In October a small group of senior leaders from health and community services in Queensland spent a morning together in Brisbane. A commissioning body, peak bodies, advocacy organisations and a direct service provider, in different seats in the same system. The Chatham House Rule applied, so nothing here is attached to a person or an organisation.
The question in front of the room was a practical one. Where do you need to land, by when, and what are you doing with the time before you get there?
My read, which I put to the room before we started, is that the problem is rarely the amount of change on its own. It is change that arrives without a why, without a date, and without the people closest to it being part of working it out. Slowing down does not fix any of those issues.
Nobody in the room was managing one change
Everyone named more than one change. New operating practices being embedded, structural and governance change, senior leaders moving on with gaps while roles are filled, inquiries and reforms layered over the top, and for some, rapid growth as well.
Some are tapping into diversities of thought in existing communities of practice to support their change processes, and putting their effort into building understanding across all the groups involved.
Sitting between two governments is its own pressure
Several described being caught between the Commonwealth and the State. National reforms have not produced the improvements people expected while demand keeps climbing. Working with people in government who do not know the service well slows things down and puts the need to develop their understanding back on the organisation. Changes in policy direction were flagged as likely to constrain creativity at a time when the amount of available funding is reducing. Where money can be spent is narrowing, and organisations used to turning a dollar into two have less room to do it.
There was also a point about public debate that treats some groups of people as a drain on the system. That framing sets groups against each other instead of focusing people on how to get the system working as intended.
The hard question is how much to tell people about a change that
may not happen
There are always more proposed changes than confirmed ones. Prepare people too early and you create fear, and sometimes anger, about something that may never arrive, and you put at risk the trust of the people you serve. Leave it too late and the change lands with no time to absorb it and adjust.
There is no clean answer. Working out together what a change means, rather than announcing a conclusion, takes some of the fear out of it. People were described as frightened less by the change itself than by the sense that nobody had explained it. The other risk people named was policy pushing organisations away from models they feel have worked well for a long time.
Growth brings its own pacing problem
Growth is usually treated as a good outcome. Here it was also named as a pressure. Rapid growth over a short period creates friction between programs that have funding and programs that do not, and some programs are being built while they are being rolled out. The response was to keep sight of what the growth is for, and to build the confidence and competence of the teams delivering it.
How people respond to change is both the hardest part and the
biggest strength
When the room mapped its challenges and its strengths, the same item appeared on both sides. How people perceive a change and how they engage with it is the most frustrating part of the job and the most rewarding.
On the strengths side: being comfortable with discomfort and experiencing a change rather than sitting with the fear of a proposed change. One organisation described an accreditation process that moved the internal conversation from a deficit conversation about what is missing to what we need and how we will get there.
On the challenges side: pleasing people for the wrong reasons can work against you. Timing of implementation. And testing something in one part of the organisation without sharing what is learned is an issue that is resolved by taking a whole of organisation approach rather than a team by team one.
What people are trying
Take what you learned from the last change and use it on the next one. Try something small before committing to something large, and test the downsides before you commit. Use the five whys process to get under a problem rather than treating the first answer about why as the cause of frustration or fear. Agree in advance how feedback will be shared and how it will be answered, so people know how and when the loop closes. Keep the structure of your change conversations consistent and capture decisions and actions each time.
Two of these go further than technique. The first is moving from a deficit framing to a strengths one. It shows people what they gain, lifts engagement, and puts them in the position of the person they are trying to help. The second is setting what success looks like collectively rather than over-focusing on KPIs that cannot be influenced and using team and personal success indicators alongside them. That keeps attention on what the organisation can influence rather than the outcomes it cannot.
Time spent improving the organisation is seen as investing in progress, not time taken from clients and members. Telling people broadly what has changed, with staff feeding what they see into systemic advocacy, is part of that.
The Wider Lens is a morning for senior leaders in health, community and human services, with curated tables under the Chatham House Rule. The Peer Room is a breakfast for chief executives. Email susanne@lebout.com.au if you would like an invitation to either, or to put one of your senior leaders forward.
