Note from Changing Practices Cell 3
Note of a third Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 17 September 2020
SUMMARY
Putting relationships first in service design and development can be an uncomfortable process, and requires patience, and a willingness of the organisation and its funders to ‘let go’.
Where there is conflict or a divide between people, this often arises through a power imbalance, and it is important for this to be recognised, and not to ignore the feelings associated with this. Indeed, to bring about positive change, we need to stimulate behaviour change, not rely on process.
As well as looking at building in kindness and humanity into services, and at building connection and community, we should also be thinking of organisations as communities in which relationships are nurtured internally as well as externally.
It is usually easier to build relationship-centred practice locally and on a small scale. Operating at scale can be more difficult, and it is important to distinguish between unhelpful practices (e.g. tick box exercises) and helpful practices (e.g. providing checklists, encouraging open questions, allowing space for reflection).
We are interested in the possibility of relationship-based standards – behaviours that promote good relationships - which could be widely applied, and used to help individuals and organisations get better at building good relationships, as well as to get feedback. It might be more productive, ultimately, to measure success not in terms of outputs or outcomes but in terms of the quality of relationships forged..
The building of good relationships is emerging as a priority across many of our discussions and in many different contexts and is a critical skill to the creation of connection and community and sharing power, changing organisations and collaborative leadership.
In our next meeting we will explore in more depth what relationship-based standards might look like, and how they could be introduced.
1. AIMS OF THE CELL
Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. Our Call to Action for a Better Way includes ideas around changing practices, putting humanity and kindness into services and building connection and community through relationships, not just passive services. This cell is a working group which will meet several times as an informal think tank, to explore these questions together in some depth, share knowledge and insights, and produce a document to share across our network and beyond.
At the first meeting we’d noted that in COVID-19 new relationships have formed, and new partnerships, and it was suggested that there might be a six months window to blend the best of what we have learned in COVID-19 with the best of what we have been doing in the past. We also noted that building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state.
At the second meeting, we discussed the transformative power of self-help groups, and how we need to move away from the model that sees people as consumers of services, which assumes that charities and other providers are there to fix people’s problems, towards creating relationships between people where they can support each other and fund their own solutions. We also asked ‘What If’ local authorities and others were to act less as gatekeepers and more as enablers or facilitators of relationship and community building, and the focus of our third meeting was to consider this question in more depth.
2. OPENING PRESENTATIONS
We started the meeting with two presentations:
Alison Pike, from Mencap, explored how organisations can develop relationships to provide better support for those they serve. At Mencap, a priority area for the charity has been early intervention, giving families and children with a learning disability the best start in life, and they decided that in Newham in East London they would adopt a community-led approach, based on principles of empowering families, empowering communities, and working alongside local services and decision-makers. The starting point was building relationships with families in the area, to understand what they were feeling as they supported their child from 0-7 years and what good might feel like, rather than pre-empting a service solution. This led to a shared vision and purpose. Then an asset-mapping exercise was carried out, to find out what already existed. A series of multi stakeholder conversations, in different settings over twelve months, considered what needed to change. Families involved in some of the early conversations were trained as co-deliverers.
Alison shared learning from this work to date, including the following
This way of working can feel uncomfortable. It takes time, and many people are looking for a quick fix. It is not always obvious at the time how the conversations will lead to improvements.
Co-development and co-delivery is essential to reach marginalised groups. Alison gave an example of a father from the Bangladeshi community, who became a co-facilitator of workshops to develop peer networks, and was able to build relationships in ways which helped to overcome stigma.
Don’t underestimate the power of the peer group, Alison advised. Supporting families to connect to each other can open many doors.
Taking a strengths-based approach gets relationships off to a positive start.
Individual facilitators need to be given autonomy and trust. The organisation, and its funders, need to be willing to let go. When things go wrong, there needs to be honest reflection.
