Survive & Thrive Series Part 3 – Who Has a Seat at Your NDIS Strategic Table?

13 May 2025

Grab a coffee and set aside 9 minutes reading time to ask yourself honestly:

 “Does my organisation have the right expertise and experience to revitalise over the next 12 months, whilst we continue to respond to what is needed right now?”

This article explores how to identify the key players in your organisation, who has a seat at your NDIS strategic table and, and how to implement a structured transformation approach to drive the survival of your organisation.

In Part 2 of the Supporting Potential Survive and Thrive series, we addressed some of the critical drivers forcing change in the NDIS right now. NDIS Service Providers need to make a conscious decision if they want to be Blockbuster or Netflix.

If you’re still engaged in this series, were assuming that you want to be Netflix and that you understand that change is hard for everyone, but as the leader, you set the tone. In this fast paced and chaotic operating environment, you can’t do this on your own. You need to form a team that represents all facets of your organisation. By involving voices from frontline staff, operational leaders, and the people you serve, you create a collaborative environment where challenges are addressed holistically, and opportunities are seized with confidence.

When you empower your transformation team to challenge assumptions, identify blind spots, and co-create strategies that align with your vision while meeting the needs of those you serve, this collective effort fosters ownership, innovation, and a shared commitment to organisational growth.

A well-rounded transformation team brings diverse perspectives, ensuring that your strategic plans are not only comprehensive but also deeply relevant to the evolving NDIS landscape.

“Transformational success starts with the voices that drive impact. The time is NOW to engage the doers, the thinkers, and the changemakers.”

Optimising NDIS Service Success: Identifying Key Contributors and Structuring Effective Change Management to Transform for NDIS 2.0

The Step-by-Step Process

A study by IBM involving over 1,500 change management executives revealed that nearly 60% of projects aimed at achieving business change missed at least one objective or failed entirely. Without a clear and structured process, transformation efforts often lose momentum, suffer from misalignment, or fail to deliver sustainable outcomes.

Formalising your approach ensures that everyone, from the boardroom to the frontline, understands the direction, the reasons behind each change, and their role in making it happen.

It transforms change from a reactive scramble into a proactive, measurable journey. In the context of NDIS 2.0, where expectations, compliance, and participant outcomes are rapidly evolving, a step-by-step approach helps you navigate complexity, track progress, manage risk, maintain exit routes and build trust across your organisation.

Step 1: Attributes members of the transformation team ideally should have

Who you select to be on this team can significantly enhance the success of your NDIS 2.0 organisation. You need a team that not only navigates change effectively but strongly aligns with the values and goals organisation. Ideally you want people passionate about ensuring your organisation will emerge stronger and more capable.

Really challenge yourself during this step to think “Who in my organisation quietly demonstrates these skills?”

Beware the trap of relying too heavily on formal roles instead of actual influence.

Consider each of these attributes in your team members:

1. Adaptability: Members should be flexible and open to change, capable of adjusting to new processes, technologies, and ideas as they emerge throughout the transformation.
2. Visionary Thinking: Look for individuals who can see the bigger picture and have a strategic mindset. They should be able to envision the future state of the organisation and understand how different elements will interact within that future state.
3. Resilience: Transformation projects can be challenging and fraught with setbacks. Members need to be resilient, able to cope with obstacles and continue moving forward even when things don’t go as planned.
4. Collaborative Spirit: Effective team members should excel at working with others, sharing ideas, and building consensus. Collaboration is essential in transformation teams as it involves various departments and levels of an organisation.
5. Communication Skills: Strong verbal and written communication skills are crucial. Team members must be able to articulate ideas clearly, listen effectively, and persuade others to embrace change.
6. Problem-Solving Skills: Look for people who are not just problem identifiers but also problem solvers. They should be analytical and creative in finding solutions to complex issues that the transformation might entail.
7. Leadership and Influence: Even if not all members hold formal leadership positions, the ability to influence and lead others is important. They should inspire and motivate their colleagues, fostering a positive atmosphere and driving the team towards its goals.
8. Commitment to Learning: Transformation requires continual learning and adaptation. Members should be proactive learners, eager to update their knowledge and skills and to apply new understandings in their work.
9. Integrity and Accountability: Trustworthiness and a strong sense of duty are vital. Team members should hold themselves and others accountable for the project’s success, ensuring transparency and ethical behaviour in all activities.

