THE OVERLOOKED LINK IN ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE At the start of the year, I wrote about high performance as a collective endeavour. The prompt was the annual wave of New Year thinking focused on individual improvement. There is nothing wrong with personal growth. But too often, performance is framed through an individual lens: individual goals, individual accountability, individual success. Yet the evidence increasingly points elsewhere. High performance is not simply about how

Schools are increasingly being asked to act as community anchors. Great work is happening in this space yet education, health and wider public services often still operate as disconnected systems. Across the country, leaders are working hard to improve outcomes for children and families. The challenge is no longer ambition. It is connection and harnessing collective agency. Over the past year, I have become increasingly immersed in systems leadership work. From coaching local

In my work with leaders, I increasingly notice something interesting. The behaviours that enable us to lead well in complex systems: listening deeply, collaborating through tension, and navigating uncertainty, don’t always feel natural. In fact, they can feel uncomfortable. Even risky. This is because they are often counterintuitive (they go against how our brains are wired to keep us safe) and countercultural (they go against how we’ve been shaped to behave in systems like e

So what is this image all about? I referenced it at the start of a presentation at the Systems Thinking, Systems Practice conference in Hull University last week and it simply illustrates (with my limited Canva skills), a shift in how we understand the education system itself. For a long time, most schools have operated, whether willingly or not, as delivery units, overly focused on Ofsted results and narrow attainment outcome. A flow of direction, accountability and improve

Can we leverage human connection to provide the light through the cracks? In this blog I outline why turning our attention more intentionally to how we connect with ourselves, with others and across systems, especially when life and leadership feel hard is more important than ever. So much in this world is fracturing. Increasingly we are hearing that we are still operating in systems largely designed for the industrial age: efficiency, hierarchy, standardisation and individua

When can tough collaboration be worth it, in order to solve hard and important problems?How can we work with people we dislike, in order to do good work? Sometimes we resist collaboration with people we dislike, distrust, or fundamentally don’t agree with. That resistance is human. But increasingly, in our workplaces and wider systems, we don’t have the luxury of only working with people we like or feel aligned with. If we are serious about solving complex, high-stakes proble

This is the first of two blogs inspired by Adam Kahane’s timely second edition of Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust . It draws on some reflections from my personal life; the follow-up blog will focus more on work and systems leadership. I am a strong believer that our work and personal lives are not separate. How we show up in the world is deeply entwined, and the skills we draw on in one part of our lives inevitably s

It’s Time to Reframe High Performance: From Individual Excellence to Collective Impact For years, the conversation about high performance has centred on individuals, high‑achieving leaders, star performers, and personal productivity. In some ways the plethora of new years resolutions based on personal goal setting is a reminder of the ego-centric world we live in, particularly in Western cultures. Increasingly the evidence is clear: individual brilliance alone does not creat

How listening to your staff can help drive the change your school truly needs. Listening is often seen as the poor relation in the communication toolkit, lagging behind reading, writing and even speaking in how we teach, model and value it in schools. I’ve been a huge advocate for oracy for years, yet even I can admit that listening has sat quietly in the background for too long. It’s time to bring it to the forefront, especially in school leadership. Look at the global pol

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