What did we learn from our Learning Week?

Published in Inside Iriss on 12 Feb 2025

Learning Week is over at Iriss now. We spent three days in person, eating pastries and chatting about how our year was, things we celebrate and learn, how we keep aligned to our new strategy, using our new evaluation process, showcasing our skills and impact and what the next year could look like for us. 

We are lucky to be able to take this time away from our regular work and try to make the most of it by capturing what we’ve chatted about and making action plans for some of the exciting ideas. You should expect to see a few bits and pieces published with some of these thoughts and plans, but for now, here are our highlights from the week and the big things we learned (both this week and in the last year). Maybe some of these will resonate with you.

Things we learned about social work and social care in the last year:

It's more complex than we thought and will take a long time to really change

Curious impulses are definitely there, but often hampered by the environment

That structural change in social care will lag behind structural change in social work

There's a lot of connections and there's value in taking space to explore them

There are change makers making good progress in local areas

There are change makers making good progress in local areas

Whilst social care funding is under pressure, change is difficult

Systems change takes time

The will to improve is strong, but people are often unsure on methods for improvement

There is always something we don't know about that is really important to people working in our sector

Things we learned in Learning Week:

Learning is both a process and a product

How to link in better with other parts of Iriss - particularly the wider ASP work

How we have so many ideas for what we could do, but are limited by capacity and funding!!

How we can improve our comms and for it to be a full team effort

we know more than we think we do

We are good at generating ideas but need to work on implementing them

We know more than we think we do

Impressed by the creativity of colleagues and their knowledge of the repertoire of Taylor Swift and trees

We are never short of ideas

And our own highlights: 

Getting together to brainstorm creates loads of ideas

Having time to focus on organisational development

The shared vision for transformational change blew me away

Having opportunities to talk with colleagues I don't always have as much contact with.

It reminded me what makes Iriss special, a small team with tons of expertise

It reminded me what makes Iriss special, a small team with tons of expertise

It has been great to spend time learning about all the work happening and future plans

Good to spend time as a team discussing new ideas

Was great to have some Board members come along and contribute on the first day

I hugely value this time to combine reflection and planning for the future