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
Note from Changing Practices Cell 2
Note of a second Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 16 July 2020
SUMMARY
We need to stop thinking of public and charity services as ‘fixing’ people and start connecting people up instead. This means we see people not as ‘consumers’ of services or ‘beneficiaries’ but as citizens and producers.
We shared examples where traditional service provision could be shifted towards models of community self-help, which would allow positive relationships to flourish, and which would respond to the needs and circumstances of the whole person.
There are good examples of this, not least the Self-Reliant Groups supported by WEvolution.
We need to ‘re-found’ the purpose of local government away from a gatekeeping to a more enabling role. We may also need enabling legislation, such a Community Power of Competence, to encourage a more widespread change in practice.
There is also a need for different job roles for those working on the public sector, and in the voluntary sector as well, to support this change.
In our next meeting we will explore in more depth what these job roles could look like, and also what might prevent the change we want to see.
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, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop new strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.
At the first meeting we’d noted that Covid-19 had strengthened some relationships, not least among those involved in local partnerships, and in some cases this has led to greater agency for more people, she said. Online relationships have worked well for some people, but not all. There is a short window in which to embed these changes as we come out of the pandemic, we thought. We also noted that building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state.
Following on from this, the focus for this meeting was what the state and civil society can do to build stronger relationships.
2. OPENING PRESENTATIONS
We started the meeting with two presentations:
Becca Dove, Head of Family Support and Complex Families at Camden Council referred to an article by Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project
What we need to build is the Citizen story, where the role of government is neither all nor nothing, but in between: to equip and enable us, and to partner with us; to share as much information and power as possible, so that we can work together with government and with one another to create a new normal. … If you start from there, you don’t try to serve people-as-Consumers, you learn with people-as-Citizens.
So, asked Becca, if we were to see local authorities as public servants and public learners, what could that mean for the relationship with residents? What if, rather than just recruiting professionals, local authorities were to put as much effort into enabling families to support other families, where the professional’s job was to create the space and provide the support for families to help each other? In child protection, what if local authorities which currently commission advocacy for the families concerned were to direct their resources to supporting people with lived experience of child protection to advocate for one another? What if, rather than funding food banks, the role of the local authority was to support residents to create their own food co-ops and shops? And what if, rather than commissioning care packages, the role of adult social care was to find the strengths in residents and honour and strengthen relationships so that people could feel that their next door neighbour was as much there for them as their distant family many miles away?
When we think of residents as consumers, local authorities become, as Jon Alexander has described, branches of a retailer to central government’s head office, where the highest aspiration is to provide services efficiently and ‘cock-up less often’. But it need not be like that, and local authorities’ relationships with residents can be fundamentally different, Becca believes.
Noel Mathias from WEvolution identified prevailing areas of difficulty, including the following:
A negative mind-set: Our thinking is dominated by negative mental constructs (‘deprived community’ for example suggests dodgy places, unemployed people, single parents, crime, people on benefits). This need not be the case. In India for example the term ‘slum’ is associated with ingenious, enterprising and industrious places and people. But in the UK we tend to divide people into the weak and vulnerable on the one hand, and gatekeepers, regulators and messiahs on the other. This mind-set produces an imbalance in power and an imbalance in equality.
A culture of fixing: Our dominant culture is one of fixing, and this leads to dependency and entitlement. The benefits system for example is intended to help people, but ends up with people becoming dependent and feeling entitled, and less able to determine their futures themselves.
Deconstruction of the human person: If I have a mental health problem, says Noel, this is dealt with by a mental health charity. But if I am hungry I am passed on to a food bank, if I have a debt problem, I need to go to a debt agency. Each organisation will claim they are achieving their outcomes, but the person gets left behind.
WEvolution has developed a vehicle to bring about change: self-reliant groups. These are informal groups of people who come together to save small amounts of money, support each other, learn new skills, and become unexpected entrepreneurs. There are 135 such groups, in Scotland, England, Wales and Holland, and they provide spaces for people, mainly women, to meet, save and create. Some people end up becoming entrepreneurs. Self-reliant groups produce a series of shifts:
From simply being a consumer or beneficiary to becoming a producer and citizen;
From fixing to connecting;
From being treated in parts to the whole persons being empowered to act on their own.
