Laurie McMahon is a Professor in Health Policy at City University, London and Director of Loop2 - He has extensive experience in management and organisational development and change across a broad range of public and private sector organisations both in the UK and overseas.

He is the co-founder of The Office for Public Management (OPM) and before forming Loop2 led their healthcare practice. In his previous lives he was a Fellow of the King’s Fund, a senior consultant in overseas healthcare and in academic settings ran a series of highly successful post graduate management programmes for health care managers and professionals.

His main interests are in strategy development and implementation, organisational design and delivery, engineering large-scale organisational change and the use of behavioural modelling to understand complex ‘futures’. Recently he has focussed on helping provider and commissioner organizations respond to the introduction of market forces into the NHS.

He is also Policy Advisor to Nuffield Hospitals, Special Adviser for the WHO Office for ‘Investment for Health’, a Fellow of the Institute of Quality Management, and a Fellow of the Health Finance Management Association.

60 second Interview

How did you get into OD

I read my way into it really – as a kid back in the early 70s and running a big management training department in a flash of inspiration (and using someone else’s budget!) I bought the Addison Wesley series of books written by the likes of Ed Schein, Chris Argyris, Dick Beckhard, - people who were to become the founding fathers of the OD movement. And back then it was a movement too - it was very unusual to hear of anything that wasn’t a top down dirigiste view of how organisations work and how change might be managed. I was converted!

Who gave you your big breakthrough?
There have been a few! The first was a guy called John Phillips who trusted me enough to give me a job destabilising psychiatric hospitals in Wales – I had to learn a lot and fast but I got to understand the politics of change pretty well. The second ‘leg up’ was Iden Wickings who appointed me to a Fellow’s job at the King’s Fund College in London which brought me back to London and into the thick of radical whole system change in the health service. The third is meeting my friend Greg Parston – it wasn’t so much a breakthrough as a meeting of minds – he and I met at the Fund and together we designed and built the Office for Public Management. The working partnership lasted 17 years, created an institution and we are still good mates!

How has your work changed over the years?
Well I guess the world has caught up! There is now so much good in-house OD capacity in client organisations that the things that we thought were radical are now common place. As a result we are asked to move ‘over the horizon’ to deal with complex strategy issues or into the tight space between the rock and the hard place to tackle really wicked multi-stakeholder problems.

What are the secrets of your success?
Realising that it is the client’s success rather than my own that counts! Sounds a bit glib but unless you think about a problem from the perspective of their values, their interests, their aspirations it won’t work!

What is the most fun you have at work?
Getting large ‘rooms-full’ of people who entered feeling adversarial and bumptious to leave with an appreciation of the need for change and a shared commitment to make it happen. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end!

Who do you most like to work with?
I have really enjoyed working with David Mobbs, the Chief Executive of Nuffield Hospitals. David and his team are unbelievably patient focused and business minded - by working with them I have learnt so much from about how the private sector handles the delivery of public services. That has really extended our reach into the private sector and we have found that much of what we know about whole system change and dealing with complex sets of stakeholders reads acr

And the least?
Now we are running a small catalyst consultancy rather than a big OD consulting house with lots of mouths to feed I really don’t have to work with people I don’t like or whose mission I can’t believe in – it is one of the best things about setting up Loop2.

What are your worst nightmares?
Well - literally - I have a recurring dream about walking on stage in a packed theatre without even knowing the play let alone my lines! Apparently it’s a symptom of something called the ‘impostor syndrome’. I blame my Dad who when he found out that I was running a session at Manchester Business School said “What do you know that they want to hear – you’re just a boy from Barnet?!” I was 19 and living at home at the time. He’s less dismissive now – I think!

Favourite thing to do when not working
There are days when I would say sleeping – but apart from the necessities I would be sailing with my boys, riding my Ducati motorbike rather too fast or pottering around fixing things.