The Leadership Centre took part in the 2016 NHS Transformathon by providing thoughts and insight on our place based work and sharing our recent publication, The Art of Change Making.
2. The Art of Change Making
• Who we are we?
• Systems Leadership in relation to change
• Introduction to The Art of Change Making
• Technologies test
• What’s this like in real life?
• The future of The Art of Change Making
3. Our History
• 10 years! supporting
leaders in public services
• A move from local
government specifically to
public services broadly.
• A focus on people and
place!
5. The work we do
• Develop leadership capability in individuals, teams, organisations and
places
• Leaders at all levels
• Create space for new thinking, relationships and collaboration.
• Use a real issue to develop leadership capability
• ‘Wicked’ (needs leadership) not ‘tame’(needs management)
• Examples include: Total Place, Troubled Families, Community Budgets,
Health & Social Care Integration Pioneers
• Coordinating the Systems Leadership Alliance & designing and delivering
interventions.
6. Leadership in relation to change
• In England there’s a push for more integrated, seamless
public services
• Financial pressures
• Demographic pressure
• User demand & expectation
• This means we have to think in a more interconnected way
and change the way we operate.
• Worked with over 50 places in last 3 years to explore and
develop capabilities for leading this type of change. Systems
Leadership!
7. What the work tells us is…
Ways of
feeling
Ways of
perceiving
Ways of
thinking
Ways of
relating
Ways of
being
Ways of
doing
Change doesn’t occur through structural
modification alone (if at all)
It’s about RELATIONSHIPS and TRUST!
8. And…
Systems act to preserve themselves.
Maturana & Varela – evolutionary biology
• Organisms, from single cells to eco-systems have a variety of
characteristics in common
• They have evolved to be in a perfect relationship with their
environment
• It is a symbiotic relationship, the organism/organisation defines the
environment and the environment defines the organism
• Organisms are self-referencing, they act to preserve their own
identity (autopoeisis)
9. Competing models for change…
If your current thinking got you to where you are now, then you
need new thinking/experiences to develop the solution.
To change or develop something new we need to change the
way we do change – or we will just get what we’ve always got.
10. How we work (shorthand)
Understand
Build
Test &
Deliver
Politics
Relationships
Leadership
Citizen
11. The Art of Change Making
Technologies
Our ‘enablers’ got together to share
ideas, tools and ways of thinking they
use in places with the hope that it
would help others to lead change in a
different way.
A collection of over 70 different ways of
understanding the interconnected world
and tools and skills for leading and
intervening to create change.
http://tiny.cc/TheArt
12. Three levels of Organisational Culture
Edgar Schein
Level 1: Artefacts – how people
behave, how it feels attitude.
Dress code, décor, urgency and
caring.
Level 2: Espoused values – how
an organisation explains it culture.
Level 3: Tacit assumptions –
Assumptions values and beliefs.
The understood ways of being,
doing, understanding.
13. Multiple Cause Diagrams
Jake Chapman, Open University
• Think about the primary causes of
this problem.
• Connect the causes to their effect
• Now think about the causes of
those causes.
• And connect, and ask again, and so
on.
• Make sure paths make sense.
• Review the diagram, explore and
discuss it.
• Ask where can intervention be
made?
14. You have a go.. What do you notice?
• Think about the primary causes of this
problem.
• Connect the causes to their effect
• Now think about the causes of those
causes.
• And connect, and ask again, and so
on.
• Make sure paths make sense.
• Review the diagram, explore and
discuss it.
• Ask where can intervention be made?
Level 1: Artefacts – how people
behave, how it feels attitude. Dress
code, décor, urgency and caring.
Level 2: Espoused values – how an
organisation explains it culture.
Level 3: Tacit assumptions –
Assumptions values and beliefs. The
understood ways of being, doing,
understanding.
