Wrapping Up — and Looking Ahead
The Winter Seminar Series is now complete. When we return in the autumn, the series will have a new name — the Bigger Picture Thinking Seminar Series.
Before we get to what’s next, here is a look back at the five sessions that made up this year’s series — and the threads that ran through them.
The sessions
We opened in November 2025 with Dr Frank Reilly on co-production — what it actually is, where it falls short, and why relationships are at the heart of it. Frank’s central point was that co-production is not a process with an end point; it is a relationship, and one that can be spent without being replenished if the conditions aren’t right. Read the blog.
In December, Prof. Katharine McGowan joined us from Mount Royal University in Calgary to explore social innovation in complex systems. Her iceberg model — the idea that most of what drives a system’s behaviour is invisible — gave the room a shared language for something many people already felt instinctively: that working harder within broken systems is rarely the answer. Read the blog.
In January, Dr Helen Wilding and Dr Erica Gadsby brought a public health systems thinking lens to the series. We hope to have a blog to share from this session soon — watch this space.
February brought Andrew Laird and Sophie Coles from Mutual Ventures, exploring Radical Place Leadership — the argument that efficiency alone cannot solve the challenges facing public services, and that health and wellbeing are shaped by place as much as by clinical intervention. The discussion was honest about the pressures that make this kind of leadership difficult, and about the courage it takes to hold space for a different approach. Read the blog.
We closed in March with Neil McInroy — economist, activist, and Argyll resident — on community wealth building. Neil argued that if we want to tackle ill health, we need to be talking about the economy: who owns it, how wealth flows through it, and whether it actually works for the people who live here. Takki Sulaiman joined him to describe the work already under way locally, including a community wealth building charter approved by Argyll and Bute Council ahead of the new legislation. Read the blog.
What ran through it all
Looking back across the series, a few things kept surfacing. The tension between long-term, preventative work and the short-term pressures that dominate most systems. The importance of relationships — and how easily they can be spent without being rebuilt. The recognition that working harder within systems that aren’t designed for the outcomes we want is rarely enough: what’s needed is the patience and courage to work on the system itself.
Each speaker, in their own way, pointed towards the same thing: that communities are not the problem to be solved, but the resource to be supported. And that change at scale requires practice, movement, and policy working together — none of which can do the job alone.
Returning in the autumn
We are taking a break over the summer and will be back in the autumn as the Bigger Picture Thinking Seminar Series. If you would like to hear about dates and speakers when they are confirmed, sign up to the mailing list using the QR code on the series flyer, or keep an eye on the Communities Working Together pages.
Thank you to everyone who came along this year, and to the speakers who gave their time and thinking so generously.
Leave a Reply