The Self-Reliant Groups allow people to use the resources they have, rather than waiting for resources to be handed to them. They are not issue-based (e.g. focused on mental health problems or domestic abuse) but they can address specific issues, because they are used by people for whatever they think is best. SRGs across the country also share their experiences and learn from each other.
Learning from this experience, Noel recommends a focus on context, ceding power, and getting out of the way. We must recognise that people can often solve their own problems, without formal agencies doing it for them.
3. DISCUSSION
Participants broke into smaller groups to consider what the state and civil society can do to build stronger relationships. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:
3.1 WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD RELATIONSHIPS AND TRUST
Good relationships, it was suggested, emerge from:
Parity of relationship, with an equal footing between the state and community - traditional ways of working imply control by the state.
Permission, to challenge, to do things differently, with authority and accountability.
Partnership, based on equal trusting relationships.
Good relationships are more likely to be produced when people come to the table willing to listen to others rather than determining beforehand what they want. And also when there is respect for those working on the ground.
Strong relationships are those which emerge from tension, not those which avoid tension. Keeping conflict buried is foolish and never works.
3.2 Learning from existing examples
Experience from India and elsewhere suggest that the model of self–reliance can become widespread and highly influential on public services, and financial institutions, for example. For this to happen in the UK we will need to keep things simple, easy to establish, informal, and civil society organisations will need to co-ordinate their efforts better, rather than fight for themselves.
Organisations like Groundswell are demonstrating that it is possible to create the conditions for people in difficult circumstances (in this case long term experience of homelessness) to become effective in supporting other people with similar difficulties in their lives.
In Leeds there are 37 bottom-up neighbourhood networks, often led by older people. There is a lot to be learned from models such as these, about fostering connections and improving lives.
3.3 What makes things difficult
The centre needs to get out of the way so that those on the ground can get on with things and even break the rules. This requires a leap of faith and is not an easy step to take. For those in the statutory sector formality of structures can make this difficult, and for those in the voluntary sector, the funding regimes can be a problem.
Getting out of the way does not mean being absent. There will often be a need for professionals in some shape or form to support peers to work well with each other, and to help manage stress associated with the work, and even to provide oversight and supervision.
State-based community development tends to be short term and often fails to leave a legacy, especially where things are done to a community, not with them, or where professionals do not recognise the ability of people who are not professionals.
3.4 Re-thinking the role of local government and civil society
We need to lift our sights high, and consider how to ‘refound‘ local government, moving away from a ‘gatekeeping’ to an ‘enabling’, not ‘extracting’ role – and identify the principles at its heart that we want to revive and sustain.
It was felt that in re-imagining local authorities we need to reduce the distinction and distance between those working in local government and those in community roles. Local government could be redefined as part of a common local effort, working with and alongside other local agencies. Perhaps there ought to be ‘A Chief Relationships Officer’ to help facilitate this. There needed to be a permission to challenge.
Indeed, the problems of centralising command and control practices, and delivery of atomised services, are not confined to the public sector. They are also to be found in the charity sector. Those who want to shift towards more distributed models of self-reliant social support and community building, working with the whole person, will do well to make common cause, whatever sector they are from.
What if the community had a Power of Competence? The onus would be on the local authority to provide that a self-reliant group could not make use of a community centre, not on the group to prove that it could.
What if there was a statutory requirement for local authorities to create an Easement function? In other words, if a community group could explain that a rule really doesn’t work for them, and the local authority would be required to consider easing the rule.
There is often a deeply engrained but narrow sense of what the job is. We need to identify new and better public sector and civil society job roles, specifying the types of proactive enabling functions which can help to foster and support community self-help.
4. TOPICS FOR FURTHER MEETINGS OF THE GROUP
The following topics were suggested:
What are the proactive enabling roles which we would like to see public sector and voluntary sector agencies adopt, which can enhance the ‘What If’ types of relationship building and community self-help we have described above?
And what are the Why Nots? – in other words what are the obstacles which will get in the way?
We agreed that in the meantime blogs and video interviews would be helpful for the work of the group, and to help share our thinking more widely. All members of the group are encouraged to contribute in this way. NB See this subsequent blog by Caroline Barnard.
