What if the best way to change your system isn’t to wrestle it into shape… but to see it more clearly?

What if the best way to change your system isn’t to wrestle it into shape… but to see it more clearly? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_june-2025-national-commissioning-academy-activity-7322893924610600960-kqV- If you could change one thing about the system you work in, what would you choose? And what stops you from starting? Contact me if you want to join the National Commissioning Academy.

What if the best way to change your system isn’t to wrestle it into shape… but to see it more clearly? Contact me if you want to join the National Commissioning Academy.

The Academy returns this June, and I am quietly thrilled at what it makes possible. If you work anywhere across public services and have anything to do with outcomes, commissioning, or change, it is a practical, challenging, mind-shifting experience. Not a course, but a developmental collaboration. Not just theory, but real movement in the live issues you face.

At its heart, the Academy is about developing actionable focus — a phrase that should be a mantra in public service. Too often we see training offer knowledge without application, insight without agency. Here, we create the space for focused work on the real challenges you face, using powerful tools like systems mapping, outcomes frameworks, and coproduction methods — with coaching and facilitation to help you actually apply them.

Participants tell us it was not just learning but the chance to think and act differently that made the difference. That it gave them confidence to lead across boundaries, to build better markets, to address inequalities through inclusive commissioning, to move from firefighting into building conditions for system change.

This is not ‘how to commission better contracts’. It is about commissioning for whole-place outcomes, about growing system leadership, about making a difference where complexity cannot be simplified away. It is about real life, not tidy frameworks. Which is why we ground the work through anchor days in London and Birmingham — very kindly supported by Browne Jacobson — practical peer support, and war stories from people who have been through the real-world fire. And why the Academy itself is proudly a collaboration between a network of organisations across sectors, not a single provider.

Public service demands new ways of thinking and working. We need to shift from internal measures of success to what matters for people and communities. That is why our focus is on applying learning into your day job as we go — no waiting until ‘after the training’. You will develop and evolve a hundred-day plan throughout, turning #learning into #leadership.

Over 90 per cent of past participants rated the experience as excellent or highly relevant, and nearly 90 per cent would recommend it to colleagues. Not just because of content, but because of connections made — this is a #community of practice for change, building a growing alumni network nationally.

So if you want to be part of a movement towards smarter, fairer public service — to connect ideas, action, and outcomes — and you are willing to be challenged, not just comforted, then this could be for you.

#PublicService #Leadership #Transformation #Commissioning

If you could change one thing about the system you work in, what would you choose? And what stops you from starting?