Using new and innovative ways of helping executive and senior leaders to work collectively to deliver integrated care and drive change and improvements for the benefit of children and young people within Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire
Challenge
The Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire (BSW) ICB CYP Board faced a range of complex challenges working in a changing, often ambiguous and volatile landscape. The Board was established to provide strategic direction and oversight of the delivery of integrated social and health care for children and young people (CYP) who make up 23% of the general population across BSW.
We were asked to provide a hosted space to bring together the system leaders including Directors of Children’s Services, Director of Public Health, and NHS CYP commissioners and transformation leads to develop a clear sense of purpose and ways of working for the delivery of integrated children and young people’s care across BSW.
What we did
Using an ‘Art of Participatory Leadership’ approach we created the space, time, and conditions for people to work together. This approach to working on leadership scales up from the personal to the systemic using personal practice, dialogue and facilitation to enable co-creation and is particularly helpful in addressing complex challenges. It creates the conditions that allow conversation-driven processes to lead groups to deeper insights and meaningful results.
Using a multi-disciplinary team of our facilitation, organisational development and CYP subject matter experts we worked in partnership with the NHS CYP Transformation team in BSW to be clear on the purpose of the event and to design an appropriate structure and set of exercises for the session.
During the event, the hosting team helped the group understand what they were uncovering as they worked together, using Art of Harvesting techniques to capture what the group had produced together.
Activity
System and organisational effectiveness
Using the Art of Participatory Leadership approach to create space, time and conditions for people to work together
Communications and engagement
Our multi-disciplinary teams facilitated the appropriate structure and exercises during the events to deliver the required outcomes
Behaviour change
Senior leaders built emotional connections gaining insights into colleagues' individual and collective stories, perspectives and narratives.
Outcome
- The psychologically safe environment created enabled senior leaders to work together and build emotional connections between board members. Delegates reported gaining insights into colleagues’ individual and collective stories, perspectives, and narratives.
- Senior leaders benefited from the hosted space to come together to discuss important questions, think about and discuss strategic issues, and use their collective knowledge to work these through.
- A shared set of principles and practices was created with a commitment as to how these would be demonstrated and how they would hold each other to account during their work together.
- They produced a co-created purpose statement for the CYP board delivered through collective sense-making of the CYP environment and drivers.
- Collective agreement on the focus for the best use of resources led to an action plan that included widening board membership, identification of the next focus items needing deeper discussion, and the need to ensure the appropriate balance of whole system solutions with local needs.
- Trusted relationships were developed.
