Creating an evidence base for Whole-Scale Change

Dr Amanda Woolley – Tricordant Associate Consultant with expertise in the psychology of decision making, reasoning in complex systems and collaboration for change and transformation initiatives.

In Tricordant, we’ve lots of experience of large group events for change in different organisations and systems. We’ve been organisers, facilitators, commissioners and participants. We’re passionate about this method of creating neutral, creative and just spaces for real lasting change.

For a long time, we’ve recognised that the people who do the work are the ones with the knowledge, skills and relationships to design good organisational solutions. Not the external experts and not only the senior leadership team. In addition to this, we also know that ‘the work’ is always a feature of the organisation and its stakeholders as a whole. So, the knowledge for a good solution also exists across multiple teams, functions, stakeholders, geographies and more. Out of this comes the intuition that ‘getting everybody in a room’ to discuss and deliberate on a solution in real time is a more effective route to successful change and improvement than closed room summits followed by top down communications and engagement.

You may be thinking that ‘everybody in a room’ could be a lot of people! And it is, even if, as we do, you only take a microcosm. Won’t that just be chaos?

Large events need to be carefully designed, managed and facilitated to avoid chaos and overwhelm while staying true to the goal of really involving everyone in the outcome. Much of the work of a successful large event is actually before and after the event day itself. Throughout this entire process our team carefully facilitate a balancing dynamic between ‘divergence’ – opening up to difference and generating lots of ideas – and ‘convergence’ – bringing things together and unifying multiple realities.

Unfortunately, we know not all large group interventions live up to expectation. We’ve experienced ourselves being invited to a large event with the promise of being heard only to find out we’re only there to be told what’s already been agreed. Even worse, anecdotally we have heard of people – often service users – having their perspective or criticism silenced. Even when an event runs really well, if there doesn’t seem to be any tangible output or change afterwards, it doesn’t take long for cynicism to set in about large events in general.

Within Tricordant we use the Whole-Scale Change (WSC) method to make sure we’re intentional about how we include large numbers of stakeholders in organisational change and improvement. WSC isn’t ‘an event’ but a series of action learning processes, leading to a shared paradigm shift. Any event, large or small, is just an accelerator of that process. Of course, on top of that there’s a lot of expertise to bring in terms of how to hear the individual voices of 150+ people in a room at once!

With all this in mind, we want to start building an evidence base about what works, what doesn’t and why with large change events. We’re beginning a journey of exploration and hope you’ll help us.

Please participate in our quick survey

At a very high level, we are interested in how different stakeholder groups view the effectiveness of ‘whole system’ multi-stakeholder workshops or large events for promoting change or improvement in health and care services specifically. 

We want to gather the views of those who have participated in a large multi-stakeholder event in the last two years to help us generate some further testable ideas about the effectiveness of large events for change in the health and care system.

 Click here to take part in our quick survey.

We would also like to establish a Community of Practice for Whole Scale Change where together we can continue to learn how to best support lasting positive change in organisations.

Interested then just email leaders@tricordant.com and let us know.