The Henley Forum: Absorbing Complex Change

KNOW | LEARN | ADAPT | INNOVATE

In a changing working world, it’s time to let go of the idea of embedding changes from individual change projects. Instead, organisations and individuals must enhance their capacity to absorb and integrate change from multiple sources simultaneously. And to cope with the complexity that goes with it.

At the third event in our 2018/19 programme, we will explore the key theme of Absorbing complex change to help you develop new, actionable insights.

We will share ideas, experiences and tools through a range of speaker and workshop sessions. Helping you to enhance performance and unlock potential in your own organisations.

We’ve planned a practical day, packed full of good things. We hope you’ll join us.

In brief:

Henley Forum’s Director, Dr Sharon Varney, will be your host for the day and will help you to warm up your thinking on this important topic. She will also introduce the Henley Forum Listening Project and explain how you can get involved.

Paul Skinner, author of ‘Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success’, will present some of the key ideas from his book and support you in using them to better forge common purpose, mobilise support across diverse stakeholder groups, drive innovation and engagement and unlock valuable new partnerships.

Katherine Woods from Meeting Magic returns to The Henley Forum along with her colleague Sarah Perry to lead a session on Conversations for complex change. Katherine’s passion is making a difference through conversation. As you might expect, this session will be interactive.

Helen Gillman from IFAD will share her knowledge management strategy journey and show how a theory of change was central to its development.

Volunteers will be invited to have a conversation about the qualities and skills needed for knowledgeable practice in the next 10 years, as part of the Henley Forum Listening Project.

Dr Christine van Winkelen will be unveiling our upgraded Members’ Website, giving easier access to the wealth of practical tools, reports, slides, audio and webinars available to Henley Forum members.

Rounding off the day, Benjamin Taylor from RedQuadrant and the Public Service Transformation Academy will be addressing the complex challenge of Public Service Transformation. Benjamin will take us on a partly experiential journey through the ‘five worlds’ of public service transformation, covering complexity, hierarchy, self-organisation, systems leadership, meaning-making and service transformation. Here's the full draft agenda.

Book your places NOW:

Henley Forum members can book places for this event through Marina Hart. If you are not a member, please contact Marina to find out more about this event and learn how membership can help your organisation.

Comments from some of our previous Henley Forum meetings:

• “I found the entire day extremely informative – lots of new thinking and ideas”
• “Very valuable, especially the room for discussion”
• “Really good to get a cross-sector group together and to appreciate the different approaches and styles to knowledge and learning”
• “The different backgrounds of the participants has set a rich environment for learning”
• “A great mix of different, yet complementary subjects”
• “Provoked deeper thinking”
• “Given me lots of ideas to take back to my organisation”
• “Another stimulating event – thank you!”