Joining forces across sectors, including with the private sector

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘joining forces across sectors, including with the private sector’.

The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• The business sector has resources at its disposal that are far greater than anything the charity sector could ever hope to deploy.

• It is therefore potentially a huge force for positive change, especially if companies can make a shift to discover their core social purpose.

• The charity and wider social sector can encourage that to happen, but that means going well beyond asking for money.

• It means finding better ways to build alliances and join forces across sectors, inviting companies to help discover the solutions, and help to design new approaches.

• On both sides we need to recognise and respect the ‘different worlds’.

• There will be misunderstanding, disappointments, and bad experiences. But we shouldn’t allow that to become the barrier to trying again. 

• Social sector organisations will achieve most when they approach businesses with positive intent, and assume the same positive intent in them as well.

• It is important to generate small wins, to keep the momentum. And to build on that with creativity and ambition.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change, which some have called the Better Way ‘beachball’: 

In this cell we are exploring the ‘joining forces’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time was Joining Forces across sectors, including with the private sector: How can we build alliances not just between the voluntary and public sectors but also with the business sector?  

As Cate Newnes Smith, thought-leader for this cell, pointed out, collaborations with businesses often work best where there is one clear theme where a difference can be made in people’s lives, rather than spreading efforts too thinly, and where the charities are not simply approaching companies with a begging bowl.

Presentations

We first heard from Tom Levitt, former MP and author of the Company Citizen.

He started by saying that Corporate Social Responsibility is insufficient. It is optional, short term, input led, and usually about fundraising and team-building rather than about making change. 

Rather the focus should be on ‘purpose’, a reason for being which goes beyond, or even comes in front of, making money for a company’s owners. The very term company derives from the Latin meaning to ‘break bread with’ – a social not just economic purpose. Over a century ago the Lever brothers, W.H. Smith, Jessie Boot, and others founded companies which had a real social purpose.  

The potential for businesses to make a difference is huge. The turnover of Oxfam is about £1m a day. This is equivalent to a single large Tesco store. If just 1% of the business sector’s revenue were to be applied to doing good that would dwarf what charities can achieve.

In recent years the funding provided to charities from private businesses has reduced. But in some cases this is because the businesses are taking on social projects themselves. For example the Wates company is training prisoners so that on release they can take up jobs in the construction industry. This is good for the business too, helping to create a skilled and potentially loyal workforce.

Tom pointed out that more companies are now addressing climate change, especially the FTSE 100 companies. 40% of all investment is now ‘climate sensitive’, according to the World Economic Forum.

Tom set up Fair4You as anti-poverty private company, to provide an alternative to high cost lenders. Capitalism, said Tom, is a toolbox, and the tools can be used to maximise profit, or to maximise good, or somewhere in between.  It is in the interests of business to put things right. For example poverty is not good for business, if people can’t afford to buy their products. Climate change is not good for business, because it raises far too many unpredictable risks. 

The social sector has its own unique role, Tom acknowledged. But in partnering with business, and acting as advocate, in raising the gaze of business from the short term to the long term, and in raising the moral and practical issues, it is possible to establish a win-win situation for business, the planet and society, and that he believes is the way to go.

We then heard from Mel Smith, Deputy CEO at Grapevine Coventry & Worcestershire.

Mel explained that Grapevine’s work is all about creating deeper relationships between people, sometimes by being playful, introducing the unusual, with elements of hope and joy and music.

During the pandemic Grapevine hosted a series of ‘Summits’ and learned a great deal about the process of gathering people together to bring about change. For example, who should be there, how should the discussion be framed to achieve the best possible outcome, how can the energy from the event be harnessed?

A Public Sector Summit came first, involving national as well as local contributors, and this addressed three questions:

• How can we keep shared humanity as a motivator?

• How can we model and normalise new ways of working around permission, risk, and shared purpose?

• How can we continue to collaborate together on end goals and outcomes that meet everyone’s needs?

This was followed by a public sector ‘thinkers and doers’ group, which continues to meet.

The Business Summit built on this learning. Grapevine was able to draw on relationships which had been formed over time, before the pandemic, with businesses which had connection and belonging at their heart, and which seemed to be well placed to support the Grapevine mission to end marginalisation and isolation.

For example Grapevine had started to build a relationship with Drapers, a café/bar, and Drapers agreed to host Grapevine social living rooms. The management were willing to say ‘Yes’ to Simon who asked if he could buy a coke and blackcurrant cordial for the same price as their cheapest drink and sit there as long as he wanted. And as the relationship deepened, Drapers provided a Christmas meal for a group of people Grapevine was working with, and discussed their staff induction with Grapevine. They decided that they should position themselves as a community-facing business.  

It was becoming clear, said Mel, that town centres need to be destinations that are more than just about shopping. They also need to develop as places for sociability and belonging. So the Business Summit explored two big questions:

• How can we improve our recovery prospects by making sure that behind our shop fronts the door opens to a range of experiences for socialising and belonging?

• How can we make sure that connection, sociability and belonging are hard-wired into re-imagining the future of our high streets, and suburban core?

It felt important to have many voices around the table, including for example speakers from local and national companies, and the Business Improvement District leads. 

Grapevine had never before really thought about the business sector in such depth.  Mel said, ‘It is hard, we are trying to understand each other’s world, and what change we can make together’.

A cross-sector working group, including Grapevine, the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and Chamber of Commerce, has been formed. The Summit has led to a discussion with the Coventry Building Society, and they have decided to fund a community organiser post to work specifically with the business sector, able to connect with those at grass roots levels but also speak to those who hold power and make decisions in Coventry. Grapevine is also working with an artist to design resting spaces, and is in discussions to establish them with companies across the City.

It really feels like entering a different world, said Mel. It is important, she said, to gain a really deep understanding of each other, developing the local contacts and relationships, sharing tangible examples including local stories as well as things that are happening elsewhere in the country, which show the potential of what can be done together and which demonstrate the aspiration and inspiration for change. And also small wins that can keep the momentum and appetite for change going.

Discussion

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: ‘How can we build better alliances with the business sector?’  In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:

We need to understand better what is likely to attract a business into an alliance

• We are likely to achieve most if we can discover the shared value, the mutual benefit. For example,  the common ground might be the well-being of people in the community where the business operates, and where its employees and customers come from. 

• It is usually a good idea to approach the business as a prospective partner not just as a prospective funder. It is attractive for businesses to be positioned as leaders or pioneers, and ideally as a major part of the solution. Businesses can offer leverage, not just money or volunteering days

• We need to remember that many businesses will need to be persuaded of a business case, and need to believe that there is potential for financial or reputational benefit, even if that is likely to come about indirectly.

• Social sector organisations may be able to offer routes to customers or influence or funding.  They may also have specific products such as disability awareness training which the company can benefit from.

• It is helpful, some felt, to think about alliances and joining forces rather than partnerships.

Suspicion and prejudice exist on both sides and must be recognised and overcome

• It is not easy to build good relationships across sectors. There are likely to be differences in motivation, in culture, even in world views. There are likely to be many misunderstandings and disappointment on both sides. 

• Charities can sometimes be viewed as a soft touch by unscrupulous businesses, and treated badly, especially if they are seen simply as a route to attracting public funds, or establishing a better public image. Equally, unscrupulous charities can treat businesses as a soft touch, telling them whatever they want to hear to attract money, and delivering very little in return.  

• It is not surprising then that the voluntary sector often has a prejudiced view of the business sector. But it is useful to remember that any large company can often be experienced as positive or negative by different charities at different times. And while a bad experience with a single company can easily generate a psychological barrier to future relationships with the business sector as a whole, that is not a sufficient reason to give up on the attempt. Keep trying, it was said.

• Equally, it is not surprising that the business sector often has a jaundiced view of the ‘begging-bowl’ charity, and often underestimates or undervalues the skills in the social sector. But charities and other social sector organisations are experts in their field, and there is a more respect in the relationship if they can establish that from the start. And moreover many of the people working in the social sector have highly developed business skills – some, for example, are highly entrepreneurial and have expertise in managing complexity. The more contact businesses have with social sector organisations, the more likely they are to realise that.

Welcoming spaces to meet and positive intent are often the keys to success

• It was felt that, to start with, we simply need to create better opportunities for the two sectors to meet, so that there are more opportunities to overcome misconceptions on both sides, and build relationships.

• But the interactions need to be positive from the outset. Social sector organisations should offer a warm and welcoming space for businesses, to reach hearts and not just minds.  

• It is essential to set out with positive intent and assume that this positive intent is shared by others. When those in the social sector approach businesses with suspicion, and mistrust their motives, it is much less likely that something worthwhile will happen.

Future meetings

• 19th October, 3.00pm-4.30.  Joining forces to inspire, rather than to control: If, in our collaborations, we seek to control the actions of others we may be preventing the growth of something bigger, a wider social movement. So, can we ‘let go’ when we collaborate, without losing our way?

Putting relationships first: building good relationships in adversity and conflict

The topic discussed was how to build and sustain good relationships in adversity and conflict and how we can manage stress and conflict creatively.

The opening speakers were Neil Denton, the co-founder of the After Disasters network at Durham University who has also been working with the Relationships Project on the Bridge Builder’s Handbook; and Roger Martin from the Mindset Difference, which works with people and organisations to help them find innovative new answers when disagreements inhibit progress.

Key points made by the speakers and participants included:

• Bridging capital (ie relationships between different communities), unlike bonding capital (relationships between people), has been weakened by Covid if anything. There has been a growth of tribalism, for example over Brexit and in the culture wars, and some differences have become toxic.

• Conflict can lead to innovation and if we can manage it well it could be an enormous game-changer.

• It helps to find the shared objective and create a common objective – the ‘we not the me’.

• Relationship building is critical to breaking down barriers between people.

• Disagreements are inevitable but can be dealt with in healthy ways.

• Listening is a critical skill - listening with ears and eyes and heart. Humans have a deep need to be heard but this is hard: everyone has their own filters and triggers and there can be pent up emotions and fears.  Assuming good intentions on all sides helps as does curiosity and compassion. Hearing is not the same as agreeing.

• Knowing oneself and understanding one’s triggers is helpful– we need to listen deeply to our own thoughts as well as to other people.

• It’s important to create safe, courageous spaces to provide the creative conditions to find a way forward and where people are not phased by disagreements and difference. It’s the process and the journey that matter not the destination.

Here are the 5 principles from the Bridgebuilder’s Handbook drawn up by Neil Denton for the Relationships Project.

Putting relationships first: Seeing people as the solution not the problem

The topic discussed was: seeing people as the solution, not the problem, acting as enablers, seeing people not as consumers or beneficiaries or vulnerable but as citizens who help create the changes they need and can often lead the way, and present those we help as having agency and potential, rather than problems.

The first opening speaker was Edel Harris, the CEO of Mencap, who spoke about her own experience as a mother of her disabled son, and told us about the steps Mencap is taking to be genuinely led by people with learning disabilities and how they are engaged in co-production and personalisation of services.

The second speaker was Alison Navarro who drew on her wide experience, including as CEO of Community Action Sutton, to emphasise the importance of asset-based community development and community organisation and power, with the use of emergent thinking and storytelling and the sharing of lived experience. She stressed that you need to focus on the change we want to see, not the problem and talked about the particular value of safe spaces for people with lived experience to open up, facilitated by people who can help use their experience as a catalyst for wider change.

Key points made in discussion were:

• We need to focus on the change we want, not the problem, start looking at what’s strong, not what’s wrong.

• But we are driven by a deficit culture. People with learning disabilities, for example, are as diverse as the rest of us and have many different assets but are too often defined by their condition and in order to campaign for Covid vaccinations for them campaigners had to define them as vulnerable.

• Teams that are part of the community and include community members in them can be powerful.

• Asset-based community development is one way forward, using techniques like emergent thinking, story-telling, the sharing of lived experience, training local people to be community led researchers, creating safe spaces, community power and organising.

• ‘Leading from behind’, carrying out a facilitator role, putting the beneficiary in a position of power, starting at grass roots and working upwards, is part of this. Emergent thinking means sharing learning together.

• Relationships are key to this new model – we need to create new ‘relational spaces’ – and assume that everyone starts from a position of good intent.  These need to be places of safety.  As you open up new spaces, you open up new needs.

• Buurtzog is one model of empowered teams enabled to empower those they work with.  Large organisations can do this too – eg Mencap – if broken down to lots of individual human relationships. 

• This approach needs lots of attention to detail and small things, building relationships one to one. You need to take one chunk at a time.

Roundtable - doing things differently in the North

This event, held online on 14th July 2021, was hosted by Laura Seebohm, Better Way Convenor in the North, and brought together many people - public and voluntary sector, community businesses and private sector, including individuals and organisations who are connecting institutions and individuals - who are doing things differently in the North.

Introducing the topic, Laura explained that over the last year there has been much interest and some cynicism about the Government’s commitment to ‘levelling up’ and what this might mean for people in the North and Midlands.  At the same time, there are many places across the North and Midlands where people and communities are already doing ground-breaking things.  This is patchy and diverse, but momentum is building to do things in a very different way.  Several people had suggested that the Better Way model in Time for a Change captures the practices that will deliver real change, she explained, and the purpose of the event was to try and tease out if there were common threads from what is already happening in the north and midlands that could be applied elsewhere.

As well as lively discussion among the participants, there were four opening presentations and also two respondents , and you can watch these below.

Opening presentations:

Mark Smith, Director of Public Service Reform for Gateshead Council

Charlotte Carpenter, Executive Director Growth and Business Development, Karbon Homes

Sommer Springer, Trauma and Wellbeing Co-ordinator, Changing Lives, Wolverhampton

Samantha Abram, Asset Coach from The Brick, Wigan

Respondents

Rosie Lewis, Head of Policy for Imkaan

Sue Pearson, Chief Executive of Heeley City Farm, Sheffield

Concluding the discussion, Caroline Slocock, the national co-convenor for a Better Way, remarked on how each of the speakers in different ways had emphasised the importance of principles and process to delivering change. Their contribution and the input from participants had shown that it was possible to identify common threads from which others could learn. She grouped these under the four dimensions of the Better Way model, as these provided one framework for doing so:

• Listening to each other, with many of the speakers talking about the importance of listening to those least heard now, because that is the only way to find out what’s not working and what will.

• Sharing and building power, with the examples described vividly demonstrating that we have more power than we think to make change happen and we can also empower others to bring about change in their lives.

• Joining forces, across organisations, because very often we need to change the system not the person, the speakers had said, and we can’t do that alone.

• Putting relationships first, creating relationships as the norm in organisations, both with those who seek help and amongst ourselves and across organistions.

The speakers had also demonstrated the importance of the learning journey, sharing and learning as you go along with generosity of spirit, which underlined the value of events and networks like these.

Sharing and building power: building inclusive and equitable communities

The topic discussed was how to create inclusive and equitable communities of place and interest.

The opening speaker was Sonya Ruparel from Turn2Us, who talked about her experience at Action Aid setting up a new international feminist network, with 70% of women from the global south; and, at Turn2 US, of building a new accountability framework and, most recently an alliance of grant-makers.

Some key points made by the speaker and participants were:

• Many existing communities are not inclusive or equitable and it’s important to recognise that ‘who we are’ may be the problem. Actively seeking to diversify and change who is involved to make sure that no group or vested interest dominates and to rectify power imbalances is part of the answer.

• Building inclusive and equitable communities takes time, because you have to identify a common problem and build a common cause, genuinely listening to and learning from each other.

• It’s important to be able to surface conflict, be able to feel comfortable with it and recognise that it’s ok to disagree.  But it is often hard, particularly for those with least power in a community, to do this.

• Techniques and clear ground rules to create equity of voices can be really valuable, as some voices will otherwise dominate and, in the context of organisational alliances, it is often those with most money and other resources who do.  Online meetings have helped to reduce these power imbalances, as they have an equalising effect.  Other techniques include: talking to each other during a walk, rather than holding a formal meeting, enforcing ‘equality of speaking’, and genuine shared decision-making eg through voting.

• Being accountable to each other is important.

• Division is being created through the culture wars, especially on trans issues, which is tearing people who might otherwise find common cause apart.

Joining Forces: imbalances and inequalities

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘Imbalances and inequalities: How can we recognise the imbalances and inequalities that exist in collaborations and agree standards for behaviour that enable participation by all?’

The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• Organisations operate in a highly competitive funding environment and this can exacerbate imbalances and inequalities within partnerships. 

• Dominant partners can sometimes abuse their power, and in the worst cases this needs to be called out more, and mobilised against.

• On the other hand it is possible to recognise and embrace disagreement and conflict, in ways that allow this to become a stimulant to innovation.

• And things often work best when we start by assuming the best, rather than the worst, in others.

• Furthermore, there are techniques and tactics which can be used to help everyone appreciate better what each partner brings, and skilled connectors can also play a useful role.

• Above all, establishing a common purpose, and seeing the bigger picture, especially when this is done together with those who are beneficiaries, and those working at the front line, can encourage more generous and less self-interested behaviours.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change, which some have called the Better Way ‘beachball’:

In this cell we are exploring the ‘joining forces’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time was ‘How can we recognise the imbalances and inequalities that exist in collaborations and agree standards for behaviour that enable participation by all’.

As Cate Newnes Smith, thought-leader for this cell, pointed out, lives are complex, and public services generally try to compartmentalise needs, but this leaves may gaps, and that’s one of the main reasons we need to join forces. ‘Joining forces’ is a helpful concept she felt, because it implies combining the power of organisations, rather than them doing their own things.

Cate has found it difficult to find instances where inequalities in partnerships have truly been successfully addressed. She shared an example of a service ‘alliance’ between an NHS Trust and 12 charities where the NHS England commissioners of the service made deliberate attempts to address inherent inequalities in the partnership, e.g. by requiring that £4.5m of the £24m available needed to be distributed to the charities. But despite this, the standard top-down contract management model which NHS England has applied has not been helpful for alliance building and sharing of power.

We also had a presentation from Arvinda Gohil, CEO of Central YMCA.  She pointed out that in partnerships between organisations there is often an inherent inequality, where one is dominant, adopts the leadership role and is the gateway to the money. This can be aggravated by funders and commissioners who want the reach that comes from partnerships but prefer to deal with just one organisation, because this keeps things simple for themselves.

Contractual relationships can be constructed to create an ‘upper hand’ for a larger, more powerful partner, over a smaller, less experienced organisation. Arvinda spoke of her experience when she ran a housing association in the North, newly set up to improve access to housing for the Black community, and partnered with another much larger asset-rich housing association, to be the developer of new housing. The contract stipulated that the developer would retain profits over an agreed pricing level and in the event the scheme was highly profitable. In this case Arvinda was eventually able, but only with the help of a third party, to negotiate a profit-share agreement.

More recently, Arvinda was leading a smaller organisation which merged with a larger one because it was not financially viable on its own, in order to safeguard services for a poor community in London. However, following the merger, the dominant partner asserted its authority and ability to overrule, repeatedly saying ‘we own you’. This led to a difficult relationship, one that Arvinda eventually felt she had no option but to leave.

More positively, Arvinda has now found herself in the role of running a larger organisation which has offered its sports and exercise facilities as well as staffing support to a small youth club working with young Black and Asian men, in exchange for a small affiliation fee. This is working well, said Arvinda, and she believes that it is indeed possible to live the positive values of collaboration, but this requires determination and commitment from those in leadership roles, especially where they are the stronger partner.

Steve shared a further example, where some years ago Groundswell, a small homelessness charity, which was struggling financially at the time, was transferred into the ownership of Thames Reach, a much larger charity, to ensure its survival. Groundswell subsequently thrived, and when it reached the point where it could once again operate independently, Thames Reach allowed this to happen, without requiring anything in return. This, Steve felt, was an outstanding example of selfless behaviour by a larger organisation, but one that is unfortunately uncommon.

Discussion

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: ’What standards of behaviour in collaborations would enable participation by all?’ In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:

What gets in the way

• Many organisations operate in a highly competitive environment and leaders are programmed to protect their own organisation first and foremost. Unless we can change this, and encourage leaders to think less about their own organisation and more about the shared impact they can achieve with others, the harmful inequalities and imbalances will persist.

• We cannot assume that positive and generous motivations will always be present, and some people and organisations are driven by a need to dominate. 

• Even when people are willing to work together for a common aim, their own behaviour can get in the way, for example, if someone asserts that their favoured solution is the only one that will work, and is unwilling to make space for other possibilities to emerge.

• Where funding depends on the partnership, and one partner holds the purse strings, there is an inevitable inequality and imbalance.

• In service delivery partnerships, the imposition of predetermined targets can become a means of control and this can reinforce power imbalances.

How to generate positive behaviours

• A shared common aim, where shared investment leads to shared success, is more likely to drive positive behaviour than a set of standards.

• A focus on what can be done that actually makes a difference to people’s lives, with co-production as a guiding principle, including involvement of recipients of a service and of people at the front line of delivery, developing priorities together, can generate a shift away from organisations positioning themselves for their own advantage.

• In the best partnerships everyone is respected for whatever they bring, whether that is resources, or connections, or expertise, regardless of the size or strength of the organisation. 

• A state of mind that starts with assuming the best of everyone else in the partnership can help a great deal to bring out good behaviours in the group.

• There are techniques and tactics which can be deployed where there are imbalances, for example different forms of meetings that enable greater participation and encouraged shared solutions.

• Restorative practice can help to shift organisational culture in favour of better collaboration, for example being non-judgmental, person-centred, and empathic. Appreciative inquiry can help people understand what everyone wants to achieve and what everyone can bring to the shared task.

• Leadership needs to be flexible, agile, and adaptive, using evaluation to learn and improve impacts, which can help to build a culture of collaboration, rather than seeking to prove impact, which can make collaboration more difficult.

Collaboration in a competitive environment

• In the commercial world, companies which are engaging in fierce competition for customers can nevertheless sometimes find themselves able to collaborate, for example by sharing best practice, or by establishing buying clubs, to get better deals.

• Organisations tackling complex and wicked social problems will need to collaborate, to achieve any worthwhile impact, even though they are at the same time in competition for funds. This is a tension that they need to understand and manage.

• It is sometime possible to push back against commissioners in a concerted way, and encourage them to adopt commissioning models that will lead to more collaborative and less competitive practices.

The role of connectors

• Connectors (trusted people who are skilled in identifying common interests, and can make introductions and encourage co-operation) can play a big part in establishing and maintaining productive and well-balanced partnerships, and investing in the connector role can be very worthwhile.

Embracing conflict

• Positive collaborations need to be willing to recognise and embrace disagreement and conflict, not least where there are complex ‘wicked’ problems that don’t lend themselves to simple solutions. 

• If something is not working well it is better to address this openly and have the difficult conversation, rather than allowing things to fester. Conflict should, it was suggested, become normalised, making it a stimulant to innovation rather than a stimulant to divisiveness.

• It can be helpful to make potential disagreements and conflicts explicit at the outset of any collaboration.

Shifting power

• Sticking together in a partnership requires team work and discipline, but when that is achieved and sustained through thick and thin, it is possible to shift power imbalances.

• The most powerful thing is the truth, it was said. Those who have small amounts of money or other resources, but have the truth (especially when connected to a social injustice) can find themselves able to influence others and win allies.  

The need to call out abuses of power

• Sharing power is really hard for many individuals and institutions, including local government and the civil service, who have a tendency to accumulate and hoard and sometimes abuse power.

• There is a need sometimes to call this out, mobilise to challenge abuses of power, and stand by those who are treated unfairly.  

And finally…

• In partnerships there is a need to make a deliberate effort to stand back and appreciate the whole in order to ‘see the elephant’, otherwise people are likely to have very different and narrow perspectives, and fail to appreciate the wider task:

Future meetings

• 21st September, 3.00pm-4.30. Joining forces across sectors, including with the private sector: How can we build alliances not just between the voluntary and public sectors but also with the business sector? 

• 19th October, 3.00pm-4.30.  Joining forces to inspire, rather than to control: If, in our collaborations, we seek to control the actions of others we may be preventing the growth of something bigger, a wider social movement. So, can we ‘let go’ when we collaborate, without losing our way?

Listening to Each Other: How can we listen together?

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘How can we listen together? Where leaders from different organisations come together to listen to those they serve, and work with them in a positive and motivating way to bring about change.’

The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• Collective listening can be a powerful tool. Especially when partnerships are formed first and foremost to build and share knowledge, in ways that can produce social change, rather than simply to design and deliver a set of services.

• Listening well is difficult. It matters who is in the room, who is included, as well as who is absent.

• It also matters how the listening is practiced. Operating at a level of intimacy, allowing people to enter into each other’s lives and build trust, can produce the best results.

• We need to remember that listening only brings about change when it is acted upon. ‘Voices need to have consequence in the context of now’, it was said.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.

In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time is ‘How can we listen together.’

Karin Woodley, thought-leader for this Better Way cell, pointed out that listening is hard. To drive people-powered innovation we need to step into our service users’ experiences and understand the limitations of our own biases, experiences, knowledge and judgements, and create safe spaces for people to share their own experiences and desires.

In the current economic and political climate, when organisations are struggling for their own survival, it is a challenge to lead change through partnership. But as leaders we can come together, listen better, and allow the knowledge and lived experience of our service users to be shared. In this way we can gain a holistic view of what is happening in service users’ lives and so better understand drivers of exclusion and poverty.

Some years ago, when Karin was CEO of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, she worked with Imperial College, Oxford University, and local schools in South London. The starting point was listening to Black parents, and it quickly became clear that the parents were highly aspirational for their children, but that their children were being characterised and limited within the school system. As a result of this partnership undertook research to understand the cognitive skills required for different roles in the built environment, from architecture to engineering. This shifted the practice in the participating schools regarding the teaching of STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, maths), and also led to fresh approaches to work with excluded young Black people, for example opportunities to travel to the United States to take part in Nasa-sponsored competitions.

The challenges we face as society are so much bigger than any one of our organisations, said Karin. We need a new era of working together, deploying tools like radical listening, to create systemic responses to match the scale of the challenges we face.

Sally Young spoke from her long experience in the health service and the voluntary sector in the North East on England. She has realised, she said, that she has not always been a good listener. And that it is wrong for those who work in the charity sector to assume they are necessarily superior at listening, compared to those from other sectors.  

About ten years ago, she said, Newcastle reviewed its contracts for children and young people’s services with local organisations, and decided it would save money to move to a single contract. A large national organisation won the contract, and local agencies were de-funded.  In response, Sally helped to establish a consortium, to encourage local organisations to work together, and this led to some shared contracts, and improved connectivity across agencies. But it was not easy to maintain solidarity. As people changed the values also changed, and organisations under pressure were sometimes less willing to share.

Sally pointed out that beliefs, values and principles, and relationships and trust between people, are needed to bring about change.  There is no point in just listening and gathering information if we do nothing with it to challenge structural problems, not just the superficial ones, she said.

Lawrence Walker, from A New Direction spoke next. Listening, done well, is an art form, he said. It is personal and provocative; it disrupts power and inspires new action. It takes years to be a skilful listener. Most organisations listen for their then own ends, and while this can be useful, it limits the potential for change is limited, because no single organisation can account for the complexity of people’s lives, or can have the influence to bring about wider change. We need to open up the process and have more shared endeavours, he said.

Orientation is fundamental to successful collaboration. People need to understand what they are signing up to, and the nature and level of investment required, and they need to be prepared for the nuances and politics of relationships.

Risk-taking, generosity, and giving away power is easier said than done. The process needs to be held by someone, and that person needs to be willing to be accountable to the group.

Collective listening processes can be genuinely exciting. People will bring their wisdom and specialisms, but at a deeper level it is the interplay of cultures – language, filters, frames – which produces appreciation and engagement. ’Be ready to be surprised and have one’s organisational bias challenged,’ said Lawrence.

He described a recent collaboration about young people in the pandemic which involved five organisations. This, he suggested, might be about the limit – collaboration becomes more complicated the larger the number. This particular collaboration was hard, but worthwhile. One of the insights was that allowing voices to be heard is important, but it is not enough. ‘Voices need to have consequence in the context of now’, he said.

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: What does good collective listening look like?  In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses:

We need a shift in organisational culture and practice

• Collective listening needs to be much more integral to how organisations work together, and become part of the prevailing culture, it was suggested.

