Dr Nick Waggett

I enjoy photography and it is one of my main sources, and expressions, of creativity. I like to incorporate photography and imagery into my consultancy work as a way of opening up conversations and coming at organizational dilemmas from a fresh perspective. My approach is to help people make sense of the challenges they face, find new ways to address them and perform effectively. In this way, they are left with additional capacities to meet new and different challenges. A meaningful image creates something new out of what life presents you with. Andrew Paynter, Photographer Working with  imagery of all kinds is a source of great potential to unstick teams, organizations and leaders, and help them towards creative and effective responses to the rapidly evolving demands facing all sectors. If the answer to new market challenges was obvious then everyone would be doing it! The use of imagery is a way in which the hidden and ‘beneath the surface’ can be made visible and thought about....

  Like, what colour is a conversation with a colleague? All those bits that might not be reflected in the calendar. The research I undertook for my Professional Doctorate (completed in 2017) explored how technology alters organizational processes and structures. The above quote relates to the use of the Outlook calendar to manage workload in a health clinic. Some of the findings anticipated the transformation of work that was accelerated by the pandemic and enabled by technology.  For example, I showed how technology transports work across an organization’s usual boundaries of time (9-5) and place (the office). The affordances of technology (i.e. what it enables) have many positive aspects, such as maintaining delivery of critical services during a global pandemic. Society’s capacity to deliver its core functions was many times greater in 2020 that it was 10 or 50 years earlier. Some impacts were unexpected – such as accelerating the decline in physical newspaper sales beca...

Creativity is central to organizational success Creativity is crucial in responding to change, innovation, growth, re-structuring and challenges in the market or operating environment. Creativity in these situations is needed to enable new thoughts, connections and ideas to arise, and to avoid getting stuck in old and unhelpful patterns of working.  Think of the sports team that has a set way of playing that has worked for them but who can’t adapt to other teams improving or using new techniques. A once successful team will steadily, or even rapidly, become second best. Doing the same thing over and over - when it has been shown to be ineffective or even damaging - is a sign of something unhealthy going on in the team, organization or business. To unstick  and move to a new, healthy and productive position requires curiosity, creativity and the generation of new ways of working and connecting with the client, customer or audience.  The problem is that these processes – ch...

Nick Waggett   (2012)   Ghosts in the care home: the nature of relationships in a home for people with learning disabilities,   Journal of Social Work Practice,   26:4,   443-457   Abstract: This paper considers the complex task of working with adults with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour in a care home and the impact on relationships within the staff group and wider organisation. Examples are drawn from an organisational consultation to a home with a history of disputes, grievances and sick leave. The metaphor of ghosts is used to explore the processes by which the residents' own traumatic histories come to be played out by the care home staff. The paper concludes that an increased understanding of organisational processes in the residential care sector may help staff form more helpful relationships with service users and hence lead to better outcomes. Keywords: process consultation, learning disabilities, projective identificati...

Waggett, N. 2017. Technology at Work: An Investigation of Technology as a Mediator of Organizational Processes in the Human Services and the Implications for Consultancy Practice. Prof Doc Thesis University of East London Social Sciences Abstract: Increasing technology use in the organization of human services is seen as essential to achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness. However, the promises may not be realised if technology generates processes and structures that are misaligned to the primary task of the service. How and why this occurs, and the role of unconscious and emotional factors, is insufficiently understood. There is limited guidance on how to work with technology in complex services where anxiety, and defences against it, may be a significant factor. Drawing on systems-psychodynamics, actor-network and process theory, this research addresses these gaps through a methodology in which human and technology are seen to operate symmetrically in the ongoing formation of...

CEO of the Association of Child Psychotherapists Dr Nick Waggett has recorded a webinar in which he discusses what we can learn from the experience of remote and online working during the  COVID-19 pandemic for the future provision of mental health services. Drawing on doctoral research on the impact of technology on organisational process, and recent experience of the ACP’s response to COVID-19, he argues that the many potential benefits of technology and online working will not be realised if we do not learn fully from this experience. Instead the risk is that a partial view of the efficiencies of online technology is implemented as being an ideal model which in reality does not meet the needs of many service users and places an excessive burden of anxiety on staff. To engage thoughtfully and creatively with these new opportunities an environment is needed where anxiety can be moderated and decisions made that are clinically led rather than being technologically determined. The w...

"We must learn from the experience of online working during the COVID-19 pandemic to meet the needs of all mental health service users." During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a rapid and quite remarkable take up of information and communication technologies that have facilitated the continued provision of critical mental health services, both for adults and for children and young people. An abrupt and dramatic switch to working from home and remote provision of services has been necessitated by the physical distancing and lockdown policies. This has been enabled by technologies such as video conferencing platforms and cloud storage, laptops and smart phones, in ways that would not have been possible even a few years ago.  People have commented on how different lockdown would have been for the public without Netflix and Amazon Prime. Equally, how different would it have been in mental health services without Zoom, Microsoft Teams and remote access to patient records?  As...