5. NEXT MEETING
Thursday 17th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm.
Note from Changing Practices Cell 1
Note of a first Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 10th June 2020
SUMMARY
Covid-19 has strengthened relationships, including local partnerships, given more agency to employees and led to professionals working in new ways that are giving the people they work with more agency. Online relationships have worked well for some people but not all, and we’ll need blended services in future. There is a short window in which to embed these changes as we come out of the pandemic and, amongst other things, we need to tell the story so that we inspire others to do more. Building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state which is one of the issues we will be exploring next time.
1. AIMS OF THE CELL
Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. We hope to build on an earlier Better Way roundtable about relationship-centred public policy in the coronavirus emergency and beyond. Before Covid-19 Caroline wrote a report on deep value relationships bringing together the insights from many sources, including David Robinson’s Relationships Project, and one of the conclusions was that we have a moment where potentially we could redesign existing services around relationships, and that we can build on existing practice, but need to do more together to build the case to make this widespread. 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, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop new strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.
2. OPENING PRESENTATIONS
We started the meeting with two presentations:
DAVID ROBINSON
David introduced the Relationships Project. This is exploring a big question: how do we build a better society by building better relationships? In specific terms this might include, for example, a better neighbourhood, a better community group, a better health service, a better school. Those involved in the Relationships Project are asking themselves how their own place (their neighbourhood, their team, their classroom) would change, if relationships were the central operating principle.
The Relationships Project has set up an Observatory to publish ‘sightings’ and take stock of what of what is being learned. Within much current activity around Covid-19, not least the thousands of Whats App groups, several undercurrents in attitudes and behaviours are emerging:
From doubting to trusting (neighbours are shopping for people they hardly know, front-line staff have budgets and responsibilities they didn’t have before);
From controlling to enabling (this includes more equal partnerships between independent organisations and the state, more sharing of leadership and power, more enabling styles of support);
From competing to co-operating (this is driven by an awareness that no single organisation or department or individual can fix the problems);
From standardised methods to personalised methods (this is found in many disparate practices, not least teaching, shopping, worship, and domiciliary care, and is engaging people who have been overlooked for a long time);
From me to we (a tide of good will has been generated by the crisis and by permission to behave differently).
David noted that there has been inconsistency from place to place, and a shift backwards in recent weeks: bonding capital (between ‘people like us’) is still strong but bridging capital (between ‘people less like us’) is becoming weaker. But nevertheless there has been an emergence of behaviours which are principle-led, more can-do, kinder, more emotionally responsive, personal and human.
A key question is how to ‘bank’ these gains in ways which also preserve that which was good before? Developments in technology have worked for many people but do not replace the preceding models of face-to-face contact. So how do we integrate and combine the best of the old and the best of the new into our work? David believes there may be a window of six months to do that well, before the pendulum swings back.
Ten million people have been involved in caring for others (for more than three hours a week) and 78% say they intend to continue. So, how do we enable and support that to happen without killing what makes it special and beautiful? The answer, said David, is not for the state to establish a volunteer army, nor to simply stand by and say let’s see what happens. We will need to design a light touch framework that doesn’t rely on chance but fills in the gaps and consciously seeks to embed the change in the years ahead.
PAUL FARMER
Paul is CEO of national charity MIND, and he shared several reflections.
Because the lockdown rules set at a national level were clear this has allowed permission and flexibility at a local level, street by street. The regulatory structure largely disappeared, with little backlash. While there will always be some abuses, the prevailing story has not been one of safeguarding breaches, nor of high volumes of scamming.
Paul pointed out that the voluntary sector has demonstrated that it is possible to reach a mature stage of relationships characterised by co-opetition (competing and co-operating at the same time). Many organisations have recognised the benefits of working co-operatively for the greater good or common cause, while also competing in some instances.
He also noted that the voluntary sector as employers had developed a new relationship with their own staff, giving them permission to get on with the task as many worked at home during the lockdown, and relying on trust, rather than oversight. This had worked well.
There appears to have been a shift from the selfish to the selfless. We have taken more notice of the people who live next door, and have benefited from deeper human interaction. Relationships between the individual, community, state, and employers are all changing. Many people who are working at home have been given permission to get on with things, and there is no sign of a productivity problem as a result. Employers are discovering they can trust more.
We have seen coalitions emerge to promote connectivity, for example the Connection Coalition, and the Together Coalition – perhaps these could themselves connect up with us?
There are, Paul noted, many serious concerns about the mental health of people in the emergency, but building resilience during the much longer and messier period of emerging from the crisis may prove to be a still harder task. National initiatives to date, including the NHS Volunteering Scheme, have adopted a largely transactional model, but haven’t addressed the need for a deeper set of relationships.
Some people are able to access digital services and really like them, and online therapy works for some, but many others don’t have that access or are uncomfortable with on-line methods. The future, said Paul, will be a blend of on-line and offline services, but what that looks like is not yet clear.
Above all we must not lose sight of the fundamental need for human connection. We have been hyper-local for three months, and we have lost some of the connections between places, and across communities. The recent Black Lives Matter debate about race and identity has been challenging but also gives some grounds for hopefulness, if we can bring people together into a better connected space.
3. DISCUSSION
Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the questions, ‘What are you doing to create connection and community and what can be done to make this more widespread?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:
We need to understand the catalysts and preconditions for people to come together and build relationships, recognising for example the importance of social infrastructure and behind-the-scenes systems.
Professionals have been working in new ways with their ‘clients’, and despite the distancing created by IT this has sometimes led to a subtle shift in power away from professionals to their clients and to better relationships. There were lessons, but these need to be articulated clearly, so that the recent shift in behaviour can be maintained.
We cannot underestimate the importance of telling the story, not least of how institutional and professional worlds have changed and can change.
We always had it in us to do this together and we have proved that, but there were particular conditions, there was an emergency, we had more time, and we were at home. But we now need to prepare for the time when one or more of these conditions is no longer present.
New ways of working, founded on human relationships, can flourish where we recognise a shared purpose, for example when a group of agencies decide to work together to improve life chances for young people. On the other hand, compartmentalised ways of working (with different agencies offering support on addiction, mental health, homelessness, for example) makes it harder to build relationships.
The state has conditioned people and communities to expect a certain type of relationship for decades. But this can change. For example John Alexander has set out ideas for how local authorities can step into a ‘Citizen future’.
We will need to consider carefully how power operates in relationships, and the tensions inherent in that. There is often an imbalance of power in relationships. That is not in itself bad, for example a doctor/patient relationship is never equal, but can nevertheless work well. But in some circumstances the imbalance can become poisonous.
People are stepping up in neighbourhoods, and discovering their power, but there is also a desire from centralised institutions to take back control, for example in managing volunteering.
The building of relationships can help to overcome deeply entrenched inequalities, but that needs to start with humility, a willingness to learn and to be exposed to vulnerability.
We also noted that within the Better Way network we have missed face-to-face contact but the experience of Zoom has helped us connect with each other in some ways better than before, removing geographic barriers, and allowing wider participation, in ways we had not anticipated.
4. TOPICS FOR FURTHER MEETINGS OF THE GROUP
The following were suggested as topics for the group to address in future meetings:
What are the implications of digital platforms for relationship building?
What relationships would we like to see between individuals, civil society and the state?
What is a good relationship when there is a power imbalance?
How we can anticipate the impact of the impending recession on relationships?
Having discovered each other in an emergency, how can we now discover capacity to do other things together?
It was felt that our future meetings should ground our discussions in practical examples, such as the work of Wevolution in establishing self-reliant groups, or the experience of relationship-building across sectors in Camden, for example.
We agreed that in the meantime blogs and video interviews would be helpful for the work of the group, and to help share our thinking more widely. All members of the group are encouraged to contribute in this way.
5. NEXT MEETINGS
Thursday 16th July, 3.00pm-4.30pm
Thursday 17th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm
Note from a roundtable: Relationship centred policy
Better Way on-line roundtable on relationship-centred policy, 24 March 2020
1. BACKGROUND
Participants were welcomed by Caroline Slocock. She reminded us that in a Better Way one of our guiding principles is that relationships are better than transactions:
Deep value is generated through relationships between people and the commitments people make to each other. We find this first and foremost in families, communities and neighbourhoods, but organisations in every sector need to do more to treat people with humanity and as individuals and so generate deep value too.
