We are beta testing a new service to record health check scores. Please see the new site here to enter your scores.
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Frequently asked questions about the healthcheck.
The healthcheck is a check on the health of you Transition group. Our experience of many different Transition groups is that the essential ingredients on the health check are the most important ones to get right to give your group a very good chance of working well and thriving. This proposition has been tried out in many different groups and in many different countries and has been modified to reflect what other group have said contributes to a successful group.
You can do it either way, but you will get the most out of it by doing it as a group as it means that you compare results and have conversations about things that matter. These conversations are more important than the scores, because they encourage you to reflect and evaluate how you work, and can help you to work together better. The health check gets you to reflect, and focus your attention on those things that are most important for running a high functioning Transition group. Doing this together can help you build a common story and understanding on what’s important, and to help to unpack projects or events that might have gone wrong in the past so you can do things better in the future. This should help build your group’s cohesion and resilience.
It is all just information. Some people we know are harder ‘markers’ than others. What is important is that you come to a common understanding of how to go forward by learning from and celebrating mistakes or things that didn’t go so well in the past. The scores are just crude indications. The understanding behind the scores is what is really important.
We took a very severe look at the Transition model and process and stripped down it down to these fundamental ingredients. The analogy we used in The Transition Companion was in baking a cake you need some basic ingredients, like some kind of flour, something to sweeten, and to give it flavour. But that cake would be very basic, and of course you would want to put some other flavourings, decorate it, etc. So yes the other ingredients are still useful and for some vital, but generally our experience so far is the ones in the Health check are the critical ones.
This was the first attempt we made to explain what the Transition model and process was and how to do it. Although we liked the very simple approach of 12 steps, we soon realised that this was not a step by step, linear process, and that not all of the steps were actually steps. Some steps were tools, some things to be aware of. So, as in all good experiments, we changed how we talked about Transition based on the real world experience of thousands of Transition groups around the world to come to this way. It is based on our understanding of the non linear and systematic way in which Transition works.