What it was
Before HellaCoach, I spent years contracting across the North West, and one of the pieces of work I'm proudest of was the Greater Manchester Care Alliance, where I worked as Digital Health Lead on an initiative set up by Andy Burnham when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. He's Prime Minister now, which still makes me smile when I say it. I was there until COVID pulled me over to the Northern Care Alliance, so I was still working my way through the pandemic.
The idea was simple and ambitious at the same time. Around one table sat people from the police, the prison service, social services, education and maternity services. Together they took on problems that nobody owns outright: homelessness, gaps in local transport, making sure children were ready for school by the age of five. Problems that don't sit neatly inside any single organisation.
The lesson that changed how I work
If you only treat the symptom standing in front of you, you'll be treating it again next year.
The headline lesson for me was the whole person approach. When we looked at a problem, homelessness is the clearest example, the first step was applying the PESTLE model: the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental forces around the problem. That gives you the shape of it. But PESTLE is just the first step. The real work came from going deeper, really understanding what the emotional and environmental drivers of that problem were.
That's where going back in time comes in. How did this person end up here? What was their education like? What was going on at home? Were Social Services involved, and if so, what happened next? Because if you only ever treat the symptom you're looking at, you'll be treating it again next year, and the year after that.
Whole system, not single service
That's also why the board mattered. No single service owns a problem like homelessness. Housing, health, education, policing and social care each hold a piece of it, and the fix only works when the pieces point the same way.
It's the same in any organisation. The problem rarely lives in the department where it shows up. The conflict between two teams is usually an upstream decision wearing a disguise.
Where it led
That kind of whole-system thinking ripples forward. The Alliance's work led into the setup of the Bee Network, Greater Manchester's public transport system. Where a patchwork of suppliers made getting around confusing and expensive, the Bee Network brought cheaper, clearer pricing, and with it better access to work and education.
That matters more than it sounds, because getting to work and getting to education shows up directly in homelessness statistics. Homelessness in Manchester is still an ongoing problem. The Bee Network is just one of the initiatives working towards helping with that. And that's the point: real change is a collection of connected efforts, not one dramatic fix.
Change fails without the people
The other thing this work cemented for me: transformation doesn't land if the humans aren't with you. You can map the process perfectly and still fail, because nobody asked what it would feel like for the people living inside it: their personalities, their workload, whether any of the benefit actually reaches them. Leave that out of the plan, and the change usually fails.
Where I carry it now
Everything I do as a coach and analyst stands on this. When I work with a leader or a team, I ask the same question the Care Alliance taught me: where did this actually start? The argument in the meeting room is rarely the real problem; it's the symptom of something upstream.
If your organisation keeps solving the same problem year after year, that's usually the sign. Everyone's treating the symptom, and nobody has walked back to the beginning.
I tell the full story of this work, and how I became a business analyst in the first place, in my episode of Community Talk. You can watch it on YouTube here.