Feb 5th Meeting
We had an excellent meeting on Feb 5th. It was kindly hosted by the Royal Mail at their offices in Old Street. The meeting started with a talk from Robin Mar of Royal Mail who gave examples of the successes and difficulties that they have had with innovation. They introduced a prize competition in order to reduce absenteeism among their 180,000 
employees. Despite some scorn in the press it was a big success and reduced absenteeism by 26%. Robin shared some other examples including their driver risk assessment scheme and some highly innovative direct mail initiatives. Among the issues he discussed were inertia, risk aversion and insularity.
Matt McNulty of consultants Mouchel then gave a presentation on their innovation efforts. Some of his intriguing examples included allowing traffic to use the hard shoulder on the M42, which Mouchel recommended to the Highways Agency. When Mouchel had a problem with silo mentality at a client they came up with a board game which people played to learn the interdendency between departments. Mouchel have 250 innovation champions to aid the idea generation and implementation process.
We finished with an interactive exercise on Transformers - a technique to force creative thinking in a process or procedure. The teams came up with some great ideas and the feedback was excellent. Copies of the presentations are available to BQF members from Pat Myles.
Paul Sloane