This weekend, I watched a DVD with my 3-year-old son. It was Thomas the Tank Engine, and it was a particular film called Day of the Diesels.
For those of you who have not had your Thomas initiation, either because you’re not British, or because you don’t have children under 5, Thomas the Tank Engine is a British children’s programme, featuring a range of anthropomorphised steam train engines, who generally get into trouble, realise they’ve done something stupid, then get themselves out of it through teamwork or support from their (engine) friends. Humans play a very much secondary role, and the only one who actually matters is the boss of the railway line, called The Fat Controller. It’s based on a series of children’s books written in the middle of the twentieth century, just as diesel power was entering the real railway landscape, and so, on the face of it, Thomas the Tank Engine is a paean to an outdated, but romantic mode of transport.
However, children’s programmes are never as simple as that; they always have some level of education underpinning them, either scholastic or moral or physical. In this regard, Thomas the Tank Engine borders on the rabidly didactic. The engines vie to be “Really Useful” (particularly in the eyes of their boss, the Fat Controller), either in making sure the right goods get to the right place, or that they rescue each other, or whatever; their ultimate worth is only really seen in terms of units of production or efficiency. It is as if the books were written by Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill – Thomas the Tank Engine is almost a children’s primer for the philosophy of utilitarianism; in other words, it’s overriding message is the individual only has worth and can only derive happiness through social or economic output – the results of their actions, or effort.
So, I’ve always found watching Thomas the Tank Engine the most philosophically engaging, if, at times, annoyingly blunt, of all children’s TV. So, what cultural or organisational teachings did this particular programme The Day of the Diesels – a feature length episode, no less – have in store? I found myself realising that there were many similarities between the storyline and our current experiences with clients’ multichannel operations and organisations, and how best to improve performance.
The story followed the two teams of engines – the “good” steam engines, featuring Thomas, his best friend Percy, Gordon, Edward and a whole range of others, and the “bad” diesel engines, who are often so derided they don’t even have names, other than, well, Diesel. The diesel trains are naughty, dirty, deceitful and cunning. They don’t care about doing their jobs, are characterised as a bit stupid and solely interested in empire-building, although they do want to look good in front of their boss (the same Fat Controller). The plot revolves around the Diesels’ coveting of the “beautiful” clean, well-kept shed that the Steam trains have, with all its turntables and other fun tools. They hatch a dastardly scheme to tempt Percy away from Thomas, by convincing him he was no longer his best friend, and the Diesel leader would become his best friend, and so Percy would decide to move across to stay in the Diesel shed.
Percy then realises that actually, the Diesels were just trains, working in cramped, dirty conditions, and weren’t so bad, and perhaps his prejudices about Diesels were wrong. They needed help from some of the other Steam engines, whose skills would benefit them, and allow them to tidy up their own shed. Percy then starts to bring other engines across, including a crane engine, which is the particular skill the Diesels miss – they need to be able to move stock around their yard from one high place to another, which seemingly no-one had thought of. At this point, the Diesels show their true colours, revert to (stereo)type and imprison both Percy and the crane engine, wait until all the Steam engines come to find them, and then steal into the Steam shed, and take it over, playing with all their new toys. Percy manages to convince a couple of small Diesel engines left to guard them that kidnap and imprisonment isn’t really the right thing to do, and they find Thomas and friends, who come to their rescue, confront the Diesels in their Steam shed, and the standoff is resolved by the Fat Controller, who finally realises he has a turf war within his organisation. The Diesels are sent packing, but not before everyone helps to tidy up and rebuild the Diesel shed into a new spick-and-span warehouse, so everyone is happy, and Percy is returned to the Steam shed and he and Thomas are best friends again and the Steams and the Diesels get back to doing their own thing again in peace.
All of which plot detailing means you don’t need to watch the programme now (with apologies for those of you who didn’t want the ending spoiled!), but it also struck me how much this mirrors how many companies have attempted to manage multichannel so far; you may well recognise some of these elements in your own multichannel operations, although please forgive any inevitable generalisations.
