How do we change the way we relate?

Relational practice, relational leadership, relational public services. How do we change the way we relate? Join the conversation on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_relational-public-services-some-learning-activity-7388842086483259393-FERx

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.

If relational practice has always been the underground stream of public service – surfacing whenever systems forget what they’re for – what would it take, this time, for it to stay above ground?

Most of us have worked somewhere that got this – where trust, time and care made the difference. What did that look like for you?

How do we change the way we relate?

Quick plug, since this is the last chance for levy funding (if you work in England), for this incredible learning experience – which will be very focused on these challenges! https://www.publicservicetransformation.org/level-7-apprenticeship-course-leading-and-commissioning-for-outcomes-in-complexity-convening-systems-change-free-webinar-on-20-august-2025-1230pm-uk-time/

Here’s the original thread with a load of brilliant responses (from some absolutely awesome people) https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nick-kimber-a7789a21_hello-can-anybody-point-me-to-a-decent-accessible-activity-7387430771348897792-Si42

How to move to relational public services https://chosen-path.org/2025/10/26/how-to-move-to-relational-public-services/

The history of relational practice https://stream.syscoi.com/2025/10/24/nick-kimber-on-linkedin-hello-can-anybody-point-me-to-a-decent-accessible-history-of-relational-practice-thinking-leadership-ideally-short-form/