Service transformation requires significant changes to organisational and professional cultures.

Systems Leadership is a practical, grounded approach to integrated working and long-term behaviour and culture change.

It describes the way people need to behave when they face large, complex and seemingly intractable problems; when there are multiple uncertainties, no one person or organisation can find the solution on their own and everyone is grappling with how to make resources meet demand. In these cases, the way forward lies in involving as many people’s energies, ideas, talents and expertise as possible.

Over the past three years, there has been a national Systems Leadership programme supporting research, joint leadership development and 60 place-based projects around the country. The projects focus on integrating health and social care, or on improving some aspect of population health and wellbeing, such as reducing social isolation or increasing exercise levels.

Examples include integrating health and social care in Wiltshire and Wakefield; reducing inter-generational obesity in Gloucestershire; and alleviating food poverty in Cornwall. The basic aim is the same across all the work: to develop Systems Leadership at local level, create new ways of working, and achieve measurable improvements in health, care and wellbeing.

Crucially, we put a Systems Leadership enabler in each place to help develop leadership capacity and it is this initiative, which helps hold people to the task, which is particularly useful in making progress.

Some of the learning from these on the ground experiences is drawn out in a recent report The Revolution will be Improvised, and evidence of shifts in culture and behaviours is brought out in the independent evaluation of the first projects.

The national and international research on ‘what works’ looks at the characteristics of good System Leadership and the environments in which it is likely to thrive. The Executive Summary gives six key dimensions of Systems Leadership behaviours:

• Ways of feeling – grounding what you do in strong, personal values;
• Ways of perceiving – listening, observing and understanding;
• Ways of thinking – curiosity, sense-making and intellectual rigour in analysis and synthesis;
• Ways of relating – enabling and supporting others, understanding the context in which they’re operating;
• Ways of being – having personal qualities such as courage, resilience, persistence;
• Ways of doing – behaving in ways that lead to change, including using narrative and framing.

We wouldn’t claim that Systems Leadership is a magic bullet, or that it can shift deep-seated cultures and patterns of behaviours overnight. But its approaches are helping achieve real progress and it is a useful tool to have in your armoury when you’re thinking about service transformation.

This article was first published on the Public Service Transformation Network site.