Learning Sets

Really Learning specializes in learning sets. In addition to those run for purely personal development of the participants we have an expertise in Sets that look broadly and deeply at a particular issue, with the aim of deepening understanding and making that understanding available to others. Many of these sets are run in conjunction with Anaptys Ltd.

We have developed a new learning set ‘Unlocking Commissioning’ that explores how commissioners can resist calls for rationing and instead grow an NHS they can be proud of by unlocking resources that have become trapped in services and buildings that are no longer the best way of meeting needs, in processes that add no value, and in attitudes that have become defeatist and cynical. For more information read the invitation or to discuss support for CCG Boards, CCG Board members or development programmes on a wider basis that support challenge and enable individuals and groups to achieve real change please email Valerie.

Our Take it to the Limit Learning Set has recently concluded. It has considered why it is that across the NHS and beyond a deep dissatisfaction has been noted on the part of doctors and other health care professionals (HCPs). This is especially puzzling given that unprecedented sums of money are being spent on health care and technology offers exciting advances and evidence about what works enables resources to be targeted wisely. So why do HCPs not feel excited, able and effective?

Using schools of thinking not often applied to health care organisations (anthropology, sociology, psychotherapy, moral and political philosophy) we have discovered that there are a small number of pervasive forces that inevitably result in good people offering bad care, unless our responses to these forces are altered.

Take it to the Limit

To see the full discussion paper click here.

The arguments in this paper now form part of a wider discussion about how to (and how not to) reform and renew the NHS in a book called Why Reforming the NHS Doesn’t Work: the importance of understanding how good people offer bad care. Download a final draft here

Previous Sets have included:

Beyond Partnership:

Why is it that so many partnerships between organisations fail to deliver their potential? This set discovered that by asking four questions at any time in the life of a partnership it is possible to identify what the partnership can realistically achieve and what it cannot. To see the paper click here

Making Strategy Work:

How can practicing health care leaders mix together classical thinking about planning and strategy, with that of emergent strategy and complexity theory and in doing so introduce change that will stick. To see the paper click here

Trust and Trustworthiness

Why is it that so many Boards of NHS organisations feel they are not trusted by other NHS organisations?

This paper results from a series of conversations between chairs of PCTs and SHAs, facilitated by Valerie Iles of Really Learning and explores why the relationship between them can be so fraught.