There’s a major shift in the Bromford Strategy that upends our legacy business model: our move to place-based working by 2027.

But how do you shift to a completely new model within the constraints of a 60 year-old organisation?

This series of posts will chart our journey: the highs and the lows, the breakthroughs and the fails, as we begin to test our new model.

First of all: What exactly is place-based working?

Place-based working is a person-centred, bottom-up approach used to meet the unique needs of people in one given location by working together to use the best available resources.
By working collaboratively with the people who live and work locally, it aims to build a picture of the system from a local perspective, that seeks to highlight the strengths, capacity and knowledge of all those involved

We launched the first of our four place discovery phases last week, in Staple Hill, South Gloucestershire, and three more will follow in the coming months before the model gets applied across the organisation.

The initial hypothesis we are testing is something like this: Does connecting the people who already work in a place together and removing them from management silos lead to better outcomes for customers and colleagues?

Accordingly we’ve brought together our Neighbourhood Coaches, our engineers, our landscapers, our caretaking team - and given them a blank sheet of paper to start from. How would they work if it was Day One?

Some of the lessons learned so far in putting the first test together:

Stop obsessing about technology - most of our problems can be solved by just connecting people and getting them to talk to each other. An obsession with tech as a solution has created a division not a connected community

Ditch the hierarchy (or at least get them away from the real work) - we massively underestimate the corporate treacle and inefficiency tax placed on colleagues and communities by too much management and well meant interference

Your organisation isn't best placed to solve every problem - real people given the right access to power and resources could do a better job than anything in your corporate plan

Just listen and respond - it's not a lot to ask. But most of us aren't doing it if we're really really honest. Not being listened to creates distrust, and we know where that distrust leads.

We’ll be posting here once a week throughout the discovery phase with other lessons learned.