On 3 April a group of 20 leaders from diverse sectors including finance, media, energy, retail and healthcare, joined us in an immersive visit to Alder Hey Hospital’s Innovation Hub. Alder Hey provides one of the most inspiring, living masterclasses in innovation under pressure.

Associate Professor and Director of Innovation Iain Hennessey and his team generously shared their journey as they’ve grown the Innovation Hub to a team of 38 and how Europe’s largest children’s hospital now thrives at the cutting edge of care through agility, collaboration, and courage.

Innovation in healthcare isn’t just difficult—it can seem impossible. Between regulatory complexity, limited resources, and the high-stakes nature of clinical care, creating space for experimentation and agility is a monumental challenge.

And yet, at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital we found a thriving Innovation Hub doing exactly that.

During an immersive visit, we saw firsthand how the Innovation Hub’s approach thrives while providing so many lessons in leadership agility. Here are ten powerful lessons from our visit—lessons that can inspire leaders in any sector to rethink how they drive innovation and adopt an agile leadership approach.

1. Practice Agile Thinking: At Alder Hey, agile isn’t a methodology—it’s a mindset. The Innovation Hub and its team encourages and models creative problem-solving, lateral thinking, and the courage to challenge long-held assumptions. Every problem is seen through multiple lenses, and the default response to challenges is curiosity first, with the overriding question – does this serve our client?– the hospital cares for over 450,000 children and young people every year from a wide catchment that stretches from North Wales to the northern border, with demand for services only ever increasing.
2. Create a Culture of Experimentation: At the entrance to the Innovation Hub sits a Museum of Failure—a physical, permanent tribute to learning through trial and error. It’s a bold message: failure is not just tolerated, it’s celebrated. With the right systems and structures, trying (and failing) becomes a safe and strategic act. How often, do we shy away from speaking about failure in a positive and public way as leaders?
3. Develop Emotional Intelligence: Leaders at Alder Hey regularly demonstrate a servant-leadership approach that focuses on the wider societal impact of the work they do and they are incredibly emotionally connected to their purpose. Self-awareness plays a critical role in this for leaders wanting to develop agile leadership – by understanding their own role in creating the conditions for others to thrive and contribute with courage and helping to remove invisible barriers. They practice the relentless alignment that Adrian Simpson explored in his session, in terms of aligning action with the organisation’s deeper purpose. And they don’t just pay lipservice to the purpose. They live and breathe it. In fact our group was struck by the incredible alignment of every single employee we encountered throughout the day – from the wonderful Michelle Meridith who provides the most caring environment for families, patients and staff at the Alder Hey Centre to Laura Smith, whose warmth and joy helps to create an amazing experience for patients at the onsite Medicinema – an incredible facility that provides much-needed respite for so many.
4. Break Down Silos: The Innovation Hub doesn’t operate in isolation—it’s tightly integrated with the hospital’s day-to-day. Frontline staff, clinicians, project managers, data scientists, innovation leads and technologists work together in cross-functional teams. Problems are solved collaboratively, and solutions are more robust because every perspective is in the room.
5. Make Room for Strategic Thinking: Innovation needs space to breathe. Leaders provide the ‘balcony view’ required for strategic reflection—linking projects to the broader organisational purpose and facilitating the team in scanning for emerging opportunities. This ensures innovation is not just busy, but meaningful and adds real value to the day-to-day service delivery. We heard so many stories of the incredible results of the InnovationHub that not only enhance processes, but radically improve outcomes and have a direct impact on people’s lives from the Little Hearts at Home platform that monitors the vitals of babies with complex conditions at home to the piloting of an incredible ambient AI tool developed in partnership with Lyrebird that is currently transforming the time clinicians are required to spend on record-keeping so that they can spend more and better quality time with patients.
6. Advocate Learning Agility: The team seeks out new knowledge constantly—through external partnerships, industry insights, or fresh skills. Throughout any development or ideation process they ask, “Does this new information change our thinking?” and adapt quickly if the answer is yes. It’s a muscle they train deliberately.
7. Understand the Problem. Ideate. Implement. Add Value: The hardest part of innovation isn’t having ideas—it’s executing them. The Alder Hey team tests relentlessly, staying open to feedback and iteration. Communicating the impact of their work is key to getting executive-level buy-in. What gets celebrated, gets repeated.
8. Social Innovation Matters: Solutions that connect to a genuine human or social benefit gain faster traction. The team is working on a national level to address some key issues connected with increasing child poverty; issues ranging from transport poverty which means children might be missing critical appointments, to access to dental services, all the while keeping the child and family experience at the centre of every project, creating resonance far beyond technical outcomes.
9. Relationships Are Everything: The magic happens in relationships. Innovation flows from trust, shared purpose, and open collaboration. At Alder Hey, this isn’t a happy accident—it’s a cultural cornerstone. Integrating innovation within the entire system and engaging with the people that serve their patients on the frontline is as important as executive buy-in to ensure the work can continue. Relationships are the foundation for the agility to follow.
10. Resilience Anchored in Purpose: The path of innovation isn’t smooth. But when setbacks come, the team re-centres on their purpose. Leading with integrity and values provides a compass when the road gets tough. And when leaders encounter resistance, which they inevitably will, it is important to connect back with the purpose of what they’re doing because when there is a strong emotional connection with purpose, innovation and agility wins.

Alder Hey shows us what’s possible when Agile Leadership isn’t a buzzword but a way of being. It proves that even in the most constrained environments, innovation can flourish—with the right mindset, culture, and commitment. The future of healthcare—and leadership more broadly—may just depend on it.