• This requires a big shift in our practice, moving beyond the efforts by individual organisations to gather feedback about their own work or their own plans. It needs to start with an ambition to discover people’s experiences of a system or within a place.

• The purpose of collaboration should best emerge not simply from a pooling of organisational interests but rather first and foremost from listening to the people the organisations exist to serve.

• Listening can lead to fundamental changes in the practice of an organisation. We heard how Shelter was approached by tenants on an estate in the North of England. They wanted to take legal action to prevent social and private landlords increasing their rents (by 60%). Legal action wasn’t possible (the landlords were operating within the law) but rather than simply saying, sorry we can’t help, the charity then worked with the residents to develop a campaign, using community organising principles, and this led to the landlords backing down. This would not have happened without listening. 

• This outcome was not simply due to a local community organiser. It also required a different mind-set across the whole Shelter team, with staff in different parts of the organisation being willing to listen and act accordingly, going beyond the confines of their traditional service.

Methods for collective listening

• Collective listening needs preparation and structure. When there is a clear reason for listening the exercise is likely to be more productive. 

• It is important to take account of both the different views of those who want to be listened to, and also the different agendas of those who are doing the listening.

• It matters who is present and who is absent. If those who control funding and have ability to make decisions are absent, it will be much harder for collective listening to produce the changes that are needed.

• Listening is, however, not just about getting people from different agencies into the room to listen. The process needs to be inclusive. There needs to be human-to-human empathy.  Speaking kindly to each other goes a long way.

• It can help if listeners and those listened to can mirror each other, and so can more easily relate to each other.

• Putting people at ease, paying attention to the layout of the room, can also matter a great deal.

• Listening without an agenda is important. Well-meaning organisations often start with a stance, their idea of what might help people.  Whereas it is best to start with discovering the skills in the room, recognising the experience and gifts that people themselves have, allowing their insights to inform decision-making. 

• It was also suggested that citizens’ assemblies can be a useful model for collective listening, particularly in respect of complex challenges, where there are opposing views on how to proceed.

Should we be listening better to voices from the past?

• In China, it was explained, there is a different culture, where people are much more likely than in the West often look to historical precedents to find solutions to modern challenges. It was suggested that appeals to historical wisdom can help to overcome short term organisational self-interest. 

• On the other hand, it was also pointed out that a reliance on historical precedent can perpetuate and reinforce embedded inequalities.

We need to understand when listening is useful (and when not)

• We need to develop our understanding of when listening is most useful, and when not. The idea that the voices of lived experience should inform decision-making has become much more prominent in recent years in some parts of the charity and public sectors. But in fact, the value of such voices is far higher for some types of decision-making than for others, it was said.

• Failing to recognise this can produce a reductive box-ticking set of behaviours, rather than one that really drives social change.

Final comments

Karin Woodley, in reflecting on the discussion, suggested that a key challenge is how to create strategic partnerships or collaborations that are not just about developing or delivering a service, but more fundamentally about building our collective knowledge, in a way that allows unheard voices to drive decision-making and bring about change.

She also said that in her experience, the best listening results from efforts to make conversations intimate, allowing people to build trust by entering into each other’s lives.   

Putting Relationships First: Turning organisations into communities

The topic discussed was how to turn organisations into communities, not machines, following on from the topic considered in February of how to make relationship-building the purpose of organisations. We started the meeting by asking everyone to give examples of this, good and bad, from their experience.

In the discussion, four main ways emerged to unlock humanity at work:

• Creating new activities that bring staff together in informal ways, eg over cakes and coffee without a formal agenda, or engaging everyone in a common task where new relationships could form.

• Sharing our whole selves in every aspect of what we do at work, often through intentional one-to-one conversations.

• Finding the right ‘touch points to demonstrate a different, more human way of doing things, for example, understanding that some forms of communication may be impersonal or even threatening and using more personal approaches.

• Creating structures and formal practices which create a sense of community.  This is not about dismantling hierarchies or pretending that everyone in an organisation has equal power.  What seems to work much better is creating ways in which people genuinely get to know each other and look out for each other eg shared work lunches and making sure people who need a bit of extra support get it.

Sharing and Building power: authentic voices

The topic under discussion was:

Authentic voices: looking in more depth at how to create inclusive platforms and encourage unheard voices.

Jude Habib from Sound Delivery, which has a spokesperson network of people with lived experience, explained how they mentor people with lived experience and cultivate journalists in order to create opportunities. She introduced two people in their network who spoke about their experiences, Brenda Birungi, the Creative Director of Poets Unchained, who had founded National Prison Radio while she was in prison, and Amanda Hailes, who is part of a Hull Based colllective called Untold Story which has written a book by the same name that tells the story of women working in prostitution in Hull, using their own words and images.

They both stressed the importance of Sound Delivery’s network and support in helping them to speak to a wider audience. ‘It was an eye-opener to find other people like me and not to be embarrassed', Brenda said, adding ‘We don’t shut up anymore because we realise there are so many people in that position. I’m now proud of where I’ve come from’.

‘Our voices need to be heard before anything can change’, said Amanda, explaining that experiences can get trapped in ‘layer after layer of truama’ caused by multiple disadvantage and by speaking up people like her were trying to get others to understand. With Sound Delivery’s help, she had learnt to ‘stand proud’. She had learnt that you need to ‘keep going, keep going, because you are the expert - an expert in surviving’.

Brenda emphasised that the support provided by bodies like Sound Delivery needed to be from ‘beginning to end’, which was what Jude Habib and Sound Delivery do. Brenda said that through the network she was not just being given platforms herself but was ‘passing the mike to the person behind me.’

The critical thing when working with charities, Amanda stressed, was for people with lived experience to be treated as ‘part of the team’ and be really incorporated into their work, rather than just being seen a tick box exercise and paying lip service. She had experienced both approaches and there were a world apart. Brenda said it was very important to go to formal places the Houses of Parliament and Broadcasting House and speak in person. They needed not just to have the opportunity to tell their stories, but direct access to the people who have power to make the changes.

Here are some of the other points made in discussion in the group:

• We need to build greater awareness of the power of authentic voices and make much greater use of that power.

• The purpose of enabling authentic voices to access platforms and be heard is ultimately to share power and enable them to become leaders, not you.

• We must genuinely empower authentic voices, but people in bodies working with people with lived experience can also feel protective and deeply responsible and this may be an inhibiting force. Safeguarding can sometimes turn into gatekeeping. It’s important to work through this and ensure that people have the training and support they require, to make decisions with the people themselves rather than taking them for them, and make sure that everyone is comfortable with the degree of risk sometimes involved. One person recalled a person with lived experience being told: ‘We’ll tell your story for you at our booklaunch’. It was probably intended to be protective but it was not right.

• This is emotional work in which human support is critical. Many are new to this and would benefit from more sharing of learning. There are a lot of practical things to consider - for example the use of real names or not.

• People with lived experience should be paid properly, as consultants.

Sue Tibballs from the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, who is the ‘thought leader’ for the Sharing and Building Power cell, reflected that empowering authentic voices was a really important and radical step which was ‘shaking the foundations of how charity works’, requiring charities ‘to get out of the way’ and build genuine solidarity with people with lived experience. Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, concluded by saying that the group had heard not just about the power of authentic voices but also about the power of their leadership role and their potential to be role models to others.

Joining Forces: building systems leadership into job roles at all levels

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘Systems leadership: How can we build systems leadership into job roles at all levels, and help people to do this from a perceived position of no organisational power?’ The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• Systems leadership is capable of being exercised far more widely, and at many more levels, including at the frontline of services, than is often assumed.

• But for this to happen, we need to build a different culture and set of expectations about what good leadership looks like.

• And we need to create psychological safety, especially for those in front line roles. So that they feel they have a role to play, believe that their voice will be equally heard and thought about, and are confident that they can contribute their own ideas and perspectives. 

• We also need to pay attention to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion so that participation in systems leadership activities can be truly inclusive rather than simply the preserve of a relatively privileged minority.

• The leadership models associated with New Public Management are a very real barrier to progress, and these are deeply embedded. So this is not an easy journey, and the changes are especially difficult for large national organisations, where claiming credit is fundamental to maintaining income and profile.

• But, it was suggested, the conditions to make progress are perhaps more favourable now than they were before, because during the pandemic it became obvious that many things worked better when more responsibility was devolved to the front line, and that operating at a greater level of trust was more viable than many had expected.

• Most progress will be made when there is a clear understanding that, first and foremost,  everyone should be working for what the community needs rather than what the organisation needs.  

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change, which some have called the Better Way ‘beachball’: 

In this cell we are exploring the ‘joining forces’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time was ‘How can we build systems leadership into job roles at all levels’. As Cate Newnes Smith, thought-leader for this cell, pointed out, we need everyone to be playing a part in bringing about systems change. It is not enough to have a group of senior leaders in a room somewhere trying to change a system. The richness often comes from the front line. 

We started with two presentations:

Nadine Smith described the challenges that face systems leaders. It takes a long time to unlearn the models and behaviours of New Public Management.  Nadine spoke of her experience in Whitehall, where everyone wants to be the best, to have the answers, to be the hero.

One reason why New Public Management hasn’t died is because we lack an alternative that is clear. But the conversations on how to build a different kind of leadership are nevertheless developing in a healthy experimental way in many parts of government, and are promoted by public sector reform networks such as One Team Gov. 

Systems leadership training tells leaders that their role is not to control, but rather to create the right conditions for good things to happen. But this is very daunting in the civil service, where performance management reviews insist on answers to questions such as ‘What did you do, what was your role?’ and pay rises and promotions are awarded accordingly.

Systems leaders know that they need to take account of complexity, and the Human Learning Systems model pioneered by Toby Lowe provides helpful guidance on what leaders can do when faced with complexity. The Centre for Public Impact has a forthcoming report which will catalogue a wide variety of approaches, from across the world, which embody the spirit of systems leadership and Human Learning Systems.

One big challenge is how to measure and evaluate in a system that is complex and messy. This, suggested Nadine, requires new methods to capture different types of information, including stories, emotions, and relationships. And it is necessary to ask whose voice is missing, to consider how untested assumptions obscure the truth.

It is also useful to adopt methods that can evaluate programmes in real time, and which can provide a running commentary on them. Measuring for control can create perverse incentives in the system, and it is better to use measurement for learning, not control.

Systems leaders can easily become burnt out. In part this is because they are worried about the whole system, and about accountability and responsibility. Systems leaders need a really good team around them. If they don’t sleep well at night it might be because there aren’t people around them they can trust.

The Human Learning Systems Approach uses VEST as a guide for systems leaders:

·       Variety – respond to the variety of human need and experience

·       Empathy – use empathy to understand the lives of others

·       Strength – view people from a strengths-based perspective

·       Trust – trust people with decision-making

It is also important to remain open to that which is unexpected. Nadine quoted the words of a senior civil servant Clare Moriarty, who said: ‘I came across happy accidents. Things that changed my view of the world without me planning for it. It led to enlightenment and deep learning.’

Polly Neate

Everything on the Better Way ‘beachball’ is really difficult for a national organisation like Shelter, said Polly. But we cannot ignore the importance of large national organisations, where so much resource and capacity is concentrated.

At Shelter, work is in progress to do things differently, with a new approach to local services, working within communities to provide a base for systems change.

Shelter has appointed three community development workers, with the aim of bringing people who have lived experience of homelessness to the centre of local decision making. This is not about placing Shelter at the centre. If no-one recognised Shelter’s role, that really doesn’t matter, says Polly.

For example, in Bournemouth, over the last six months, the community development worker has established links with a variety of local partners to achieve more input of people with lived experience into a consultation about the local authority homelessness strategy, and their recommendations were included in the strategy. She hosted a consultation on a women-only centre in Dorset, to establish a housing case for this centre. She set up a partnership with a Gypsy and Traveller forum, to consider how the new trespass Bill could lead to homelessness and loss of property, and Shelter was able to take up these issues in its national lobbying. While carrying out this work, it became clear that there are widespread problems with mould in Gypsy and Traveller caravans, and the Shelter DIY skills adviser, funded through a B&Q partnership, was able to offer support to address this. The community development worker also formed relationships with the Dorset Race Equality Council and other organisations working with minoritised communities, and one result of this has been that Shelter has provided free training on housing rights, benefits, and debt advice to these small grass roots organisations, so that they themselves can provide advice to their community members in future. 

These are examples of activities which, as a large national charity, Shelter would not traditionally have undertaken. But the locally based community development workers have already been able to expand the charity’s reach, and bring national resources to bear to support local efforts, without having to be worried about branding everything as a Shelter project.

The biggest challenge for Shelter, as it localises more and more, is how to align the local and national operations. At national level, Shelter has effective and well-resourced media, campaigns and policy and research teams, but has had to scale back some national campaign activities in order to redirect resources to local activities, and this hasn’t been easy for everyone to understand.

The whole exercise has raised big questions about how to make the most impact, and what is counted as impact. Working at a national level, and trying to persuade the current government to do things differently, is resource intensive and difficult. Sometimes the impact that can happen locally is just as important, and indeed sometimes achieves a greater level of change. 

But a shift from national campaigning to local influencing is very hard for a national charity like Shelter. Particularly when Shelter’s own role in bringing about change needs to be prominent in order to attract the funding and recognition which is necessary to remain a strong national charity, and without which it would not have the resources to support local community-based systems leadership of the type Polly has described.

Discussion

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: how can we build systems leadership into job roles at all levels, not just at the apex of the organisation? In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:

A different culture of leadership

• A shift from the Me to the We requires that that leaders have to be present at all levels of an organisation, not just at the top.

• But this cannot happen without a different culture of leadership. Not expecting leaders to have all the answers, challenging them to think differently, allowing them to fail in the pursuit of change.

• We all need to unlearn the engrained top-down assumptions about leadership.  Education is a problem. From early childhood most people are kept in their box, they are not encouraged to develop their leadership qualities, or play their part in shared leadership, or as followers as well. Furthermore, schools don’t encourage systems thinking.

• Those that are able to exercise a systems leadership role are in a relatively privileged position. There is a responsibility on them to model a shift in culture and behaviour in their own practices, to be credible and authentic.

