Hello.
I’m Amy, founder of The Work in Progress. The Work in Progress is for you, your organisation, your local community, society and humanity overall. You’ll notice I use the word ‘we’ a lot. This is to reflect the collective nature of thinking, ideas and contribution. Depending on the work, I collaborate with Associates to ensure the most impactful collective approach. This is the story of how I came to set up The Work in Progress.
The Starting point
My background is in Psychology and Organisational Psychology. I started my professional career translating a draft Medical Leadership Framework into a development programme for doctors in postgraduate medical education. Ever since I have drawn on the latest thinking, research or strategy and created shape for ideas to exist in our everyday. In the years following that first job I have developed leadership in organisational, regional, national and international contexts and hold a varied portfolio ranging from strategy development; commissioning; full cycle intervention design, delivery and evaluation; academic content development and delivery as well as research. Read more about my career in brief below.
The upside of a downturn
In my early career the philosophies I hold so dear now started to take shape alongside a growing awareness about how my views sat with the established norm. I was grappling with ideas about the potential for new approaches in an increasingly changing world which seemed to value defined expertise and past experience over anything else. I thought this was important, I just didn’t think it was the only way. In fact, the more I dug deeper into thinking about leadership and development the bigger the questions got. At that time I was asking myself - if we are promoting shared leadership for all, how does this sit with the narrative equating leadership to position?
Then came the recession. The number of positions started to decline. These weren’t necessarily positions traditionally associated with “leadership” but ones that would be the next steps in development for me and many of my generation. The impact of the economic downturn led me to question the narrative about personal progression. Living philosophies about leadership for all I started promoting personal development in another way, through creative projects. So I set up The January Project.
The dawn of system leadership
The Dawn of System Leadership is a paper published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Senge, Hamilton and Kania in 2015. To this day, when I read the paper I learn something new. It was the first time I could clearly see the rationale for the role of a positional leader alongside the notion of shared or collective leadership and why this type of leadership was needed in society today: “The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require a unique type of leader—the system leader, a person who catalyses collective leadership.” Crucial when the authors highlight that solutions to our biggest questions may ‘not be visible from any single vantage point alone’. A positional leader that ‘creates conditions’ - I connected with this. Now I’m not saying this is the only way to describe a positional leader that values the collective contribution of others. But it was this description that connected with me. Finally, I thought, a narrative of leadership that sits with the normalised structure of positional leadership and plays to the strengths of a collective.
The Turning Point
This paper would not have been a turning point if I wasn’t working in the NHS, in the North West of England at the time I read it. Nationally, the vision for health was set out positioning health alongside wider system partners. In the North West, it was a time where health and the wider determinants were being more closely connected to a growing awareness of the regions economic potential. I was awoken to the complexity and importance of a system which not only affects every aspect of our lives today but has the power to help or hinder the reaching of our potential in the future - and it was on my doorstep.
From the doorstep to space
I continued to work in health and transitioned my portfolios to build on the notion of ‘creating conditions’. My colleagues and I embarked on an experimental commission to explore the conditions that enable us all to connect, collaborate, co-create – however we think about working together – both within and across traditional organisational boundaries.
Our thinking was – if we are to meet the ambitions of an integrated health and social care, we know we have to work differently, expand the sphere of our possibilities and enable different voices to contribute to conversations with ease. We also observed that this was already occurring in many places across the region and that the social infrastructure is able to move at a much faster pace than the physical make up of our organisations or estates.
We hoped to learn about the conditions that influence this social infrastructure so that we can contribute to creating enabling conditions through the leaders and leadership we develop.
At the same time, I read an interview with Jeff Bezos relating to his work with Blue Origin. Bezos talked about the difference in the dynamism experienced between commercial space exploration and the tech industries in existence as a result of the development of the internet. His response, infrastructure. He talked about his mission to create the ‘heavy lifting infrastructure’ so the next generation can have ‘an entrepreneurial explosion into space’. I thought ‘if Bezos can do this for space. What can we do for health and social care?’.
What could be?
This journey of exploration made me reflect on ambition, how we can and do contribute towards a future of health and wellbeing and how far should we go in thinking about the future we are building. In the context of ‘what could be’ I presented thinking on ‘The Future we are Building: Lessons from the new space race’ in order to pose the question - what is next?
This was on the last day of that job. This experience has been a catalyst for me to continue connecting with the work of those exploring issues with the potential to affect not only society as we know it but humanity as a whole and ask the question - what can we do through development today to build the psychosocial infrastructure required in a future context?