Beyond our own walls

Who It's For

Leaders working across systems, places and partnerships

Overview

Beyond our own walls is a flagship for leaders whose hardest problems, from homelessness to health inequality, sit across many organisations that none of them controls. It builds the grammar of systems thinking with Meadows's stocks, flows and leverage points, Senge's archetypes and the practice of mapping a system, then uses Cynefin and Weick's sensemaking to act well where analysis runs out. It turns to what systems leaders actually do: adaptive work, Theory U, collaborative advantage and partnership machinery, co-production and change at scale. Wales's Future Generations Act, England's integrated care and devolution, Human Learning Systems and the Wigan Deal and Preston Model show it at work.

Aims

This programme aims to develop leaders who can see the whole system they work in and change it with others: reading complexity accurately, choosing where to intervene, building the trust and partnership machinery that collaboration depends on, and sustaining themselves through work that outlasts any single role.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Map a system you work in, identifying its feedback loops, archetypes and leverage points, and name the kind of complexity each challenge presents.
2. 2Design safe-to-fail action and partnership arrangements across organisations, using adaptive leadership, co-production and measures that support learning rather than gaming.
3. 3Lead collaboration across a place or partnership with attention to power, trust and relationships, drawing on the Welsh and English frameworks that shape systems work.

What you'll develop

Through the programme, you will be able to:

1. 1Explain what a system is, using elements, interconnections, purpose and boundary, and distinguish tame problems from wicked ones.
2. 2Explain Meadows's twelve leverage points grouped from shallow to deep, and why most organisational effort goes to the weakest.
3. 3Describe the five movements of the U and Scharmer's four levels of listening, from downloading to generative.
4. 4Describe the role of Integrated Care Boards and the main steps in twenty years of English place-based reform.
5. 5Explain how Heifetz's productive zone of disequilibrium and Heifetz and Linsky's ideas on hungers, role and self apply to your own leadership.
6. 6Explain how Weick's sensemaking reverses the conventional analyse, decide, act sequence, and identify when careful analysis still fits better.
7. 7Explain Boyle and Harris's definition of co-production and what the words equal, reciprocal and relationship each require.
8. 8Identify a team's developmental stage and diagnose its dysfunctions from the foundation of trust upward, using Tuckman, Katzenbach and Smith, and Lencioni.