Moreover, our November 2019 Call to Action called for:
Changes to practices in order to ‘put humanity and kindness into services’; and
Changes to organisations to ‘start creating connection and community, not just passive services, for people’.
At this time of national emergency, Caroline said, it has been impressive and encouraging that so many people have already found ways to connect and support each other within communities. But this support was still largely transactional (delivering groceries and medicine to high risk groups). Important though this is, she said that more attention needed to be paid to well-being and mental health; and she suggested we should create a national befriender service to provide personal contact and support to isolated people, not just physical supplies. She also thought that communities and volunteers needed not just to support the NHS but also the social care system; and that volunteers might help isolated people to become more empowered eg by helping them set up home delivery and other online services.
2. INTRODUCTORY PRESENTATIONS
INTRODUCTION (1) DAVID ROBINSON
David drew on his two recent blogs, Coronavirus and Social Disruption, and Inventing the Future. He spoke of his time as a community worker and his realisation that building good relationships is at the heart of effective responses to people whose lives are in difficulty. In recent years Hilary Cottam and Julia Unwin among many others have pointed out that services and policies have often lost sight of community and kindness and that this needs to change. We have seen some signs in recent years that relationship-based thinking is beginning to be taken up by politicians from the right and the left. In recent weeks, as coronavirus has spread, our world has started to change very rapidly:
We are re-neighbouring at pace. At least 2,700 covid-19 mutual aid groups have emerged in recent days.
We are learning to do things on-line in ways we couldn’t before.
There is a wealth of original activity, some of which will turn out to be superficial and will not last, but some will.
We may be seeing the signs of a fundamental shift towards a kinder society. After the lockdown, there will be a very long tail of difficulty and disruption to everyday life, but we will emerge with two new commodities:
Lists - of people we didn’t know before.
Trust – the discovery that we can do things for each other on trust.
In the coming weeks, David felt, we should identify the positives which are coming out of this crisis, the principles which underpin them, and what can be done to sustain the positives in more normal times.
INTRODUCTION (2) AVRIL MCINTYRE
In her recent blog Avril pointed out that community is alive and well, and she argued that we must learn through this crisis how to build tomorrow’s world, investing in relationally focused support, not the service-led approach we lived in yesterday. She spoke of her experience as a member of a church, as a charity leader in Barking and Dagenham, and as Chair of the Barking and Dagenham Collective, and how strong local support networks have been built.
A lot of people do have friends and families but many do not. The plan therefore was to establish a borough-wide network of community hubs, backed up by formal public services (not handing people over to services in ways that would lose community connection).
This has now been overtaken by the COVID 19 crisis and a new mechanism been put in place fast, with eight locality leads and clusters of people and agencies available to respond to needs, and willing and able not only to drop off shopping and medication but also to respond to people as human beings when doing so.
The important thing is to use this time to learn how to work better together, and build a positive environment, based on relationships, so that when this crisis ends, we have a new way of working that we can build on.
3. DISCUSSION: WHAT CAN BE DONE NOW AND IN THE FUTURE TO PUT RELATIONSHIPS AT THE HEART OF PUBLIC POLICY
3.1 CAPTURING THE LEARNING FROM THE COMMUNITY RESPONSE FOR THE FUTURE
The huge volume of unstructured and positive activity in communities in response to coronavirus is making a profound impression. This does, we felt, provide reasons to be optimistic about what the future might hold beyond the crisis.
We will need to ‘capture’ the capacity which is emerging now, so that it can be retained for the long term. This means capturing learning in real time, to help us understand the situation properly, as well as to help prepare for the longer term (some places are using citizen participatory evaluation/ 'detectorism' techniques).
Several contributors pointed out that organisations need to think not just about how they can deliver services in response to the coronavirus crisis, but also how they can help communities themselves be the response. They should encourage people to do the things they can do, not assume they can’t.
We realise that the shared sense of urgency and adversity will eventually wane, and priorities will shift from a collective effort to stop the spread of the virus to potentially an individual focus on getting back on your feet. We may have a return to blaming and targeting/scapegoating. So we need to find ways to make the positive legacy of meaningful relationships last.
