The Strategy Is Sound. The Culture Isn't Ready For It.

The Strategy Is Sound. The Culture Isn't Ready For It.

Wes Streeting's NHS 10-Year Plan is one of the most structurally ambitious healthcare reform agendas in a generation. Shift care from hospital to community. Move from analogue to digital. Reframe the NHS from treatment service to prevention system.

The direction is right. The logic is coherent. The evidence base is solid.

‍

But here's what I keep coming back to, working at the intersection of strategy and organisational culture: you cannot deliver a neighbourhood-first, prevention-focused, digitally-enabled health service through a hierarchy built for command-and-control hospital medicine.

‍

The culture required to realise this strategy is fundamentally different from the one that exists across much of the NHS and DHSC right now. That's not a criticism — it's just an honest structural reality.

‍

The strategy calls for integrated, cross-disciplinary working. Clinical staff empowered to make decisions at the point of care. Leaders who enable rather than direct. A workforce that treats patients as partners, not cases.

‍

The current culture in many trusts and ICBs reflects decades of hierarchy, risk aversion, and a compliance orientation that was — completely understandably — built around acute risk in acute settings.

‍

These two things pull in opposite directions. And no amount of structural reorganisation will bridge that gap without deliberate, sustained investment in culture change.

‍

The question for NHS and DHSC leaders isn't whether the strategy is right. It's whether you're actively building the culture that can actually deliver it.

‍

What does that investment look like in your organisation right now?

‍

#NHS #HealthcareLeadership #OrganisationalCulture #NHSReform #HealthPolicy

‍

Other Posts

The Three Conversations System Leaders Aren't Having

Here are three conversations I keep seeing systems avoid: telling hospitals they'll be doing less, asking GPs "What are you going to stop?" and being honest that things will get messier first.

The Sequencing Problem Nobody's Talking About

You cannot shift demand to primary care until you've built the capacity to handle it. But you cannot build that capacity without shifting resources away from secondary care. Yet you cannot shift resources away from secondary care while it's still managing that demand.

Was Steve Jobs's most important decision not directly product related?

On his return to Apple in 1997, one decision Steve Jobs made arguably determined their future success. Find out more...

I get a Notion life will be different from here on

What one app can integrate your fragmented digital life into one place, make managing projects, tasks, knowledge management content, long-term learning integration and much more so much easier and less time consuming? I think I have a Notion...

Brain-Friendly Learning

How Zoom Overdoses are Impacting Our Brains

The increase in digital communication due to the pandemic is causing a shift in our brains, impacting on things like creativity and ability to learn. Read on to find out more.

On a Hiding to Nothing? The Impossible Quest for Neutrality

Is acting as a neutral vessel when facilitating truly a realistic aim? Experience shows it's impossible, so what's the next best alternative?

Diversity & Inclusion

How equally do we Judge Female and Male Book Covers?

Whoops! New veterinary students mistake world leading research vet for a technician due to her clothes, and most likely a heavy dose of unconscious bias on their part. What do we now need to be doing in schools to support better gender balance in the workplace?

Why Generalists are the Secret Ingredient to the Future

Does 2020 mark the start of an era where the balance between specialists and generalists comes more into equilibrium? Will the speed of change and volatility in the marketplace place more demand on generalists? We think so, read on to find out why https://bit.ly/2QXz9FA

How Decision Making Unwittingly Limited the World’s Future

How you make decisions in your organisation has a huge bearing on the longer-term outcomes you bring into being. Yet for most teams and organisations we work with, this area starts out being a blind spot.

Excelling in Distributed Collaboration = Key Competitive Advantage

If you’ve recently moved people to work from home, how well does your culture support it? With such a significant move, without conscious focus your culture can quickly morph, and not necessarily in a good way.

Distributed teams

Why Poor Punctuation could be your Weakest Link

Punctuation is important, right? Without it, a string of words won’t necessarily make sense. The same goes for our work. We need punctuation points over the passage of time in order to keep some sense of reference to what we’re working towards.

Distributed teams

More Control is Not the Answer

Getting your team aligned is one of the most important things you can do as a team leader, particularly when your people work remotely.

Lessons in Lockdown Leadership from Z-Cam

Learn how one company has managed to delight their customers during lockdown, with a combination of product development and customer engagement via social media.

Distributed teams

Could you be more specific please?

Remote working puts a magnifying glass on our communication. We’re no longer in the context-rich setting of an office where we pick up a lot through background conversations, non-verbal communication and chance meetings.‍

Distributed teams

Why Remote Teams aren’t all Plain Sailing – and How to Calm the Water #2

Are your results with remote working being limited by the tools you're using? It's a factor many organisations are blind to because they've always worked the way they do.

Diversity & Inclusion

Leaders of the world, are you ready for this generation joining the workplace? Can you even attract them in the first place?

Leaders: Right Now You Have Everything to Lose

Tough times bring our values to the fore, like a magnifying glass analysing the degree of alignment between what we say we value and our day-to-day behaviours. If you show any cracks here, it'll come back to bite you...

The ONE thing you MUST do with your team as you return from furlough

If you’re bringing furloughed employees back to work soon, have you planned on how you recalibrate your team?

Distributed teams

Why Remote Teams aren’t All Plain Sailing - and How to Calm the Water #1

Have you been missing those coffee machine conversations while working remotely? Noticing that the lack of spontaneous communication has an impact on your work and relationships?

