Our approach – Thinking Systems
Our core principles are that we deliver:
• Improvements to the public, whether customer, community, or patient;
• Cost-effective solutions; and
• Increased capacity for ongoing improvement;
And we integrate leadership and improvement activity for sustainable change.
Our experience is that leadership and improvement ‘initiatives’ are all too frequently delivered in isolation. This can create an ‘achievement gap’.
Leadership initiatives which focus on individual development and organisational culture change stumble when they need to institutionalise approaches and apply new thinking to operational processes and structures. Improvement initiatives suffer from ‘cultural resistance’, and quality and efficiency improvements either sub-optimise the whole system, or are short-lived as the organisation reverts to ‘business as usual’. Our team offers unusually deep integration of understanding of need and flow-based organisational improvement with knowledge of leadership and culture.
Our approach to skills transfer in this kind of engagement is to try to break down three sets of apparent dichotomies:
• Between focus on content and focus on process;
• Between the application of tools and the analysis of systems; and
• Between focus on whole organisations and focus on the specific.
Our overall approach is to combine the following elements to integrate ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ interventions to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and economy:
