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Introduces Caledonia Council, a business simulation specifically created to prepare senior managers in local government for major reorganization. Describes how it was designed in a partnership between client (Central Regional Council) and consultant (The Argyll Consulting Group) and has been rigorously tested with over 200 managers to date. Claims that it provides a highly realistic environment for managers to develop their leadership and management skills. Explains that this tool is wholly owned by Central Region and is currently being cascaded to middle management.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the impact of Appreciative Inquiry on the diagnostic phase of a management development programme. A case study of an organisation delivering both further and higher education will be used to illustrate how the involvement of a management population in the diagnosis and design of the programme resulted in individual, team and organisational learning. The use of Appreciative Inquiry challenges conventional methods of diagnosis and evaluation. One year later a second Appreciative Inquiry was adapted to become an evaluation tool. The outcomes of this work will be reported in part two of this article.

Appreciative Inquiry workshops involving 72 managers were used to encourage a collaborative approach to diagnostics prior to the launch of a management development programme. The workshops followed a four-stage structure. Small self-managed teams, with representation from different departments and levels of management, engaged in a diagnostic process with support from Lancaster facilitators.

Participants discovered new working practices for exploring and solving organisational issues and challenges. Individuals learned from the teamwork and established new networks and sources of innovation. The benefits of a collaborative approach included greater clarity on strategies, priorities and rigorous alignment of management development needs to the mission of achieving outstanding status.

Participants of the management development programme were actively engaged in the diagnosis of learning and development needs. The diagnostic phase accelerated engagement with learning across a broad spectrum of managers and key organisational stakeholders.

The use of Appreciative Inquiry as a diagnostic tool ensures that management development is firmly rooted in strategic priorities of the organisation. The approach ensures that all contributions are respected and this results in a higher quality dialogue across different parts of the organisation.

The paper is original in presenting a management development programme diagnosed and evaluated by organisational members. The result was practical, cost effective and sustainable development which transferred capability to the organisation. Part two of this article will report on Appreciative Inquiry as an evaluation tool and provide evidence of the sustainability of individual, team and organisational learning.

Points out that it is difficult to work learning directly with an organization′s strategic goals and needs. Reports on Scotland′s Central Regional Council′s approach which suggests that strategic goals and needs should be examined before a learning programme can be implemented. This is done by the Development Needs Analysis (DNA). Lists the subsequent benefits of DNA.

Describes a management development initiative undertaken by the Hertfordshire FE service to accelerate the process of cultural change throughout the area. College managers became the first group to experience a management development programme during 1990. In early 1991 a second phase of the initiative included workshops for Principals, Governors and LEA (FE) advisers and officers. All training and development programmes are designed to be client‐centred, demonstrating both the process and benefits of this style during the learning experience.

The purpose of this paper is to report on qualitative research conducted to evaluate the sustainability of learning derived from a novel leadership development process which involves a short period of retreat. The findings aim to provide evidence of the impact of an “inside outside” approach to leadership development on the performance of managers back in their organisations. The paper seeks to challenge the traditional approach to the outdoor management development favoured by trainers in the 1990s and offer an alternative learning method that ensures the transfer of practical outcomes to the workplace.

A semi‐structured survey was conducted with 50 senior leaders within two large UK corporations. The survey results were cross‐referenced with desk research to explore reflective approaches to leadership development in the UK and the USA. Participants' written reflections post‐retreat and one year later were used to supplement the findings. The target population included cohorts of leaders who had participated in a leadership development programme from 2003‐2006.

The paper finds that the process of retreat acts as a catalyst for both emotional and intellectual learning. Through the training the participants were able to access intuitive knowledge about themselves, their lives and the impact of their leadership on the organisation.

Links were established between the “inside out” approach of Wilderness Thinking and tangible outcomes back on their workplace. The practical changes initiated by leaders exposed to Wilderness Thinking counters the traditional challenge made to outdoor management development in the limited success with learning transfer to sponsoring organisations.

“Wilderness Thinking” represents a breakthrough in leadership training and development through a unique approach to the use of outdoors to personal change and learning transfer. The findings of the paper add to the debate about the role of outdoor management development in the development of leaders.

Describes the development of a leadership approach in which the outdoors became an environment for personal reflection.

Reports on the pilot findings from research conducted with 50 managers from Airbus UK and TOTAL and contribute to knowledge about reflective approaches to leadership development

A process of retreat became a catalyst for reflective learning about leadership among 50 managers from Airbus UK and TOTAL. The findings challenge OMD and SMD and their specific use of the outdoors as a medium for individual learning.

Evidence was found that wilderness thinking represents an innovation in reflective learning which challenges the main trends in the use of the outdoors to develop leaders

The aim of the paper is to report on application of Appreciative Inquiry to the evaluation of a management development programme involving 72 managers from an organisation delivering further and higher education. The structure and ethos of Appreciative Inquiry resulted in stories of both individual and collaborative learning and the resultant impact on organisational performance. The evaluation data were compared with the outcomes of a previous appreciative inquiry and the discourse generated by participants indicated a shift to a more collaborative culture.

