Culture, partnership working and liberating structures 

Liberating Structures are a set of "must-have" tools designed for systems convening and leading collaborative change. They provide structured yet flexible ways for teams to solve problems, innovate, and access collective creativity by moving away from traditional top-down management logic 

1. TRIZ: Described as a systematic set of tools for inventive problem-solving designed to overcome "stuck" thinking and access collective creativity for innovation. It is used to clear space for new ideas by identifying what must be stopped.

2. 15% Solution: Highlighted as a method for focusing on "the simplest thing" an individual or team can do immediately without needing additional resources or permission.

3. Mad Tea: Referenced as a technique using open-ended sentences (e.g., "A bold idea I recommend is...") to spark reflection and dialogue within a group.

4. Ecocycle Planning: Represented visually through a "Birth Ecocycle" diagram, which helps teams understand where their projects or ideas sit in a lifecycle (from birth and maturity to creative destruction)

5. Purpose to Practice - forming a project in the parameters of establishing clear purpose and visoin for your intention 

The Leader-Leader approach is a transformative management model designed in SPFT acute settings to shift healthcare culture from transactional tasks to relational excellence Originally inspired by Captain David Marquet’s naval leadership principles, it replaces the traditional top-down "leader-follower" hierarchy with a system that empowers every individual to lead.

This approach is built on four core pillars:

• Clarity: Setting a collaborative, shared vision so everyone understands the "why" behind their actions.

• Competence: Ensuring staff and service users have the technical skills and knowledge required to make safe, effective decisions.

• Control: Gifting decision-making power to frontline staff and service users, transitioning them from passive recipients to active "service leaders".

• Courage: Fostering a "Just Culture" where leaders trust their teams and view mistakes as opportunities to learn rather than reasons for blame.

By moving authority to where the information resides, this approach increases engagement and improves outcomes. At Langley Green Hospital, implementing the Leader-Leader model helped reduce sickness rates and seclusion incidents while improving team relationships. It represents a commitment to intent-based leadership, where managers provide clear intent rather than rigid instructions, allowing a truly human-centered care culture to flourish.

Quality Improvement (QI) in healthcare utilises a diverse range of structured methodologies and tools designed to analyse systems, test changes, and measure outcomes. These methods can be grouped into several categories based on their function. 

• Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA): This is the fundamental cycle for testing change. It involves developing a plan for a small-scale test (Plan), carrying out the test while documenting observations (Do), analyzing the results against predictions (Study), and deciding whether to adapt, adopt, or abandon the change idea (Act).

• Double Diamond: A design model that maps the divergent and convergent stages of a project through four phases: Discover (finding the need), Define (finding the problem), Develop (finding the solution), and Deliver (testing the solution)

• The Model for Improvement: This framework precedes the PDSA cycle by asking three critical questions: What are we trying to accomplish (the aim)? How will we know that a change is an improvement (the measures)? What changes can we make that will result in an improvement.

• Huddle boards are visual management tools used to facilitate regular, short team meetings (huddles) focused on continuous improvement and safety 

• Five Whys: A root cause analysis technique where the question "why" is asked repeatedly (usually five times) to move past symptoms and identify the actual process-level cause of a problem.

• Driver Diagrams: Visual maps used to show the relationship between a project's overall aim and the primary and secondary "drivers" (factors) required to achieve that aim.

• Nominal Group Technique: A structured group process that starts with two minutes of silence to allow for individual reflection on key issues, followed by grouping ideas into themes and discussing the core problem, vision, and required actions.

• Cause and Effect (Fishbone) Diagrams: Used to explore and display all potential causes for a specific problem or outcome

Trauma-Informed Leadership and Partnership Working is an approach to leadership that applies trauma-informed principles to how organisations, teams and partnerships operate. It emphasises safety, trust, collaboration, choice and empowerment, enabling leaders to understand the impact of trauma on people and systems, strengthen relationships, and create the conditions for collective action and lasting transformation. 

Empathy Mapping: A design thinking tool used to understand the user's perspective by mapping what they are Doing, Thinking, Feeling, and Saying regarding a service or system

My approach to leadership has been shaped by the transformative value of recovery practice, peer support and the expertise gained through lived experience. Through working with peer-led approaches, including the 4Pi principles and other principled ways of working, it became clear that these approaches offer valuable learning for how services, organisations and systems can operate more effectively.

True coproduction and collaboration require more than simply involving people; they require a meaningful shift in relationships, power and decision-making. This means creating the conditions for shared ownership, actively ceding power, valuing different forms of knowledge, and ensuring that people with lived experience are equal partners in shaping services and solutions.

Recovery practice as a leadership skill is about recognising that wisdom does not sit only within professional roles or organisational structures. It emerges through relationships, experience and collective learning. By embedding these principles into leadership and partnership working, we can create more compassionate, effective and responsive services.