The Changing NHS

Here’s the Brief

A group of 20 people find themselves thrown together as a result of a merger of 3 Strategic Health Authorities. They have been working as one group for about 6 months and the leader thinks that now is a good time to agree some key work principles that will strongly influence how the group behaves with each other and with their 'customers'.

Rather than seek to impose some new work norms, the leader wants the group members to generate work principles for themselves, with him shaping the outcome by participating in the process and reserving the right to add or modify the outcome of the work if he thinks it necessary.

We have two and a half hours for the first 'get together'.

Here’s The Process

To get something useful 'into play' quickly I used a combination of World Cafe process (described in an earlier post here) and affinity clustering. The process was as follows:

1. World Cafe style dialogue process for an hour to give everyone an opportunity to explore the key question "What's really important about how we work with each other and with our customers?"

2. 20 minutes back in original groups to agree 4 key work principles, with at least two being about how the group works with external customers and agencies. The suggested principles are written on 20 sticky hexagons (much better than post-it notes) - You can get these from Teamtalk

3. 15 minute tea-break whilst the small tables are removed and chairs are re-arranged in a horseshoe facing a blank wall. When people return to the room everyone is asked to get hold of one sticky hexagon that contains a suggested key principle that came from their last group discussion

4. Each person takes turns to come out to the front, tell the whole group about what's written on their hexagon and why its' potentially an important work principle and then stick it to the wall. Here's the good bit. When sticking hexagons to the wall, ask each person, to affinity cluster their hexagon with others already on the wall which are thought to be very closely related

Note: you might need to invoke editorial privilege in the early stages of the affinity clustering as people tend to be quite polite and are reluctant to suggest that their idea is different from those already aired. But once you've intervened a couple of times they soon start to make better judgements about what ideas are really closely coupled with others and which ideas are better placed on their own.

The 20 suggested key principles were organised into 6 clusters:

1. Offer support and encouragement

2. Have clear roles and personal objectives

3. Be skilled at working in teams

4. Be seen by customers as change agents not technicians

5. Have a clear strategy that is well understood by group members and customers

6. Take pride in delivering on challenging work

The next step is to agree some statements that illustrate desireable behaviours congruent with each principle in action. After this the group can find ways to regularly and systematically reward/encourage people to exhibit these desirable behaviours more frequently.

What do you think about this simple process? It's not rocket science is it, but I'm amazed at how many new departments and teams don't make the time to do this kind of norm building work. Instead they hope that appropriate norms will somehow emerge over time. But, as I heard someone say last week - Hope is not a strategy!

Steve

nhs

culture

workshop design