The Tool Shed and Leading Transformation
A small practitioner cohort for making better use of methods, experience, and each other’s judgement in live work.
Who joins
Change-makers, consultants, facilitators, and systems practitioners working in different sectors and countries. Bring a real situation: a difficult intervention, an organisational pattern, a client relationship, or a change you are trying to support.
What the cohort provides
- Typically four to six people, with Benjamin P Taylor, meeting online twice a month for 90 minutes.
- Co-coaching, action learning, constructive challenge, and discussion of live practice.
- Access to the Leading Transformation core programme and supporting practice resources.
- Mentoring and ‘shadow consulting’ to think through engagements, approaches, and interventions, within the agreed support arrangement.
- A continuing community of practice, with communication arrangements agreed by the group.
Cohorts typically work together for twelve months. Additional one-to-one support and organisational groups can be discussed separately. Dates, fees, and access arrangements are agreed before joining.
The intellectual range
The repertoire connects organisation and viability; human relationships, power, and systems leadership; and intervention theory and practice. It draws on the Viable System Model, Barry Oshry’s work, systems leadership theory, organisational development, adult development, outside-in demand analysis, lean, iterative service design, and Peter Block’s consulting and community work.
The point is to understand what different approaches let you see, where their assumptions and limits lie, and how to combine them without pretending one model explains everything.
How the group works
Small groups, adult and peer learning, generosity, confidentiality, multiple perspectives, and inquiry through action. Participants can question both a method and its application, including the facilitator’s interpretation.
Leading Transformation: the core content
The Tool Shed includes the 24-module programme below. Each module brings recorded teaching, slides, learning questions, worksheets, and further resources into practical use. Participants can work through the material between cohort sessions and bring their application back to the group.
The 24-module curriculum
The programme moves across leadership, management, citizen experience, services, and change and learning. The sequence can be adapted to a cohort’s work.
Leading transformation
Introduction and overview
The five worlds, outcomes, Seven Ways to Save and Improve, and a hundred-day plan.
Transformation and the possibilities of organisations
Purpose, hierarchy, distributed leadership, accountability, and the possibilities of organisational life.
System leadership: purpose and measures
Shared purpose, technical and adaptive challenges, viable systems, and measures that inform action.
Leading in complexity: the uses of power
Power, commitment, contracting, action inquiry, and leading change without complete control.
Being a transformation agent
People in systems
Relationships, adult development, resilience, and support for the change practitioner.
The limits of methods
Consulting judgement, assumptions, context, and learning by trying ideas in the real world.
Mapping systems
Rich pictures, soft systems, system dynamics, archetypes, and the uses and limits of diagrams.
Management world
Understanding organisations
Service views, organisational maturity, business models, and the Viable System Model.
Designing organisations
Service architecture, operating models, delegation, roles, tasks, and decision authority.
Shaping culture
Understanding culture and working on the conditions that reproduce it.
Citizen world and demand
Citizen and customer insight
Purpose, needs, co-design, journey mapping, listening, focus groups, and customer safaris.
Behavioural insight and strengths-based approaches
Behaviour, community assets, strengths, and Positive Deviance.
Understanding demand
Demand analysis, provision and supply, and the fit between a need and a service channel.
Service world
Understanding and designing services
Seven Ways to Save and Improve, activity and process analysis, Resource Optimisation, and service design.
Cost analysis and building the business case
Activity-based costing, options, and a business case that connects resources to the work.
A deep dive into lean
Purpose, flow, respect for people, A3 thinking, waste, inquiry, and the risks of applying tools mechanically.
Change and learning: making progress
Prototyping
Principles and practical approaches for testing service changes through rapid prototypes.
Delivering change
Readiness, appreciative timelines, Breaking the Shell, project and risk management, and learning loops.
Communications and stakeholder management
Listening, vision, objections, stakeholder mapping, and working in a political setting.
Change and learning: sustaining the work
Understanding people
Responses to threat and reward, and practical ways of engaging people through change.
Managing change positively
Appreciative Inquiry, action learning, force-field analysis, and constructive conversations.
Embedding change
Ownership, process management, benefits, outcomes, and the distinction between targets and useful measures.
Strategy and change
Learning, Patterns of Strategy, scenarios, whole-system processes, commissioning, and delivery arrangements.
Pulling the learning together
Recap and summary
Review the repertoire, its application, and what the participant will take forward. An immersive simulation can be added to a blended programme.
Join the conversation
Ask about joining a cohort, explore the RedQuadrant Tool Shed, or discuss a Leading Transformation programme with PSTA.
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