HOW NEW MEDIA IS CHANGING THE WAY WE GO ABOUT CHANGE

Dr. Helen Bevan is recognised globally for her expertise in change leadership in the health sector and as a pioneer in the use of social movement leadership principles.

She provides advice, guidance, and training on large-scale transformational change to leaders of health and care systems across the world. In 2000 Helen was awarded the OBE for Services to Healthcare, and in 2008 (the 60th anniversary of the NHS) she was recognised as one of the 60 most influential people in the history of the NHS. In 2012, her NHS Change Day initiative won the global "Leaders Everywhere" challenge run by Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Consulting.

Helen’s previous leadership roles in local government and education were always about leading change, helping people think differently and building new skills. She currently leads the NHS Horizons team, generating ideas and knowledge to enable the spread of improvements at scale.

Helen’s team uses a variety of different tools and approaches including social movement thinking, community organising, improvement science, accelerated design and digital connectivity. It champions the role of emerging leaders, students and trainees at the forefront of radical change.

We’re very excited to welcome Helen Bevan to the Centre for Applied Linguistics to talk about social movement leadership principles and digital connectivity in large-scale transformational change. As well as strategies for leading change through new media practices, she’ll present a case study that links her closely to the University of Warwick and our Social Sciences faculty.

Rolf (official #ambassacat for the university) is a twitter phenomenon in his own right. He holds a University of Warwick ID card and patrols the campus daily, posting updates and interacting with the campus community and colleagues on the other side of the world. His movements are captured and shared online by the students and staff among his 7000+ twitter followers. Rolf, who wears a specially commissioned GPS tracker to cover his exceptional 3km roaming range (10 x bigger than the average cat) has been featured in the mainstream media and in an exhibition of university cats in the Netherlands.

He’s asked Helen to emphasise the positive impact of his online and IRL presence, and how his 2,500+ tweets to date represent the increasing importance of cats in the public sphere (Podhovnik, 2016).