Saying why

In general, it has gone quite well!

The most recent Topol Digital Fellowship workshop day in Leeds made me reflect on some of the positives and negatives of large-scale digital change and where this will affect my project in the near future.

Change is difficult. Change in healthcare is difficult+++. We are lucky to have a great team who have worked very hard to move us to a new way of working. One of our discussions at the workshop yesterday with Public Digital (https://public.digital/) focused on ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in changing an organisation. One of the ‘soft’ powers was comms.

Throughout the changes our Comms team has been exemplary with keeping people up-to-date with the changes and ensuring the whole trust (of 11,000+ people!) knew what was going on. But since the changes, an overwhelming majoring of the people I have spoken to about ‘going Digital’ have said a similar thing:  they don’t know why these changes are happening. All of us were taught to use the system a certain way, but not why.

It has made me understand more about what I will need to concentrate on with my project communications when I get to rolling it out – concentrate on why the changes are happening, and not just what is happening.

If I am to successfully show colleagues that using the system differently will improve their practice and release time to care; they will need to have the insight into the decisions taken, the reasons why the original way isn’t the best, and how this change can be a positive for them.

We would not do most things in life if we were told to “Just do it because I said so”. Why should organisational change be any different?

Now the post-Christmas lull has just about abated, the next stage of my project (re-doing the Time and Motion Study) has started and I am able to start creating the new way of working, the ‘To-Be’ model!