In a perfect world, every team member would excel in all of these skills and attributes. But perfection is the enemy of progress, so as the leader, your role is to ensure balance and understand where each members strengths and weaknesses lie.

Step 2: Determine the composition of your transformation team  

McKinsey research shows that 7 percent of employees need to be involved in initiatives or milestones for the transformation to generate positive returns.

So, who is part of your 7%?

• You! (Obviously). Your vulnerability and bravery will ultimately be what supports your team to succeed. Depending on the size of your organisation, you may need to include additional members of your executive team, but senior leaders should not be any more than 2% of your 7% team. You can ensure you continue to have full leadership buy-in by appointing a transformation team member to report to the executive.
• Participants: If you were trying to design a new smartphone to take market share from Apple, would you have a transformation team that have never used smart devices? This may feel like a challenging undertaking, but by explaining what it is you want to achieve it and asking for help from the people receiving your services, you will not only be able to innovate faster, but you will support a more palatable transition for your participants. They will know they were integral to designing the services that they need and will get the most benefit from.
• Frontline Workers: They are directly involved with the people you serve and understand their needs intimately. Their insights are invaluable in shaping services that are both responsive and effective. Organisations that actively listen and act on recommendations from frontline employees are 80 percent more likely than their peers to implement new and better ways of doing things.
• Frontline Leaders: This group is the connection between the organisational vision and the daily outputs that work to achieve it. They will be able to support the vision with workable solutions that are more readily accepted by the broader staffing cohorts.
• Management Team: This group strategizes and steers the direction of the organisation, ensuring that the structures and systems that support operations align with long-term goals.
• Support Staff: Often overlooked, these contributors handle everything from administrative tasks to client communications, and their efficiency directly impacts service delivery.
• Stakeholders: This includes family members of clients, community partners, and funding bodies. Their engagement and feedback is crucial for adapting and improving services.
• A Project Manager: Someone who will break the work down into manageable tasks and monitor completion and impact.

Step 3: Rationalise and adjust your transformation team based on position

If you are an organisation of 200 people, you will have 14 people on the broader transformation team:

You and one other senior executive

2 participants with different support needs but representative of your broader cohort

2 influential frontline workers

2 frontline leaders

2 management team members with different business focuses

2 administrative support team representatives with different business focuses to the management team

1 stakeholder representative

1 project manager

Step 4: Allocating roles to members of the transformation team

In this step, each person on your transformation team gets a personalised “role card”.  You may be tempted to skip this step, thinking that everyone should have ‘equal’ roles or conform to their job title. DON’T.

Ensuring people have clarity about the expectations of their involvement will:

• • create ownership, focus, and accountability
  • prevent confusion and duplication
  • provide the confidence to contribute, even if it means disagreeing with a senior leader
  • making change feel relevant, not abstract as people understand their unique contribution is moving the vision forward
  • prevents groupthink and limits assumptions that “someone else” will handle the hard stuff

You can do this as an icebreaking activity within the team, but the following goals have to be determined:

• • the role’s purpose in the transformation
  • strengths they bring to the team
  • perspective to drive
  • a list of tasks to be completed
  • a checklist of what is needed for the role’s success. For instance, the KPIs assigned could be to gather input from 30% of peers about a proposal.

Step 5: Make adjustments to balance workload and avoid burnout

To make a transformation team effective, it’s not enough to clarify roles within the change process, you also need to acknowledge and adjust people’s day-to-day responsibilities. Transformation work requires time, energy, and focus. If team members are expected to contribute meaningfully while still carrying the full weight of their regular duties, progress will stall, or burnout will set in so leaders must proactively create space. This might mean reallocating tasks, arranging backfill, or temporarily shifting priorities. If you find this difficult, ask each member of your transformation team to identify the lowest value tasks that they complete each week. Risk assess the impact of those things not getting done.

By recognising the workload realities and planning for them upfront, you demonstrate that transformation is a serious, supported effort, not just an add-on to already stretched roles.

