First-Time Board CDIOs Programme — Cohort 4 Summary

TL;DR: Continuing to evolve, but still terrible at time-keeping. A great two days in Liverpool

Background

There’s some background to this Programme, which is available in the Cohort 1 Summary. You can see how it evolved in the Cohort 2 and Cohort 3 summaries.

Iteration

As with Cohort 1&2, we gathered feedback from Cohort 3 and updated the programme. However, this time, we changed very little other than add in some content about politics. Perhaps we have something approaching an evolved programme?

As before, we got excellent logistics support from NHS Providers, we had the same set of sponsors as Cohort 4 (PA Consulting, Channel 3, Moorhouse Consulting and Nervecentre). We also gave each delegate the same two books — The First 90 days and Aspirationally Idle.

Faculty supporting cohort 4 :

• Rebecca Moore
• Amy Freeman
• Martin Sadler
• Kate Warriner
• Paul Rice
• Mike Fell
• Andy Callow

We had someone drop out a few days before, which was disappointing and didn’t give us time to fill the space with someone else. As at previous times, we continue to wrestle with how to deal with that. Because of the generosity of sponsors, we can offer the programme at no cost, I feel some delegates attach lower value to it, and therefore it is ok to drop out on a whim. I find it very poor behaviour. Anyway, we did have 10 delegates who attended and contributed brilliantly.

Cohort 4 Programme Summary

This time we were in Liverpool, which is not a city I’m that familiar with, but the sun was shining over the two days and I thought it was a great place to be.

As with all cohorts so far, I opened the day with the view that we are not here to just talk at the delegates, it only works when we have a series of conversations, which recognises that collectively the whole group of faculty and delegates have considerable experience and knowledge to impart to the whole group. Martin, Amy, Kate and I confirmed that we continue to get a lot of the sessions and therefore our motivation is that there’s still value we get from being there.

Day 1

Paul had managed to arrange his calendar and transition from his role at Bradford Teaching Hospitals to the Health Service in Northern Ireland to be able to be with us for the first half of Day 1. He talked about his career and reflected on many routes to the CDIO role are chaotic and don’t follow the same path. He talked about how he felt acquisition of qualifications earned him credibility and a seat at the table. He had a long list of qualifications! He talked about his experience of being part of Boards and the abstract concept of “fit”. He also initiated a discussion about what “no surprises” means, both up and down.

Nicole from PA led us a Strengths session, with a number of practical exercises individually and in pairs. This session has consistently had high feedback from previous delegates. We talked about how some organisations do strengths assessments with teams so they attempt to define what strengths are required to be successful in a role, and then attempt to match employees to the role through a strengths assessment.

Amy then led a session on Board Basics and introduced a theme that we talked about a lot over the two days, which was being really clear about Assurance vs Reassurance and the need for the Exec-Non-Executive relationship to be firmly in the Assurance zone.

Martin and Lucy from Moorhouse did a session on Curious Leadership, which again included some Lego Serious Play. I could have kept going on that all afternoon…

The Curious CDIO as exemplied in LEGO

At the end of the day, Nervecentre led on a session, talking about EPR implementations, architecture and leadership. The topic stimulated much conversation, so much so, that the hotel had to hint about kicking us out of the room.

Martin finished the day in traditional style by giving delegates their homework for tomorrow.

Day 2

Martin held us ALL to account with delivering our homework, which I won’t summarise so it won’t spoil it for future delegates. He then went onto a session on Service Delivery, using his long experience as consolidated into his book “Aspirationally Idle”. Every time I hear him talk, I come back energised and feeling that there’s more to do for our service desk at NUH. He talked about the massive move of Sandwell and West Birmingham hospital to the newly built Midland Met Hospital and all that involved.

Matt from Channel 3 talked about the importance of change and the importance of focusing on that rather than the technology. We had a great conversation about the importance of Business Continuity Processes (BCP), which led to a debate on where to put effort — into resiliency or into BCP. One of the delegates talked about categorisation of systems, including shadow IT into:

• CORE — corporate systems
• COMMON — managed by departments
• DISTINCT — e.g very locally used and used by a handful of people for a specific purpose

By popular demand, Mike Fell returned to do a session on Cyber Security for Board-Level CDIOs. We talked about the need for transparency in understanding what happened in a cyber security incident and how that may be publishing a playbook for the destination for future attacks. We also talked about aligning an approach that is clear about targeting local investment where there is a gap not provided nationally.

I did a session on the first 100 days, drawing heavily on my “How Not To Suck” series of blogs, of which the first 100 days, in turn, draws heavily on the Watson book The First 90 Days. As part of the lead in to this, we had a good discussion about job offer negotiation and the importance of thinking about what you need without being an idiot.

Amy and Kate then led an Action Learning Set session, where we split in two and then did two rounds of action learning in each group, which was a first and those who were the centre of the set, reported getting a lot out of it.

And as is traditional, we finished the day with distribution of the books gifted over the two days (see below for the list), collection of some feedback, and seeking preferences for mentoring arrangements for the coming 6 months. I’ve not managed to get hold of the collected feedback from Cohort 4, but the verbal feedback was very good.

Reflections/Feedback

• Some people don’t read physical books, so we need to think of some way that people can gift audio books/eBooks
• We still failed to ask delegates and faculty to provide bios in advance
• It was great to have the programme in the same venue as the overnight accomodation for ease
• It would be good to ask for each supplier to provide a one-page summary of what they do
• Could we do something about personal brand?

Appendix A: The Gifted Books

Interestingly, when I look back at the books gifted over all four cohorts, there is only one duplicate — White Fragility, which I’ve gifted at every session.

• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
• Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
• The Empty Raincoat by Charles Handy
• The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters
• No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
• Equality vs Equity by Jenny Garrett
• Winning! by Clive Woodward
• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef (this gifting also included tantalising reference to The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies)
• The Art of War — Sun Tzu
• The Coming Wave by by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
• Platformland by Richard Pope
• Let My People Go Surfing by by Yvon Chouinard
• The Ultra Processed People by by Chris van Tulleken