Holding both: leading organisations and shaping systems

There is a particular tension at the heart of senior civil society leadership that rarely gets spoken about directly. You are accountable for your organisation – its mission, its people, its sustainability – and yet the problems you exist to address don’t respect those boundaries.

Systems pull in directions that no single organisation controls; relationships form and fracture; decisions get made in rooms you aren’t in; influence is unevenly distributed; and the dynamics of power across sectors can feel both opaque and immovable.

This highly interactive workshop is designed for senior civil society leaders who recognise that tension and want to navigate it more effectively – leading not only within their organisation, but across the systems they are part of.

Before the session, participants are invited to complete a short Microsoft Form, sharing the system-level challenges they are currently facing: where they are trying to work across boundaries, what is getting in the way and what they have already tried.

Those responses will act as a focused co-design process, and the session will be built around your actual experience – real dilemmas, live frustrations and the questions you genuinely want to explore together.

The day will be varied across short input, individual reflection and work, group and connecting experience and a session with external contributors drawn from across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Together, participants will:

• name and work through the real tensions they face when trying to lead at organisational and system level simultaneously – using their own live challenges as the starting point
• explore what it means to understand the system or systems you are part of: who holds power, where decisions are actually made and where your organisation has genuine leverage
• examine the mindsets and approaches – collaboration, coalition-building, movement thinking – that make system-level leadership possible in practice
• reflect with honesty on the realities of shared leadership: questions of power, influence, visibility and accountability when working across organisations and sectors
• learn how to hold organisational clarity and mission focus whilst contributing to something larger
• engage directly with leaders who have navigated these challenges themselves, drawing on their experience and the practical tools and approaches they have developed

By the end of the session, participants will have a clearer understanding of the systems they are part of and where they sit within them, greater confidence in how their organisation can contribute to collective impact, and practical tools and fresh thinking they can take back and use.

Contributors
The session draws on the experience of leaders who have worked at the intersection of organisations and systems in different contexts:

Tim Rutherford, Deputy CEO of the Ted Wragg Trust, has spent over two decades working in and with communities across Exeter and the wider South West. He has led significant school improvement work, built cross-trust leadership development across 16 schools, and co-founded SW100 – a collaboration working to eradicate educational inequality across Devon and Cornwall. He brings direct experience of leading at scale whilst staying close to place and purpose.

Chandru Dissanayake, Executive Director of Strategy and Communications at the Greater London Authority, leads across a portfolio spanning intelligence and analysis, policy and strategy, city data, external relations, London resilience and emergency preparedness. He previously held senior roles across five government departments, including leading reform work in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. He brings a sharp understanding of how large, complex systems function – and where civil society organisations can find real traction within them.

Paula Head, Policy and Value Access Lead at Roche, is a former NHS chief executive and senior fellow at the King’s Fund. She brings experience of leading within and alongside the NHS at system level and now works at the interface of the healthcare industry, policy and the public sector – a vantage point that offers distinctive insight into how organisations navigate influence, access and accountability across very different kinds of power.

Facilitator

Theo Miller

Director, Leading Communities

Theo Miller

Director, Leading Communities

Theo is Director of Leading Communities, working alongside leaders, teams and organisations to create space for reflection, connection and development – recognising that meaningful change rarely comes from a simple new model or tool. His work spans the public, private and voluntary sectors. He is also part of the core team at the Leadership Centre, which exists to promote the value of leadership and empower leaders to have the greatest collective, positive impact with the communities they serve, creating big and sustainable movements of change in public services for the benefit of citizens.