We are calling our strategy paper our ‘North Star’ paper* – the thing that will set out our intention as to where we want to be as an organisation. It’s a phrase used in a workshop which has really captured people as a way of expressing a direction and intention but still leaving space for …
How we go about the business of change makes a huge difference to the results you get. Similarly understating why you are changing can either drive purpose or set up resistance. This post is a bit about unpacking that. Change is a really layered thing and when I talk about it I’m looking both at …
I am something of a methodological magpie and I am trying to properly integrate a few different domains that I have been using to develop an approach to change. We will be working to change Dorset Council over the next few years and I want that to be a participatory experience where, within the constraints …
I’m really excited to see the shift in the Test, Learn and Grow work as Nick Kimber and the team put the focus on movement building. If we want to get beyond pilots and make test and learn ‘how we do things round here’ across the sector then its time to lean in and take …
Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating. This was always going to be a messy process and the balance between figure it …
I have been pitching an idea for a while now which almost always lands well and which I can’t leave alone, so I thought I would put it out more widely in the universe and see what happens…. I want to be part of an event which brings together a set of system actors from …
Not long before Christmas we published ‘Our Plan’ which is the culmination of nearly a year of ‘thinking, feeling and doing’ and I am hugely proud of what we have created. It’s not a strategy – but instead it is a description of the kind of organisation we want to be and what we think …
I’ve been thinking about governance a lot recently – how and where we make decisions – and specifically how we make them robust and trusted how we make them fast enough to get stuff done rather than admiring problems How we manage the tension between these two things How you build in accountability with the …
Rather than running around our organisation saying ‘we need resilience’ over and over I want to unpack what I mean. I’m doing it here as a way of working and thinking in public – it helps me to develop my ideas and is part of the openness which I think of as a building block …
Even when we are way beyond school age summer feels like a time of transition and this summer more than ever. It seems both endless and goes in the blink of an eye. Time has been distorted by our year of pandemic and I am feeling that sense of summer transition more than ever. I …