3.2 BUILDING COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP INCLUDING BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND CIVIL SOCIETY
It was observed that within national government transactional methods are indeed dominant at present. The work of civil society will be critical to rebalancing this.
There is a risk that strategic agencies will fall over each other in the rush to design ways to co-ordinate neighbourhood action. One view – not shared by everyone - is that it will be best to allow the formal statutory agencies to lead the co-ordinating effort, with civil society agencies working in support, and allowing people at neighbourhood level to get on with what they can do best.
The quality of co-ordination will be very important – we may need systems at community level (perhaps equivalent to fire wardens in WWII) to ensure that necessary actions are taken and are effective.
However, Local Resilience Forums are dominated by statutory bodies, and community voices are not heard enough. This matters, because if the planning is confined to what the formal statutory agencies can do, it will fail to take account of what informal relational community activity can do. And if the statutory services are overwhelmed, community action will be needed more than ever.
Several of us felt that public agencies could consider what they can do to help mutual aid at neighbourhood level flourish and sustain. However, there was also a view that public agencies and support bodies should avoid the temptation to over-engineer; the tools for community action are actually very simple. In some cities/regions, support agencies have produced maps of community hubs or other sources of support and this was felt to be useful by some but not by everyone.
The need for effective and trusted conduits between national and local, between government and community, has become increasingly obvious.
All sides will need to work on relationships and trust. For example the initial Charity Commission guidance on coronavirus provoked an angry Twitterstorm, but this became a catalyst for better understanding and accommodation.
3.3 ADDRESSING INEQUALITY AND HELPING EVERYONE BE SAFE AND FLOURISH
There is danger, we felt, of an increasing class divide, with community action flourishing among relatively affluent groups and some poorer neighbourhoods left behind. For example there are many people who cannot afford to go on line, and so will miss out on the opportunity to build on-line relationships – in an effort to address this Community Organisers have launched #OperationWiFi calling for a free-to-use open WiFi network for communities during the outbreak.
While vulnerable children will still be offered places at school, many are not taking that up, and we should remember that home is not always a safe place to be.
We noted that Groundswell has produced advice for people sleeping rough, and for people in hostels or temporary accommodation as well as guidance for people planning a local response.
Access to welfare rights services is especially important at this time. While government has put in place measures to maintain a portion of the income of people whose work is affected by Coronavirus it is likely that many will fall through the cracks in the system, and will need help to get any support that is available.
Bridging social divides, building relationships, trust and support across people who are different as well as similar is important. We need to learn from the current situation about who is missing out, why, and what and who could help enable their inclusion?
Some tools to help people connect deeply might be useful, eg non-violent communication techniques.
The crisis is forcing us to reassess how we can create conditions for good mental health –good relationships, strong communities, establishing the conditions for people to be able to help each other, are all important contributors to mental well-being.
Civil society has a crucial role in surfacing the needs of groups who may otherwise be overlooked.
3.4 PROMOTING A POSITIVE STORY OF HOW PEOPLE CAN RESPOND TO THE CRISIS AND BEYOND
We believe we should talk about vulnerable people as contributors of support not just recipients, and talk about connection as strength rather than connection as contagion. The Frameworks Institute is producing a series of short newsletters to help advocates and experts be heard better, and help to reframe public discourse more positively.
We will need to support an inclusive culture shift which aligns with our population shifts, and emphasising 'us' and not 'them'.
We can celebrate people doing good things.
We can promote ‘love in a time of coronovirus’.
3.5 BUILDING THE CASE FOR DIFFERENT WAYS OF DOING THINGS
There is an opportunity to move decisively beyond new public management and build the evidence base for doing so. For example we should be able to discover whether those places where relational systems are strongest are most able to reduce the impact of the coronavirus.
One effect of the current crisis is a nationwide shift in perceptions of what work should be valued. Stackers of supermarket shelves, delivery drivers, front line and ancillary social care and health staff, for example, are suddenly much more appreciated than they were just a few weeks ago. Sustaining this shift beyond the crisis could have profound and positive consequences.
The Beveridge report which led to the creation of the welfare state emerged at a time of national crisis; the current crisis may provide the conditions in which a new version could win widespread support.
