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Section 4 of 6
Pathway 4: Managing complexity

How practice leaders can manage complexity in practice

With a clearer sense of how you want to manage complexity, these practical tools will help you to:  

  • make informed decisions 
  • streamline service delivery 
  • build a supportive environment that enhances staff well-being and performance.  

By applying these approaches, you’ll help your teams to both:  

  • lead with confidence in demanding environments 
  • strengthen their ability to deliver high quality services. 

These are separated into suggestions that will benefit you, your teams, and your work with wider stakeholders. 

Which of the activities below do you think you, your supervisees and service would most benefit from doing? Choose at least one activity from each section to experiment with in your leadership practice.

Thinking about yourself

Strategic scenario planning

Engage in strategic scenario planning sessions where you explore potential future challenges within children’s services, such as policy changes, budget cuts, or emerging social issues.

Develop long-term action plans that balance risk, resource allocation, and service outcomes, developing your ability to lead through complex, evolving environments.

Multi-service field visits

Visit frontline services across departments, including health, education, and housing, to observe how their operations contribute to managing complex cases.

Use these insights to inform strategic decisions on resource allocation, service coordination, and leadership interventions.

Thinking about your teams

Accountability storytelling

Create a storytelling project where staff share the successes and challenges they experienced in being accountable to the people they serve.

Sharing these stories internally encourages open discussion and gives people the chance to learn from each other’s experiences and improve their own accountability.

Ambitious goals forum

Launch a forum dedicated to discussing high expectations and ambitious goals. Include a segment on how diverse backgrounds and experiences can help achieve these goals and promote inclusivity in aspirations.

Cross-department shadowing with an equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) focus

Implement shadowing programmes where staff can learn from colleagues who work with specific populations such as:  

  • refugee families 
  • young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other (LGBTQ+) 
  • children with disabilities 

This will spark curiosity about how different identities intersect with social care and encourage staff to think more inclusively about their practice.

Thinking about the wider system

Cross-service executive problem-solving groups 

Lead or participate in senior-level problem-solving groups that bring together directors and senior leaders from various sectors.

Manage shared challenges such as resource optimisation, service integration, and workforce resilience. These will produce collective strategies for managing complex, system-wide issues.

Stakeholder alignment reviews 

Conduct reviews where you and senior leaders from partner agencies map out current service overlaps, gaps, and conflicting priorities.

These reviews provide opportunities to realign stakeholder efforts, refine roles, and strengthen collaborative frameworks for managing complexity across systems.

Over to you 

After you’ve reviewed these activities, choose one from each section that you’d like to experiment with. You can use the 4C leadership capability framework action plan to detail when and where you’ll try these out and reflect on their effect over time.

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The resources have been developed by Frontline in collaboration with DfE.
Published: 30 January 2025
Last updated: 30 January 2025