Culture first, change second
Culture, engagement and mergers in public sector change.
Around four hours on putting culture first: culture and change, legitimacy in public services, engagement and participation, change at scale, culture in mergers, and psychological safety.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Leading people
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Leaders and change practitioners in councils, fire and rescue, health and the voluntary sector
Overview
Culture decides what a change becomes once it leaves the plan, and in public service, change happens in public. Taken from the Immerse Change that sticks, this Focus opens with Schein's three levels of culture, the McKinsey Seven S framework and South Wales Fire and Rescue Service. It turns to legitimacy through Mark Moore's strategic triangle, the Well-being of Future Generations Act and Arnstein's ladder of participation, tested against the Welsh default 20mph limit. Appreciative inquiry and its four-D cycle, positive deviance and the Wigan Deal follow, then change at scale, where optimism bias meets the outside view. It closes with culture in mergers and Edmondson on psychological safety.
Aims
The course exists to help leaders diagnose the culture beneath any change before they act, earn public permission for what they propose, engage staff and communities in shaping it, and make it safe for bad news to travel so that change holds once it leaves the plan.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Diagnose the culture beneath a proposed change using Schein's three levels and the McKinsey Seven S framework.
- Assess the legitimacy of a public service change using Moore's strategic triangle and Arnstein's ladder of participation.
- Plan a large change that counters optimism bias with the outside view and keeps it safe for bad news to travel.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Explain Schein's three levels of culture and why change aimed only at artefacts and espoused values tends to fail.
- Explain what makes public service change different and why legitimacy must be designed into a change from the start.
- Describe the 4-D cycle of appreciative inquiry and assess when it produces transformational rather than merely positive change.
- Use the NAO's four root causes of scope, planning, interdependencies and oversight as a health check on any programme.
- Identify Schein's embedding mechanisms, both day to day and through systems, and explain why they shape culture more than formal statements.
- Explain what psychological safety is and is not, and how it combines with high standards to create a learning zone.
- Place a culture change on the words and systems matrix and identify which 7S elements it leaves untouched.
- Use Moore's strategic triangle and the five ways of working to assess value, permission and capacity in a change.
Built from 3 parts.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Where culture meets changeOrganisational culture and public sector changeBitesize · Leading through Change and Conflict2 modules
- 02Change with people, not to themEmployee engagement and large-scale changeBitesize · Leading through Change and Conflict2 modules
- 03Trust at the heartCulture change, mergers and psychological safetyBitesize · Culture in Organisations2 modules