Beyond our own walls, together

Who It's For

Leaders of partnerships, Public Services Boards, integrated care and place-based programmes

Overview

Beyond our own walls, together is a six-week masterclass for leaders of partnerships, Public Services Boards, integrated care and place-based programmes, people who cannot fix it alone. Week by week it moves from seeing the whole system, through complexity and sensemaking, to Meadows's leverage points, trust as the real currency of partnership, communities as partners, and learning as the way we lead. Each week includes a live session with leaders who have done it, from mapping their own system to Human Learning Systems in practice. Drawing on Senge, Snowden, Huxham and Vangen, McKnight and Kretzmann and Ostrom, it ends with the Wigan Deal and the Preston Model.

Aims

This programme aims to develop leaders of partnerships and places who can see their system whole, find where a small push goes far, and lead across organisations and with communities on the strength of trust, leaving with a system map and a leverage plan for their own place or partnership.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Map your own place or partnership as a system, identifying its feedback loops, recurring archetypes and the leverage points most worth acting on.
2. 2Plan safe-to-fail action in complex conditions, building partnerships and co-production on community strengths, shared power and trust rather than formal control.
3. 3Lead a partnership as a learning system, with measures that support learning rather than gaming, while sustaining yourself through long-haul systems change.

What you'll develop

Over the programme, you and your cohort 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 how Weick's sensemaking reverses the conventional analyse, decide, act sequence, and identify when careful analysis still fits better.
3. 3Describe the core capabilities, dimensions and disciplines of systems leadership set out by Senge, Hamilton and Kania, Ghate, Lewis and Welbourn, and Senge.
4. 4Explain collaborative advantage and collaborative inertia and identify the four themes of aims, power, trust and membership that make collaboration hard.
5. 5Explain the working definition of partnering and use four questions to test whether a new partnership is genuinely needed.
6. 6Distinguish a wish list from a delivered community strategy using the four requirements of shared vision, narrow priorities, a named delivery mechanism and a review cycle.
7. 7Explain the three principles of Human Learning Systems and the familiar management habit each one replaces.
8. 8Analyse a real case through several systems frameworks at once, including archetypes, leverage points, stocks and flows, and power.