Police Scotland: Developing Vision 2030 – A Leapwise Case Study 

Introduction

Police Scotland (1) is a large and ambitious service, with outstanding detection rates for high harm crimes and a proven track record of providing good service to victims and witnesses.  

The Challenge

The service has made a number of changes and improvements over the past few years, but leaders had started to feel that lack of alignment on the force’s long-term priorities was causing increasing challenges. Across their Chief Constable’s priorities, joint strategy for policing and 9 enabler strategies the force had already made more than 55 commitments, identified more than 40 priorities and set 30 objectives. This complexity left many in the organisation, and external stakeholders, unclear on which goals and commitments were most important. There were growing signs that investment was spread too thinly across diverging initiatives, the workforce was becoming overwhelmed and buffeted by competing pressures, and departments were working too much in isolation towards individual goals, rather than on collective priorities.  

The executive team, under the leadership of new Chief Constable Jo Farrell, wanted to establish a direction of travel for the service that is straightforward and resilient – cutting through the complexity of the current landscape to create a single vision that can guide future decision making and drive meaningful impact over a few targeted areas. A key focus was renewing emphasis on frontline policing services that communities most value, and which employ a majority of Police Scotland personnel. The service commissioned Leapwise to collaborate on the design and articulation of a vision and directional objectives that tells the story of how the service will be different in 2030. 

Our Approach

Police Scotland had already done a significant amount of stakeholder engagement to better understand how they can provide an outstanding service to their communities, while protecting staff wellbeing. In response to budgetary pressures, work had also begun on their new Target Operating Model, intended to identify and reduce inefficiencies under the current model. Our approach built on these existing engagement insights while informing the development of the service’s new target operating model.  

Over three months the Leapwise team worked closely with Police Scotland to understand the desired focus of Vision 2030 and its directional objectives. It was imperative that the result resonated with a variety of stakeholders including the public, partners, the workforce and oversight bodies (the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) (2)  and Scottish Government (3) ). As such, we aimed to maximise engagement with each group, with a particular emphasis on workforce and senior leaders. As well as providing opportunities for input feedback, a collaborative approach looks to generate a sense of shared ownership over a project and its delivery, defining its goal at every level of the organisation and embedding it into the service’s culture.  

Over three months we: 

1. Conducted a rapid current state analysis to understand operational and community needs, through: 
   • Thorough review of existing strategy and force engagement work 
   • Review of the force’s performance data, including benchmarking with similar UK and international forces, where feasible 
   • Research into future trends affecting Scotland’s communities and crime environment, with a focus on ensuring the vision is resilient to anticipate demand and context shifts.
2. Conducted a focused engagement process which supplemented the force’s existing insights from 8000+ members of the public and workforce, by: 
   • Directly engaged nearly 300 members of the workforce, through focus groups, 1:1 interviews, onsite observations, use of an internal dialogue platform and live polling at force-wide senior leaders forums 
   • Used data from these engagements was synthesised to create an insight report summarising key areas of focus for the attention of the executive  
3. Gathered wider input and provided assurance to the SPA and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scottland (HMICS), through hosted forums and Q&A sessions around draft approaches (4) 
4. Collaborated with the Executive to design, refine and test the vision and objectives, by: 
   • Conducting a series of workshops with the executive team to design the vision and objectives – harnessing our prioritisation frameworks, workforce input, discussion and interactive polling techniques to surface and resolve different perspectives.    
   • Drafting various iterations the vision and objectives based on these workshops, and iterating them in smaller sessions with the Chief Constable and her Deputies.    
   • Testing each version developed through Chief Constable/ DCC sessions in subsequent Executives workshops, until the broader leadership group were comfortable with the result.    
   • Designing a detailed engagement and testing process for Police Scotland’s implementation with the wider workforce, including language testing methods.    
5. Worked with function leads to begin embedding vision and objectives across the organisation, by: 
   • Identifying the critical path to embedding the vision, including the seven change levers that would be most critical to success, and the immediate ‘quick wins’ that could start to embed the vision and objectives into BAU. 
   • Facilitating Leads for each of the levers stepped forward to present their delivery plans which they will be responsible for taking forward over the next year. 

Results

The challenge of developing a long-term vision is in the balance between the diverging interests of its stakeholders, and the need to organise behind just a few focussed and achievable priorities. The executive team’s ability to arrive at such a balance within challenging time constraints is testament to their collaboration and openness.  

Our work with Police Scotland has resulted in a single ‘on-a-page’ view that set out: 

• A single vision that clearly articulates four key areas of focus until 2030. This will set the course for the service and provide 4 areas of focus around which future decisions can be oriented. 
• 7 directional objectives, whichexpand on how the force will deliver on the vision’s 4 focus areas. These will provide a more refined and tangible set of objectives for business areas to guide investment, tasking, change and performance.
• 7 statements on how objectives would be achieved, to provide additional context and clarity  

This asset, and significant supporting data and information from engagement, formed a foundation for Police Scotland’s 3-year Business Plan (5) published in September 2024. Alongside this, we clarified: 

• The critical path for embedding the vision, including by defining immediate next steps to establish the legitimacy and the vision.   
• A high-level medium-term plan to structure further activity and performance monitoring around. 

“I was impressed by the focussed, engaging and creative approach adopted by Leapwise in supporting the work to develop our long term vision for Police Scotland. On taking command at Police Scotland, I committed to simplifying our strategic planning landscape and establishing a clear and shared vision for our service. I was clear that this should enable better prioritisation and support engagement with our people and our partners. Leapwise’s commitment and insights were pivotal to successful delivery of these objectives.“

– Deputy Chief Constable Alan Speirs 

“Working day to day with Leapwise colleagues was a wholly positive experience and their professional challenge and valuable experience enabled us to undertake a significant reset of our strategic landscape and direction with pace and focus. Their approach was both positive and pragmatic and has driven significant improvement in our decision making and planning for the future.“

– Director Tom McMahon 

Key to this success was Police Scotland’s executive commitment to collaboration with both the Leapwise team and one another, and the workforce’s comprehensive engagement with the project. They also provided clear focus throughout on ensuring the final product is realistic and reflects the needs and priorities of communities, victims and the workforce.  

Read more about police objective setting here, and for more insights on effective long term strategic planning or workforce engagement, please contact one of the team.  

**Image AI generated.