Establishing inclusive psychological safety

• Systems change requires the contribution of multiple top-down and bottom-up perspectives, with spaces that can accommodate conflict and collision, and a willingness to listen, and without this depth of inclusion, meaningful and lasting change will not happen.

• People at every level therefore need to feel confident that they will be allowed to exercise systems leadership. For example to feel they have a role to play, to believe that their voice will be equally heard and thought about, and that they can contribute their own ideas and perspectives. 

• It is necessary to examine this through an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lens, addressing race, gender, and disability, because without this it will not be possible to establish psychological safety in a truly inclusive way, and some groups of people will once again be left on the margins.

Recognising the opportunities and the barriers

• Leadership is situational, it was suggested. Everyone has the potential opportunity to be a leader in their own situation, and we need to consciously and persistently push for ever more agency and accountability in every role, from trustees, to staff, to co-production partners, to volunteers, to partners. 

• Barriers to this can be systemic (the annual appraisal cycle, the operational plan, the strategic plan, all of which tend to be top down) and cultural (the unspoken and unwritten rules and behaviours). 

The role of Boards and the senior leadership

• For those at the operational level who want to work differently it can be difficult to manage upwards and it is hard to bring about change without people at senior levels who are believers and proponents. So change needs to happen from the outset at the level of Chairs of Boards, CEOs, and Directors. 

• Social sector structures are governed by voluntary Board members who often come from a commercial and senior professional background, and the behaviours they exhibit can set a pattern for the whole organisation. For example if they see their role as inspecting and directing the CEO, this will make it much harder to build agency and systems leadership throughout the team, including at lower levels.

The role of funders

• Funders can sometimes make it harder for organisations to build agency among the people they work with, by imposing controls that have a waterfall effect right down to the service front line and to beneficiaries.

• We heard about one organisation which wanted to provide small grants to individuals struggling with poverty, and to give them full agency and control over how they used the money, but had to turn down funding for this, because the funder insisted that all the grants had to be fully approved and tracked, with a paper trail of receipts.

• Funders can however also help, for example by giving funding priority to partnerships which are seeking to encourage systems change and which are promoting leadership among those in operational roles.

Bringing about change is difficult, especially in large organisations

• The change we are trying to bring about is a big one, and the journey to get there will be uncertain and iterative. 

• It is difficult to move to a new system while needing to operate an old one. As one person said, it is hard to jump off the New Public Management carousel.   

• In a larger organisation it can be just too difficult to tackle everything all at once.  It is usually better to start small and build out, it was suggested.

The conditions for change may – perhaps – be shifting in our favour

• During the pandemic many people realised that it was possible to trust others, including those in undervalued front-line roles, much more than they had expected.

• The model of New Public Management came about, it was suggested, because of an assumption that mistrust is necessary in public life. Once it is widely accepted that this assumption is flawed, the momentum to find better ways to operate is more likely to gather pace.

Establishing purpose

• Progress will perhaps best be driven by a clear understanding that everyone should be working for what the community needs rather than what the organisation needs.

Listening to Each Other: recruiting the right people, those best placed to listen and act on what they hear

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘How can organisations recruit the right people, those best placed to listen and act on what they hear?’  The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• It is possible for organisations to recruit extensively from within the communities served, and so become mirror images of their communities.

• But recruitment is only a first step. Organisations need to enable people who are appointed as staff or volunteers to be comfortable, creative, and accepted. 

• Flexible working practices, and a working environment that supports well-being, can make a big difference, as well as enhancing levels of team commitment.

• It is possible to go further, to establish teams with a high level of autonomy which are of the community, rather than of the organisation.

• Organisations constantly ‘other’ those who come from the communities served, thereby marginalising them. Overcoming this, and establishing a ‘team of us’ requires a profound power and culture shift.

• By that mustn’t mean patronising these who have lived experience.  And we need to establish teams that are truly diverse, even (and especially) when that feels uncomfortable.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.

In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time is ‘How do we recruit the right people?  The people best placed to listen and act on what they hear are most likely to come from the very communities the organisations serve.’

We started with two presentations:

Arvinda Gohil, CEO of Central YMCA

Arvinda explained that we need to start with listening, as the first rung on a ladder, then move to dialogue, to engagement, to involvement, to empowerment, and then to passing on power. But as a sector we have failed at the first step.  We haven’t made our organisations mirror images of the communities in which we operate.

When people say, ‘You are not the right fit for us’, what does that mean? It means essentially that those leading organisations are only comfortable with people who are the same as themselves.

Good leaders have to challenge this, all the time. Questioning who we who we work with, who we entice into the organisation. This requires great tenacity, said Arvinda.

Opening the door is not enough.  The organisation needs to enable people who enter to be comfortable, creative, and accepted.

The strategies we have tried on the past have failed, and we need to try new things. We have to take risks and be willing to make mistakes, learn from them, and evolve. 

For example, leaders can seek out the ‘hidden gems’ within their team, those who are often unrecognised, and invest in them as bridge-builders, giving them time, empowering them to link to the community and to make changes in the ways things are done.

And it is better to ask people ‘What are the terms that would work for you?’ rather than ‘Can you work within the terms we offer?’

Nasim Qureshi, CEO of Inspired Neighbourhoods

Nasim described how Inspired Neighbourhoods started just eight years ago, and now provides a range of services, across four different communities within or close to Bradford. This includes, for example, mental health and physical health support, domiciliary care, employment advice, enterprise advice, and a library.

For each of its locations, the organisation drew a two-mile radius and sought to understand all the networks and communities within that area.

Before any project is started, there is a period of co-design with the community. This makes it harder to apply for grant funding, which usually requires that what will be delivered is already pre-determined.  For this reason, earned income is preferable, because this allows the organisation to operate more flexibly.

Each centre has a community advisory Board, and the Chair of each advisory Board sits on the main Board. So community voice travels continually up and down, and this achieves a level of intelligence that could not be obtained from any number of surveys.  There is no need to spend money on marketing and promotion to the community, said Nasim, because the connections are already in place.

The process is not just about co-design, it is also about co-delivery. People from within the various communities become volunteers, and they have written roles and responsibilities, and training opportunities. Most of the paid employees started off that way. There are now 60 employees and 42 volunteers. The library service is entirely run by community volunteers.

Staff are employed on a competency basis. 95% of the workforce is peripatetic. Nasim has a simple principle: ‘If we are sitting in a room, we are not working with the community.’

The organisation does not use time sheets, and employees work the flexible hours that are needed to deliver services, often outside standard hours, responding to emergencies, while balancing their own childcare or other family needs.  Nearly all staff give more than their 37 contracted hours, and turnover is very low.

Many employees have lived experience of the difficulties the organisation is seeking to address. It is a disability-friendly organisation, and a lot of attention is paid to mental well-being within the team.

The Board composition in 90-95% local.The organisation is responsive to its communities because of the people in it, the informal conversations that happen all the time.

Inspired Neighbourhoods decided to establish a summer school service, to gain greater insights into how lives of children and young people have been changing in recent years.  In the area selected for this service, the organisation partnered with a large number of local community organisations, building on their strengths, and reaching people they were not otherwise in contact with. They also involved the police, schools and statutory bodies, and were able to influence the City-wide strategy, inviting the Council Chief Executive and others into discussions with the young people, letting them speak for themselves.

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: How can we build teams that mirror our communities and as a result are better at listening and following through? In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses to the question:

Establish teams which ‘are the community’

• In the past some organisations have taken a community development approach (employing people with specialist community development skills to enter a community and work with local people), or they have taken a partnership approach (forming partnerships with local community organisations to reach more people). 

• A more radical approach is to build local teams which are the community, in other words entirely or predominantly made up from the local community, who may be actual or potential service users, and who will be able to act as authentic community connectors. The challenge of an organisation supporting such a team is to provide it with genuine autonomy, so that it is able to operate as the community’s team, rather than the organisation’s team.

• To do this well can take considerable time, and it is not easy, especially where organisations already have a deeply embedded way of operating, and it is made even more difficult when funders don’t allow sufficient flexibility.

• But it can be surprising and encouraging to discover that quite a few organisations are now going in this direction. (And some funders too.  For example the National Lottery Community Fund in Wales has introduced a funding stream to encourage more co-production.)

• And it is always important, it was felt, to go where the energy is, building on what is already there.

Reduce ‘othering’

• Organisations struggle to reduce the distinctions between those who are staff and those who are service users.  How can we genuinely become a “team of us”, rather than professionals on the one hand and lived experts on the other?

• We ‘other’ all the time in our language, our service models, our business planning, and the moment we do so we create a power imbalance.

• For example a local community organisation run by Asian women immediately becomes ‘othered’ and then marginalised, because they are seen as niche and not mainstream.

• We need to shift our perception of value, it was suggested, towards people and organisations which are from the communities served, instead of seeing them as niche and therefore as of less value.

Avoid patronising those with lived experience.

• Designating people as lived experience experts, or as co-production partners, can lead to patronising behaviours, where those people are not challenged in the same way as other colleagues would be. 

• Those with lived experience are often more ready to tell their own story than to listen to others. It is important to recognise that listening is a distinctive skill, which needs to be nurtured. 

• Sometimes people with lived experience can become gatekeepers, and end up becoming a barrier for others, including those who have lived experience but different interpretations of their experience.

• There is a difference between lived experience and lived expertise.  Reflecting only on one’s own experience is different from possessing sufficient emotional and mental distance to critically assess what you are offering as an insight.

Build diversity even when that is uncomfortable

• The recruitment processes matter, for example establishing balanced panels, not asking for qualifications that are not required, considering where best to advertise the roles.

• Mirroring the community must not just become a tick-box exercise in representation.

• There is a danger of focusing only on protected characteristics, instead of remembering the importance of diversity of thinking and approach. We need to be more willing to work with people whose political or social views we find difficult. And to establish safe spaces where people can test each other and learn from each other.

• We mustn’t be afraid of diversity in our teams.

Shift and share power

• We cannot share power, we reminded each other, without leaving our egos behind.

• One suggestion was that leaders should always take on a direct delivery project, however small, so that they understand the system, and gain experience at first hand. Rather than simply telling others what to do they will find themselves entering into real conversations.

• Now is a good time to shift our practices, it was suggested. Not least because many organisations have recognised that many things went better during the pandemic, when those at the front-line of services were making independent decisions, while office-based staff were on furlough or sitting at home.

• It was felt that people from the communities served, who are playing advisory roles, should be given real power to review and shape services. 

• There might also be something to learn from the retail world, where consumers play a role in determining the success or otherwise of the stores they shop in. In the social sector (bearing in mind that relationships rather than transactions are usually what matter most) can we arrange things so that the success of our organisation is in the hands of our customers/service  users?

Listen and engage better

• There are challenges of personality – some people find it easier to be present, others have to work hard at this. Nancy Kline’s ‘Time to Think’ describes a practice of listening which fosters an environment where people can do their best thinking together as equals.

• Does a flatter organisation produce better engagement?  Not necessarily, it is culture rather than structure that matters most, it was felt.

• We need to find better ways to engage with people without designating them as a class of people who need to be engaged with. Technology might help, it was suggested, for example by delivering constant feedback in the course of everyday activities.

Sharing and Building Power: understanding how power works and the tools that are needed

Summary of main points

• In order to share and build power we need to understand how it works. There are many forms of power, from individual, collective, social and societal, and these interact with each other.

• The Sheila McKechnie’s draft Framework for the Accountable Use of Power encourages us to take a hard look at access to resources and formal rules and policies and also to deepen our own consciousness of power and capabilities, as well as our culture and connections, leading to reflective practice and a conscious shift in exclusionary cultures, narratives and practices.

• Taking power starts with oneself, including challenging self-limiting beliefs and practices. There is a dangerous narrative of finite power which can be self-constricting for individuals and organisations.  Being reflective about the different types of power, whether power over, power within, power for, or power to, helps create a greater consciousness and can be enabling.

• Asking the question ‘why’ can help to build a strong ‘power for’ with a common purpose and shared values which in turn makes it easier to give staff more power and to be more powerful externally.  Radical listening, particularly with those who are effectively silenced now, helps unlock this power.

• Relatively hidden forces can be a significant block to sharing and building power and these need to be understood and addressed. Internal governance, systems and processes, including regulatory requirements, can be disempowering to both staff and communities.  Power imbalances, for example between professionals and those served, should be recognised and addressed. Culture can make cross sectoral alliances difficult, for example.

• The social sector needs to do more to share its own power and build power with others, while also calling out abuses of power in society.

In more detail

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, introduced the meeting by talking about what the network had already learnt about power:

• Sharing power requires awareness and new tools
  Each of us can play a part, by understanding the sources of power and privilege, including our own, and identifying the blockages that prevent power from being shared. 

• Authentic voices can challenge existing sources of power
  Authentic voices stemming from personal experience can challenge existing sources of power, if they are not used in a tokenistic way. Storytelling ‘from the heart’ can be powerful.

• Connecting people creates power
  Connecting people – for example, through networks, coalitions and activities that link people together – creates new forms of power. Communities themselves also generate power, sometimes out of negative experiences, as Covid-19 has shown.

She explained that we were going to explore the first of these during this session, and introduced the thought leader for the cell, Sue Tibballs, the CEO of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK), which has been working on how to build and share power over the last few years. 

Sue Tibballs said that in order to build and challenge power, we need an understanding of how power works, which is why SMK have been producing various tools to help and she said it would be great to get the group’s input to these at this meeting.  These were still being finalised and would be published in an interim report in due course.  There have been previous attempts to understand power, she said, but these have often included binary assumptions when in reality power was more complex, and they had not taken hold.  Covid-19 had made it even more clear that we live in an unequal society.  The significant challenge for the social sector is to reform itself so that it shares power more equally while also exercising its own power externally.  This is all the more difficult when its power is currently being challenged by the Government.

Sarah Thomas from SMK then outlined the draft tools they are developing.  She said that they had mapped examples and had identified a nested system of power, as shown below.

These interacted with each other, rather like a dance.  Power is both an enabler and a constraint, and the draft Framework for the Accountable Use of Power SMK have developed allows us to understand better its nature and what we can do to share and build power ourselves.  This framework has four dimensions – consciousness and capabilities; culture and connections; resources; and formal rules and policies including governance.  This slide sets these out in more detail. 

The last two quadrants show the formal and arguably more familiar elements.  On resources, accountability is needed not just to ensure equitable access to money but also technology, information and networks.  Inside organisations, a review of formal rules and policies is important, including governance and procedures, because these can be a barrier to sharing power.  She also highlighted the top two quadrants.  There is often too much emphasis on building capacity of people with lived experience to take power, she said, and not enough on looking at ourselves. Reflective practice, and dialogue with those with less power, is vital too.  This new framework encourages us to look at shifting exclusionary cultures, including hidden codes and exclusionary networks and alliances.

In breakout groups, points made included:

• Taking power starts with oneself and one’s own organisation, including our own assumptions and beliefs, which can be self-limiting.  Perceived power is important. There is a dangerous narrative of finite power which can be self-restricting.  

• Being reflective about the different types of power, whether power over, power within, power for, or power to, helps create a greater consciousness and can be enabling.

• We need to ask the question ‘why’ rather than accept current assumptions; and listen deeply to those who are effectively silenced in society and act upon what is learnt.  We must make sure that the power we hold is genuinely working for, not against those we serve. Power ‘for’ is about creating a shared purpose and common values, and will have a really strong ‘why’. When it works well, it makes it easier to create self-organising teams within an organisation, as well as to provide a strong sense of external purpose and power.

• Governance, systems and processes, including regulatory requirements, can be disempowering to both staff and communities, for example by taking away autonomy for staff or placing restrictions on how communities naturally work.  

• Culture can be a significant bar to building social power within and across sectors, with an example given of a large company attempting to work with the social sector but with difficulties in both sectors in understanding each other’s culture and language. It can also lead to ‘group think’, with people gravitating to people like themselves rather than people who challenge their assumptions.

• Power imbalances, for example between professionals and those they work with, need to be recognised, and can get in the way of people realising their own power and agency because they defer to what they see as greater knowledge or are dependent on them to unlock further help. Professionals and organisations need to be aware of this and ‘gently hand the ball back’.  Sharing power takes trust on both sides, and is a continuous process which has to involve all levels of the organisation.

• Abuses of power are being used very effectively to bully certain groups, for example through racism, or attacks on the power of social sector, and need to be called out. 

• The social sector should be setting standards, being the best it can be internally, as well as making the best happen. It needs to challenge and call out the abuse of power in a way that is safe and effective while also getting our own house in order.

Overall, the reaction to SMK’s new tools was extremely positive and we thanked them for their contribution to the discussion.  SMK’s slides were circulated after the event and information about their social power project is available here.

The next meeting of the cell on 5 May will consider look at how to create inclusive platforms and encourage unheard voices through authentic voices. 

Joining Forces: developing a shared language to build collaboration

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘developing a shared language to build collaboration’. The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• Shared language matters, but must be simple and direct, and making time to develop shared language at an early stage of collaboration is usually time well spent;

• Language can be divisive, and it is a good idea to consider the language we use about the people we work with;

• We need to get past the jargon used within and across organisations and get to the person;

• Radical listening can help to generate a more empathic shared language, in favour of the individual;

• Shared understanding is what matters most.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.

In this cell we are exploring the ‘joining forces’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time is developing a shared language to build collaboration ’is how we can work on the shared language that engages and motivates people and underpins successful collaboration.’

We started with two presentations:

Cate Newnes-Smith, who has agreed to be thought leader for the cell, pointed out that joining forces really matters because, as set out in the Time for a Change document, we can’t solve complex problems alone.  She gave an example of efforts in a local authority to overcome silo working, and noted that this is really difficult. For instance, local authority staff are much happier to ask people what they think about specific council services, rather than find out about their lives, in case things come up that are outside their particular remit. It would be better, said Cate, if council staff were to join forces across departments and with others in such exercises, so the right people would be in the room, people could talk about things that really matter to them, and a system-wide response could be considered.  

Cate said she has been on a journey to understand the difference between collaboration and partnership, and likes the term ‘joining forces’, because it is harder to claim to be joining forces when it’s not happening. To join forces well there are many things that have to be got right, and we hope to explore these in the cell. On the question of language, Cate hasn’t come across instances where people have really been able to build shared language, and hopes to hear from others examples of this.

Steve pointed out that we are not looking for a single shared language that everyone can use in any circumstances.  Rather we are keen to understand the process whereby people seeking to work together can build an understanding among themselves and support that in the language they use.

Kevin Franks offered some provocations, as requested. He asked whether we really need a shared language, and whether if we had one it would be useful for improving services, outcomes, and communities?  And indeed, can a shared language really underpin successful collaboration?  To take one example, organisations have many ways of talking about engagement with those they serve. They might talk about involvement or participation, for example, and the engagement might take different forms, e.g. engagement in decision-making, or a sporting activity, or a training course.  There are as many different meanings as there are different organisations.  It would be very difficult to find a common term with a single meaning for everyone to agree with, and not necessarily useful to attempt to do so. 

Kevin agreed that a lot of the language we use can exclude – how many people understand co-production, for example?  But the real difficulties are not about language. Many of the things we seek to change are connected: unemployment and problems with mental health and isolation and loneliness and substance abuse and crime and poverty for example. None of these sit outside the others. Funding and projects often focus on one particular symptom, and don’t address causes. And furthermore beneficiaries are often excluded from design of solutions. These are complex issues which require complex and collaborative solutions, not a shared language.

We need to focus on shared values and shared power, in how we influence, learn from, and work with each other.  Kevin said he has moved away from talking about partnerships, and prefers to use the term collaboration, and likes the term joining forces. But actions speak louder than words and no amount of shared language will make any difference, unless it is backed by behaviours that result in meaningful change.

In response to Kevin, Cate pointed out that the lack of a shared language can sometimes get in the way of a collaborative effort. She gave an example where schools, concerned about the mental health of some of their children, were making referrals to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), but the referrals were rejected because the language the schools were using was different from that used by the CAMHS team. 

Discussion

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: Can we develop a shared language to build collaboration?  In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:

Shared language matters, but must be simple and direct, and making time to develop shared language at an early stage of collaboration is usually time well spent

• For those working together on a project or a service it is often necessary for all of those involved to establish some shared language, with agreed definitions, for reasons of efficiency and to avoid misunderstandings. Spending some time early on doing this is usually worthwhile.

• The language used by service managers and frontline workers among themselves and the language they use with service users or members of the public is often very different.  Perhaps they need to be brought closer together.   

• From the perspective of a service user a shared language can be important. One person may have contact with many different services and if they are not using the same terms they won’t join up and understand each other, and the service user may find it difficult to understand them and engage with them.

• Shared language needs to be as simple as possible. If we want to make services accessible and intelligible we need to avoid jargon. 

• To attempt to bring everyone across society to the same language is another matter. Different sectors have very different ways of talking about things, academics, corporates, charities, for example. By way of illustrating the difficulty of this, some felt that the Better Way model for change is expressed in terms which are direct and simple, and are likely to be understood across all sectors, but some of the text in the full document may be less effective for some people from some sectors.

Language can be divisive, and it is a good idea to consider the language we use about the people we work with

• Language can be divisive, reinforcing an ‘us and them’ culture. For example, it is common in service delivery partnerships to talk about some people as ‘hard to reach’. Often they are not in fact hard to reach (they are likely to be in contact with someone, after all). ‘Seldom heard’ would probably be more accurate.

• When organisations are seeking to join forces, a discussion between them about the implication of terms such as ‘hard to reach, ‘vulnerable’, ‘disadvantaged communities’, ‘NEET’ etc. may help them reach a fresh understanding of what they really want to achieve and how to do that, moving beyond a deficit model which implies that the people they work with are the problem.

We need to get past the jargon used within and across organisations and get to the person

• Sometimes new terms are very necessary to define things well, to bring coherence and clarity to a complex situation, and convey meaning quickly.

• However, a lot of the language which is employed in any one sector doesn’t really serve this purpose. Instead it functions as a way of claiming distinctiveness or difference from other sectors. If we want to join forces we need to be willing to express ourselves in simpler more direct language.

• When we are attempting to do something new, and want to present it as such, is it really necessary to generate a new set of terms to reinforce this?  Or is it preferable to make us of existing and commonly-used terms, accepting that this might indicate that what we are trying to do may not be so new after all?

• Furthermore some terms used by service providers (‘crisis’, ‘acute’, etc.) can actually make it harder to join forces and can generate misunderstandings because they are used in very different ways by different organisations.

• Most significantly many of these terms fail to connect with the lives of the people the organisations are seeking to serve. We need to get past the jargon to get to the individual person.

Radical listening can help to generate a more empathic shared language, in favour of the individual

• If organisations are to serve people well, they need to find ways of establishing a shared language that is able to build a deeper and fuller understanding with the individuals they work with.

• This may require a reflective practice. For example, a playback technique sometimes used in radical listening (a topic which is being explored in another Better Way cell) can help to generate an empathic understanding between people, especially where there is a power imbalance. This is where the listener plays back what they have heard but speaks in the first person, thereby putting themselves in the shoes of the other as they speak.

• A listening session could be followed by a sense-making session, to consider what has been said from multiple viewpoints, not just from a single perspective.  We felt that such techniques (as sometimes practiced in appreciative inquiry) could be helpful in achieving better collaboration, not only between an organisation and its service users, but also between organisations.

• The New Systems Alliance, established by the Mayday Trust, has been exploring a PTS (person-led, transitional, strengths-based) model of coaching, working without referrals, to give more power to the person within the coaching relationship, using simple language, and allowing them to set the terms of the discussion.

• Building empathy needs to be undertaken with care when working with people with experience of trauma, to avoid re-traumatising them and sending them into a downward spiral.

Shared understanding is what matters most

• Shared understanding is what really matters when joining forces, it was felt. Shared goals and shared purpose and shared language can be important, but shared understanding is the foundation for the type of collaboration that leads to effective concerted action and makes the most difference.

Listening to Each Other: changing how we lead so that we listen better

Summary of key points

The theme of the discussion was ‘how can we change how we lead so that we listen better’. The main points which emerged from the discussion were:

• Radical listening is transformative, shifting the balance fundamentally in favour of the people and communities we work with, building confidence and agency, and the ability to influence and shape how things are done.

• But many things, not least the conventional expectations of leaders, managerial cultures, and organisational hierarchies, can make the practice of radical listening very difficult.

• Therefore courage and determination are required to change the way we lead. 

• There are some well-established techniques (action learning, appreciative inquiry, reflective practice etc.) that can be helpful. 

• But what is really needed is for leaders to make space for themselves and for others to listen, in a conscious way, and not react defensively when assumptions are challenged as a result.

• Leaders can develop a less hierarchical and more participative leadership culture, so that radical listening can happen at every level.

• At the same time leaders can build a much more diverse and inclusive team, in composition more like the people and communities served.

• And finally leaders can challenge themselves to go further, by reaching out to the ‘silent society’, in other words  those people whose voices are never heard or listened to, and also by building a practice of listening well right across the voluntary public and private sectors.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.

In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.

Our focus this time is how we can change how we lead so that we listen better, even when that’s hard – recognising that it’s not about knowing all the answers or finding the solutions for others, but about creating an open-ended culture where others can participate.  We started with two presentations:

Karin Woodley, CEO of Cambridge House, has agreed to be the thought leader for the cell, and she opened the discussion. She spoke about radical listening, explaining that this starts from the premise that everyone deserves to be part of a conversation about societal reform. It aims to change the way we engage with the communities in which we work, so that people from those communities become more powerful.  

Radical listening requires those who listen to be genuinely curious and inquiring, and enter into discussions where the purpose is not to provide evidence for what we already think. We have to learn to stop waiting for things that justify our own beliefs, said Karin. We have to be brave enough to have our assumptions challenged, and be willing to listen beyond the surface level to discover what most matters to those we are listening to, making time to do this well. 

We need to be conscious of our own behaviour, avoiding for example summing up for people, re-organising their words, and telling them what the next stage is.

We can start practicing this with colleagues in our own organisations and if we do so we will make it easier to challenge traditional internal patriarchies, and well as creating the conditions to listen better to those outside.

Venu Dhupa, previously CEO at Community Links, and now working independently, then spoke about what makes good listening so difficult. Operating in an untidy world, she said, we have a tendency as leaders to want things to be well ordered, and it is difficult to live with ambiguity.  Listening is time-consuming, and requires people to be present, but people with very busy diaries will struggle to make space for this.  Leaders are under pressure to provide answers, and identify metrics, and even when they are genuinely curious they find it hard to say ‘I don’t know’.

However, Venu explained that when she makes space for others, and trusts that something worthwhile will happen, it often does. For example, Community Links was visited by the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and Venu decided not to arrange formal presentations.  Instead she created an opportunity for women from the local community to tell their stories, and this had far greater impact. 

Listening can have multiple benefits for leaders. It can open them up to them to considering different kinds of evidence. It can help them more reflective judgements. It can create useful frameworks that others can fill. It can allow more careful questioning, especially when faced with a complex challenge. It can help leaders go beyond the impulse to control and get to purpose. Leaders can find it hard to manage different opinions and conflict, but teams that are able to work their way through disagreement by listening well to each other can become stronger.  And leaders who listen can pick up clues, often given respectfully, but which can be easily missed.

Venu shared her wish that leaders would make more space to listen, allowing people opportunities to explore an issue, and thereby place more emphasis on judgement rather than quick answers.  To do so would be a sign of a mature organisation and mature leadership, whether in a Board or Executive role.

Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: How can people in leadership roles create a culture where others can participate?  In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:

The difficulties of listening

• We need to name the difficulties people have in listening well, if we are to have a chance to overcome them.

• Often we listen because there is an end in mind, and we are listening to clarify certain things, for example, how we can best assist someone in a crisis. This can be valid in itself, but is limited, but often those who are listening don’t have the mandate to listen more widely, or are caught up in a treadmill of activity which prevents listening.

• To pursue co-production and radical listening requires trust and courage.

• Working to meet the interests and needs of beneficiaries, and listening to them, should be the primary consideration, but this can be difficult, if, for example, this means turning down contracts that would pull the organisation in another direction. 

• Hierarchies in organisations can affect how we listen to each other. But the real expertise is often held by those working on the front line.