Part one of this article outlined a successful application of Appreciative Inquiry to the diagnosis of individual and organisational development needs involving the collaboration of participating managers. The same managers agreed to be part of a second Appreciative Inquiry, in 2012, to generate evaluation data on the impact of their management development on college performance. Content analysis was used with the qualitative data produced to formulate key themes. Deeper meanings and insights into organisational culture were derived from a later discourse analysis.

Evidence of a significant change in cross college collaboration was seen in both the content and discourse of the 2012 Appreciative Inquiry. The impact of this collaboration was demonstrated through stories of strategic thinking, innovative solutions and tangible performance improvement. Impact stories also revealed an interesting discursive shift amongst the management population and indicated a greater sense of personal accountability. Discourse analysis also revealed an emerging realisation that interdependent nature of college business was the source of learning about individual and organisational performance.

The workshop teams from the second Appreciative Inquiry were not the same configuration as the original diagnostic workshops described in part one of this article. During the management development programme, action learning sets were created with team coaching support. The impact of team coaching on the sustainability of learning became clear during the second Appreciative Inquiry. The teams were more experienced at working collaboratively and their self-management of the process more confident and effective.

Appreciative Inquiry can be used to diagnose development needs, create an evaluation framework and later conduct an impact evaluation. In this case study, a management population of 72 were actively engaged in all three outcomes.

Appreciative Inquiry used as an evaluation tool ensured that managers had an active role in creating impact stories. The resultant discourse was the collaborative effort of 72 managers. The evaluation research was the co-creation of managers working in cross business and multi level action learning sets.

This paper seeks to investigate conditions under which entrepreneurs emerge as agents of effective and sustainable change in UK National Health Service Trusts.

The research synthesises literature on changing regulatory structures (“post‐bureaucracy”) and entrepreneurial behaviour to understand how individual identity construction is informed both by context and by individual attributes. Thematic analysis of interview data involving managers from 11 NHS Trusts, including detailed analysis of six transcripts, focuses on regulatory processes, the emergence of entrepreneurial behaviour and outcome variations in workplace innovation and improvement.

This study identifies co‐existing modes of regulation, which interact with individual behaviour, generating strategies differentiated as entrepreneurial or conformist. Four ideal types are identified: organisational entrepreneurship, resisted or dissonant entrepreneurship, conformity, and symbolic entrepreneurship. Analysis reinforces those literature findings, which suggest that the interaction of regulatory structures and the identity work of individuals influence the emergence of entrepreneurial behaviour and the effectiveness of change.

The ability to achieve effective and sustainable outcomes varies considerably even between NHS Trusts faced with comparable challenges in implementing nationally prescribed targets. This variance is explained in terms of the organisation's ability to generate the structures, processes, individual competence and motivation which enable employees at all levels to act entrepreneurially with the ability and legitimacy to achieve strategic goals by working creatively in the spaces between formal organisational structures.

The study identifies specific conditions, which stimulate the emergence of entrepreneurs as agents of effective and sustainable change in the NHS, identifying factors that policymakers should consider when implementing change.

This paper revolves around the central question: is it possible to do “proper ethnography” without complete participant observation? The authors draw upon a student's experiences of negotiating National Health Service (NHS) ethical approval requirements and access into the student's research field, a British NHS hospital and having to adapt data collection methods for the student's doctoral research. The authors examine some of the positional (insider/outsider, native gone academic), methodological (long-term/interrupted, overt/covert) and contextual challenges that threatened the student's ethnographic study.

The paper draws on reflexive vignettes written during the student's doctorate, capturing significant moments and issues within the student's research.

The authors highlight the temporal, practical, ethical and emotional challenges faced in attempting an ethnography of nursing culture within a highly regulated research environment. Having revealed the student's experience of researching this specific culture and finding ways to overcome these challenges, the authors conclude that the contemporary ethnographer needs to be increasingly flexible, opportunistic and somewhat covert.

The authors argue that it is possible to do “proper” and “good” ethnography without complete participant observation – it is not the method, the observation, that is the essence of ethnography, but whether the researcher achieves real understanding through thick descriptions of the culture that explain “what is really going on here”.

The authors hope to assist doctoral students engage in “good” ethnographic research within (potentially) risk-averse host organisations, such as the NHS, whilst being located in neo-liberal performative academic organisations (Foster, 2017; McCann et al., 2020). The authors wish to contribute to the journal to ensure good ethnography is accessible and achievable to (particularly) doctoral researchers who have to navigate complex challenges exacerbated by pressures in both the host and home cultures. The authors wish to see doctoral researchers survive and thrive in producing good organisational ethnographies to ensure such research is published (Watson 2012), cognisant of the pressures and targets to publish in top-ranked journals (Jones et al. 2020).

Having identified key challenges, the authors demonstrate how these can be addressed to ensure ethnography remains accessible to and achievable for, doctoral researchers, particularly in healthcare organisations. The authors conclude that understanding can be attained in what they propose as a hybrid form of “propportune” ethnography that blends the aim of the essence of “proper” anthropological approaches with the “opportunism” of contemporary data collection solutions.