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Systems Leadership in a Post-Darzi Review World – 03 December 2024

Recording and slides below

In September, Lord Darzi delivered his report on the state of the NHS and health services in the UK.  He did not mince his words, describing the NHS as being in a ‘critical condition’, with waiting times having deteriorated in every part of the health service for a decade, no progress on early cancer diagnosis, and falling productivity that is partly due to the NHS being ‘starved’ – his word – of £37bn in capital investment.  His conclusion was that turning the health service around would take years, and that doing so would depend on three things: greater use of AI; much more emphasis on services in community and primary care settings; and a shift towards preventing ill-health and keeping people healthy. If this is going to happen, it has to include a focus on the building blocks of health.  So irrespective of any changes within the NHS (Keir Starmer has said that the NHS must ‘reform or die’), there will need to be more capacity in other areas – local government, public health, and physical activity/sport and leisure organisations across the public, private, voluntary and community sectors.  Drawing on outcomes of Active Partners Trust’s recent Making Our Move Conference, and on key approaches from systems leadership, this session will look at the practical building blocks of how you can help to make this change happen in your neighbourhood. We believe we can get ahead of the game in preparing ourselves, so that we can lead change and have real impact in our communities. 

Wednesday 29 January, 1.30pm – 3.30pm – Systems Leadership: Having Difficult Conversations

If we’re working in complexity, and we’re looking to build relationships as a solid basis for trust and shared purpose, it’s likely we’ll need to have difficult conversations at some point.  They’re also an inescapable part of good management – and part of leading with compassion also means being able to have these kinds of conversations.  But because they’re difficult, it can be tempting to put them off, until ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’. Or other people in our organisations will put them off, sometimes for years, and then expect us to deal with the fall-out. Or we may be in situations where we’ve had difficult conversations that didn’t go well, and we want to learn from them.  In this session, drawing on the work of Alec Grimsley, we’ll look at how you can have a difficult conversation in a way that builds mutual understanding and outcomes that everyone can sign up to, so that the impossible becomes a bit more feasible. And there will be opportunities for you to get peer coaching in relation to current issues you’re facing.

Tuesday 25 February, 1pm – 3pm – Systems Leadership: Understanding Your System

If you’ve ever felt bemused by how your system operates in practice, as opposed to the neat and stylist organogram on the wall; or you’ve had something go wrong recently and you want to understand why; or you’d like to look at the relationship between different issues and organisations, this might help.  We’ll look at ways of understanding a system using Rich Pictures, and then at ways of deepening your understanding around why something happened as it did, or how different causal factors interact, using Root Cause Analysis and Multiple Cause Diagrams.  Everyone will get an opportunity to try out these approaches for themselves, and the session will also be especially suitable for people who’d like to attend as a group, and apply the approaches to an issue their group is currently facing.

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