Suppose that you have a group of leaders in an organisation and you want them to develop a vision of cultural change which they can then lead and communicate to others.  How would you do this?  In collaboration with internal specialists at East Lothian Council, we brought together drama, theatre and outdoor education to provide a challenging, experiential leadership programme tailored to the needs of the leadership team.   This work shows how powerful metaphors can be in supporting organisational change.

At an initial Council-wide Management Conference – Challenge for chanage – we created a series of scenes to highlight key points describing the day-to-day work that misses opportunities to reinforce customer care.

For example, during one of the scenes, people were concentrating on the struggle of an elderly woman trying to get her light working on her communal stair. The electricians had not brought the right bulb much to her frustration. Just as her scene ended there was sudden bang on the window. It was the Gulf War veteran who had been seen quietly begging as the delegates first entered. He was now outside the huge window. The elderly woman is frightened and runs off. The man is left alone, still outside unknown and forgotten. He represents the unseen, the dispossessed, the forgotten. Who has responsiblity to address this?

A frequent claim made about the Council was that the community it served was ‘on the outside’.  One of the key aspects of cultural change the Council wanted to achieve was to do more to involve the community in decision-making.  Thus, the veteran became a metaphor for addressing the barriers between those on the ‘inside’ and those on the ‘outside’.

Through this work the group identified a complex metaphor which they called A Place to Grow, later transformed into A Space to Grow.  This has been adopted across the organisation to describe and communite the cultural change that the group is now leading.

A download describing our approach to leadership can be found here – Developing leadership capacity

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