Don’t Give The Lab A Bad Name

Since the appointment of Datuk Seri Idris Jala as Minister spearheading the Government Transformational Programme (GTP), the Lab has become the latest in-thing among government agencies, including State agencies, and everybody is trying to jump on to the bandwagon.

In the haste to be seen as toeing the line of the Federal Government, there might be a danger of the Lab being given a bad name as government agencies do it without proper understanding of the concept and, more importantly, without properly trained facilitators. As things stand now, in some agencies it seems that any extended brainstorming session is summarily called the Lab and people with a historical link to Datuk Seri Idris Jala in his early Shell days are deemed automatically qualified to facilitate the Lab session.

Some of these Labs are run for only 3-4 days, often with 3-4 sub-labs dealing with different problems witihin the same session, coming up with general solutions and questionable implementation timelines.

Without proper understanding of the Lab process, some facilitators tell the participants that transformation mean to forget the current processes and come up with new processes, as if everything is starting from scratch. That seems to be going against the Lab process of first thoroughly understanding the current processes and identifying bottlenecks, and then dealing with the bottlenecks through innovative and “out of the box” thinking if need be. From my understanding, in the companies that he turned arouind, Datuk Seri Idris Jala did not summarily discard any current processes or reinvent the wheel on everything, but work with whats available but improving them through brave and innovative thinking.

Without proper training, some facilitators might miss actual bottlenecks altogether. For example in one so-called Lab sesion with 5-6 sub-Labs within it, all the sub-Labs identify the unreliable data from the same database system as hindering them to fully computerised their operations. A trained Lab facilitator would have identify that as a bottleneck and zoom in on it, calling in all the required resources and coming up with a detailed solution plan and timeline to resolve the bottleneck. In this case, the problem was mostly put under the “assumptions” page and new processes was drawn up with the assumption that the data issue will be solved. How, when and at what cost? Nobody really knows. The timelines for the implementation of the new processes themselves are then drawn based on this yet-to-be-resolved assumption, which make the whole so-called solution questionable in actual implementability.

Conducted properly, the Lab has been proven time and time again to be an effective tool by Datuk Seri Idris Jala in his turnaround and transformation of failing companies. But there might be a danger of the Lab being given a bad name as government agencies implement it without proper understanding and facilitation, leading to solutions and timelines which are not implementable.

Therefore it may be a good idea if government agencies refer to the Federal Government if they also want to use the Lab as part of their transformation tool. Alternatively the Federal Government can some up with a “certification” scheme to properly train and certify Lab facilitators who can then be assigned to agencies to make sure the Lab is done as it should be done. Let us not spoil a good tool through our own ignorance of what the tool really is.

[I am not a Lab expert or trained facilitator, but in 2007 I had the privilege of having face-to-face briefing with the then Encik Idris Jala and his right-hand man for the transformation programme in MAS, Encik Izani, on the Lab in their office at the MAS complex in Subang Airport, and have some appreciation of the tool]