Clever Together’s Next Chapter
Clever Together is evolving and growing to become a people participation and strategy agency, with a twist. We have two business units, Clever Together Conversations and Clever Together Thought Partners, that develop and deploy unique insights, methods, and people participation technologies. Our units can be commissioned separately or together to ensure people have voice and leaders act with more wisdom.
Clever Together Conversations
We are proud that Clever Together has been at the forefront of innovation and transformation for over ten years and continues to put people at the heart of change, supporting clients in health and care, higher education, local authorities and in the private sector. Our multidisciplinary Conversations team create psychologically safe digital and physical spaces, where the voice of the people, en masse, are brought to the centre of change and understanding. At speed and at scale. We provide leaders with connectivity, inclusion, insight, and shared ownership.
The evolution of CT Conversations allows us to focus on our signature services to deliver strategy co-creation and culture and workplace transformation, that have transformed so many organisations – at local, regional, and national levels. We also bring the spirit of co-creation to other complex issues in customised conversations to help leaders explore and understand issues and priorities from the diverse perspectives of their people and stakeholders, or larger complex conversations to explore and co-create insights and then ignite change, seamlessly collaborating with our Thought Partners Unit to ensure you have the best support possible.
Martin Connolly is our new Managing Director of Clever Together Conversations. Martin has led the continued growth and expansion of Clever Together since joining as our Commercial Director in 2021. He is an active Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has a passion for innovation, change and creating a better future. Before joining Clever Together, Martin worked as a social value consultant, helping both private and public sector procurement enhance value created in communities, and has over ten years’ experience in financial services and relationship management. In 2020, he was elected as public governor to serve on the Council of Governors at Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.
Over recent months, our Conversations team has brought the voices of hundreds of thousands of people to the centre of change and innovation in co-creation and crowdsourcing projects such as:
- Co-creating new national strategies for Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) and for the future of HR and OD professionals – ground-breaking and innovative engagements that brought large and diverse stakeholders together for deliberative conversations to co-create their futures together for the first time.
- Refreshing our seminal work with Leeds Teaching Hospital where we originally co-created The Leeds Way with staff and revisited values and behaviours in 2022 with a Trust-wide engagement.
- Supporting and developing the creation of new corporate strategies with staff and partners at South Yorkshire ICB, Derby and Derbyshire ICB, and University Hospitals Leicester among others as part of our signature strategy co-creation – helping bring clarity and alignment on a strategic framework that is shared and owned by everyone – including the vision, purpose, goals, values, and behaviours for the entire organisations.
- Co-creating positive cultures for positive performance with our signature culture work with organisations such as Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospitals Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust and Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Foundation Trust among others – elevating the voices of those with lived experiences to help leaders get clarity on real context, how values are lived, how people treat each other, to co-create a better place to work and so that people are well led, well managed, with meaningful work in an environment that is fit for purpose.
Clever Together Thought Partners
Our newly defined Clever Together Thought Partners team works with leaders to take radical responsibility as they seek to enable meaningful positive humane change, by making sense of and navigating complexity. Our fast-growing Thought Partner unit is passionate about providing in-depth understanding, co-creating solutions, and enabling positive impact on global issues through advocacy, igniting social movements, the deployment of new tools, and leadership mentoring. They have been focusing on a number of wicked issues, including:
- the global physical and mental wellbeing crisis,
- the increasing use of data and decision-making technologies shaping our individual choices, as well as society and democracies at large, and
- barriers to having kind, positive, and adaptive workplaces.
Lidia Velkova is our new Managing Director of Clever Together Thought Partners. Lidia’s background is in global issues management and strategic communications. Before coming on board at Clever Together, Lidia held global public affairs roles in the communications agencies Edelman and APCO Worldwide. She also worked as Development Director for a national UK charity focused on childhood obesity, physical and mental wellbeing. She is passionate about putting deeper values and ethics at the centre of how organisations use data and technologies to influence people’s choices and behaviour and the impact that has on society and democracy as a whole.
Over recent months our Thought Partners team has been:
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Partnering with a Global Food Manufacturer to rethink:
- Responsible Marketing – understanding and navigating the complexity of ever-evolving approaches to advertising, enabled by data and technology, and expectations by consumers and stakeholders. The insights and strategic counsel we’ve provided has helped our client to remain a leader in this space and to have a positive impact through the influence which its global brand advertising has on people’s choices and its effects on their physical and mental health as well as wider society.
- A Crowdsourced Approach to Issues Prioritisation - developing a bespoke model to understand and measure how issues develop, their importance to stakeholders and business performance. True to the Clever Together mission, we built a platform that enables more voices to contribute insights and data that feed into the prioritisation model. Our ongoing collaboration has brought evidence and a standardised approach to prioritising issues and allocating resources to addressing them. Clever Together Thought Partners is currently exploring what other resource allocation and prioritisation decisions can be better made through this innovative approach.
At Clever Together, we value knowledge sharing and are always open to discussing with you how our methods might help, and how you can benefit from innovative ways to co-create your future, strategies, help you tap into the wisdom of your people or explore and understand complex issues. To find out if either our Thought Partners or Conversations team can support you, Martin and Lidia can be contacted at Martin.Connolly@clevertogether.com and Lidia.Velkova@clevertogether.com .