Asif Afridi, from equality organisation Brap, talked about how to repair relationships which were not working well and how to bring people together who in some way are apart. He spoke about the importance of feelings and emotions, especially where relationships are felt to be unequal.
He was a panel member of the independent Civil Society Futures inquiry, which heard from many people that they experience the relationship between state and civil society inquiry as a very unequal and unsatisfactory one. However, this was rarely acknowledged. Feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency were ignored or washed over. The things which have prevented growth and maturity in the relationship, Asif said, are not procedural, e.g. length of consultation periods, but largely behavioural and attitudinal. This includes, for example, a lack of trust, failure to recognise diversity of the sector, favouritism, preference for certain forms of communication, and lack of honesty about where power lies.
There are ways to address this, such as showing respect, displaying kindness, recognising bias, developing awareness of power and privilege; understanding that rank in a relationship can affect the content of the feedback received; and taking the time to contact people if a decision didn’t go their way and explaining why.
The PACT framework, as set out on the Inquiry report, helps people consider their behaviours in terms of Power, Accountability, Connection and Trust. However, these relationship issues are often treated as not important, or excuses are made that there is not the time or the resources to do this well. We need a set of clear behavioural prompts or standards, Asif suggested, which characterise an equitable and respectful relationship between civil society and government. This should be more than a voluntary sector compact. It should be based on measurable behaviours, with perception-based indicators (e.g. how much trust is there in the relationship), and capable of easy reporting, allowing measurement at a national level and becoming an indicator of our democratic health.
The Better Way has pointed to the benefits of community-driven decision- making. But a lack of power can be experienced on all sides. We all need to work on our discomfort, recognising our own privilege and power, and the impact that has on our relationships. Lack of awareness of power is often a core foundation of conflict.
When we rely on external sources of power, when we depend on others to make us powerful, when we don’t have a good sense of self-esteem, and a strong internal vocation, purpose, and drive, we react when the external power is withheld, and lash out. Instead we need to develop our own personal internal sources of power, and recognise our reactions when we are in a low rank situation.
Moreover, those who are in a situation of relative power often feel they are expected to act as heroes. But it would be better if they were to admit limitations, to accept vulnerability, to act with humility.
So, if we want to build better relationships, we should pay more attention to feelings and emotions, become more aware of power in the relationship, and put our faith in behaviour change, not in process.
3. DISCUSSION
Participants broke into smaller groups to consider ‘what if’ the state and others including charities were to focus on building relationships rather than delivering services. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:
RELATIONSHIPS AND GOVERNMENT PRACTICE
We need to encourage government and others to move to behaviours that are more relational and less transactional. For example, in several urban neighbourhoods, local authorities have introduced traffic restricting measures to reduce pollution and accidents and improve quality of life. They were surprised when residents protested against this. But no-one had talked to them about what they felt, and what they wanted. Consultation exercises, asking for reactions to specific proposals, are rarely of much value. Much more open questions are needed. So, relationship standards would need to consider the quality of the conversation, the quality of co-production.
Naming relationship-building roles within public sector bodies or other institutions, as suggested at our previous meeting, would not necessarily be helpful, it was felt, because that immediately establishes a hierarchy.
VEHICLES TO ENCOURAGE RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
We can establish vehicles that encourage better relationship building. For example, in the field pf public sector procurement, it is possible to establish an alliance framework for commissioners and providers, making the relationships more equal, as has been demonstrated in Plymouth.
ORGANISATIONS AS COMMUNITIES
Moreover, we can see our own organisations as a ‘conscious community’, seeking out the strengths and assets available across the organisation , cultivating strong relationships within the organisation as well as without, and encouraging people to bring their ‘whole person’ to work. This could lead to self-managed teams, supported though coaching, as an alternative to a hierarchical management structure, and these teams were likely to be better at forming relationship based-services.
