The Public Service Transformation Academy

Relational practice, relational leadership, relational public services. Behind the buzz sits something older and simpler – the idea that good life, good work depends on good relationships. Nick Kimber asked an innocent but impossible question: can anyone point to a decent, accessible history of relational practice? This provoked two pieces from me on the same big question: what does it really mean to take a relational approach to public service? One asked about history; the other, practice. Both were informed by other responses to Nick. It became clear that there isn’t any one history – the ideas are there, but they were never institutionalised. Relational practice has been the living residue of care in institutional systems designed for control. It runs through social work of the 60s, community development programmes of the 70s, participatory and co-design movements, those who tried to make organisations humane without getting sacked. It’s a braided thread: cottage hospitals, the Pioneer Health Centre, Robin Murray at the GLC, cooperative experiments, antipsychiatry, the Open Dialogue movement, and the people who kept trying to repair a state that misunderstood what it was for. Relational practice isn’t a school of thought – it’s a steadfast faith. So I turned to what it would take to make this stance real now. ‘How to move to relational public services’ isn’t a manual but a diagnosis. The reason relationality struggles to scale is that the way humans deal with the compromise of working in these institutions is to deny the parts that hurt our souls - and make them undiscussable. We settle for performance management, contractualism, and target-driven accountability which actually avoid human accountability - we compromise ourselves to be able to survive. So the work is to redesign the conditions, not the behaviours, and it needs to be done in a psychologically informed way. A Camerados tea and and a chat, getting people into a learning space (which means an unlearning space) and revisiting 'the front line'. Getting the whole system in the room and appreciating the pressures on all the groups, and their implications. In any case, recognising the real barriers at multiple levels that need to be dissolved - and that doing it needs to be practical, strengths- and outcome-based, not oppositional. Making power and responsibility visible. Moving to relational services is not a ‘programme’. It’s a destabilisation, a shift of identity, a reconvening of systems, from Poor Sick Miserable People and Heroic Saviours, from Dominant Institutions versus Plucky Upstarts, from Nasty Beancounters versus Humanitarian Ideologues... to people as co-authors of value. These two threads – the incomplete history and the practical pivot – belong together. One reminds us we’ve been here before; the other, that we could still choose differently. How do we change the way we relate?

Nice Management vs Nasty Management vs Effective Management! Do you have a philosophy of management? Listen to Benjamin P. Taylor on the latest episode of the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gt2r6ZzQ #leadership #systemsthinking #complexity #cybernetics

Professionalising systems practice felt like a paradox at this year’s SysPrac25 conference – perhaps the ultimate #futureofwork challenge – how do we embed #systemsthinking in institutions that seem designed to repel it? Yet paradox was exactly the point: 160 of us (from policy wonks to engineers) swapped stories of being 'systemic' people inside our organisations – discussing the undiscussable one minute and blurring boundaries the next. Ray Ison used his keynote to urge embedding 'learning systems' into the DNA of our organisations, making institutional learning part of how we work: how can we sustainably continue to design contextually-relevant learning systems? Patrick Hoverstadt used the Viable System Model to show how leaders can still balance complexity in modern organisations. Andy Wilkins captured this shift in mindset best: 'from experts to connectors…from theory to story'. We heard from apprentices on the Level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner apprenticeship who in three years had gone from radical thinkers, experts, leaders - to radical thinkers, experts, and leaders with deep, solid systems practice skills and experience. And I had a lot of fun at my #systemicconsulting workshop - I think the participants did, too. This wasn’t a dry academic talking-shop – hands-on workshops with scribbled flipcharts in every corner proved that real #innovation in #leadership can come from people learning together in real time, not just another app. I left energised by a sense that our community might be quietly coming of age - it felt to me like one of the most welcoming events I've been to for years, with a context where good challenge was welcomed, where ideas were really shared and debated. How do we spread this systemic insight through the mainstream without turning it into just another orthodoxy?