Next-step strategy gives clearer vision to whole organisation
Strategy Development - Council of Deans of Health
“Andrew was very constructive. He did a really good job of facilitating the awayday. He had to be quite direct at times to bring the Trustees to order, which kept us on track. He was an excellent sounding board for me and the team when we were finalising the drafting and very supportive with his suggestions on how we might frame things. I’d have no hesitation in working with him again.”
Ed Hughes, CEO, Council of Deans of Health
Background
The Council of Deans of Health represents the UK’s strategic academic leaders in healthcare education and research. Its membership comprises over 100 university and further education faculties across the UK, working together to strategically improve healthcare education, research and public health.
Although the council has been going for 25+ years, it only became an independent charity less than five years ago, so the time had come to develop its second strategic plan. CEO Ed Hughes had begun work on this after about a year in post and when discussing it with trustees, one of them had suggested it might help to get some external support, to give extra capacity and an external perspective.
Ed is a member of ACEVO and had attended a webinar Action Planning had delivered on strategy. On the strength of that, he got in touch. Andrew Johnson took the brief.
Brief
Having made a good start on developing the new strategy, Ed and his Chair asked us to work with the trustees to focus on the mission, vision, values and strategic objectives for the coming period. It was key to think about the Council as a maturing organisation within a new structure.
Process
Andrew began with an analysis of work already undertaken, including consultation with a range of internal and external stakeholders. This then fed into the key event, which was an awayday with the Board and Senior Leadership Team. With input from the Chair, CEO and the SLT, Andrew put together the agenda and facilitated.
He began by asking about the change they wanted to see and the impact they wanted to have as an organisation, while looking at the trade-offs involved in balancing the needs of members, then took them through some exercises to redefine the mission, vision and values and what the strategic objectives should be.
“We had some choices to make and Andrew tried to get the Trustees to think about the implications of those choices,” said Ed. “It was a really useful exercise and for me and the Chair, the benefit of having an external facilitator who understood where we were trying to get to was really helpful. It enabled us to contribute to the discussion and he was able to prompt and nudge and challenge in a way that could have been difficult for us.”
“The strategy day took us a long way towards clarifying the key elements of the new strategy but we knew there would be more work to do. Afterwards we were clear on what we needed to focus on.”
Andrew agreed to work on with Ed and his team as they refined the strategy over several iterations, with feedback from members, Trustees and key stakeholders.
Outcome
The final draft of the new strategy was shared with members at the AGM, after which it was finalised and launched a month later. It’s now public and the team have developed a suite of resources to go alongside it.
“It landed well,” said Ed. “What we’ve tried to focus on is a fairly simple set of mutually reinforcing objectives. The work with Andrew really helped us to see the mutuality of those strategic objectives.
“We also tried to frame it in a way that really gets us thinking about the impact and outcomes of the work. We’re developing a strategic delivery framework to the board that will focus on the outcomes of our work at a strategic level, rather than what we’ve had before, which was measuring outputs and inputs. In other words, focused on what we’re delivering rather than how much stuff we’re doing.”
The Council has also undertaken an independent governance review, some of the recommendations in which related to how they could use the new strategy in shaping board agendas. The review and the new strategy are connected.
“We were keen to make sure that that work was aligned,” said Ed. “Following on from the governance review we’re doing work now to refresh our strategic risk register in line with the new strategy and it’s been important to connect the two pieces of work together. We’ve also done work on our branding and comms and updated our website, which supports the messaging in the new strategy.
Consultant’s insight
CODH were at a really interesting point in their organisational journey. Having worked with many health organisations over the years it was great to take a deep dive into their work and understand their DNA before planning the strategy away day. Through a range of interactive activities throughout the day I was able to encourage Trustees and SLT to think a bit differently and examine the outcomes they wanted to achieve.
I love supporting organisations to really focus their strategy on the change they want to effect. During the day there was lots of enthusiastic debate and the whole group were really open to being challenged, which was so good to see. It was brilliant to then support Ed and the team to develop the strategy following the away day and help them think through how to visualise and communicate it to all their stakeholders.