Change is a human endeavour

It’s been five days. Five days since the headlines were filled with breaking news about NHS England. Five days since ICBs were tasked with a further 50% saving. Five days since providers were challenged to get back to pre-pandemic corporate spends.

Yet today when I scroll through the BBC news app, the news is no longer filled with commentary on a transforming NHS. The world has moved on.

Now, I am not here to debate the rights or wrongs of these transformational decisions. I would not pretend that as one single person sat in south east London I hold the solution.

But what I will say is that from the perspective of colleagues sitting in NHS organisations across the country, the impact of last week’s news certainly has not moved on. Leaders across the NHS find themselves this week staring down the barrel of a set of difficult and challenging decisions, regardless of whether they view the changes positively or negatively.

What and how

It is my hope that in the midst of all of this we see leaders across our health system not only think about what needs to change, but also how they will support their organisations to be ready for that change.

I have worked in organisational development, design and change for more years than I care to count. I have worked across the health system and in the charity sector. The one thing I have noticed when it comes to change and transformation in organisations is that we focus on what needs to change, but we don’t always think deeply enough about how.

Let me be more specific: we don’t always think long-term enough about how. So our plans grind to a halt at implementation.

Understandably, we have so many questions to answer about structure, processes and the mammoth logistics that accompany transformation, that we easily take our eye off the trust, resilience and motivation that we need to nurture in the teams we depend on to deliver change.

Change that works

Change is a deeply human endeavour. At Kaleidoscope we talk about change that works. We believe that it requires kindness, clarity and compassion.

Clinical psychologist Susan Michie talks about change needing:

• capability – we have the skills, knowledge and understanding to do what is required of us
• opportunity – we have the processes, systems and accessibility to actually do what is required of us
• motivation – we actually want to do the thing that is changing).

It sounds simple. Why does this matter in the human endeavour that is change?

Well think about it…

Workforce capability

The plans that are being drawn up across the NHS today, and in the weeks to come, will require the incredible people of the NHS to stop doing things they have done before, to do new things, and work in different ways to how they work now.

We will need to ensure that our incredible workforce has the capability to adopt different ways of leading and working together. If we are moving funding closer to frontline workers, how does this change the team, organisational and system leadership ask of our clinical and frontline workforce?

The plans that are being drawn up across the NHS today, and in the weeks to come, will require the incredible people of the NHS to work across the boundaries of health and local authorities in ways that they have never done before. We will need to ensure that people have the practical opportunity and freedom to do that.

The plans that are being drawn up across the NHS today, and in the weeks to come, will require the incredible people of the NHS to weather emotional and relational distress.

People will leave, the psychological contracts with employers will change, and staff will experience processes that cannot be as open and transparent as they might like. We will need to ensure that people feel supported and empowered to embrace the future, even in the face of uncertainty.

Radically different future

In my experience through the work we do at Kaleidoscope, when organisations imagine a radically different future there is so much work to be done to decide on the ‘what’ of that future that the ‘how’ of the future gets crowded out. It is easy for this to happen.

But my hope for the NHS is that leaders across the system think now about the capabilities, opportunities and motivation that their teams will need in 2026 to be high performing organisations. This means thinking about how the people who will embody these changes will need to show up for the future, and paying attention from the very start to how this is incorporated into their change plans.

It is my hope that we will remember that change is a human endeavour.

If you ever want to grab a coffee and chat about how we keep this all human just let me know!