Alison Donaldson

The facilitation approach described here, though developed in artistic contexts, can easily be adapted to tackle serious organisational issues like team relationships, collaborative working and strategic planning. In a nutshell, it involves combining movement, material and words to create an emotionally safe, trusting landscape that is conducive to...

Kafka's book The Castle remains a brilliant and chilling allegory of the modern bureaucratic world. That world is generally associated with rules, hierarchy and rational organisation, but another typical feature of bureaucracy is copious documentation. A close reading of The Castle reveals numerous instances of the written word being used to block...

With this project, we set out to investigate how trusting relationships develop in the workplace, and the consequences of losing trust. We began by exploring relevant literature and undertaking in-depth case studies, and in our original proposal we suggested experimenting with form and length of narrative material. It soon became clear that one pag...

Communities of Influence tells the story of how a prominent UK non-profit organisation (Macmillan Cancer Support) has engaged both professionals and patients over the past two decades to improve cancer care. Dedicated staff at all levels of large healthcare organisations can be frustrated by a perceived inability to influence healthcare priorities...

When the Cancer Genetics Pilots Programme was established in 2004, Macmillan Cancer Support undertook to create and facilitate the work of a "National User Reference Group". The purpose of this group was to give service user representatives (patients and carers) from each of the seven pilot projects regular opportunities to meet and share experienc...

Many organizations find it a challenge to measure and evaluate the impact of complex organizational interventions. In this second of a two-part article (part one, ‘Connecting through Communities: How a Voluntary Organization Is Influencing Healthcare Policy and Practice’, appeared in the last issue of this journal), the authors relate how UK-based...

In recent years, the UK charity Macmillan Cancer Relief has been developing innovative ways of stimulating learning—among health professionals, patients and carers—to improve the experience of people living with cancer. In essence what it is doing is to create and support a number of groups and communities that ‘float’ around its organizational str...

In this report, published by PEP and Sussex University's Centre for Contemporary European Studies, the authors hope that union leaderships will again be able to exercise enough authority to create a unified strategy, despite current contrary strong pressures from sections of their membership. This strategy would consist not just in overall pay rest...