For more than three decades, Ian Walsh, Managing Director of Intent Group, has been driving improvements in organisations around the globe. Ian understands deeply what is required to deliver and sustain improvement.

Here he shares his thoughts on what New Zealanders can do to recover from the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As I write this, we are in the run up to the election for 2020, with politicians offering promises and plans for how they will implement policy that will enable New Zealand to go in the right direction.

This includes investment in housing, infrastructure, tax cuts and so on. I have heard almost no dialogue on how we are going to afford all of this and repay the huge cost Covid-19 has wrought on the country.

The answer seems to be that we will stimulate the economy with these offerings and the implication is that this will fix it.

I believe that some of these will help but ultimately, we have to address our poor productivity.

I am concerned that we are still applying band aids to a sick patient and we are not getting to the root cause of the problem. As Einstein said, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.’

So, as New Zealanders, we must take collective responsibility for where we are – the bottom end of the OECD in terms of economic performance, and therefore our future and potential quality of life.

However, the board of New Zealand is the Government, and over the last 30-40 years they are ultimately accountable for NZ sliding down the OECD.

I have heard nothing that would suggest that there is an integrated plan to address our productivity gaps. Meanwhile we add more compliance costs and wage hikes onto businesses to fund.

We are behaving as if we have the economic performance of a top ten OECD country. Not an underperforming cellar dweller and many of these initiatives, whilst laudable, are unaffordable in the short term, because the burden is still to be carried by small under-resourced businesses.

Again, we have a broken system. Politicians are incented to be in government and going in new and perhaps challenging directions is hard to sell to the electorate.

It is not the approach that wins. Only when there is a crisis do they risk these things. This is why Japan adopted different approaches, when their economy and country were decimated!

Do we have to burn the platform and sink before we adopt new and better ways of thinking?

Do we even have the right people making these calls?

Shouldn’t we just empower a ministry to drive productivity through the adoption of global best practices and proven data to enable this, and measure their performance via movement up the OECD as opposed to trying to achieve outcomes through top down macro-economic policy?

The recent work by the Productivity Commission on Frontier Firms provides some good direction in this regard, and is timely.

Consider this: Over 90% of the New Zealand business leaders I have met in seminars or presentations (totaling well over 1,000 now) have:

• No data as to why their customers choose their product or service over competitor offerings. Many surmise but have absolutely no data.
• Not segmented their products or services based on the customer perception of value. This is logical given the above, as they haven’t asked their customers what they value.
• Little awareness of best practices, such as continuous improvement methodology, Lean, Six Sigma, and certainly have no ability or capacity to implement them.
• No idea of their performance potential, their true loss and wastes versus a zero-loss model.
• Never led a culture transformation program.

Will changing the tax regime, adding more sick leave etc. address any of these issues?

New Zealand businesses are falling into three categories;

• Those continuing as they always have,
• Those who know they need to do better and change, but are unable to do so, and
• Those trying to implement change.

Unfortunately, the third category is the smallest group. Many NZ businesses are continuing to operate the same as always.

However, many businesses will not survive and prosper if they rely on the things that protected NZ businesses in the past.

Covid has taught us this, and now anything can be procured on the internet and competitors can come from anywhere, so you must be ready.

Many of these businesses either don’t know the mountain needs climbing or have forgotten their map, appropriate gear and the Sherpa!

If we want to be world class, we need to know why we need to climb (so we can share the vision with the team), what mountain we are climbing, how to climb, and have the right gear and proven guides who know the way to the top.

We need more businesses to commence the climb to excellence, to be visionary, create role models and be aspirational, to enable others to follow and to help NZ pull itself up.

We have a few excellent examples, but we need more. Are you up for the challenge? I am!