Value Leverage

The Value Leverage approach to creating a step improvement in organisational performance.

Value Leverage was the original name for the approach Now called Challenge Mapping. This is one of the most effective approaches to achieving a fast, step improvement in organisational performance and flexibility. Value Leverage achieves this by enabling everyone in the organisation to work much, much smarter, and in a way that aligns their activities with the overall goals of the organisation. It is a technique that greatly enhances the effectiveness of every aspect of the organisation. By ensuring that people view the organisation in terms of interlocking systems, it is able to quickly change people’s perception of their role within the organisation.

Value Leverage is a “Systems Thinking” skill that allows managers to overcome the traditional organisational problems by focusing on optimising the relationships between the parts of the organisation. This enables them to build holistic solutions that maximise the overall synergy. As it is the relationships that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, it is in this, almost completely neglected area, where it is easiest to make the greatest improvements in the overall performance of the organisation.

So Value Leverage utilises a unique way of identifying the relationships between the performance of a system and the critical, measurable aspects of the inputs. This reveals how to create the Value Levers that will achieve the maximum level of improvement at the lowest possible cost. In other words, Value Leverage changes the focus from the control of the component parts of an organisation, to the control of the interfaces.

One of the consequences of using the approach is that it allows everyone in the organisation to work much, much smarter in aligning their actions with improving the performance of the organisation in an ever changing world. The reason for this is that people can only work smarter if they have the relevant information, techniques and understanding to enable them to utilise their untapped intelligence. Few other approaches even start to address such fundamental issues. This difference alone can account for substantial and fast, step improvements in both performance and flexibility.

However, the differences do not end there. Value Leverage is different to other approaches because;

• Typically, the various management techniques have been developed by attempting to simply copy a method that has been successful in other organisations. Value Leverage is based on sound scientific principles, so that the solution can be specifically developed to ensure it succeeds in your organisation.
• Other programmes tend to focus on solving specific problems. Value Leverage focuses on creating holistic solutions capable of simultaneously resolving multiple problems.
• Standard approaches separate the “hard” technical issues from the “soft” people issues. Value Leverage integrates these two aspects, because the hard issues often affect the way people behave and vice-versa.
• Many techniques use analysis to reduce, or break down those problems into even smaller parts, creating an additional problem of trying to join up the separate solutions. Value Leverage uses synthesis to create complete and fully integrated solutions.
• Normal approaches often focus on what is going wrong inside the systems, processes, departments or organisations. Value Leverage focuses on what needs to be right at the interfaces or joins between the systems.
• In other approaches, risk analysis is often neglected because it is a completely separate part of the change or improvement project. In Value Leverage, assessing and minimising the uncertainty is an integral part of the approach and is a key factor in its consistent success.
• The majority of methods plan, forward in time, those processes or actions required to progress in the general direction of the desired goal. Value Leverage starts from a precise future goal and plans back, towards the current situation. In this way it is possible to quickly identify all the critical intermediate states or milestones that are essential to success.