Secret Musings of a Change Agent 3 - Cat Duncan Rees
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 on a mission to understand more. Join me as I delve deeper in my new blog series to help us all understand how we build change capacity for the future.
Cat Duncan-Rees is like spacedust for your brain!! Cat fizzes, whizzes, excites and sets off all kinds of questions, thoughts and connections in your brain when you talk to her. She sees the big picture of what matters and why and running through every vein in her being is a drive to make the world a better place for the people who inhabit it. She’a a rebel, a comrade, a crackerjack facilitator and a thoroughly nice person.
Cat is like space dust
She fizzes, whizzes and excites
I first met Cat a few years ago when I was looking for some support to co-design a programme of change that could support people - regardless of what organisation they were in, role they did, or level of seniority they held - to work in a strengths based way. I didn’t know what it would end up looking like but I was absolutely sure that if I involved people who had been on the receiving end of a strengths based approach and people who already worked in that way, I’d end up with a much better result than if I went down a traditional route.
A colleague gave me Cat’s details and we met up for a chat. Cat blew me away. She instantly “got” what I was looking for and she designed and facilitated an approach that took us all on a journey with great results. We’ve stayed connected ever since. Cat is one of my go-to people when I get stuck with my thinking or if I want to make sure there’s a strong voice of the people in whatever it is I’m doing.
Cat instantly got it
She designed and facilitated an approach that took us all on a journey
So what is it that makes Cat great at making change happen? What’s her story? And what can we all learn from Cat when we’re thinking about building change skills and capacity for the future? In my mission to understand more, I met up with Cat for a chat and to delve deeper.
After doing her A Levels, Cat worked in a community hub which for people who know her and see her passion for community connections won’t come as a surprise. She subsequently decided to go to University and made the bold decision to study for enjoyment doing a degree in social policy. She continued to work in care settings over a number of years and over time started to develop what she describes as a “niggle”. It didn’t feel right that services were recompensed based on the more people they drew in, and not on their ability to support people to be more independent.
For Cat, everything is connected
And it all comes back to what matters to people in the community.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Cat moved into a role as Strategy and Performance manager at her local Council - she’s not your usual “fit” with a corporate role. She was able to bring her knowledge from working in the community and her evolving facilitation talents to shape different approaches to supporting people. She developed a voucher scheme for carers that gave them flexibility as to when and how they accessed support and when asked to develop a commissioning strategy for day services, she chose to go right back to basics, asking people what they wanted and using these insights to shape a new approach which was grounded in personalisation.
Of note was how Cat talked about Mike Illingworth her manager at the time and Terry Dafter, the Director she worked for. It is clear that they, along with team mate Karen Kime, are some of the people who played a major role in influencing Cat’s approach to change. Ahead of their time for 18 years ago, they were advocates of flexible working, working from home and playing to the strengths of the team. Cat describes frequent conversations where the team would come together to share who was doing what, who wanted to get involved in what and how they could best utilise the strengths in the team. Cat talks fondly of working alongside Karen who was great at facilitating change in others and who generously shared her talents with Cat
Team Strengths
Cat recalls regular conversations to agree how best to play to individual strengths in the team as a key influence in her approach.
As Cat goes on to talk about her onward journey that eventually led her to be chief Curator of Change, working freelance to support others to make change happen, you can’t help but get a sense of the growing confidence Cat developed in doing what she instinctively knows to be right.
I found it fascinating that for her last few years of salaried employment she didn’t have a defined role as such but was proactively invited into spaces to troubleshoot and design approaches to engagement that would enable people to learn from opening up to different perspectives whilst at the same time being able to progress key deliverables. This is a space I’ve occupied myself and I know that it requires a big dose of holding your nerve and resilience. You have to get comfortable working in a space of tension because on the one hand you’re seen as a safe pair of hands due to the skills and approaches you bring whilst on the other, there’s a level of threat because of the challenge or sense of different that you open people up to.
Managing the tension
How does Cat manage the tension of being a purveyor of good trouble?
So where and how does Cat manage the tension of being a purveyor of good trouble and how does she keep resilient. She has a shed load of personal experience to draw on. It’s a sign of her authenticity that she’s open in talking about periods when she’s suffered through poor mental health including bouts of serious depression. She talks about the lifelong journey she is on and how many hours of therapy and learning to manage her mental health has given her the skills to process things in a different way and the confidence to apply this to her work. So she’s not afraid to challenge what isn’t working and she’s developed the resilience to recognise that when you’re trying to change things for the better, the sense of threat that can create for people isn’t personal.
Lived Experience
Cat’s lived experience has given her the skills to process things in a different way
Like most of us, Cat has also learned from failures along the way. One in particular that stood out for her is an occasion when she and a colleague were asked to facilitate an engagement session with people who accessed services out of the local area. The aim being to understand how the local authority that commissioned the service could support people closer to home if that’s what they wanted. During the session the CEO of the service caught sight of the session plan and started to question what Cat and her colleague were doing and why. Cat describes how they had fallen into the trap of trying to engineer what would come out of the session to get the “right result”.
After a very difficult conversation with a very unhappy Chief Executive, Cat reconnected with her gut and turned the situation on its head by starting with a blank page and using her skills to facilitate the session in a way that gave people freedom to contribute what they wanted to from where they were at. She turned it round and this challenging event taught Cat to trust her gut and have the confidence to facilitate in a way that doesn’t attempt to engineer an outcome. The result was the ‘right’ one, because it was grounded in what really mattered to the participants, and not the organisation or the workshop sponsors.
“The most natural thing in the world....”
Cat now describes as “the most natural thing in the world” her ability to be able to bring people on a journey through the conversations she has, holding the space of not knowing what will come up but having the confidence to know she’ll be able to work with it.
When I asked Cat to identify one change super power that she has, she talked about her ability to stop and listen to her gut, the unspoken that helps her to tap into how she feels and what will work.
And finally, her advice for aspiring change agents out there? Have the confidence to go with what you know makes sense. Don’t let people tell you are wrong. Recognise that the impact you have isn’t always measurable by statistics and find the people who you connect with as your source of support.
Cat is an enterprising and energetic practitioner running her own business. With more than 20 years’ experience of facilitating organisational and workforce development for a wide range of public sector organisations. Cat is also a national “coproduction” expert, a Pirate and Camerado! In her spare time she is also mum to three children.
@CatDRees
@Curatorsochange
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cat-duncan-rees-3666181a/
It was magnificent talking to Cat and getting under the skin of what makes her great at making change happen. If you enjoyed this blog and would like to understand more about what makes a great change agent so we can learn together how to build capacity for the future, check out my blog series for more “Secret Musings of a Change Agent”.
