I helped host and attended an event made for upcoming systems leaders in Greater Manchester. You might ask - ‘what and who is a systems leader?’. A systems leader is collaborative, part of a network of people in different places and at different levels, with a shared purpose, co-operating to make significant change.
So that means you and me and the person next to you in the line at a coffee shop on our shared purpose to get coffee before the 9 am rush... well, kind of! We just need to define a few things like shared purpose and collaborative bahaviours.
That’s why we at Macc, in collaboration with 10GM, Curators of Change and GM Moving, have launched a series of workshops and events to get more people leading across systems in Greater Manchester. With the aim to get people to be more active and to move more in their daily lives for healthy living.
On 16 October we hosted the first 'GMMoving open learning event’ to discuss working and leading across systems in Greater Manchester Curators of Change hosted a workshop at this event featuring a World Cafe to explore peoples ideas on the world they would like to experience, where they are stuck and the best next steps and actions in helping them to achieve their goals in getting more people moving in their daily lives through systems leadership. People commented “we want equal access to fundng” and would like the ”regular chance to share, collaborate and reflect.
We had a day packed with learning, activities and speakers. The audience got a chance to hear from our key partners, past systems leadership work and our future plans centering around you!
We learnt from Debbie Sorkin the importance of shared purpose, values and accumulating change through behaviours that help to impact the way people think, enabling you to visualise things that lead to influence.
Claire from GMMoving was our first speaker and talked through past systems leadership approaches, focusing on how important it is to unite around a shared vision / purpose. Claire showed the Onion diagram (see image) to show factors that influence and how/ why people move through inequalities / barriers / such as ableism and disabilities.
She concluded with reminding us that “We are part of the conversation” and the importance of contunuiing to feed into this narrative.
From our partners at Curators of Change, Cat and Naomi, we learnt what the focus for the next year will be. We discovered how we can all be part of the co-production aspect of this project through the locality sessions. The locality sessions are conversations with each of the 10 boroughs in Greater Manchester (and Glossop) aimed at those who want to be involved in changing the way they work and the systems they work in.
To follow up we had a past participant of previous systems leadership programme talk about their experience and the positive impact it had on their work. Hayley from Tameside spoke about how attending the Values and Framing sessions helped her connect with her work and achieve her goals.
Louise from Aqua talked about the work they are doing in leadership as a Systems Leadership behaviors programme hosted by the NHS. They run a consultancy organization based on the NWLA systems leadership behaviors framework and they provide allyship when people want to work differently.
Jackie Le Fevre explained the vital role that values play in helping us find our North Star, as a “way finding” tool. She also introduced us to a few key concepts such as:
- Theory of mind - understanding how others think and the bias in our own mind
- Mind body connection - things we dislike in our mind makes our body react differently
- Moments of flow - high priority values subconsciously regulate our immune system
Jackie held a session specfiically on values on the 8 November going into more details on these concepts and our collective and individual values.
To end the session we asked people ‘How do you feel about systems leadership (after attending this open learning event) in one word?’ The answers were:
The key learning from this event was that we are all systems leaders, we are all part of the conversation.
Thank you for your attention, see you next time.
Join our mailing list to attend future events like this and to learn more about systems leadership: Email: [email protected]
