Tweets of the Week, 9 April 2021

The Horizons team features many influential Twitter users. This curates a wealth of insights, knowledge, and information about transformation in health and care from other thought leaders across the world. (Tip: to read an article or watch a video mentioned in a tweet, click on the blue text. To view the original tweet, click on the image).

The School for Change Agents

Exciting news! The School for Change Agents starts again on 19 April. Find out more about the School in this post. Sign up for School now!

Caring4NHSPeople

You're welcome to join April's #Caring4NHSPeople wellbeing session: we're looking forward to hearing from brilliant speakers about civility & respect & creating kind & compassionate cultures in NHS. The session will be live on Wednesday 14 April at 4pm until 5pm. It's open to all - no need to book, just turn up. More details are here.

Wellbeing

Five ways to carve out time for yourself & your own wellbeing when you don't have the bandwidth to even think about your own needs: 1) Define your needs; 2) Work out what's feasible; 3) Set the time; 4) Prep yourself; 5) Be clear with others

Join the Institute of Health and Care Management on 19th April 5-6PM for their Personal Confidence and Empowerment Workshop with Helen. Register here.

Working Together

Make your meetings: 1) Smaller - once you’ve got 7 people in a decision-making group, each additional member reduces decision effectiveness by 10%; 2) Specific - 2/3 action items are enough; 3) Shorter - talk expands to time allotted. Read more.

When we think about networks it's about groups, communities, systems etc. Yet our network metrics often focus on socially influential individuals. We need to look less at the centrality of the few & more at the weaving of the many. Read more.

"Dunbar's number" says people can only maintain stable relationships with 150 others max: human structures at a scale beyond 150 will often fail to work. Do we need to rethink rules/norms for managing large scale organisations? Read more.

The holy month of Ramadan starts on Monday. Helen used to be cautious discussing Ramadan with Muslim friends & colleagues as she was anxious about saying the wrong thing or showing her ignorance. Now more & more she appreciates the spirit of Ramadan. Here's a great thread for learning more.
It's great to see more use of personas in health & care, seeking to base the design of care on the realities of people's lives. Personas must be archetypes (based on data) not stereotypes. These are recent personas from @Design4AHS , Canada for understanding future home care needs.

Further to the tweet above, Helen stressed how personas need to be archetypes not stereotypes. Twitter friends requested more info so she created a quick slide deck.

Improvement and Change

"Employee activism": the voices of difference that challenge the established status quo as to who gets heard and/or what should be included in the formal organisational agenda. Activism is here to stay and leaders need to get used to it.

When we redesign services/processes, we too often treat people like widgets to control on a production line. It's good to see the growing impact of People-Centric Operations (PCO). It can help us combine people recovery & service recovery beyond #Covid19. Read more.

Some leaders are thinking about changing their organisational design to be fit for a time beyond Covid. This recent research gives us clues on doing design in culture-creating ways that avoid us reinforcing the very patterns we want to change.

Important new @theQCommunity report: "Improvement" (using a systematic approach to improve quality/experience/outcomes) played an important role in the #Covid19 response & it was more valuable/impactful where an improvement capability existed pre-pandemic. Read the report.

If you work in #QI this curation of updates from the past month is a must-read!

Helen used to think she was particularly bad at planning project timescales. Then she learnt that "planning fallacy" means that most people can't estimate timescales. Add other kinds of bias, eg optimism bias & we're not good at planning in general. Read more.

Virtual Working

Tools for people working virtually. This is a "superlist" of hundreds of tools, apps & platforms to help you work better remotely. This is the most comprehensive list of tools for virtual collaboration & working that she has ever seen.

If we want to continue the "can do" approach to problem solving we adopted as part of the #Covid19 response, we have to invest massively in agile teams. Agile teams are small & multidisciplinary, with the skills & power to complete tasks. Read more.
In a recent study of 2000 people who started working working from home due to the pandemic: a third said they'd worn pyjamas during a virtual meeting & 10% said they'd worn no trousers at all on Teams or Zoom.

New: @microsoft on the future of work. Hybrid work means big changes. 7 emerging trends inc. 1) leaders being increasingly out of touch with employees 2) high-productivity masking rampant burnout 3) authenticity transforming work culture.

How leaders of large complex systems, who are seeking to scale & spread change, can learn greatly from smallholder farmers & initiatives with rural communities in Columbia

Do you want people in your virtual Teams/Zoom meetings to have a better meeting experience, feel closer, learn & communication better? Consider downloading & adopting these evidence-based virtual meeting hand signals.

And finally...

This was posted in relation to Easter, but is relevant all the time.