Locally Led Assessment Tool

A tool to assess how your organisation enables locally led solutions

This tool will help your organisation to understand it might better enable local action. It is designed for organisations working on complex challenges. A complex challenge is one that:

  • Is constantly changing

  • cannot be solved by a uniform or single solution.

Organisations cannot solve complex challenges by “rolling out” pre-existing interventions. What worked in one place at one time, may not work in another place at another time. Instead, organisations need to build the capability and capacity of local people to find solutions that work for them.

Based on two behaviour change models

We originally developed this tool to help staff in regional sports trusts to understand how they might better engage with young people. We have since added a second question set so you can use this tool no matter your target audience. 

It combines two models. The first is Sport NZ’s Locally Led Approach, which suggests there are five aspects to effective local action:

  • Understanding community

  • Partnering

  • Being strengths-based

  • Learning

  • Enabling leadership.

The second model is the Behaviour Change Wheel, which suggests there are three conditions required for a person to change their behaviour: Capability, Opportunity and Motivation.

How to use the Locally Led Assessment Tool

This tool works best when you use it with a larger team rather than just completing it by yourself. It is designed to spark conversations that help a team understand what next action they might take to be more locally led.

To use the tool: 

  1. Prepare: Print out the appropriate question set and the matrix in colour. Cut out the question set. You want no more than 8 people per question set. You may need to print several question sets depending on your organisation or team size.

  2. Ask, discuss and place: Have one person ask each question out loud. As a group, discuss where on the matrix you think it sits for your organisation. If you find it hard to agree where it should go, then you can let the person who read the question make the decision.

  3. Look for patterns: Once all the questions are on the matrix, review them to see if there are any patterns. You may find there are patterns in terms of the Behaviour Change Wheel. These are the words “capability”, “opportunity” and “motivation” on the bottom right of the questions.

  4. Discuss actions: Then, discuss as a team what actions might help you to be more locally led. Write these in the far right column of the matrix.