We are lucky to have a “balcony view” of the sector. We can see how organisations are behaving. How government shifts in policy and funding are impacting and how customers are choosing. We have had a bit of a stop and think about what we have seen this year and have co...

In times of significant change and market disruption people yearn for unbiased, impartial information and advice to make their decisions. Some people also need support to navigate a changing system that doesn’t always deliver on equity.

There is no doubt in my mind that...

In all the reform madness and “busyness” in health social care we are often focussed on what doesn’t work. We spend our energy on reforming, changing, positioning the faults of the “system” and sharing stories of inequity and poor practice. We are fixated on compliance...

There is something inherently counter-intuitive about the use of evidence based work when it is associated with practice in a changing environment. In the sector at the moment, all that is spoken about is how much things are changing and how uncertain so many things ar...

Remember the chaos and conspiracy theories of 1999. The Y2K bug was going to be catastrophic and people everywhere were planning and creating all sorts of scenarios.  To be honest however, all I could think of was dancing to Prince – “we gonna party like it's 1999” and...

In a few month’s time, the NDIS will roll out across most of NSW and people and organisations are clamouring to be ready. One of the reasons for this is that government; the architect, driver and regulator of it, is still not ready. This is despite the long lead time,...

For many years, our funders required us to have strategic plans; not so we could follow them not measure the effectiveness of what we did, but because we needed them!

Times have changed and the next time you hear a customer ask for your strategic plan before they decide...

We must admit, that despite the best intentions, social care engineers don’t always get it right. Some of our most “seemingly logical” social policies of our time have led to the deep and lasting disadvantage. Remember adoption laws and practices for “wayward” mothers?...

Just when you thought you had it all under control, something changes.

Most organisations are aware of the ‘’hyper-connected consumer’’ … we have been told that people are now connected 24 hours a day; if they don’t like something there is a website they can criticise y...

With so much talk about change, NDIS, person-centred planning, strategy, planning and the like, one of the core concepts that has been overlooked is that of risk. By risk, we are not talking about operational risk, but strategic risk and very specifically, risk appetit...