PUBLICATIONS

All Systems Go! Leadership in a Complex World

All Systems Go! takes a closer look at how public services and political leadership interact with human behaviour, networks and systems. Against a backdrop of public services operating with significantly reduced budgets and unprecedented demand, alongside dipping public confidence in political processes, All Systems Go! seeks to explain and describe what a systems approach would look and feel like in this environment.

The book is designed to act as an aide to leaders needing to switch back and forth between traditional management practices and more systemic approaches.

Making Meaning Together

Making Meaning Together sets out how leaders and other change agents can operate effectively in today’s complex world. Building on over 70 years of accumulated international practice, and a vast body of academic and practical work on leadership, the authors propose a dynamic model for leading, going beyond “systems leadership”. Instead, they propose a more collective and systemic approach for dealing with wicked issues and making new things happen. Grounded in a combination of ‘real-world’ examples and theoretical models (or ideas), Making Meaning Together proposes a highly original framework for leaders to operate.

How to lead when you’re not in charge – SEND Programme Workbook

Created as part of the Essential SEND Managers Programme, this publication is a set of supporting resources that sits alongside the two days of the programme. The aim of this is to act as:

• A reminder of what was covered in the programme
• An opportunity to practise some of the technologies and skills
• A resource for further exploration and reading

Messages for national leaders from the A&E Front-line

On behalf of NHS England, the Leadership Centre has been working with local health systems, particularly A&E Delivery Boards, to help local leaders think and work as integrated systems rather than as isolated organisations.

The Leadership Centre thought it would be helpful to bring these messages together in a single document which we hope will inform discussions among the national leaders as they develop the 10 year NHS plan.

The Revolution will be Customised: the Eastern AHSN’s Digital Pioneers

The Leadership Centre has recently worked with the Eastern Academic Health Science Network to support their Digital Pioneers across the East of England. The Pioneers have been looking to implement and sustain digital innovation, with a wide variety of projects aimed at joining up services and improving people’s overall health and well-being. They’ve achieved real success, and we’ve drawn together some of the lessons learned about how you make digital innovation happen – and keep going – in places.

Health Integration: The best way to secure better outcomes

For almost as long as the NHS has existed, greater health integration has been a “holy grail” for policymakers. The fact that it is still an ongoing objective speaks volumes about the success of past attempts.

This publication asks if integration is really the best way of securing improved health outcomes. In particular, it looks at the shaky record of integration, and at some of the alternative collaborative approaches which focus on ‘front end’ rather than ‘back end’ provision.

Digital Disruption in the Public Sector

For the last twenty years, our understanding of managing transformational change has been radically altered by the notion of disruption. The challenge for leaders – in radically altering the strategic direction of a whole organisation – is a particularly stark one. In the public sector, where there is far less existing practice in digital disruption, there are major challenges to recruiting and overseeing the necessary skills and talents to develop these activities, but also huge opportunities in being a pioneer of major ways to rationalise public sector delivery mechanisms. The shift in leadership mindset can be considerable, and involves moving on from “results leadership”, in which decisions are based on immediately-apparent short-term results, and towards a strategy that embraces challenging the status quo.

Commercialisation: Options in Local Government Finance

This publication gathers some options for systems thinking, examining a range of future scenarios for local government – starting with the most likely, if the status quo continues, of financial collapse – and takes in various policy options. As well as repeating various instances of best practice – including in areas where the Leadership Centre has had direct experience – it also looks at different functions that local authorities could perform, particularly in the area of revenue generation. A large number of major developments affect local government: austerity, public sector reform, devolution. Yet local government need not have these things happen to it; as is argued here, there is scope for local authorities taking the initiative to deliver services differently, and more affordably.