• It can be hard to hear certain things, and a message might need to be repeated several times in different contexts by different people before it takes effect.

Techniques to listen well

• Action learning is a technique to share challenges with others, allowing people to discover their own solutions, put them into practice, consider what has improved, and reflect on what has been learned.

• Appreciative inquiry can help people, whether they are service users, those with lived experience, service providers, or commissioners understand how a system works and how to change it.

• Active listening can include a process of feedback to check whether something has been properly understood, and inviting the person to suggest possible solutions. 

• It is the spaces between the formal interactions that produce the reward.  There is value in informal conversation and incidental listening, and it can be worthwhile to engineer opportunities for this.

• Listening is more than hearing, it is possible to use other senses to build awareness of what is happening, and even where there are barriers to communication it is possible to be creative to overcome them. 

• The experience of advice services is that often the presenting problem masks an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, which may not be immediately obvious but which can been be brought to the surface. 

Changing the way we lead

• Leaders don’t need to have all the answers, they need to be good at coaxing/coaching them out of others.

• There are conflicts inherent in the role of managers, who need to take account of their Boards, their team, their users, their community, their funders. It is not easy or always possible to please everyone.  There is often no single correct solution. There are dangers of raising expectations that can’t be met, because the resources are not there, or because the change required would be too difficult.

• Traditional top-down hierarchical management does not encourage good listening, and we need to shift away from patriarchal management models towards more participatory forms of leadership where listening is part of what everyone does. 

• Indeed, one implication of the Better Way model for change is that we need to dismantle traditional organisational hierarchies, it was suggested. 

Large and small organisations

• It was noted that in large institutions a hierarchy of experience can be useful, where if someone is able to solve a problem on their own they will, but if they reach a dead end they can escalate it to someone who has more experience.

• In smaller organisations, or in community settings, hierarchies within meetings are usually not useful, because it is more important that people (including those who come from large institutions) have an equal voice and are respected and valued equally.

Shifting the organisational culture

• Within organisations is necessary to have some people who are driving the change, putting in place ways of operating that can help people become more confident about listening and being listened to. This includes making time available for listening in its own right, holding back from offering answers even when invited to, and enabling people to take action on the basis of what they have heard. 

• Empathy, especially with those who have been most marginalised, is aided where organisations are more representative of those they are working with. Many charities have become more like public bodies in their staffing structures and composition, but diversity within staff teams should ideally take many forms including class and education, and this can disrupt traditional hierarchies because lived experience brings knowledge, insight, and empathy, thereby helping to redefine what constitutes good leadership.

• Decisions are best made as close to the people affected as possible, with assurance given to people on the front line that if they listen well they will have authority to act. Over the last year in the Covid pandemic we saw more of this, especially in the first lockdown, with some very good results, although more recently this way of operating has become less evident.

Changing the wider system

• We need to create a shift from passive service users to active and empowered co-producers of solutions, and this will only happen if we listen and provide conditions necessary for people to generate the outcomes they want (one example of this, it was suggested, is direct payments, where funds are made available to people in ways that enhance choice and control, rather than simply setting up a care package).

• Most people do not want to be drawn into the management of the services they use, but they do want to be listened to and have some influence, so that services are run in a way that are responsive to what they actually need.

• The pandemic has helped people see weaknesses in their organisational models and the ways in which services are designed, and there is an appetite to develop strategies for organisations to help them do things better. The Better Way model of change can help with this, but changing structures and methods to make them less hierarchical and more inclusive, and which can generate the practice of radical listening, will be a long journey, and will need to engage the efforts of people at every level.

Going further

• There are parts of society which appear silent, where there are deeper levels of structural inequality and voices are not reached or heard. We need to challenge ourselves to enter into that part of society and listen.

• It can be difficult to listen well across the different sectors, voluntary, public, private, but this is becoming ever more critical.

Putting Relationships First: making relationship-building the purpose of our work

Summary of key points

• The disruption caused by Covid-19 had led to more relationship-building in some cases, and we need to find ways of sustaining and building on this.

• For relationship-building to become the central operating principle, it needs to be woven into everything we do: not just seeing it as our role to facilitate good relationships between people within the community, but also building better relationships with peers, clients, contractors and between funders and funded, for example.

• The quality of relationships matter: equality, curiosity, kindness and listening are all important. We need to build up this lexicon and develop the language.

• Organisations should be built around relationship-building rather than tasks.  Processes, rules and regulations should be re-designed to support relationships, rather than the other way round.

• Funders have an important role, not least to invest in relationship-building and measure this activity and its impact on outcomes, rather than looking at projects and outputs.

• Cultural as well as systems change is needed. We need to start a different kind of national conversation in which we ‘uphold our human space’ against attempts to commodify human beings or de-personalise services. 

• Leaders, perhaps especially in the social sector, have an important role in achieving that cultural change, starting that national conversation and demonstrating ‘relational leadership’.

• There are good examples of putting relationships first, and we should look for them where you might least expect to find them, and promote them to show what is possible.

In more detail

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, began by recapping what the network had learnt so far on putting relationships first.  As explained in Time for a Change, three things had stood out:

• Designing relationships in, not out, generates ‘relational power’.

• Our humanity is the most powerful change agent.

• We need to stop talking about people as problems, and see them as solution.

She explained that today’s discussion was going to focus on the first of these, building relational power, and we were going to look at how to make relationship-building the purpose of our work, with everyone in an organisation seeing relationship-building as core to the job they do. 

She introduced David Robinson from the Relationships Project, who is acting as ‘thought leader’ for the group.  The Relationships Project have been operating an Observatory during Covid-19 and David said that they had discovered that relationships had in many cases flourished, despite social distancing, especially in the first lockdown where communities came together and many people had volunteered for the first time.  The disruption had helped to change the normal ways of doing things. As we seek to recover from the pandemic, there is a real opportunity to learn lessons from this and put relationships first in how we work with others, he thought. However, as we come out of lockdown, people needed a period of recouperation and reflection.  It was a ‘time to be slow’ and remain generous to each other.

Graeme Hodson, who is the Commissioning Manager for Adult Social Care at Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council and also as a volunteer for Care Network Cambridge and a local community organiser, kicked off the discussion with some reflections. In his work, it emerged, relationship-building was happening in a number of different ways with different people, and all were important:

• The councils are facilitating a stronger relationship between residents needing care and their personal assistants and communities, working in a variety of ways.  For example, in East Cambridge they are seeking to change the situation where domiciliary carers often change from day to day and no real relationship is built up.  Direct payments to people needing care are a standard option, but this comes with what can be a heavy and undesirable administrative burden as employer.  So residents in East Cambridge are instead being offered Individual Service Funds in which a third party takes away the admin, but people needing care still retain direct control over who becomes their carer.  The councils have also commissioned a Direct Payment Support Service to give advice for those who do want to take full budgetary control.  They are also about to sign a contract with Community Catalysts to enable carers to become self-employed, so they are better able to develop strong, consistent relationships with those they care for, particularly in under-served rural communities.

• The councils build relationship-building capacity in other ways, too, particularly through the social connecting role of community hubs and community organisers and mutual aid groups.  For example, they have a network of Community Navigators who signpost people to local services and activities, with the aim of early intervention. 

• They build relationships with service users through co-production, for example through Healthwatch Partnerships Boards, and they work with providers at the very beginning of designing what they commission.

• They also seek to build good relationships with central government, the NHS and other local authorities and, as a result of the trust this has created, they have been able to improve care, for example, directly providing PPE and vaccinations to personal assistants.

The council has also been looking at how to direct more resources to relationship-building and measure this, not outputs.  They have moved from outputs to outcomes and to help them measure the right thing they ask service users: ‘What does good look like to you? What is it you want to do?  How can we help?’  Graeme said he particularly likes the Social Cares Future’s definition of good care: ‘We all want to live in the place we call home, with the people and things that we love, in communities where we look out for each other, doing what matters most to us.’

Points coming out of the subsequent discussion include:

• The quality of relationships matters: relationships can be good and bad and in places like Northern Ireland ‘relationship’ can have negative connotations.  Equal relationships should be the aspiration, and qualities such as curiosity, kindness and good listening should be encouraged. There is a need to build up this lexicon and develop the language further. 

• Relationship-building is about a lot of different things all of which need to be done together if relationships are to become the central operating principle.  It should be carried out across the whole spectrum of organisational activity, from forging good relationships with peers, clients, contractors and between funders and funded, to helping others to form strong relationships in the community. One-to-one conversations in which people get to know each other help create stronger bonds and space needs to be made for them.

• A culture change is needed. We must ‘uphold our human space’ against attempts to commodify us or dehumanise services by putting relationships first. This requires a different kind of national conversation.

• There’s an important role for leaders both nationally and locally to lead by example, especially in the social sector, and show ‘relational leadership’.  Leaders should demonstrate human-centred values in which relationships genuinely are put first and create a different culture in which it is ok to talk about the importance of love.  Relational leadership has to be reflected at the very top in order to change the culture, but it also has to permeate the whole organisation.

• The system works against relationships.  At the moment, relationship-building tends to be accidental but in future it needs to be intentional. Organisations should be built around the people, rather than the task; and processes, rules and regulations should be adjusted to fit with relationship-building, rather than aligning relationships to fit them.

• Funders have a role in making relationship-building not just common sense but common practice, and should move away from measuring tasks and outputs to investing in relationship-building and looking at the impact on outcomes.  Some contracts are already being expressed in this way.

• This is happening in some places and you should look where you don’t expect to find it - for example housing allocations, benefit judgements and even evictions are being made with compassion in some areas.  Let’s go looking for it and show others what is possible.

• The disruption caused by Covid-19 over the last year probably helped to create new space for relationship-building.  It showed what was possible and we need to find ways of sustaining and building on this.

The next meeting of this group will be on 6 May and we will be talking about:

Unlocking our humanity: how to turn organisations into communities, not machines. If organisations focus on internal relationship building, they can unlock creativity, and give front-line staff opportunity to build relationships externally too.

Note from a Northern Roundtable: Levelling Up and Community Power

Summary of key points

• Government needs to invest in creating legitimacy, listening and learning, and become an enabler, not a controller.

• It’s important to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past - regeneration initiatives have been too top down, short-term and failed to reform the things that left people feeling powerless.

• An ambitious change of direction is needed – ‘go big, or go home’. Despite many efforts over many years, too little had changed. Government must avoid prescription and micro initiatives and let communities decide how any new funds are spent. Existing funds could also be pooled and services delivered in new ways.

• Community power must be built into the government’s forthcoming Devolution strategy, which starts from the bottom up. The more we can show examples of this working well, the more likely it is to happen.

• Local government and public bodies must play a role in managing any new Levelling-Up funds but need to give more power to local people, following the principle of subsidiarity.

• They and other organisations must do much more to ‘integrate with their communities’ through ‘radical listening’ committed to delivering the changes people want. They need to do this collectively, for example when seeking to co-produce with local people, rather than pursuing separate exercises and atomised approaches.

• There must be investment in new structures, relationships and capacity building to achieve this agenda, perhaps called ‘Neighbourhood Democracy’, and the new structures must have teeth. LEPs are not the answer.

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In more detail

The roundtable was introduced by Laura Seebohm, the Better Way’s convenor in the North, who explained that the issue for discussion was how can we level up in ways that lead to a sharing of power with communities, while also achieving system-wide impact. She said that the Better Way network has been exploring ways of sharing power and we have seen a growing momentum across the North for this, with encouraging examples of radical systemic change. The challenge now is to make sure that, as funding hopefully becomes available, we get the architecture and infrastructure right to place power and money with the right people at the right level. She introduced the four initial speakers who would kick discussion off.

Danny Kruger MP, who has written a report commissioned by the PM on the role of communities and levelling-up, and is also a founding member of a Better Way, said that now was a potential moment for change. Many people had been inspired by the community spirit shown in the first lockdown, and the flexibility shown by the public sector. His report, which reflected ideas gathered widely, called for more investment in social infrastructure and greater community power. The forthcoming Devolution White Paper, although delayed, would be important. He favoured a bottom up model of empowerment: this is not as clear cut as recruiting more mayors but had greater potential. He thought the Better Way principles, which he had helped to draw up, embodied how that should work.

Finally, he said that the more that we can do to show this can work through actual examples, the more likely it is to happen.

Nadine Smith, UK Director of Centre for Public Impact, said that, compared to other countries over the last 20 years, the UK Government had focused on effectiveness but far less so on being legitimate. Other countries which had taken legitimacy more seriously had been better prepared for the pandemic. There are examples of administrations in the UK that had tried to build legitimacy through forms of participative democracy, e.g. in Wigan and Camden, but we haven’t seen a ‘whole mindset shift’ in the UK, she said, even though the New Public Management model was dying on its feet. Government needs to be an enabler, not a controller, and without this the levelling-up agenda would fail. Key focus must be:

• Listening, with investment in feedback loops, eg the Swedish Regional Co-ordinator approach set up after 2008 crash.

• Learning – networks learning together with equity in the relationship.

• Relationships - this requires equity in the relationship and time to build relationships with communities.

Chris Marsh, from Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council and People’s Powerhouse, said that he had 30 years’ experience of translating policy into action on the ground and had seen many initiatives come and go, for example, the New Deal for Communities, Total Place and Opportunity Areas. It was important to learn from the past. Such initiatives were in general characterised by three main truths:

• They were nearly always short term – and not long enough to deliver real change.

• They were mostly top down – what people in Whitehall thought was logical, not what people wanted.

• Didn’t set out to reform the things that are really making people feel powerless.

They did not seek to change local economies or the way in which public services work, but focused on ‘better co-ordination’, with the premise that things are okay as they are, just need to be better run. They did not strengthen voice.

Going forward, he made some suggestions:

• Think about local economies so that they hold wealth in eg social value procurement, as in Preston.

• Rather than ‘community improvement districts’, with greater freedoms and responsibilities to design new models of local social and economic policy, as proposed in Danny Kruger’s report, think of ‘neighbourhood improvement districts’.

• Market failure exists in the public sector, so set up true joint ventures with local communities at the centre. We need to think differently about how we offer support.

• Use asset based approaches – a profoundly different way of delivering.

• Make more use of deliberative and participatory democracy approaches – elected councillors are not enough especially in areas where people need voice the most.

