• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Mike Chitty

Helping realise development since 1986

  • About Mike
  • Products and Services
    • Online Coaching
    • How to be an Outstanding Manager
    • Progress School
      • Join Progress School
  • Diversity, Inclusion and Power
    • Favourite Things – Power, Diversity and Inclusion
  • Reading Circles
    • Intelligent Kindness – Rehabilitating the Welfare State
  • Be A Better Leader Podcast
    • Be A Better Leader V-logs
    • Be A Better Leader
  • Testimonials
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Why Conversations to Transform Health and Care?

Mike Chitty · December 20, 2019 · 1 Comment

I was Head of Applied Leadership at the NHS Leadership Academy for three years and was asked to sit on the ‘Building a Digital Ready Workforce’ National Steering Group.  This led to me thinking about what we needed to do to help the boards of NHS organisations in particular to lead the transformation of Health and Care Services making the most of ‘digital’ – whatever that meant.

After much thinking I started to believe that it didn’t really matter what we did to develop boards; workshops, bootcamps, maturity matrices or conferences about AI and genomics. Until we changed how they saw their world and tasted different ways in which they might be able to lead in it, they were unlikely to make substantial changes in their strategy.  They might drop a few tens of millions on a new patient record system – but would that really transform? Would that allow new patterns of power and relationship to emerge? Or would it just take some kinks out of the current system?

For me it felt like doing ‘the wrong thing better’.

But what was the right thing?  The thing that might ‘develop’ the system?

Conversations to Transform Health and Care

The thing that went against the habit of Board rooms, Board tables, agendas, PIDs, rag ratings and budgetary decisions?

Against hierarchical expressions of power delivered through plans and Gantt charts and (not so carefully) managed variances?

Well for those of us that have worked a lot in civic society, in community development, the place to look for some clues was clear.  Self organisation. Emergence. Transparency. Relationships, Inclusion, Diversity and Trust.

Work in the spirit of pioneers like Harrison Owen, Peter Vaill, John McKnight, Peter Block and others.  It was about leading with communities not over them or for them.

Connecting small groups of people with the passion, responsibility and power to make change happen locally and to invite the formal power structure to sit with them and listen. To be influenced and to influence. but mainly to encourage and support.  To ‘unleash’ the power of these small groups that care to do their work.

And so we started, with the support of James Freed and Maeve Black at Health Education England and Ian Macintyre from the NHS Leadership Academy, on our project to use Conversations to Transform Health and Care.  To see if ‘Leadership as Convening’  might help to really transform Health and Care.

Open Space Events were planned for York, Hull and Scarborough to see if we could find the people who might really have the passion and the responsibility to transform health and care and whether we could help them to find their power….

What is Open Space?

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Related

Board Development, Community convening, leadership, leadership development

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Everyone counts..? ~ Mike Chitty says:
    February 1, 2020 at 10:00 am

    […] am also increasingly striving to increase ‘community engagement‘ not through the usual processes of patient participation groups and so on but by going […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Mike Chitty

Copyright © 2023 · Monochrome Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in