Who: Social Care Wales, who work with people who use care and support services, and with organisations including social care employers, to lead improvement in social care in Wales.
The brief: To design and facilitate an all-day service review and planning workshop with strategic and leadership staff, focusing on the Employer Support Service which had completed its 2 year pilot phase, and was moving to sit with a new team due to internal reorganisation. The ESS was embarking on its next phase as an established service, building on the pilot phase and needing to establish a new strategy for the near, mid and long term future. The participants included members of the team where the ESS had sat in its pilot phase, and of the new team who were going to run it ongoing, as well as relevant leadership colleagues.
What I did: As usual in these strategic workshops, I started by absorbing a vast amount of background documents to fully understand the service and current situation. I designed the session using the Three Horizons model, which is well suited to this type of reflection. After an initial PESTLIED horizon scanning, we considered:
- what is the vision for the future we want to bring about, and where are there already seeds of this desired future
- what is the current situation, where have we come from, what can we celebrate and what do we have yet to work on
- how are we going to get from our current reality to our desired future (what do we need to include in the next strategy) and in what priority order
The workshop took place in one of the SCW meeting rooms, which had plenty of mobile whiteboards and wallspace, so it was great to populate the walls with our thinking as it developed. I collected all the materials and wrote them up into a workshop report, that would inform the next draft strategy.
What they said: Some lovely verbal feedback at the end of the session, “It was enjoyable and it was productive, what more can you want. It was fab!” and once the workshop report was delivered: “Thank you for facilitating this session, it was a really useful day and enabled us to all consider priorities and focus areas moving forward.”
Three Horizons model – image credit: Leadersquest.org