John McCabe, Board member of North East Local Enterprise Partnership, amongst other roles, explained that the timing of roundtable coincided with North East LEP Recovery and Renewal Deal proposal, which they had just put to government, seeking more funding. What shone through was the importance of listening and collaboration, which they had practised in drawing up these ideas. He ran through some of the key points, including a job recovery New Deal and initiatives to create a more connected North East. His overarching point was: now was the time to be unashamedly ambitious – if not now, when?

Jill Baker, from Lloyds Bank Foundation, said she was frustrated by how little change there had been in the last 40 years, with longstanding inequalities still existing and health inequalities growing. She said that there was a lot of money already out there which could be used differently but this wouldn’t happen without ‘breaking a few things’. For this to happen, we need to listen and build relationships with real ‘live people’ and let go of egos and break down silos.

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Ideas from the group

We then broke into groups to discuss the issue. Points given in feedback to the plenary included:

Integrating with communities.

• We spend too much time trying to get organisations integrated, when the real focus must be to integrate organisations with communities. This needs capacity building, a bonfire of outputs and measures, and greater collaboration between multiple funders.

• Organisations also need to join forces so they can jointly co-produce with communities. It is unlikely existing structures will work for them and the end result may be radical change.

Listening which produces results.

• Resources need to be put into radical listening ie listening which has radical results. Too often organisations say they have listened when they haven’t, and you have to listen to what you don’t want to hear and avoid preconceptions.

• Once you’ve listened, you need to connect findings at a local, regional and national level – the Swedish model of regional co-ordination was mentioned again.

Building power in communities.

• Power needs to be given away but do this we need to build trust, create relationships and give people in communities space and time just ‘to be’ and express their own agenda, not ours. This requires a real culture change.

• Public investment is needed in capacity building, for example through community organisers and small charities and other organisations that carry out a connecting role.

• It’s important that power is equally held in a community, which it isn’t often, and help create communities and enable them to come and stay together.

• Local government must be part of the picture in managing any levelling-up fund or other initiatives such as pooled budgets. But they need to work with others and work at listening.

• A new architecture is needed which allows people to collaborate and engage, long term. LEPs are not the answer. All this needs teeth. There was a suggestion that this should be called ‘Neighbourhood Democracy’.

• There was some cynicism about commissions, citizens assemblies etc when time and resource go into the process but nothing comes out.

A Levelling Up Fund

• A national Levelling Up social infrastructure fund would be very welcome, but only if there are devolved budgets. Danny’s report needed to stop half way through at the point where the principles were outlined, and then give power to people to decide.

• We also need to be honest and talk about the impact of austerity when we talk about levelling-up.

 Overall, the message was: we need to be radical – ‘go big or go home’.

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 Sharing Power Cell 3

Summary of key points

• We heard how one organisation is fundamentally reviewing their practices, examining their data, and considering how they can apply their resources and influence in ways that achieve a fundamental shift in power in society and in their own services for those they work with.  Another told us how they were taking advantage of an increased interest by residents in their community to build agency (purpose, belonging, power).

• Other organisations will also be reviewing how they work in the light of Covid-19 but change will require determined leadership, and new tools, including use of data, better frameworks for co-production and for accountability.  It’s important agencies don’t undermine and disempower community building by temporarily parachuting volunteers in from outside.

• While COVID-19 has highlighted the power of community and connection, some groups of people have become even more isolated, unheard and/or under-served, and some have effectively been silenced, eg prisoners confined to their cells without access to support. We need to do more to highlight this loss of power. 

• A discussion about inequality can allow everyone to talk about their own experience of power and privilege, and when they have felt themselves to be at a disadvantage. This type of discussion can lead to profound change.

• We need to move away from extraction (where those in positions of relative power exploit others for their own ends) towards investment (where we support people and organisations to become more powerful, in their own right).

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In more detail

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell, the third in a series of meetings.  She explained that the aim was to share insights with each other and inspire each other to do more, and that we would share learning from these discussions with the wider network and beyond. 

Our Better Way Call to Action pointed out that power is in too few hands, and sharing power is one of the ways to redress that.  Many of our Better Way discussions are pointing towards the importance of giving people authentic voices and platforms, through a process of what has been described as radical listening. At our first meeting Sue Tibballs, the thought-leader for this cell, reminded us that although power is concentrated in too few hands and formal institutions including government do have enormous power, we have more power than we think, and so a key question is how to mobilise that. In our second meeting Whitney Iles described the value of reflective practice when bringing lived experience into organisations and policy making, working genuinely together, not labelling people, putting aside preconceptions. 

This time we want to explore how, as organisations are shifting in COVID-19, reviewing their strategies and structure, they do so in ways which share power better.  We started with two presentations:

Sonya Ruparel from Turn2us pointed out that during COVID-19 power imbalances have increased and the charity’s data is showing that financial hardship has become worse for those who were already marginalised before COVID-19, including many Black, Asian and minoritised ethnic people, many disabled people, and many women.  The data also reveals that Turn2u distributed £1.3m in emergency grants in eight weeks, and while people from BAME backgrounds received 35% of the grants, they were also less likely to be successful in their applications.  The charity is seeking to understand why this happened and how that bias can be addressed in future. 

Examination of the data has driven a stronger sense of urgency in Turn2us, to consider how to use its own power more responsibly, and not reinforce power imbalances in grant making and partnership formation for example.  Turn2us is now working towards co-designing a framework for co-production.  This will set out where, when, and how the charity should and must work with experts by experience. Sonya noted that in the crisis it has been easier to engage users in co-production, and that Zoom has been a good leveller. 

Turn2us only exists because of power imbalances in society, Sonya said, and there is no good reason why people should have insufficient money to live on in the UK, and so the charity seeks to use its programme work and the relationships it holds to demand systemic change. Sometimes power is invisible and is visible only in the violence which is done to people’s lives, but it can be revealed through data analysis.  So Turn2us is introducing a power analysis and policy and advocacy objectives in all its programmes, working with lived experts.  It is also designing an accountability framework for the whole organisation, to enable service users to hold the charity to account, to deliver what it says it will deliver, and to use its resources and power responsibly, listening and learning from feedback, and responding. 

As we learn to share power, Sonya said, we need to learn how to hold ourselves to account, and enable others to hold us to account, and have the humility to accept where we need to  change what we do, how we work, and who we work with.

Tom Neumark, from the Peel in Clerkenwell, explained the organisation’s vision to build community connections in a neighbourhood, which is very mixed but where there has not always been a lot of mixing.  The Peel aims to build ‘agency’ among local people, that is, the ability to shape the context of one’s life. 

Tom quoted Jon Alexander, who has described agency as ‘purpose and belonging and power’, and he described the varied experiences in Clerkenwell, both positive and negative, in the pandemic: 

• Purpose:  In COVID-19, as with many other neighbourhoods, there was an upsurge in community volunteering, mutual aid and participation.  At the height of the lockdown 300 meals a week were donated by local restaurants and delivered by residents to people who were self-isolating.  But for many their sense of purpose was shaken, with a lot of people searching for something else in their lives.  And some were far too concerned with immediate pressing difficulties in their own lives to think beyond this.

• Belonging:  Clerkenwell was a dormitory neighbourhood for many of its residents, who go elsewhere for work and leisure.  But in the pandemic that changed, and suddenly the neighbourhood assumed much more significance.  Some people connected with their neighbours more and their sense of belonging increased.  But for others the day to day routine in the neighbourhood has been severed, and the sense of belonging has been under strain.

• Power:  the Peel has been giving practical guidance for people who want to make something happen, in effect taking power into their own hands. For example a ‘bake and take’ initiative, where residents meet on line, bake something at the same time, and deliver it to a neighbour.  But rules about how people can meet each other, use streets, and so on, are imposed quickly and change frequently, and this can produce a feeling of dislocation and powerlessness.  New relationships had between mutual aid groups and the council but at the same time there is a tendency in the council to seek to formalise mutual aid activity, and this has resulted in resistance from those who don’t want to be turned into a service. 

• So, the Peel as an organisation has been trying to redirect its resources to become a platform for those who have felt a loss of purpose, belonging, and power.  It is learning to ask ‘what do you want to achieve and how can we meet you there?’ rather than expecting people to fit into processes set by the Peel.  The organisation is also training local people to act as radical listeners, so that they can help to catalyse activity which comes from residents themselves.

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Breakout sessions

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss these topics further. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

Shifting power in organisations

• There are many example of positive practice, but many agencies are a long way behind. Some organisations still want to be seen as powerful in themselves.  Big ‘oil tanker’ charities and public sector agencies will not achieve the turnaround needed without radical rethinking and redistribution of power, not just to those with lived experience and clients/beneficiaries, but also within the organisation itself.  

• Moreover, there are some big structural problems in the charity sector. A lot of charities still operate according to benevolent and paternalistic models developed in the Victorian era. We expect charity boards to be unpaid, but this results in less Board diversity among charities than among FTSE100 companies. 

• COVID has shown that large institutions can act at speed when necessary, but this requires leadership from the top. If the CEO and chair are not up for change, nothing will happen. It was suggested that those in leadership roles should consider what they control, what they influence, and what is beyond their influence and control. They can also reflect on their ability to bring about personal, interpersonal, organisational and societal change.

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Voices that have been silenced

• It’s a dangerous time.  Many young people in particular are looking for security and certainty but feel things are out of their control, and are feeling powerless.   Many people feel that things are not right, but that they don’t have a voice, and are not listened to, or when they are it is only as part of a tick-box exercise.  

• Furthermore, in the pandemic, many people have remained unheard and/or under-served.  What is happening in prisons is silent, invisible, not covered in media, kept out of sight and out of mind.  Because prisoners are being kept in isolation, groups working with them have been unable to visit and represent them properly.  There are others who in different ways, have also found themselves effectively silenced, including for example, Gypsy and Romany communities, those experiencing domestic violence, and the families of patients with Do Not Resuscitate notices. There needs to be more concerted efforts to tell these stories and also data can be powerful in revealing where these power imbalances lie and where they have got worse.

• When people are heard, those working in policy and media roles need to consider their responsibility to work with people in ways which do not ‘strip people’s stories from them.’

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Addressing inequality

• Many organisations have introduced EDI (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion) strategies. Some in our discussion felt that these were ineffective, especially when they categorise people according to protected characteristics groups, with the implication that one group of people has power and another group is a victim. A few people might be placed on Boards or appointed to other leadership roles, but this can be tokenistic, and deeper problems remain.  Some less visible forms of inequality, including class, are largely ignored, and EDI strategies often fail to address intersectionality, and the reality that different forms of power (or the absence of it) can be experienced by everyone, to some degree. 

• It was suggested that a discussion about inequality can be a good way to begin, because it can allow everyone to talk about their own experience of power and privilege, and when they have felt themselves to be at a disadvantage. This type of discussion can be the start of more profound change.

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Shifting power at community level

• Some areas have experienced persistent disadvantage and social inequality, over many years, despite considerable spending on regeneration and renewal programmes. This was largely because those programmes focused on individual deficits, and failed to share power, or even ask people what they really wanted.

• In the pandemic the community response came first, then the more formalised voluntary sector, then the state.  This has produced a greater respect for community activity, and a desire for more porous boundaries between informal and formal action. 

• But not all community activity in COIVID-19 produced a positive shift in power. Where people offered their services as volunteers, well-meaning, often white middle-class people often became involved, sometimes from outside the area, and this could be disempowering and/or undermine the community building that comes through genuine mutual aid.  Some even started to tell other people what they should be doing, even what they should be eating, in ways which were very disempowering.

• We need to stop talking about disadvantaged communities, as if the people who live in the communities are the problem, and require outsiders to sort things out for them.

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A need for change in the benefits system

• Across the public and social sector there is a pervasive inequality between those who are employed and receive a salary, and those who are unemployed and on benefits and only, at best, receive a voucher for their work.  There is a need to change the system so that it is possible to reward contributions without disrupting benefits. It was pointed out that ten years ago a coalition of charities called for a community allowance which would provide a benefits disregard for people carrying out paid part-time community work, but this was ultimately blocked by senior DWP officials and Ministers.  It may be time to revive this campaign, or something equivalent.

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Political education

• Many people don’t only want to tell their story. They also want an opportunity to work with others on the solutions.

• That means developing an understanding of how the system works, and carrying out a power analysis.  This can include an understanding of how invisible power can operate, through ideas and beliefs which can be a force for progressive change but which can also produce harm.

• Listening exercises therefore need to be accompanied by political education, if we wish to see a democracy which in which true sharing of power can take place.

Sue Tibballs, thought leader for this Better Way cell, shared some closing reflections.  COVID19, she said, has had disruptive effects, for good and for bad. Central government has provided massive injections of state funding to support people and businesses.  Local government has looked afresh at local charities and community groups, devolving more responsibility to them, asking them to step in.

For some people it has felt that their power to act and to make a difference has been growing. But as we head in the discussion many people have lost power, become more isolated, even silenced.   

In the coming period, civil society will need to renegotiate relationships between those operating at different levels, e.g. people (as service users, donors, volunteers), the local voluntary and community sector, and the national voluntary and community sector.

We will need, Sue said, to make sure that the work we do moves away from ‘extraction’ where organisations are taking what they can use from people with lived experience, or where big organisations are exploiting small organisations. Instead, we need to find ways to practice ‘investment’ , and this will include helping the people we work with to understand how power operates, creating opportunities for them to be active in pursuit of greater power.

Caroline Slocock concluded by saying that it was good that the power of connection and community was increasingly being celebrated by politicians and others but we must do what we can to also highlight the isolation and loss of power of certain groups, despite the upsurge in mutual aid.

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Next meeting

The group thanked Grace Wyld who has supported its work, and who is moving on from the Sheila McKecknie Foundation. 

The group also agreed it would be useful to continue to meet. Themes could include:

• Developing the accountability framework

• Understanding sources of power

• Documenting the loss of power

• Changing the narrative of power

Caroline encouraged participants in the cell to suggest further ideas and also to contribute blogs on the topics we have been discussing.  The date of the next meeting is 28 October, 3-4.30 pm.

Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 3

Summary of key points

Successful collaborations require good relationships, a shared vision, shared principles, shared behaviours and shared infrastructure, e.g., workforce development, and need to be enabling and facilitative, to adapt through learning and work to shared targets.

