Systems Leaders Community of Practice

We believe in gathering the right people in the room—those with subject matter expertise, clinical leadership, and the authority to collaboratively develop solutions. This approach fosters energy and generates diverse ideas. We are delighted to launch our Systems Leadership Community of Practice in Autumn 2024. This group is led by the Integrated Care Board Medical Director Dr Dave Briggs

Please join our Systems Leaders Community of Practice – Your starting point to all things Systems Leadership in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire

Email: nnicb-nn.businessmanagementunit@nhs-net

Our Purpose:

• To build relationships beyond organisational boundaries. 
• Help us all understand where we are as a system – celebrating success and sharing our challenges
• Utilise colleague expertise and skills to help each other and address these challenges, with the intent to improve citizens and colleague experience
• To aid professional development of participants

Why?

The group is part of our commitment to supporting ICS leaders as they transition to new ways of leading during our health and care transformation. We will ensure that a senior ICB leader attends each Community of Practice event. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions following a short briefing. This two way dialogue will help all our leaders, including our senior leaders to listen to understand what the challenges and successes in our system. Systems Leaders will sense-make together to help all navigate complexity and surface system challenges so we can deal them together.

The sessions are straight forward – with a simple structure and roles

• Convenor (ICB), curator (VSM/Exec), facilitator (OD, Comms Team, Transformation Lead)
• Curation and facilitation of each CoP (themes and assistance during the session) will be hosted by the ICB for the ICS to a mailing list.

Outcome and measuring impact: Dialogic methods are challenging to track specific impact. We anticipate the CoP will naturally highlight strategic inputs and activities that are working well in they system which may help the whole system. Over time this surface our most promising initiatives while also creating the leadership space and governance. Annual synthesis from these will give an overall sense of progress. These may also include feedback from task and finish groups that emerge alongside or as a result of the CoP.

When:

We will meet regularly throughout the year.

In 2024-2025 we will host 10 meetings including two face to face/In-person meeting .

We will meet on the same day and time monthly with a break in Summer and Winter (August and December)

What will happen

We will meet for 1.5 hours online and 2.5 hours in person. The session will begin with introductions and the curator – an ICB senior leader briefing for 20 minutes on our ICS within context of national and global health issues. The floor will be opened for questions and comments in the meeting chat function or in person on small tables. The moderator, ideally from OD and/or communications specialist will support the sessions.

How do I Join?

Please email nnicb-nn.peopleandculturesystempmo@nhs.net

One or our core objectives: 

As systems leaders, we are committed to working together to achieve our core objective of a healthier life for all. Effective collaboration requires that we work from a shared purpose. By continuing to learn how to work as one ICS team, we can reduce duplication, benefit from shared assets, and align our approaches.

We aim to maintain our open culture, spring boarding from our long history of collaboration. We know this prevents siloed working and prevents closed cultures from forming. Use our joint energy and focus to deal with our challenges. Sector, partner, and specialist initiatives will also be recognised and known to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and reducing the need for expert consulting for elements we have in-system expertise.

Members will learn early about external support and programmes that we believe will support system leaders the most. We anticipate these will continue to shift from delivering set programmes to supporting a more adaptive approach that suits our system and partners objectives. Our initiatives will work for the entire system, powered by aligning ICS assets around them (e.g., ICS Coaching, Active Bystander, Talent Pipeline).

Our Community of Practice members will join other dialogic events such as our ICS Partners Assembly and design groups and may benefit from talent and leadership initiatives directly or for their organisations/team. They will also influence our innovation challenges selection and shape our ICS talent and leadership approach.

Our experience shows that dialogues offer opportunities to explore specific issues in discrete situations, helping to co-create meaningful narratives with shared direction. Powerful dialogues have the potential to develop transformation pathways, support transformation processes, and maintain functioning interfaces between different, sometimes competing, institutions, sectors, and disciplines. They also help coordinate collective responses to challenges, threats, and opportunities and are also exciting where real change happens in the room! (online or in person)

We encourage diversity of participation in these dialogues they are multi-level, multi-partner and multi-sector and we will seek to keep to widening the circles of engagement and enable everyone to contribute, regardless of differences in power, positions, or expertise. When you come to a community of practice for systems leaders you will arrive from your host organisation but will take a system first perspective. We aim to foster dialogue where participants actively listen and explore synergies, as well as options for value-adding, collective action with those they may not typically engage with. We will make use of the technology to encourage participation and everyone share ideas and insights in the chat function with the convenor selecting key themes for the curator who will then invite people to take the floor (turn off mute) so the group can hear directly from the people as close to the point of impact as possible.