Leading Public Service Change and Organisational Development MSc

 

Teaching and Learning

Educational Philosophy

The detailed design of the programme is underpinned by eight clear principles. We are committed to using these principles as a solid foundation for your whole developmental experience during your time on the programme:

  • Regard you as an adult learner: By focusing on your professional development and learning (not teaching). These needs are identified and understood in the context of your workplaces and work roles
  • Promote, value and engage with diversity: We recognise that you may come from or work in environments within which staff, stakeholders and citizens come from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The programme acknowledges diversity both as enriching of experience and as a topic for learning
  • Design the programme as an opportunity for developing both individuals and organisations: Involving your organisational sponsors in your learning and development is a core feature of this programme. You will be expected to engage your wider department / team members and lead them in focused organisational development activities; use information and data drawn from your workplaces; undertake organisational observations to learn about processes of change; and use case studies based in your own or others’ organisations to deliver real impact in your workplaces and in your work role
  • Use the content, process and assessment of the programme to craft a ‘live case’: You will identify an organisational development ‘live case’ in your workplace, which you will lead, and which provides a ‘scaffold’ for the educational inputs of this programme. Assignments and methods of assessment are designed to appraise the application of learning and development to your organisation, and are scheduled to offer formative feedback at each stage
  • Link the theory and practice of learning and development: You need to be theoretically informed, understand key concepts and models, and apply theory in practice, incorporating it appropriately into your own attitudes, behaviours and skills  - thus enabling your services and agencies to move from changed organisations to changing organisations
  • Strive for innovation and creativity in programme design: This programme makes full use of innovation by employing project focused learning, collaborative and emergent task design, exchange learning, live case studies, inter-group work and peer critique
  • Provide a commitment to evaluation and continuous improvement: By routinely evaluating all components of the programme, feeding back the results of such evaluations to all stakeholders, and ensuring that the programme management team uses that data to bring about improvements in design and delivery where they are needed
  • Be flexible and collaborative in our approach: We will work with you to review and update the programme in line with changes in workplace environments and welcome the opportunity to work closely with you in the on-going co-creation of the learning experiences.  

Programme overview

Public sector reform presents a challenge for central government if it is to become responsive to the changing demands on public services. It involves not just structural change but also a real cultural shift in behaviour among all public servants.

The top-down policy regime can no longer operate effectively in isolation from other players. There are a chain of players involved in policy implementation, and responsiveness to citizens requires an awareness of the whole system and collaborative working from all involved. The traditional silos and demarcations within government and between government and regional services, presents a challenge for government.

The MSc in Leading Public Service Change and Organisational Development is jointly delivered by the University of Birmingham and the Tavistock Institute.

It aims to enable participants to both learn about the theory of developing organisations and apply that learning to their workplaces. With the modernisation process at its heart, participants will explore a range of topics including diagnosis, strategising, collaboration and review within the context of a complex wider system and political environment.

Programme Design

This programme is designed and delivered by the University of Birmingham and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (Tavistock Institute).

Live Organisational Case

Comprises an organisational change intervention that you are required to identify, negotiate and implement within your work place during the course of the programme.

The live case provides the continuity and link between your workplace, the five taught modules and the Inquiry and Application Groups (module six), and is the focus of assignments.

Two Programme Symposia

Located at the beginning and at the end of the programme, these are designed as opportunities to set the context for the programme, provide opportunities to hear and interact with international academics and leaders in public service change and for your workplace sponsors to attend, learn about and participate in, programme leaning.

Five Three-Day Modules

1. Context and Organisational Analysis:

Examines the challenges of implementing public policy into local organisations where the relationship between intervention and outcome is uncertain, meanings of policy are contested, the aspirations of the members diverse and the environmental context complex. This module enables you to develop an analysis that results in identifying the changes which need to take place within and between organisations.

2. Change and Agency:

Develops your understanding of taking up a change agent role, and your competence in engaging and working with the challenges and dynamics that emerge and which need to be addressed.

3. Whole Systems:

Explores theories and practices for whole systems interventions. The module focuses on large-scale organisational developments and changes, which may anticipate or be reactions to perceived challenges in the near or far environment. Leaders, managers, consultants and other agents of change need to distinguish between the focus of change (what is to be changed) and how change will happen (intervention design).

4. Designing Organisational Change Interventions:

Combines information about organisational development and change interventions, with practice on designing intervention approaches. By linking developmental evaluation of public sector change to these topics, you are also provided with a model for reflecting on your own emerging preferred approaches and biases to change.

5. Leading Change:

Examines the relationship between leadership, organisational development and implementation of public policy, with a particular emphasis on the concept of leadership as performance.

Inquiry and Application

This six-day module takes an experiential approach to understanding individual and group development. Experimenting, being reflective and learning from experiences of leading and consulting to change, group members will draw on here and now data and address issues within live cases, in order to learn how to design and implement interventions for change, using resources from programme modules and existing repertoires.

Learning Journal

Offers a (non-assessed) method for documenting a critical reflective analysis of professional learning and development, and experiences of organisational learning and development during the programme.

Organisational Based Learning

Other organisational and inter-organisational experiences are planned as part of programme activity, including an organisational observation within a different part of the public sector, a narrative 360º feedback in your workplace and a whole system evaluation of the programme experience.

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For further information: contact Tracey Gray at T.Gray@bham.ac.uk