Secret Musings of a Change Agent 10 - Helen Sharp

What makes ordinary people great at making change happen?  What characteristics do they share?  What path have they followed?  What’s their attitude to failure? And what advice would they give to others?  I’m continuing my mission to understand more to help us understand how we build change capacity in our organisations for the future.  This week, I’m talking to Helen Sharp, Director of Ideas Alliance.

I first met Helen when I started to seriously think about working for myself.  A colleague connected us and I remember feeling quite overwhelmed in a really positive way by Helen’s energy, warmth, generosity and honesty.  I felt a virtual arm go round my shoulder and a welcoming into a new world.  A community of kindred spirits saying there’s a whole other world of us out here, come and join us, we’ll take care of you and you can help take care of us.  And that had a big impact on my decision to go it alone.  Because actually, I realised I wouldn’t be going it alone at all.  Subsequently I went on to learn about the work that Helen and her colleagues at Ideas Alliance do and it’s awesome.  Ideas Alliance is a social enterprise that builds bridges between communities and public services - they are all about communities, co-production and collaboration.  Not in some ethereal aspirational way but in a really grounded way that’s rooted in experience and absolutely clear that by working with people instead of doing to them, better decisions get made and everyone benefits from improved outcomes.  So what’s Helen’s story and what can we learn from her?

Helen started her career as a frontline worker in homelessness working for a large voluntary sector organisation.  She wanted to make a difference to peoples’ lives but soon became uncomfortable with the way services were run.  She could see that far from reducing homelessness, they were actually perpetuating it because they were driven by how to run services most efficiently rather than what was best for the people they were serving.  Helen and a group of friends wrote to the Chief Executive to make the case for why a different model would be better for people.  They weren’t heard and Helen left.  What Helen was really interested in was how to help people make changes to their lives.  She got a job at Lambeth Council and learned motivational interviewing.  A little further down the line Helen “fell into commissioning”.  When Helen was on maternity leave, Lambeth moved to a cooperative model and when she came back, she was asked to work on a cooperative approach to commissioning.  This is where Helen has what she describes as her “lightbulb moment”.  She attended a co-production workshop run by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and she knew that co-production was absolutely what she needed to enable the Council to do. 

Helen reflects that she meets so many people who think they’re doing the right thing and then they experience something, the lightbulb moment happens and they get this clarity that they need to do something different.  There’s an interesting question in here for us change agents - how do we create more lightbulb moments for people so that they see the need for change?  How do we tell our stories in a way that enables people to connect with them?  How do we convey different in a way that means people go “yes, I get it and it’s what we need to do”?

Inspired by what she’d learnt, Helen proceeded to work with colleagues from NEF to co-produce two tenders with young people.  As a commissioner she had colleagues tell her “you can’t go and talk to young people, you’re not a youth worker” which is symptomatic of how we can box people into whatever their role profile tells them they are.  Helen was really proud of the work she led and knew it would make a difference.  Helen goes on to talk about how both tenders were “sabotaged” as they progressed through organisational governance so never proceeded.  She talks of how providers - both in-house and external - made representations that were fundamentally driven by fear and a desire to maintain the status quo.  She talks of “being shouted at by people who were scared”.  Shortly after, Helen left and went to work for NEF.

It’s this experience that Helen draws on to reflect what she’s learned from failure.  She learned how tricky it can be to navigate power and of the importance of having people on board who won’t block and will actively unblock to make things happen.  She talks of how she should have taken key people out for a coffee, connected with them, and listened more to them.  She also talks of how she assumed everyone knew what she was talking about and how she learned she needs to test this out more.  Helen reflects that her enthusiasm means she can sometimes get carried away and lose people.  

Building relationships

“We should have gone for coffee” - Helen reflects on the importance of relationships.

When I ask Helen if lived experience has played a role in her journey she talks of her interest in people.  She likes people and that drives her passion.  She also talks about her low tolerance of not being happy or content which I guess is what propelled her to leave places and go where she could find her happy.  Working at NEF meant Helen got to work with like minded souls.  She realised she loves working with “change people” because they are playful and nimble and want to change things.  NEF was an important stepping stone towards self employment for Helen and colleagues there, Julia and Lucy were key influencers in her journey.  They helped her to see that there’s a different way and that she had an important role in making it happen.

Another big influence on Helen has been Helen Sanderson, a woman Helen describes as very clever and pioneering.  Helen Sanderson has led huge change in the world of social care and more recently self-managing teams and is hugely skilled in making things happen - especially when she’s told she can’t.  The two Helens worked together briefly and Helen was touched when she received a thank you card from HS - a small gesture that had a big impact because it conveyed “I value you”.  

I value you

A small gesture from a colleague with a big impact

As many other change agents I’ve spoken to have have described, Helen talks of how being someone who wants to make change happen and bring different, can be a lonely place to be in an organisation.  She wanted to create a movement - an alliance of like minded souls intent on making change happen.  And so was born the Ideas Alliance.

Helen says her superpower is her energy - she’s confident in the knowledge that she’s logical, rational and has a plethora of stories to tell. This confidence translates into a level of energy that blows people away and the compliments she gets as a result further feed her superpower energy and passion.

Helen’s advice for aspiring agents of change is to surround yourself with people you like:  don’t try to do everything on your own;  don’t try to influence people who don’t want to be influenced;  find people who love doing what you do and surround yourself with them.   She finishes by saying build yourself a work family and then it becomes good fun.  And I for one feel very privileged to be part of Helen’s work family.

I found it really interesting talking to Helen, especially hearing about her confidence to move on when she wasn’t able to make the difference she wanted to and her perspectives on not trying to influence people who don’t want to be influenced.   If you enjoyed this blog and would like to understand more about what makes a great change agent check out my blog series for more “Secret Musings of a Change Agent”.