Who: Clore Social Leadership, for their Community Leaders Rhyl programme, a place-based leadership development programme for 25 community leaders from across Rhyl’s social sector. The programme – a partnership between Clore, Cwmpas, and WCVA, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund – brings together leaders from a range of organisations and roles, supporting them to grow their confidence, capability, and collective strength.
The brief: I was commissioned to design and deliver a four-hour workshop on managing change, as one of two leadership workshops within the programme. The brief was to offer something grounded in the participants’ lived experience, practically useful, and tailored to the specific context of community leadership in north Wales – not a generic change management training, but something that would feel relevant and real to people doing this work in this place.
What I did: I designed the workshop around four connected threads:
- understanding the conditions shaping change in their work;
- locating themselves as leaders within those conditions;
- exploring how to bring people with them through change; and
- sustaining their own resilience for the long haul.
Rather than leading with theory, I started each section from their experience – what they were actually navigating – and offered frameworks as tools to make sense of what they already knew.
The centrepiece of the session was the Berkana Two Loops Model, which maps the transition from declining to emerging systems and names the different leadership roles that are needed: pioneers, connectors, illuminators, hospice workers, stewards, and bridge builders. This landed well with a group who could clearly see themselves and their work in the model.
Alongside this, I built a frameworks library for the “bringing people with you” section – drawing on models from William Bridges, Rick Maurer, Kegan and Lahey, and others – which participants took away as a reference resource. The final section on resilience drew on peer sharing as much as input, which felt right for a cohort that had built trust with each other over the programme.
What they said: Um, I actually dropped the ball on capturing feedback formally – it had been a full-on morning and by the time we reached the end my brain had melted! I know warm and appreciative things were said, and I left the room feeling like it had genuinely landed. But I didn’t write anything down, and I’ve left it too long to reconstruct it now. (Lesson learnt: build in a feedback mechanism next time, and write up the case study while it’s fresh.) If you worked with me on this programme and want to share a reflection, I’d love to hear from you.
Oh – my client contact at Clore saw my presentation prior to the session, and he did say that “the slides and the content are absolutely stellar, both visually and content wise”, so there is that!
The Two Loops diagram, originally from Common Land, with my annotations