Systems thinking in action - transforming services across Wales
Our systems thinking experts worked with five councils to help them transform their housing options service, as part of the Welsh Government's homelessness prevention service. Using proven systems thinking principles, we helped each council to understand customer demand, flow of work, waste and the causes of waste. Crucially, our systems thinking programme took a people-centred approach to behaviour change.
Funded through the Welsh Government, the councils enlisted our support to plan and deliver service redesign using systems thinking which was aligned with customers' needs and expectations. There was also a need to build internal capacity to support lasting behaviour change and sustain this work, achieving outcomes not only for the five pilot councils but sharing learning with housing authorities across the country.
We designed a programme to deliver weekly facilitated sessions, drawing together a group representing all of the authorities. These sessions were carefully designed to provide background, theory and learning around our proven five stage change model (Establish, Explore, Envisage, Experiment and Embed), based around the principles of systems thinking.
We have helped all five councils achieve both cashable and non-cashable savings - the cashable component is approaching £250,000 at first iteration and represents just the beginning of the improvement cycle.
Our systems thinking work has identified huge opportunities to transform the services provided for customers and the work designs for front-line staff. Each council has also begun a second round of improvements using systems thinking to drive internal behaviour change in another area of the service. This further cycle of change is supporting the service capability as they move to more of a learning culture where continuous improvement becomes the norm.