Some in our discussion(although not everyone) felt that the case for universal basic income is now even stronger, because it would provide a foundation for everyone to be able to participate fully within society, and there has been a call for a version of this to start now during the emergency.
3.6 THE ROLE OF THE BETTER WAY NETWORK
We need to direct our efforts to capture what is happening now, and comment with a view to influencing the medium and longer term.
Government is in crisis management so right now there is no thinking about what things could look like beyond the crisis. The Better Way network should join forces with others pushing in equivalent directions, for example the New Local Government Network, as well as think tanks across the political spectrum, putting aside tribal affiliations, to help form a future agenda for government.
Some felt we need to be more proactive to ensure that voices of different communities, including BAME communities, and social enterprises as well, are heard more within our own discussions.
4. SPECIFIC IDEAS FOR GOVERNMENT
This is a summary of ideas which emerged from the discussion which could help government and other institutions place relationships at the heart of public policy. Some relate particularly to this time of crisis, others to the longer term future we would like to see. (Not all ideas were necessarily supported by all participants in our discussion).
Introduce Universal Basic Income, and also universal access to free broadband, so that everyone has the core resources to participate in community life.
Establish a nationwide befriending service, to ensure that isolated people have a friend to talk to daily and who can also help them to develop online skills and links with others where needed.
Develop a volunteer social care support network to support the existing social care system, for people currently receiving care in their homes, akin to the one now established for the NHS, so that informal and formal carers can draw on their help.
Identify strengths and weaknesses in the community responses to coronavirus and share these so that we learn quickly how to do it better.
Develop collaborative leadership and learn to trust. Governments find it very difficult to trust, and especially to trust communities and voluntary organisations, but they will need to learn to do so.
Frame the national discourse in ways which avoid ‘them’ and ‘us’.
Work with individuals in ways that do not disempower them but build their skills and enable them to use their strengths.
Note from a roundtable: Tactics for Practitioners
Tactics for practitioners
BETTER WAY ROUNDTABLE, 4 APRIL 2019
Introduction
Caroline Slocock introduced the roundtable, which is intended to identify tactics so that people and communities can thrive, not just cope. We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, which included contributions from:
Edel Harris, who says that Local Cornerstone is ‘throwing away the rulebook’ and empowering front-line staff so they have space to make time for people.
Matt Kepple, who says we should create a network of ‘curious’ people and challenges us to create our own version of Wikipedia so that we can share what works and become a collective force for good.
Colin Falconer, who explains how the Foyer Federation established Advantaged Thinking for practitioners to ‘build on strengths’ and avoid ‘the branding of disadvantage’.
Richard Wilson, who explains that good relationships between practitioners and those they work with are key to ‘Good’ and ‘Bad Help’.
Graeme Duncan, who identifies principles that are more likely to lead to better education than damaging high-stakes targets.
David Robinson, who advocates putting ‘relationships, rather than transactions’ into practice and also writes movingly about the importance of the exercise of humanity in services.
Steven Platts, who shows how at Groundswell the ‘Give a lot, Get a lot’ ethos works, bringing in experts in lived experience to support people facing homelessness.
Advantaged thinking
Colin Falconer pointed out that attempts to redress the balance between meeting the needs of people and developing their strengths has a long history which can be traced back to Aristotle’s notions of a ‘good life’ and in recent years has found expression in Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and in other strengths-based approaches.
Advantaged Thinking was developed at the Foyer Federation as an alternative narrative about young people designed to inspire rather that to focus on the negative. Seven tests were developed:
· How we talk about people (without stigmatising)
· How we understand people (potential, not just problems)
· How we work with people (encouraging risk taking and trust)
· How we invest in people (beyond surviving and c0ping)
· What we expect for people (for them to thrive)
· How we involve people as their own solutions (so they are agents of change)
· How we act to find, develop, support and challenge thinking in others (to make all of the above more widely possible)
Colin encouraged us to consider how we behave as parents, when a child is still crawling. A disadvantaged-thinking parent would assume the child will never walk, and tell the child that they will always have to crawl, and they would put in place crawl-related therapy and similar measures. An advantaged thinking parent would encourage the child to learn to walk, based on a belief that they will walk.
