Places people want to work

Who It's For

Chief executives, directors, and organisation development, people and transformation leads

Overview

Places people want to work is a six-week masterclass for chief executives, directors and those leading organisation development, people and transformation, set inside organisations that have redesigned how they work. Each week pairs Avanti Academy content with a live session: a leader who rebuilt their culture, a self-managing public service team, leading without hierarchy, co-production that changed a service, a transformation told honestly, setbacks included, and AI used to free people rather than watch them. Drawing on Schein, Edmondson, Huxham and Vangen, Ostrom and Baljeet Sandhu, it moves from culture and power through trust, voice and change to the human organisation in an age of AI.

Aims

This programme aims to help senior leaders redesign their organisations around trust, voice and shared leadership, with less hierarchy and more teams that lead themselves, and to leave with an organisation design roadmap, built week by week and reviewed with Jon and Amanda, that they can take back and put to work.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Diagnose how power, culture and trust really operate in your organisation, and where hierarchy, process or structure are holding people back.
2. 2Design practical shifts towards self-leading teams, coaching cultures, co-production and lived experience leadership, and plan how to bring staff and unions with you.
3. 3Build an organisation design roadmap that uses AI to free people for better work, tested against live examples and reviewed with Jon and Amanda.

What you'll develop

Over the programme, you and your cohort will be able to:

1. 1Explain what organisational culture is, using Schein's definition, and distinguish it from climate and from employer brand.
2. 2Explain Edmondson's definition of psychological safety and use the standards and safety matrix to place your team.
3. 3Distinguish buddying, peer coaching, co-coaching and line manager coaching.
4. 4Distinguish the distributive and integrative elements of a deal, and create value by trading issues that each side values differently.
5. 5Distinguish lived experience, lived expertise and experts by experience, and explain why lived experience is a form of knowledge rather than only feedback.
6. 6Use the NAO's four root causes of scope, planning, interdependencies and oversight as a health check on any programme.
7. 7Explain why exposure to AI is not the same as replacement and why tasks change before jobs do.
8. 8Explain what shadow AI is and why bans tend to drive use underground rather than stop it.