EOW Reflections: Let’s get radical

I’m sometimes told I’m ‘too radical’ and a maverick. It may not be meant as a compliment, but I take it as one. Sometimes it takes a different approach from the usual or traditional to get things done. I call it being entrepreneurial. Without some radical thinking we’ll all spin around forever in the vortex of desultory discussion, stultifying suggestions and debilitating inactivity. A radical thinker is someone who approaches problems and ideas in a fundamental, transformative way, often challenging the status quo and proposing significant changes or solutions. I want to be that person, am pleased that some people think I am, but am not convinced I’m really there yet.  

It was great to hear this week at the Procurement 2 Payment Network Transformation Summit and at the Finishers and Interiors Sector Awards that people want more collaboration. I’d like to add the word radical in front of that. What does radical collaboration mean? It means moving beyond simply agreeing to collaborate, setting aside personal preferences, vested interests, and behaviour that biases outcomes and taking a different approach. Collaboration as someone said is not about consensus but about deciding together to work together regardless of the personal compromises and sacrifices required, to get the best result. Add ‘radical’ and we could achieve something truly transformative.

It’s hard to collaborate. The P2PN is all about bringing together the often very separate and siloed disciplines of Procurement and Accounts Payable and achieving more for everyone through collaboration. As I keep saying few people get out of bed in the morning to do a bad job but lack of collaboration between teams or departments can result in the left hand having no idea what the right hand does and each promising outcomes that can’t be achieved alone. Without collaboration teams can work against each other even in the same organisation. However, we’ve been talking about the importance of collaboration for decades and I’m not convinced we’ve cracked it.

It’s time to get radial. As one person on a panel said in summing up you have to be intentional. If two people walk into a room with the same goal that’s great but without deliberate intent it won’t be reached.

I want to make business customers pay their suppliers quicker. Let’s day I’m from the procurement team and I walk into the room with that goal. The Accounts Payable manager walks in with the same goal, to achieve quicker payments for our suppliers. The goals themselves are laudable, but we must intend not to leave the room until we’ve come up with a strategy that can be delivered that will ultimately get us to that goal. Without that we will have a great conversation about the problems with paying slowly but that gets us nowhere. The intention has to be to do whatever it takes to come up with a deliverable process, that will get us from A to B and to make it happen. We have to intentionally decide to compromise where necessary and be radical to achieve the transformation that will get us to the goal. 

It could mean that in collaboration we have to do something new, take some risks, set aside commercial considerations, decide to go against usual company practice. If I am willing to be a bit more radical it’s probable the other party will be more willing to play a similar hand. Maybe to get a radical approach we need to invite other people into the room, to get a diversity of thinking.   

Trust is important for any collaboration. It can build through the process and the more trust there is the more radical it’s possible to be. Once we’ve moved beyond discussion and agreeing that the goals are worth achieving, we can begin the collaboration, but we can’t just leave the room at that point. We have to stick to the deliberate intention to get the job done.

Identify the barriers and think through together what would happen if we deliberately pulled them down. Would the risks be any greater than if we left them in place? Could we deliberately take those risks? Once we’ve done that let’s not just walk away but add paths and stepping stones to smooth the route from A to B. We might just get those better outcomes and if we don’t, we’ll learn lessons that will allow us to make a better job of it next time. Does that make me radical and a maverick? I think not but I’ll take it anyway.