Gang fights, Bridges and Beer

What have gang fights, bridges and beer have in common? Read on and find out #OpenYourWorld

Habit is the breakfast of champions, but also the undoing of us when we unconsciously get sucked into less than useful habits. So where’s your focus (consciously and unconsciously)? How about the company where you work? What patterns do you notice? Are you a habitually busy person, rarely able to find time to do the important things you know you should? Do you get sucked into the busy-ness of others?

Customer Experience

What an Experience

How's the customer experience with your company? How easy is it for them to do business with you? How do you most want your customers to feel while doing business with you? Anxious, uncertain, annoyed, frustrated? We guess that’d be a no. Yet there are still so many businesses that continue to generate these feelings in their customers.

The Ultimate Accountability Model

We’d like to suggest that the key to solving the angst about migration is to point people to the source of their experience. When countries and individuals realise that their anti-refugee stance is not caused by things that happen on the outside that they may feel a victim of, but by what’s going on with their thinking, then there’s hope.

Customer Experience

What Gets Measured Gets Experienced

You’ve no doubt heard the expression ‘What gets measured gets done’, an adage which seems to hold true because the things we’re measured against typically drive our focus and behaviour. We’d like to offer a slight - but important - adaptation of this: what gets measured gets experienced. Bear with me on this: I’m not sure if it holds true all the time, and I’m sharing something here that’s still in its formative stages. However, as customer experience is becoming more and more of a differentiator amongst businesses I think it’s well worthwhile trying this modified mantra on for size.

Customer Experience

Come On Retail, Retaliate!

Is it all gloom and doom in the retail sector? Sir Charlie Mayfield, chairman of the British Retail Consortium, warned last week that the retail sector is facing the loss of up to 900,000 jobs and thousands of shop closures in the coming decade. This in part due to the new apprenticeship levy and the rise in the National Living Wage. Over in Europe things aren’t much different, with Swiss retailers in particular feeling the pinch due to the strong franc and the ease of buying the same product in the Eurozone at much lower prices.

Done Lean - Six Sigma? Didn't really work?

Lots of companies say they’ve ‘done’ Lean, ‘done’ Six Sigma, and with this there’s very often an associated ‘and it didn’t really work for us’ attached. When we probe a bit further, it soon transpires that whilst they had a go at it, there were lots of required ingredients that weren’t in place, and naturally, rather like baking a chocolate cake without the chocolate or cocoa, the result didn’t meet expectations. Want to get the best from applying Lean - Six Sigma in your business? Read on.

Customer Experience

Small Words, Big Impact

Changing small words can have a big impact on outcomes. Discover some of the helpful recent findings from the world of Conversational Analysis, particularly applicable in the worlds of customer experience, negotiating, sales and general consulations.

The Curious David Bowie Effect

Fundamentally, this is what’s behind everything that prevents us realising our full potential: things like stress, overwhelm, anxiety, office politics, levels of busy-ness, baggage from previous encounters and so on. The performance of an organisation is a function of the quality of its people’s thinking. When the quality and clarity of thinking improves, great things happen.

Bringing About Organisational Change

An interview with Alastair Olby on bringing about change in organisations. When do traditional methods work, and when could you be making life easier by taking more of a cutting edge approach?

Customer Experience

To Delight or Not Frustrate? That is the Question

There’s a world of difference between a customer experience-focussed company and a customer service-focussed company: it’s a profound cultural difference, and to make the shift from one to the other isn’t necessarily easy, but it IS possible.

Graphic Recording and Groups: how much value does it add?

As a professional facilitator I’m very aware of the importance and value of visually summarising what’s being discussed by groups, but at the recent European International Association of Facilitators’ conference an interesting question arose. It seems to have become best practice to have a graphics expert work alongside groups to create a visual summary of what the group discusses. However for some it's not always easy to recall what's depicted. So what should we do?

Customer Experience

What Have Dignity And Respect Got To Do With It?

Recently a large organisation we work with launched a Dignity and Respect workshop for its staff. Why? Well customer feedback suggested that this was an area for improvement. The workshop took 90 minutes and underlined why it's so important for customers to be treated well, and the sorts of behaviours that are expected of the organisation's staff. The result? Fuming staff. Read on to find out why.

I'm Honest, Right?

The one thing followers most want from a leader is honesty. Honesty ranks head and shoulders above all the other wants of followers. It's the number one thing to get right, yet many leaders in large organisations inadvertently create an impression of dishonesty. Read on to find out how this happens.

Diversity & Inclusion

Are You Ready For The Inclusion Challenge?

Did you know that despite the economic gloom around much of the world, at the moment engineers are in short supply? With emerging markets' need for qualified, skilled engineers, many organisations are having to re-evaluate their approach to recruiting and retaining talented staff, casting the net far wider than before. This then creates challenges with ensuring people from very different backgrounds feel included in the workplace.

Are Meetings Taking Over Your Life?

So many people are finding there's precious little time to do their normal job after all the meetings they have to attend. Read on to find out how come core principles for meetings can make a big improvement.

Are You Working For A Psychopath?

Surely not! But wait on a minute. Recent research for the film 'The Corporation' concludes that the closest character definition of a typical corporation is that of a psychopath. So can working within organisational values result in decent people doing things which are collectively harmful?

Customer Experience

Is This The Same Hotel?

Do your customers experience variation in the quality of your service or product? In the age of the experience economy, and the need to focus on customer experience, not customer service, this is such an important area. How does your company stack up?