The Changing NHS

Here’s a good 2 hour process for helping your department collectively review the year and celebrate and learn from successes. It’ll work, with a bit of tweaking, with up to about 40 people.

Set up’s very easy. You just need:

1. A bunch of post-it notes and nibbed marker pens;
2. A long wall chart, with 3 horizontal rows, about 30 cms apart. Divide the wall chart into 12 equal chunks (1 for each month of the year just gone).

The process is pretty easy too:

1. Put people in groups of 5 (as mixed as possible) and invite them to take 20 minutes to identify up to 10 key world events in 2007 and jot them down, each one on a different post-it note;
2. Get all the groups to post their ‘stickies’ at the same time on the wall chart, putting each one in the time slot in the bottom row – clearly labelled ‘World Events 2007’. Give people a few minutes to look at all the events the groups have identified;
3. Repeat the process, but this time ask the groups to identify up to 7 key work achievements in 2007. These can be achievements that people in the group feel they have been personally involved with or they can be achievements that others’ in the department have mainly brought about. Again, invite people to post in the appropriate row and give them everyone a few minutes to review all the new post-it notes;
4. Repeat the process yet again, but this time invite people to jot down one or two personal highlights each from the year, outside of work. e.g completed 10km run, moved house, son graduated etc.

Once all 3 rows of the wall-chart are populated with post-it notes, invite all groups to take 30 minutes to consider these 2 questions:

1. What, if anything, do our work achievements have in common? (Perhaps they have been led or initiated in a certain way? Maybe they all have clear deadlines? Maybe they were undertaken by teams that already existed or maybe by teams formed specifically for that purpose?).

2. How might we increse our chances of being even more successful in 2008?

Finally, have a 10 minute ‘shout-out’ where each group must make no more than 3 suggestions related only to the last question. Note the suggestions and agree how they are going to be considered further.

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