This 2016 report describes an example of collaboration between a group of public service leaders to develop a learning and development ‘offer’ to support collaborative leadership in public services, called the Enabling Collaborative Leadership Pioneer Programme.
Summary
This report describes an example of collaboration between a group of public service leaders to develop a learning and development ‘offer’ to support collaborative leadership in public services. The initiative is called the Enabling Collaborative Leadership Pioneer Programme (referred to as Pioneer) and the work has been taken forward by a multi-agency group, known as the Design Team. This account reflects on the experiences of the Design Team in the first phase of their work developing and designing Pioneer.
Pioneer forms one part of a programme by Workforce Scotland – a collaborative initiative to develop the workforce across public service organisations. Workforce Scotland comes under the banner of the Scottish Leaders Forum: a network of senior leaders from central and local government, public services and the third sector.
Pioneer is explicitly experimental in its approach to working and learning in collaboration. Its central elements are ‘going to’ and ‘working in’ the sites and locations of collaborative challenge experienced by participants, and facilitating action inquiry(AI) as an integral part of the approach to learning.
Action inquiry is a shorthand term for an approach to individual and collaborative learning being applied in Pioneer. Action inquiry encourages the sharing of individual and collective reflections to help make sense of what is happening in a collaborative process, as it happens, in order to improve it. It offers an opportunity for conversations about the extent to which people are ‘walking the talk’, the difference they think they are making, and what evidence they have which gives them confidence the changes they see are an improvement.
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More details
Authors: Nick Bland and Cathy Sharp, director of Research for Real
Publication date: June 2016
Type of publication: Working paper
Related resources
Pioneering Collaborative Leadership: A Facilitated Approach for Learning in Action
Research report about Pioneering Collaborative Leadership, an experimental initiative testing an innovative development approach for public service leaders in Scotland. It covers its first 18 months and includes a case study from the East Lothian Partnership.
July 2017
