer 50 questions and a few months later you'll get some updates.

Whereas if it's like, hey, we can't do anything about this

because we might be able to look at it again in six months time.

Those conversations don't often happen and that engagement can really

help people feel like, a greater sense of belonging in the workplace.

And also engagement for the long term, yeah, I've been heard, I've

been listened to, and it's been, put on the side for now, but let's rebring it.

We bring it back to the table in six months time.

Yeah.

Exactly that.

And just to close back the loop on gross or broken windows, the magic of

those things is that they encourage a psychologically safe space, right?

Because the organization's saying, hey, let's talk about

the stupid stuff we're doing.

Or they're saying, hey, let's talk about the broken windows

that we have in our organization.

And that's what gets people familiar and comfortable with

that everyday conversation.

And then change just happens, right?

Continuous improvement just happens.

In trickles.

And trickles in our world.

Yeah.

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy my

Life Satisfaction Assessment.

It's a 30 minute program where I guide you through a deep dive into 10 areas

of your life to assess what's bringing you joy and what's bringing you time.

I call it D.

It's a fabulous place to begin a joy at work redesign.