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
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 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 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