A social Wiki
Matt Kepple described his work to establish the Makerble platform to make it easier for organisations to track impact. The wider challenge he said is how to make best practice more discoverable. The problem we face in the social sector is that the pace of iteration is too slow. James Dyson produced 5,126 versions of his vacuum cleaner that hat failed before he made one that worked. We do produce changes and improvements, but if evaluation and dissemination only happens at the end of a programme we are held back. We can de-risk and accelerate iteration by sharing and building a community of practice, but our primary methods, conferences and training events, only reach senior staff, not front-line workers. Can we learn from the extraordinary success of Wikipedia and Spotify, for example, to create an on-line library of best practice targeted to outcomes and beneficiary groups, and personalised so that the people using the library get what they need?
Much of the work of the social sector is about helping people and communities progress from a negative position (‘minus one’) to a just about tolerable position (‘zero’), whereas the real prize is to move further, to a positive position (‘plus one’):
Discussion
In the discussion, the following points were made:
An open-source approach to intellectual property is essential to achieve rapid progress in the social sector. The late Jane Slowey, who led the Foyer Federation as Advantaged Thinking was being developed, was always willing to share with anyone interested.
Models similar to the seven tests of advantaged thinking have been developed in other sectors. For example the five features of health creating practices developed by the New NHS Alliance: listening and responding, truth-telling, strengths-focus, self-organising and power-shifting.
There have been examples of successful on-line social sector sharing platforms. One is the Rightsnet system, developed by LASA, which is a platform for thousands of advisers across the UK to stay up to date with the latest social welfare law news and case law developments, to get casework support, to test their ideas and share their experience, and to network with other advice workers. Similary there is a Refugee Legal Group online network. These have been developed as voluntary communities, where any investment of time is amply rewarded. They require good administration and scale, so that information is constantly refreshed.
It is very difficult for new entrants to gain critical mass, and activities such as a festival of ideas may be needed to generate initial content on a particular cause. A feedback loop, even a rating system, can help to build trust and confidence in the platform. But if possible it would be best to use an existing platform rather than invent a new one.
Do these platforms reinforce a tendency to apply models which do things ‘for ‘and ‘to’ people, rather than to help them to do things for themselves? Not necessarily, and Colin described how communities of practice have developed in Australia to explore advantaged thinking techniques together and to involve the whole organisation.
In places, we need better platforms which can help people and organisations to come together to consider what matters and to measure impact. But we should be wary on imposing systems.
Sharing platforms can operate best whether there is also an intention to change from above. For example, in Wigan the local authority leadership has decided that asset based community development approaches should be applied to every aspect of the council’s work, and all staff are required to have basic training in the principles. Strategic determination of this kind can create the conditions for a learning community to flourish.
Social sector organisations tend to hoard their own resources. They are very reluctant to give money to people directly, to investment in them so that they can make change on their own terms. But perhaps much more of this would be a good thing, to build agency and self-determination. A recent book, Utopia for Realists, identifies examples (including work with long term rough sleepers in London) where providing people with money was more effective that providing them with conventional services.
It is wrong to assume that all social interventions are designed to support people and to help them flourish in their lives. This is not always the case. As has been revealed recently, the immigration services were designed to create a hostile environment. Much of the benefit system seems designed to control rather than support people. We have set up a childcare system which privileges those in high-income work and disadvantages those on benefits.
In such cases it is not enough to introduce better practice (eg asset based models of working). The systems themselves need to be challenged and dismantled. It is sometimes possible to appeal to notions of ‘fair play’, and to build a coalition capable of achieving a change to a national system which is treating people unjustly or holding them back. In other cases it is possible to find some common ground even where there are significant policy or cultural differences, and make some gains.
Wherever there are opportunities to build better systems, models like Advantaged Thinking will be needed, and effective communities of practice that can share learning and that can engage users and frontline staff in design.
There is an excitement about technology-enabled, not technology-led solutions. Tactics so that people and communities can thrive, not just cope, need to be both top-down as well as bottom-up. Our efforts need to build critical mass, and become viral. In that process we not only move towards ‘plus one’ practice, but also start to change the national story.