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As leaders, we spend a lot of time thinking about what needs to improve.

We worry about the challenges we know are coming and the risks that keep us awake at night. What we spend less time considering are the things we think are working well.

That might sound counterintuitive, but some of the most important opportunities for improvement can be hidden inside your strengths.

At Nexus Multi Academy Trust, we’ve spent years deliberately designing an operating model that works with and for our schools. We’ve never been interested in building a highly centralised organisation.

External oversight

Instead, we’ve developed a model that combines strong central support with genuine agency for school leaders, allowing them to become self-actualised in their own right or, as the trust vision says, become the best they can be.

As part of this approach, we have always tried to challenge unnecessary bureaucracy and design systems around what schools actually need. However, even organisations with this focus can be too close to their own systems to see scope for improvements.

As we prepared for another period of growth and planned a merger with a similar-sized trust, we wanted to test our assumptions.

Were the systems, structures and processes that had got us this far genuinely fit for the present and the future? In essence: do we have blind spots?

To answer those questions, we commissioned an operational excellence review through the Centre for Education Operational Excellence.

The review took place over three days and included interviews, workshops, observations and analysis of key reports.

Staff at every level across our central functions were engaged, both in head office and in schools. A particularly important part of the process was gathering insight from our customers: our headteachers and teachers.

The final day included an interactive workshop where the findings and recommendations were presented, giving us the opportunity to seek detailed advice on how to structure a roadmap and take the recommendations forward in practice.

What we learned

Through this work, we gained a set of genuinely insightful and actionable recommendations to help improve our systems, including issues and opportunities we would not otherwise have identified.

Procurement is a good example. We’ve invested significant time and resource in creating strong procurement processes and governance, and the review confirmed these strengths.

However, it also highlighted that some processes experienced by school staff were more onerous than they needed to be.

We’d focused on designing an effective system for the centre, but not necessarily reflected on what that system felt like for people using it in schools every day. That insight has already led us to simplify guidance and introduce clearer process maps for schools.

Similarly, while we had rigorous processes for managing major transformation programmes and large-scale change projects, we paid less attention to smaller initiatives.

For example, the rollout of a new credit card reconciliation system wasn’t something we considered to be a major project, but it affected a large number of staff and their day-to-day experience. Small thing, big change.

The review challenged us to think about change through the eyes of the people using it, rather than through the scale of the project itself.

Another blind spot concerned how we match resource to demand across central services. Like many organisations, we often rely on professional judgement, intuition and experience. But as we grow, instinct alone isn’t enough.

How do you know you have the right amount of HR support? How do you measure demand on corporate finance teams? How do you move from intuition to evidence when planning capacity?

These are questions many trusts wrestle with, but rarely examine systematically.

Getting everyone aligned

Perhaps the most important lesson, however, was about the organisational commitment to transformation and continuous improvement.

We found a strong commitment to continuous improvement among our executive and senior leadership teams, but what became clear was that this mindset was not embedded consistently across every layer of the organisation.

As a result, we’re now investing in operational excellence training for middle leaders and frontline managers so continuous improvement becomes part of everyday practice, not just a leadership principle or an abstract concept.

We’ve also introduced new mechanisms for gathering feedback from schools, and strengthened the role of our school resource business partners as a bridge between schools and the central team.

None of these changes are revolutionary. What they represent is something more important: a better understanding of ourselves, and the natural evolution of our MAT into a more efficient public authority.

As trusts grow, it is easy to focus on what comes next: new schools, new responsibilities and new opportunities.

But successful growth depends as much on understanding your existing organisation as it does on planning for the future. The biggest risks are often not the problems you know about, but the blind spots you didn’t know you had.

Lana Stoyles is executive director of business transformation at Nexus Multi Academy Trust, which runs 21 special schools in South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire