Building OD capacity and capability in the NHS by developing leaders to develop others.
“In the NHS, the purpose of OD is to improve the quality and safety of patient care and we describe OD as enabling people to transform systems. OD is a field of practice where behavioural science is applied to organisational and system issues in order to align strategy and capability. OD enhances the effectiveness of systems through the provision of interventions that build capacity and capability to achieve our collective goals. OD improves the performance and health of systems by amplifying the humanity in our organisations, enabling people to flourish, thrive and have meaning in their work.” Do OD (delivered by NHS Employers in partnership with the NHS Leadership Academy)
These pages offer a range of resources and information to support OD practitioners and organisations, including national and regional resources. There is already some fantastic OD happening in our region and we want to publicise and share this learning as well as from the range of national resources.
OD in the South East
OD empowers leaders to transform organisations and systems to make the systems we use better for the people using it. Many of the South East Leadership Academy’s interventions, such as leadership development, talent management, coaching, improvement and more, are encircled by OD, and the majority of internal development capacity available to NHS organisations includes people whose role encompasses OD practice.
In the ongoing context of public sector change and transition we recognise that OD practitioner skills and leadership have never been as important as now. Those working in OD and transformational roles need to be at the forefront of system and service transformation, enabling the right conditions to deliver the ambitions of the NHS Long Term Plan and the People Plan.
We have a long history of supporting and developing OD capability by supporting leaders, OD and HR colleagues to meet the demands of organisational and system level change and transformation. This began with the development of our popular OD toolkit, a framework for OD practitioner development, and more recently our work supporting the OD talent pipeline has helped South East practitioners to claim competence, recognising their skills and knowledge at a system level.
South East Regional Leadership and OD Professionals Network
Based on feedback we received from OD and EDI leads indicated a need and ask for a region-wide community to be created – allowing for those opportunities to connect within one another and help each other with leadership and workforce challenges, sharing what is making an impact and speeding up scaling of great work.
We know that leadership and OD and EDI leads meet within an ICS footprint however the ask from colleagues is for a network that connects colleagues beyond their own ICS so that there is a larger potential community to learn from.