Mike Pinnock

Strategic Headquarters for Enabled Deliverance (SHED Global)

Mike has spent over forty years helping people to make sense of how to make a difference to the lives of vulnerable children and young people.

His early endeavours were hampered by the fact that nobody seemed know what that difference might look like; how it could be made; who else needed to be involved, and how anyone would know if they were actually making it.

Undeterred, his big breakthrough came in the early Eighties when he stumbled across the concept of outcomes in child care research methodology. Keen (but nervous), Mike began developing and applying nascent ideas of outcome-orientated practice in his work as a manager in child welfare services.

Fast forward twenty years and more stumbling. This time across a rain-slashed paddock in Vermont in search of Con Hogan, Outcomes Legend and former Head of the state’s Human Services Agency.   Con teamed Mike up with Mark Friedman (Con’s long-time mentor and collaborator) and in 1999 Mark undertook one of his first, and most prestigious international assignments – in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire.

From his appointment as a bewildered trainee social worker in 1973 Mike eventually became an outcome-focused Head of Service in children’s services. Since 1996, he has acted as a consultant researcher to the Centre for Child and Family Studies at Loughborough University.

Outcomes remain his muse. He now works as an independent advisor works with agencies and partnerships to help them develop the sorts of organisational cultures in which outcome-orientated practices can be nurtured and sustained. In recent years his focus has also been on helping agencies make better use of systems feedback to energise staff, empower service users and support organisational learning.