“When the waters rise, you need more than ‘quality’. You need people working together, minds thinking differently and using every skill and tool, regardless of its traditional use.  That’s what turns urgency + diversity into the innovative mindset that will set you apart.”

Structuring Your Change Management Approach

Once you have established the transformation team, the next step is to structure your change management approach. Effective change management in the NDIS context should be proactive, inclusive, and adaptive.

Your key role in this process is to not have all the solutions but to empower the team to identify and enable significant change based on strategic planning and active involvement.

You need to consider and prioritise:

• Structuring effective meetings and workshops is crucial. The goal should be open communication, creative problem-solving, and decisive action.
• Clear agendas with specific outcomes to be achieved. Not all team members need to be in every workshop or meeting, but if they are there, you need a strategy to ensure every team member is engaged in the discussion.
• Tracking progress against clearly defined indicators of success. These indicators might include client satisfaction scores, service delivery efficiencies, or compliance with NDIS guidelines.
• Interactive workshops designed to harness the collective expertise of the team, using techniques like brainstorming, role-playing, or scenario planning to explore new ideas. Post it notes are a very effective way of getting people to crystallise their ideas and share without being in the spotlight.
• Empowerment and recognising and nurturing the leadership potential within the team, allowing individuals to take ownership of projects and decisions. This not only enhances their skills but also drives their commitment to the transformation agenda.

Remember, your key role as the transformation leader isn’t to provide all the answers, but to foster the kind of dialogue that brings out the best thinking from the team.

Depending on your skill set and the previous operating models you have used, you may be able to do this best by taking one of the two following roles:

Facilitator – this means you don’t contribute to the problem identification or ideas generation,

OR

Transformation team member – You hire an external facilitator to guide the conversation, allowing you to participate in the discussion as an equal.

And as always, remember:

• You are a big screen TV. Employees notice when their bosses don’t change their own behaviours to adapt to the goals of transformation.
• Focus on making work more meaningful and expressing your appreciation to inspire and motivate employees.
• Continually evaluate whether your transformation efforts are delivering measurable value.

The Key Takeaways….

Who you choose and how you support them will shape your future

Transforming for NDIS 2.0 isn’t just about responding to regulatory shifts. You need to be deliberately shaping who you are as an organisation within the new landscape. The people at your strategic table will either unlock your next chapter or hold it back. By choosing the right mix of voices, clarifying their roles, and giving them the time and support they need, you’re not just forming a committee, you’re building a movement within your organisation.

Structured change is hard, but aimless change is fatal. So, formalise your approach, centre it around collaboration, and stay focused on creating value that’s real, measurable, and felt by the people you support.

The future is already here. The question is, are you building for it, or reacting to it?

How we can help

In today’s climate of tight overhead margins and a competitive labour market, resourcing your transformation team entirely with internal staff may not be feasible.

That’s where we come in. Our experienced project and change managers can provide the specialised support you need to keep your transformation on track.

We also offer skilled facilitation for transformation team meetings, maximising your time and ensuring meaningful, high-quality outcomes.

For broader strategic needs, we provide executive advisory and tailored support packages designed to empower NDIS businesses at every stage of growth and development.

Join us next fortnight for Part 4 of our NDIS Survive & Thrive Series – The Mirror not the Microscope

Revisiting what you as the leader and the broader organisation stand for. Is it intrinsically understood and evidenced? Simply put, are you walking your talk?

Outcome – to build or reaffirm confidence, clarity and consistency about your purpose to assist the organisation and its stakeholders  identify common ground and negotiate the continued chaos.

Get in touch

If you’d like confidential support to explore a fresh perspective, feel free to book a no-obligation chat via my bookings calendar or email me at angela@supportingpotential.com.au.

Get involved…

We’ll be sharing practical tips, real life examples, and expert insights every week on LinkedIn and we’ve love to hear your thoughts!

Follow along, join the conversation, and share these posts with your network. Let’s build a stronger, more adaptable NDIS community together.

Your partner in achieving compliance, growth and sustainability 

 

Angela Harvey

Managing Director of Supporting Potential

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