“Pattern recognition and sensemaking – these are important in prioritising our service needs.”
— Clinical Director, NHS

We offer consultancy and training for organisations that:

  • need to understand messy situations

  • want to get unstuck from problems which don’t ever seem to get solved

  • require a common language for decision-makers

  • have a problem that they find difficult to categorise

The methods we use for pattern recognition and sensemaking are helpful in situations where there are multiple points of view, many conflicting demands, and where the outcomes of decisions are uncertain.

Royal Free Hospital, London

“The language of tensions offers a single language in which leaders can communicate.”
— Senior leader
“Tensions is useful language for middle managers as we are stuck between the strategic thinkers at the top and the distress experienced by front end workers.”
— Clinical leader

leadership & Decision making

At the end of the first wave of the COVID pandemic, the client debriefed around one hundred leaders, from ward sisters through to senior executives and clinical leaders, on their experiences. They asked us to look for patterns in the debrief interviews.

The severe test of the pandemic had made heavy demands on the organisational system, which had responded by flexing to meet them. We analysed the stories in the interviews to discover how that flexing had occurred.

Leaders make decisions in situations that are full of competing demands: “On the one hand this is needed but on the other hand that is required”: both options may be appealing, both may be useful and necessary, but both cannot be pursued at the same time. These are what we call tensions, and we found a number of them which showed up across different levels in the organisation.

We proposed that these tensions were key dimensions of leadership flexibility which had enabled the organisation to adapt during the pandemic and suggested that leadership competence could be seen as the ability to identify the tensions present in a situation and to work with those tensions as the situation unfolds.

We developed an approach for the Organisation Development team to support leaders at any level in the hospital to see and work with tensions in their part of the organisation.

Wakefield District Council

“I saw that we couldn’t deal with certain things - like poverty - and I knew these things weren’t amenable to programmes or projects but I didn’t know why. Working with you was a turning point - I learned that there is a mechanism we can use in that space to pull the issues into programmes or projects.”
— Corporate Director Business Change
“I am used to thinking of root causes, not the path forward. This has changed my thinking, especially around the interrelatedness and circularity of complex issues.”
— Project Manager

Homelessness in the private rental sector

The commissioning client said that poverty had been an intractable issue for such a long time that conversations about it had become stuck. She recognised that the council typically focussed on trying to ‘solve’ poverty through paternalistic approaches, often driven by central government initiatives.

Our approach as consultants is to consider complex issues as evolving patterns that we can influence, rather than problems we must solve. We recognise that complex problems are also significantly local: as one of the client group put it, “You can’t just transplant solutions, because the conditions here are different.”

We worked with a cross-functional group for about a year in ‘thin slices’ to develop their ability to:

  • see into the complex issue of ‘keeping families in their private rented homes’ in novel ways and generate options for action,

  • work iteratively to see which actions were most effective and implement them.

Two of the many outcomes from the work were:

“The relationships with private landlords have been impacted positively. We have been able to get them to engage with a package of incentives and work with the council on tenant issues, in order to better address the needs of both tenant and landlord.”

“We had a breakthrough moment when we established that tenants always needed a ‘trusted helper’ to support them to remain in a stable tenancy.  It sounds simple, but is not an easy conclusion to reach in practice. Much work flowed from this concept.”

NHS Leadership Academy

evaluating professional development programmes

The requirement was to design an evaluation of professional development programmes run by the NHS Leadership Academy, to answer the question: What difference are these programmes making, and to whom?

The issue was complex because the programmes had been developed at different times to respond to different needs, and they had been evaluated in different ways.

We used pattern-spotting to find the critical factors in the evaluation data from the programmes, from which we were able to create an evaluation framework. Doing it this way rather than importing a general purpose evaluation model meant that the framework was fully grounded in the NHS context.

We used the framework to evaluate the previous programmes consistently, and provide a common frame for future programme design and evaluation.

Civil Service HR

“People can now see the network that they belong to and our offer is clearer. We’re on the cusp of the next stage of unfolding into a decentralised network.”
— Tammy Noel, Organisation Development and Design Expert Service, Civil Service HR

Self-organising community of practice

Communities or networks are often created for staff with particular skills to learn from and support each other. Civil Service HR had a long-standing Organisation Development & Design (OD&D) Network but it had relatively low engagement and a reliance on the centre to convene and organise learning events.

Rather than focussing on the obvious - networks are about connections - we saw the OD&D network as a pattern-generator, which helped us to explain and work with community dynamics over time.

The outcomes were increased community engagement (more learning events, more connections between members, better visibility of the network) and the emergence of spontaneously-organised events (not just centrally-organised ones).

We worked with the client in short monthly sessions to keep things moving and evolving, and periodically in longer, larger group or design sessions.

“It gave me a different way of looking at complex situations and a language to use with my clients. It’s so difficult to be able to hold tensions and when we learn how to do that, magic happens.”
— Participant, Roffey Park MSc programme
“Understanding dynamical change altered the way I see organisational change.”
— Tamilla Mahkamova, HR Business Partner, Boehringer Ingelheim
“Griff and Mary delivered a seamless, engaging collaborative session which included useful theory that translates to practice.”
— Participant, Roffey Park MSc programme

Customised training

I’ve designed and run a range of trainings for clients including:

  • DEFRA

  • Institute of Leadership & Management (Ukraine)

  • Boehringer Ingelheim

  • CharityComms

  • NHS Thames Valley Leadership Academy

  • Faculty of Medical Leadership & Management

  • Roffey Park Institute

  • NHS England & DHSC (as an associate at Mayvin)

Here’s one example:

Tensions in Decision Making

If you’re making decisions amongst many competing demands, whatever course of action you choose, some demands will always remain unmet and these will hang around in some form, to return as challenges later on.

Seeing each demand/need/tradeoff as a tension, in which both ends are desirable but not simultaneously possible, is way to see into the complexity of a problem and offers us a frame for decision making.

Griff Griffiths / cocomotion

Cocomotion was originally an experiment in self-organising, a network of coaches with the strapline “confidence through community”. My then business-partner and I came up with the name pantomime-horse style: she created the front half and I was the rear end.

I subsequently developed a model for thinking about communities and how they organise, and after a few projects deploying groups of coaches into organisations, I found myself in the field of ‘social complexity’ and one thing led to another…

I work on projects whose common thread is that those commissioning them are in some way slightly stuck, finding either that their requirements don’t really fit into the usual categories or that the problem they’re looking at is difficult to pin down.

I bring a slightly unusual perspective to the work in that instead of a psychology / HR background, my education is in environmental science and engineering hydrology and I worked for some time in the IT industry. It’s a useful difference.

I have a strong bias towards methods that draw on complexity science and have taught for the past few years on the annual Human Systems Dynamics programme at Roffey Park.

I am an Associate Consultant at Mayvin and Co-Chair of OD Network Europe.

“I love working with Griff. He doesn’t come from the HR/OD tradition and so provokes some interesting and different ways of thinking. He creates great partnerships and gives them an added twist!”
— Carolyn Norgate, Deputy Director, Organisation Development and Design Expert Service, Civil Service
“Griff combines a technical corporate background with a deep understanding of Human Systems Dynamics to produce innovative and engaging OD solutions that inspire action.””
— Catherine Wyatt, Director, Franchise Operations, Global Speciality Pharma Franchise, GlaxoSmithKline