BrabantZorg
culture
strategy
Sep 2025
Story: BrabantZorg
BrabantZorg had a clear strategy for the future of elderly care. But plans alone do not move hearts. They needed one shared story that teams, residents, and families could recognize as their own.
BrabantZorg
Every sector talks about transformation. Elderly care is actually doing it, whether it's ready or not. Staff shortages, rising complexity, tightening budgets, and residents with needs that cut through spreadsheet logic. BrabantZorg had the strategy on paper: a clear course for the future of care. What it needed next was something harder: a story that thousands of people across the organisation, from night-shift carers to the client council, could actually recognise as their own.
Top-down rollouts tend to produce two things: tidy PowerPoints and quiet eye-rolling. Neither is much help when you're trying to keep humanity inside a system under pressure.
Starting on the floor, not in the boardroom
We ran BR-ND Kitchen sessions through every layer of the organisation, mixing care professionals with support staff, leadership with the client council. The rule was simple: no hierarchy at the table, just the question "what's actually going on here, and what do we want to protect as it changes?"
With 23plusone we mapped which of the 24 fundamental human drivers were already most alive in how people talked about their work. Care and humanity, predictably. But also autonomy, mastery and belonging: three drivers that matter enormously for retention in a sector losing colleagues by the month. Data that named what the organisation already knew but hadn't quite said out loud.
"Because this story was built together with us, we recognise ourselves in it straight away. It doesn't feel like an instruction from management, it feels like a shared promise." BrabantZorg team member
A shared story, then the long game
Out of the sessions came a narrative rooted in the actual floor, not in a strategy deck. From there, a multi-year communication strategy that doesn't try to launch a culture but to feed one: careful, consistent, built for the long haul of a sector in transition.
The result isn't a slogan. It's a shared vocabulary teams use to make daily choices: what to say yes to, what to say no to, and which parts of "the way we do things" are worth protecting through the change.
Read the Change Story of BrabantZorg
Leading a system change without losing the people in it?
If your organisation is going through a sector transition and worried the strategy is leaving the culture behind, this is familiar territory. Let's talk about building a story your people actually recognise, and a communication strategy designed for the long road rather than the launch moment.
Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar