How Changing Faces undertook a cross-team, no-holds-barred strategy process

Their fundamental strategy redesign focused on collaborative, evidence-based discovery and dismantled silos and created shared ownership.

The challenge

Changing Faces needed to develop a new organisational strategy. The charity faced a familiar challenge: how do you create genuine transformation rather than incremental adjustments? How do you avoid strategy development becoming a process where each department defends its territory, tweaks around the edges, and ultimately produces a compromise document that changes nothing fundamental?

The organisation knew it needed transformational change, not minor optimisation. But transformation requires difficult conversations – about what to stop doing, not just what to start. It requires challenging ingrained ways of working. And it requires breaking down the silos that naturally form when teams protect their budgets, their remits, and their familiar approaches.

As Claire Reynolds, former Director of Transformation at Changing Faces, describes it, the typical charity strategy process looks like this:

"Each team goes off and thinks about their area. They typically have an annual baseline budget that is often just extrapolated for the new strategic period, with some incremental growth planned year on year. There will be things each team wants to do, but they're only focused on their individual area."

Changing Faces needed something different. They needed a process that would genuinely interrogate what the organisation should be doing, grounded in evidence about what users actually needed, not what departments wanted to protect.

The approach

The strategy development was deliberately structured to prevent defensive positioning. It was collaborative and cross-team from the start. Crucially, as Claire describes:

"There were no questions that were off the table. We didn't shy away from difficult conversations."

The process didn't begin with "what are we doing now and how do we continue to do that, but maybe tweak around the edges." Instead, it was fundamental—genuinely starting from first principles about what the organisation existed to achieve.

The foundation was evidence, not opinion. The team examined existing evidence about user needs and service effectiveness. This helped to identify gaps in the current service reach and provision, as well as evidence gaps that led to new research being conducted. User-centred data drove the thinking rather than internal politics or departmental preferences.

They used a start/stop/continue framework—not just asking what new things to add, but honestly interrogating what should stop. This created space for difficult conversations that most strategy processes avoid.

Claire was heavily involved in leading this work, bringing her expertise in impact measurement, user-centred design and digital thinking. But this wasn't about digital imposing a view on the rest of the organisation. It was about bringing different perspectives together and letting evidence guide decisions.

The engagement was extensive. They socialised research findings across the organisation. They ran lunch and learns. They made the evidence visible. As Claire describes from earlier work at Alzheimer's Society, leading research into the diagnosis experience:

"We invested an awful lot of time socialising that research across different areas of the organisation. This really helped us improve the return on investment, as teams such as Policy saw its value in their area too, for example to support their campaigns with evidence, case studies and quotes.'"

At Changing Faces, by the time they reached decisions about the strategic theory of change and impact framework, these weren't imposed top-down. They emerged from the collaborative, evidence-based process.

The result

The strategy that emerged was structured fundamentally differently. Instead of being organised by internal team silos, "it was based around core strategic goals. They were the pillars to support the change we wanted to see. They were also how success would be measured."

Only at that point did they map team-led activities to objectives and KPIs: "This helped everyone to understand how we were all contributing to the achievement of strategic goals."

This created several shifts:

Broke down territorial budget protection. Teams were no longer defending departmental budgets in isolation. Resources were allocated based on strategic objectives.

Distributed KPIs against strategic objectives instead of departmental targets. This changed incentives—success wasn't about defending your team's metrics, but about collective progress toward shared goals.

Created genuine shared understanding. As Claire puts it: "We all understood what we were working towards." This wasn't lip service. It was the result of genuinely collaborative development where people had been involved in building the strategy, not just receiving it.

The structure of the organisation began to shift to match the strategic objectives rather than historical departmental boundaries. This is trajectory change—not just new goals, but fundamental reorganisation of how work happens.

This case study was developed based on an interview by Kris Tan with Claire Reynolds. Claire is the former Director of Transformation at Changing Faces, and is now Transformation Director at Healthia. Claude.ai supported in the synthesis and writing of the case study.