• This is very different from co-operation or partnerships.  Everyone has to be involved in developing the shared purpose and has to work together to achieve it.

• Personal and relationships and behaviour can make or break collaborations, and need to be actively nurtured. 

• Shared infrastructure needs to be developed. Behavioural standards and joint leadership training can play a role, and shared language, values and principles and information are also important.

• Shared leadership requires a change of culture and systems: engaging with end users through deep listening; involving front line staff, not just the top teams, in designing change; creating time and space for imagination about future possibilities; moving away from organisational plans with pre-determined goals; and different commissioning and procurement arrangements

In more detail

Steve Wyler, Co-convenor of a Better Way, said that some clear messages had emerged from the previous meeting, which had looked at how to sustain change when a leader moved on:

• A clear, shared purpose across organisations which has become part of the culture is important.

• A focus on the needs of communities and individuals served, not organisations, helps sustain that sense of purpose, and they need to be engaged and their voices heard. 

• Relationships are very important too, and the connector role need to be recognised and funded.

• Lasting change only happens through distributive or shared leadership, and change becomes more embedded when leaders stop seeing themselves as organisational representatives and instead act as ‘systems leaders’ and ‘systems stewards’. 

• Great leadership is also about enabling others. 

• Governance can very important where formal partnerships are established, and succession planning is too often neglected.

He said that this time we were looking at what good collaboration, systems and distributive leadership looks like in practice, and introduced Dawn Plimmer from Collaborate as our main speaker.

Dawn said that Collaborate work with many place-based collaborations and often work with local authority partners.  Complexity is their starting point: no one individual or organisation can address an issue alone and systems, not organisations come first.  The collaborations they were involved in often have a geographical dimension and are seeking solutions at local level.  It was important to put people first, not services. Collaborations are a long journey, she said, and can be challenging:  there is often a ‘fox and chicken’ wariness between commissioners and those funded, for example.

 She identified the following conditions for success

• Relationships

• Shared vision

• Shared principles

• Shared behaviours

• Shared infrastructure, eg, workforce development.

The features of collaborative or systems leadership are:

• It’s personal: ‘start with our own capacity, appetite and commitment for challenge’

• Relationships and trust are key, which is why the most effective local action on Covid-19 took place where these existed.

• A shared purpose must be developed.

• Enabling and facilitating.

• Adaptive, constantly reflecting, learning and finding new truths.

• It’s about delivering shared results, with clear roles.

Today’s collaborators are pioneers towards what will hopefully become the new normal.

Covid-19 had galvanised the system, she said, and put an emphasis on trust and empathy, and the crisis had helped to turbo charge relationships and helped people to work beyond boundaries.  The challenge now was to stop reverting to the old model, after the end of the crisis.

In discussion about what makes a good quality collaboration in practice, key points included:

The difference between collaboration, partnerships and co-operation

• The key to shared leadership and collaboration is to ‘leave the lanyards at the door’.  There had been many earlier attempts at collaboration, for example Local Strategic Partnerships, Our Place and Community Planning, but many so-called collaborations are just tick box exercises and unequal ‘partnerships’. 

• In partnerships, partners often start working together by signing up to a pre-determined agenda.  Collaboration can only flourish where there is no set agenda and a shared purpose can be developed together. 

• As one person in the group put it, co-operation is where everyone is working alongside each other toward a number of independent goals to achieve particular targets.  ‘In contrast,’ she said, ‘collaboration is where a group are working collectively toward a shared goal, parking the business of their particular organisation.  In collaboration, rather than exchanges of information and resources, team members share, no-one pulls ahead of the pack and the success of each individual depends on the success of all.’

The importance of behaviours

• To be successful, you need to ‘get the right people on the bus’ and work with people to make sure that everyone is on board.  Behaviours are often the reason why collaborations failed to lead to systems leadership.  People are not intentionally blocking, but can dig in behind entrenched positions, seeing change as criticism of what they have achieved. 

• Facilitation techniques with open-ended questions and the limitation of dominant voices can help.  OPERA is one technique designed to create a functional meeting that is quick, efficient, and inclusive. OPERA stands for OWN, PAIR, EXPLAIN, RANK, and ARRANGE.  Participants start with their own suggestions by writing down their ideas.  Next, they are grouped into pairs to discuss their best suggestions.  The best ideas are explained and shared with the whole group followed by a ranking of the proposals.  Finally, similar ideas are arranged into groups.   

A focus on users, not organisations

• A focus on users can help break through entrenched organisational positions and is an important starting point for creating a shared sense of purpose.  Deep listening is important, with an open-ended agenda.  We heard of one example where families were brought in and asked, ‘What would good look like?’  Another example was where policy makers in senior roles held late night sessions with rough sleepers in what became deeply personal encounters, and this made a big difference for a while.

Shared infrastructure, including behavioural standards and shared language

• Shared infrastructure can help to break down organisational boundaries and culture.

• Cross-sector training is one element.  There need to be shared learning spaces. 

• Shared language is important.

• Shared values and principles are important.  Behavioural standards might also play a role.  For example, respect for each other rather than judging, recognising the value different partners can bring, curiosity, and not being risk averse.  

• Some shared governance might be needed.

A change in culture and systems

• Commissioning and procurement and funding can be a block to systems leadership and must be addressed.

• Organisational strategies and planning can create inflexibility and be a block. We heard of one example where a major organisation is trying to move away from 5 year strategies with clear plans and trying to align instead around common purpose and principles.

• To create a shared sense of purpose, it helps to imagine the future you want to see together, setting aside the practicalities, as set out here by Robert Hopkins, the founder of the Transitions Town Movement, and author of From what is to what if.  He says using imagination needs time and space and for us not to feel under constant surveillance.

• There needs to be an organisational shift to focus on people.  Part of systems leadership is to give permission to the front line to become systems leaders.  The principles for collaboration can be agreed at a high level but change can only be achieved by front-line staff. 

• Participatory budgeting is a useful technique and one we might explore in further discussions.

 Reflecting on the discussion, Cate Newnes-Smith, the thought leader for the group, said she would particularly take away the thinking on shared infrastructure, including shared information, shared language and behaviour.  Steve Wyler agreed that shared infrastructure was important and that there were very few good examples of cross-sectoral infrastructure at present.

Note from Changing Organisations Cell 2

Second meeting of the Better Way ‘Changing Organisations’ cell, 8th September 2020 

1.      SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

We heard how different organisations are attempting to practise radical listening, from small community organisations to large national charities and local authorities.  Their experience suggests that the following are essential elements:

• Small scale conversations, often one-to-one, where those in a leadership or management role hold themselves back from problem-solving , and instead create a social space for people as service users and citizens to talk about what really matters to them, and using this to inform what the organisation does.

• Moving away from centrally-conceived organisational plans and targets towards a shared set of guiding principles, which allow for maximum adaptability and responsiveness at the front-line.

• Making time for everyone to practice radical listening, as a core activity.

At our next meeting we will consider how to make more of this happen, and in particular the role of Boards, and of local authorities.

2.      IN MORE DETAIL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, explained that this was a second meeting to explore further the Better Way Call to Action theme of ‘changing organisations to focus on communities and solutions’, and in particular putting those we serve first, listening to and reflecting them in everything we do. 

In our first meeting Karin Woodley had described her experience of radical listening at Cambridge House, creating informal spaces with an open agenda for people to talk about the things that matter to them and develop the work of the organisation accordingly, as well as changing the composition of staff and volunteers to become more like the community served. 

Caroline noted that radical listening is difficult, but seems to be central to many elements of Better Way thinking, including sharing power, and changing the narrative, as other Better Way cells have been exploring.  So in this our second meeting we want to explore further the ‘essence’ of radical listening.  Caroline introduced our two speakers:

MARGARET ADJAYE, CEO OF THE UPPER NORWOOD LIBRARY HUB

Margaret described how she spends time with service users who come to the Library Hub, having informal conversations, asking how they are feeling, what is going on in their lives, what is not right, what could be improved. 

The Library Hub provides various well-being as well as library and learning services, and support for enterprise start-up. Many of the Hub activities have emerged from ‘nuggets’ of informal conversation, not from formal consultation exercises. For example a chat over an hour or two with an elderly lady, who was isolated and lonely, led to a very popular ‘tea and tech’ service, where around 30 people at a time take refreshments and socialise with others, while also learning how to use computers. 

Margaret is also the convenor of the national Community-Managed Libraries Peer Network.  During COVID-19 many of the 480 people in that network have been calling Margaret, looking for help, and sharing ideas about how to maintain or adapt their service and support their local community. 

In Margaret’s experience it is the incidental and one-to one discussions that matter most, whether in the library space, on the phone or on Zoom, hearing stories, sharing sorrows, and celebrating together.  

Radical listening, she said, depends a lot on the listener, as a person, being humble enough, and having the time to sit down and talk to people, to hear what they say and respond accordingly.  If it is not possible to deliver what people are looking for, then it is important to say so, but when it is in the listener’s gift or power, then it becomes possible to work with people to make something worthwhile happen.

FRANCES DUNCAN, CEO OF THE CLOCK TOWER SANCTUARY (CTS) IN BRIGHTON

The CTS works with young people in crisis, to avoid them becoming part of the long term homeless population.  The following diagram describes the opportunities the CTS is developing for young people to have a voice, with the timeline showing the time it may take to reach that point.

As the diagram shows, the work begins with individual self-expression, to help young people understand what the CTS does, understand more about themselves, and express themselves (in positive or less positive ways) about what they want and what they need. Sometimes what young people say is uncomfortable to listen to.  The interactions depend on trust and an enabling environment, and at the CTS, young people do not need to ‘jump through hoops’ to receive services.

The blue oval in the diagram includes the stage when young people are encouraged to influence what the organisation does internally and includes a ‘wall of words’ where the things that they say are placed, to bring about internal change.  They’ve found that one to one consultation and residential awaydays work better than a ‘client council’. 

The green oval shows how they hope young people work will with the CTS in presenting to external audiences, at forums and conferences, or by acting as mentors, running their own workshops, creating a film, telling their own stories (not CTS stories), meeting with funders and corporate partners.

Finally,  the orange section indicates how, as a small team with limited expertise and capacity,  the CTS works with others, pulling in expertise from elsewhere.

Frances mentioned that Karin Woodley’s essay on radical listening in the Better Way Insights collection became a blueprint for revolutionising the way her organisation engages with young people. This included enabling staff to have more time for listening, and over half of the staff and Board now have experience of issues the young people face. Frances believes that placing young people on the CTS Board would be tokenistic at best, but Board members are all expected to spend some time as frontline volunteers in the organisation as part of their induction. The CTS tries to build an atmosphere where staff and volunteers and the Board feel able to challenge the organisational status quo, and, for example, young people are invited to suggest the training needs of staff.  This had taken time, as it involved a change of culture.

Because CTS are not paid by results linked to specific outcomes, CTS are able instead to use guiding values developed in discussion with those the young people they worked with, the first of which is that the people we serve come first, and they used these as a checklist against which they continuously judge what they do.

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Breakout sessions were then held to consider further the essence of radical listening. In the following discussion participants made the following points:

• SOCIAL SPACES CAN GENERATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR LISTENING

It is important to provide a ‘social space’, a version of ‘home’ which feels safe where unplanned and unexpected conversations can happen. The Upper Norwood Library Hub, for example, has a community bar, and a theatre, and these provide a space for people to come together and to socialise, and from this many other things can emerge. 

• PEOPLE ARE NOT ‘HARD TO REACH’, IN A ONE-TO-ONE DISCUSSION

There are many people who appear ‘hard to reach’ because they don’t want to engage in formal consultation exercises but they can be engaged in one-to-one discussions in an informal setting.  And that can lead to services that are truly accessible, and valued, and used by all parts of a community to a much greater degree. 

• LEADERS MUST BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY

People in leadership roles need to move away from problem-solving and instead model radical listening, by simply sitting and listening, not summing up, not providing leading questions, not fitting what people say into some preconceived notion of what they want to do. Leaders need to shut up, listen from beginning to end, and let people finish what they are saying.

Action which shows people have been heard and what is changing has to follow. Sometimes this means listening to and acting on things which appear less important to managers, at least to start with, and remembering ‘it’s not about me’ – what feels important to service users is important.  Two examples were given of people being consulted asking for better quality toilet paper, or wanting more teaspoons in the  kitchen area.  There’s also a deeper message there: people want the place to feel more like their home, and less like an institution.

Leaders also need to be willing to have a more honest conversation with funders and commissioners. Otherwise, the decisions about what should be done are set by funders and cascaded down through organisations, and what the users actually want is disregarded.

• ORGANISATIONS NEED TO ALLOW TIME FOR RADICAL LISTENING

It can sometimes feel as if radical listening can only happen in ‘stolen moments’, a guilty diversion from real work. But radical listening, for managers and for frontline staff, is the real work. Without it, everything else will fail to produce true value.  It does take time, but this is time that is well spent.

• RADICAL LISTENING REQUIRES A SHIFT AWAY FROM PLANS AND TARGETS TOWARDS PRINCIPLES

Some organisations are attempting to change the way they operate, with a different theory of change.  This includes moving away from centralised planning and control and targets towards a set of core principles (which act as ‘strategic anchors’ or ‘guiding lights’) that encourage greater local autonomy, including self-managed teams, with the intention that the people they support should be at the centre of decision making. 

• EVERYONE HAS A CONTRIBUTION TO MAKE

In order to develop good strategy the conversation needs to involve everyone, service users, staff and Board, where possible drawing out shared experience. 

• STATUTORY ORGANISATIONS NEED TO MOVE TO HUMAN SCALE LISTENING

For those working in a statutory setting it can be especially difficult to move beyond formalised ways of operating, and practice radical listening.  In Northern Ireland community infrastructure is well developed and community planning is enshrined in legislation but, in a society that remains divided in many ways, it is not easy to reach common agreement, and some voices remain unheard. Community Foundation Northern Ireland has introduced a deliberative democracy programme, and it was suggested that informal contact with citizens on a smaller scale (whether in person or online) allows a greater level of interaction and understanding, and can be more productive  than larger scale exercises which can become de-personalised and can reinforce division.