RELATIONSHIPS AND SYSTEMS
We considered whether systems (including sets of rules and procedures) inevitably corrupt relationships. We recognised that systems are made up of humans, and the task therefore is to shorten the distance between people in a system. And that includes sharing power and building agency for people within the system, as well as believing in reciprocity, i.e. that everyone has something to offer to other people.
RELATIONSHIPS AND SCALE
Does operating at large scale always drive out humanity in relationships? In our discussion we felt that scale per se is not necessarily the problem. Indeed, people do want to feel they are part of, or connected to, something bigger. The real problem is that operating at scale is too often accompanied by doing things by rote, according to a standardised script, together with a tick-box culture, and this produces transactional rather than relational behaviours, which are intended to bring about efficiency, but fail to respond to human complexity.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be like that, and we noted that checklists, in contrast to tick-boxes, can be incredibly useful, as tools for experts, walking them through the key steps in any complex procedure, as set out by Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto, and become part of a virtuous cycle.
So, not least when operating at scale, it is important we felt to understand the difference between setting narrow targets and doing things by rote (likely to be unhelpful), and making good use of checklist prompts, and providing a framework for reflective practice (likely to be helpful).
RELATIONSHIP STANDARDS AND MEASUREMENT
We considered how to approach the measurement of relationships and develop the skill of forming good relationships. We noted that, at a policy level, so-called hard outcomes and value for money considerations have become the dominant measures, and these pay little if any attention to relationships. But it would be valuable if, for example, we could measure what communities or individuals feel about relationships they have with the services they encounter rather than simply their satisfaction with the prescribed outputs.
However, the introduction of measures that assess the quality of relationships is something which would need to be undertaken with great care, some felt, not least because asking questions of people and collecting data from them about their behaviours is never a wholly neutral exercise. The act of measuring relationships always has an effect on the relationships themselves, and therefore there is a responsibility to ensure that any effect is a positive one. The Outcomes Star methodology, when applied well, can have a positive effect, it was suggested, as well as questions designed to reinforce a positive direction of travel, for example, asking people whether they feel there are others who rely on them, rather than asking whether they reply on other people.
It was noted that in counselling, relationship health-checks have been found to be useful. The strength of a relationship can come from a combination of positive factors, such as a shared vision, being able to let go of power, acting as a facilitator, building trust. These could perhaps become the foundations of a widely applicable relationships set of standards, capable of both assessing and encouraging healthy relationships.
4. FINAL REFLECTIONS
David Robinson, thought-leader for this Better Way cell, mentioned that the Relationships Project is developing a ‘heat-map’ to try to understand what relationships are forming and how well they are working in the pandemic.
He noted that we tend to be more confident about building better relationships and addressing power imbalances when operating at local level on a relatively modest scale, but that the task feels much more difficult when we seek to work at a bigger scale. It would be useful to explore this further, he felt. He also said that it may not be possible to systematise relationships, but that it should be possible to make systems more relational.
Caroline Slocock noted that a set of similar principles seems to be emerging from various Better Way discussions. Across many different types of relationships (between government and civil society, between commissioners and those being commissioned, between service providers and service users, for example) agencies need to start thinking of themselves as enablers and facilitators, rather than gatekeepers, they need to really listen and develop trust and build relationships, and they need to develop a shared vision, understanding the assets that are already there and building from those, rather than intervening to fix things.
Maybe, she suggested, we should seek to move to a place where the important outputs of our work are not service or other activities we deliver, but rather the relationships themselves. We could be so much more creative, she said, if we could pursue relationships in all aspects of our work, and think of organisations as a community, and society as a collaboration, and behave as human beings first and foremost in the work we do.
Relationship-based standards, it was felt, could be aspirational, enabling us to build from the bottom up, as a way to organise and deliver things better.
5. NEXT MEETING
We agreed that it would be useful to meet again, and that the topic for the next meeting would be relationship-based standards.
The date of the next meeting is Thursday October 22, from 3.00pm to 4.30pm.
Relevant blog: Organisations as Communities by Ben Collins