Until fairly recently, Multichannel Operations – which really meant Digital, including Web or Ecommerce, together with some email, mobile and social – were often run as separate businesses within an organisation. This meant they were often at odds with the traditional business, which either didn’t understand the new business model, or saw it as a threat to their existing way of working. So, Multichannel was set up as a different business silo, who had to build their own infrastructure, often with little engagement from other areas of the business, who often were looking for ways to sabotage or get round this new innovation, even if it was clear that this was how customers behaved now, and so this is how customers wanted to consume these products or services.
This explains how suspicious the traditional business – the Steam engines – is of the new innovative start-up (Diesel engines, or Multichannel/Digital business), and what goes on in that “other building”. The very fact that they are housed separately means they have to work out solutions to problems that the traditional business may well have answers to, but are not prepared to share, but also means there are two senses of identity within the business; it’s all about what the Steam or Diesel teams are doing, not actually about serving the customer, which in Thomas’ case is providing an efficient railway service.
So, the customer was second to their internal corporate battle for internal perception of performance and resulting investment. The CEO – the Fat Controller in this case – was quite happy having the two businesses operating differently, because he knows it would require significant cultural change and massive investment to reorganise the business to have both Steams and Diesels working seamlessly next to each other. But both silos look to him for acknowledgement and rewards – for the trains, this is about being praised as “Really Useful”, for organisations, it is obviously about bonuses but also greater investment levels in their area of the business.
Then, a couple of years ago, CEOs and other board members realised this was not efficient to have different silos fighting over services to the same customers. But it also became obvious that digital had changed customer behaviour, and so meant organisations had to change and be “multichannel” to serve them more effectively. This was often led by retailers, for whom the need to respond to customer behavioural trends, like different ways of shopping, is particularly acute, but is also taking place in financial services, travel and media and entertainment. But by this stage, the two silos had their own infrastructures, so the best way of organising this was getting the two silos working better together.
There are initially two parts to this process. One is to realise that some skills in different areas would benefit other areas of the business and to move people accordingly, so that they understand and learn about the whole business.
This often started with a placement or secondment from one silo to another. In that sense, therefore, Percy represents the traditional business evangelist placed inside the Multichannel silo; this was often to ensure that the trading skills that traditional business managers understood could be applied to Multichannel. Their methods may well have been crude and dirty to him, but they’d had to learn for themselves, with no outside help so far. So, these early evangelists often realised their new colleagues were skilled and determined, and not the threatening monsters they had previously thought. This was a vital step in breaking down these internal barriers and convincing colleagues to collaborate, and bring in the right resources from elsewhere. That’s how Percy can bring in the crane engine to help out; he realises that the business already has these skills, and he can facilitate this assistance.
The second part is to remove the politics or jealousy between channels, so the business can start to respond seamlessly to customers’ needs through whichever channel is necessary – to become Multichannel, rather than just Digital. There are different elements of this, but one important first step on this path is setting up a channel-agnostic incentive structure – a way in which it doesn’t matter how the customer buys or consumes products, but as long as they buy them. This was often the barrier that led traditional silos to not engage with Digital or Multichannel, but when you remove that barrier, and say it’s all about focusing on the customer, that’s when the business can start to work.
Of course, that doesn’t happen in the Thomas story, and the two silos still jealously guard their ways of working, rather than truly trying to integrate. After Percy’s secondment and his subsequent rescue by his original friends, the Diesels do indeed get their investment in their own infrastructure which he had recognised was needed, but then Percy returns to the Steam team, and the two business silos continue in the same way they always had, albeit after a period of peace. It would be the responsibility of the Fat Controller to change the way the teams work so that they could work alongside each other to provide the best quality service possible; in this story, he doesn’t.
In that sense, therefore, Day of the Diesels represents a cautionary tale for those working in Multichannel Operations and strategy. Despite the clear utilitarian message – a happy organisation is one that focuses on the end goal and the true business value – this can be missed and indeed actively subverted if you don’t build the right environment.