What did I learn?
Two days at Cranfield for the last module of the Project Leadership Programme. I enjoyed David Denyer’s session on creating a resilient organisation, which seemed especially relevant to my work supporting urgent and emergency care.
In another session, we were invited to look again at the “7 lenses of transformation“, which prompted me to spend a bit of my weekend critically assessing 10 years of transformation in the UK government digital domain.
What did I enjoy?
The day after Cranfield, some senior members of my team gathered at Quarry House to talk strategy, facilitated by Dave, Victoria, and Brin. After a comically poor perfomance in the marshmallow challenge ice breaker, I shared the results of the survey I did among colleagues based on the silent killers of strategy implementation and learning. I really enjoyed seeing the team together in the room, discussing the real problems our products and services are here to solve for patients, carers and frontline staff. Everyone in the team showed a real openness to new ideas when given the chance to step away briefly from the pressures of day-to-day delivery.
I also spent a day in London at the Leading Healthcare Innovation Summit. Across the presentations and panel sessions, there was a strong focus on the need for board level leadership around digital culture and practices to respond to the raised expectations of patients/carers and frontline staff. For the first time, I saw people with Integrated Care Board (ICB) roles making an impact on interoperability across their patches. After a dry spell, it seems like the need for interop is back front and centre.
On the days I was in the office, I enjoyed quite a few one-to-one catch-ups with colleagues. I recently reset the pattern of who I catch up with and how frequently, and I’m seeing the benefits of these conversations already.
What was hard?
As a merged team, we’re still feeling our way into what it means to work together without the commissioner/delivery divide that used to exist between the legacy NHS England and NHS Digital. I am determined that we will move the customer/supplier boundary to the very edge of the new national arms-length body that we are creating, not simply move it somewhere else inside the organisation, but old habits are hard to break.
It’s also hard to make this real for people when some of the basic business processes we depend on are not yet working as they need to. The anxiety about financial approvals and HR processes for our people creates an undercurrent of threat which makes it hard for anyone to engage in new ways of working with the transparency and curiosity that we need.
People can be reluctant to be open about their work because they fear that it will be challenged or stopped. Or they hold back from volunteering new ideas to senior stakeholders in case they’re asked to deliver them in unreasonable timescales and without additional people to share the load.
I’m taking it a step at a time, and things will get better.
What do I need to take care of?
I had a coaching session on Friday morning when I talked about some of the issues above – how we need to create the space for teams to work strategically, while also delivering on challenging near-term commitments. A few things I took away to work on:
- How to make sure we all have short term and long term objectives matched to our strengths?
Matt Edgar writes here 