NHS transformation

Following the Cooksey Review of 2006 and the establishment of nine Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care, a research programme followed three NHS Acute Trusts over five years. Three waves of in-depth interviews were conducted in 2009, 2011 and 2012; the analysis discussed in the book draws on twenty-seven interviews with nine managers who remained in post throughout.

Longitudinal data of this kind is unusual in a setting with high leadership turnover, and it is what makes the central finding possible: tracking how the same people emplotted the same events differently at different moments.

It produced the concept the book uses most in practice: prospective emplotment, a manager narrating the sequence of collective feeling before the events arrive. It also produced meta-emplotment, and the finding that people given only part of a story will supply the rest themselves, typically darker than the reality.

The book works from published research. This is the paper the case rests on, in its own words.

Morrell, K., Hewison, A. and Heracleous, L. (2020). ‘From events to personal histories: narrating change in health-care organizations’, Public Management Review, 22(6), 908–926.

To cope with large-scale change managers must understand complex events, but representations of change are never objective and factual, they reflect choices. They are not simply chronicles but personal histories.

Character · Method · Application

1. Can you pre-script the emotional sequence honestly, including the worst point?
2. What are people making up because you told them only part of the story?
3. Which template are you applying to this change, and where has the situation been bent to fit it?
4. Who is a minor character in a quest that belongs to someone else?

Chapter Two: Character — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: the passage from the underlying paper above is quoted verbatim and checked against the source · surrounding context is site-written · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript