Who: Social Care Wales is the national body responsible for the regulation, development and improvement of the social care workforce in Wales. Its Service Support and Improvement (SSI) Directorate had recently gone through a significant restructure, reorganising around specific customer groups and reconfiguring its leadership. With a newly formed team of around 20 people, including four Assistant Directors and 12 Heads of Service, the Director commissioned two days of in-person business planning workshops to help the Directorate find its feet together.
The brief: The aims were two-fold: relational and practical. On one hand, this was about helping a newly configured leadership team get to know each other and work well together. On the other, it was about doing real strategic work, reviewing a draft vision for the Directorate, scanning the horizon for what was coming, and deciding what to carry forward, adjust, or let go of in the 2026-27 business plan.
What I did: I worked closely with the Director in the design phase, meeting to map out the shape of the two days before finalising a detailed session plan. The workshops ran across two venues over two consecutive days in December 2025, with around 20 participants throughout.
The design balanced relational and task-focused work, starting with space to reflect on the restructure before moving into vision, horizon scanning, and business plan review. I used a mix of approaches across the two days: 1-2-4-all, triads, walk-and-talk pairs, a carousel review of the business plan clusters, and Service Snapshots, a simple peer-to-peer format where each Head of Service took a few minutes to share what drove their work and what they wanted colleagues to understand about their team. Deliberately no slides for participants, just conversation, movement, and well-timed structure.
What they said: There was no formal evaluation, but both days ended with a one-word check-out, and after two intense days of strategic work, the words in the room were unanimously positive. The working relationship with the Director was warm and collaborative, and I’ve continued to work with Social Care Wales since.
