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Peter Block has a deeply irritating habit.You ask him a complicated question about organisational change, resistance, expertise or leadership. He listens, then says something apparently simple which makes most of your elaborate thinking look faintly ridiculous.
He consistently Gives Good Guru.
Which is particularly funny because much of his work is about why being the expert dispensing wisdom doesnt work.
In this excellent Messy Social Work podcast with Richard Devine and Tim Fisher FRSA, Peter Blockoffers ‘our relationship is the delivery system for everything I know’.
And, on resistance to change, rather than overcoming objections, explaining harder or rolling out slide 47: ‘take the other person’s side. Invite their doubts. Find out what disappointed them last time’.
Then theres the magnificent: ‘what’s your contribution to the very thing you’re complaining about?’ Ouch.
The conversation exposes something Ive been thinking about a lot in relational public services.
We expect social workers to build trust, respect peoples agency, tolerate uncertainty and work with families. Meanwhile, we manage those social workers through compliance, targets, performance reviews, prescribed processes and successive programmes telling them how to behave.
We teach relational practice through methods which often deny it.
Peter’s point goes much further than being nice to people, or improving communication. The relationship is itself part of how change happens. The way we work together has to embody something of what were trying to achieve.
Of course, theres a difficult edge here. Statutory duties, safeguarding, budgets and organisational power are real. Control isnt simply a bad habit we can decide to abandon. And power doesnt evaporate because the person holding it decides to be vulnerable.
Peter recognises that there will still be bosses, boundaries and limits. Yet he insists that we can create different experiences within those constraints.
And then, inevitably, another line worthy of being carved in stone: ‘I cant argue against control. I can just whisper moments of liberation’.
For those of us working on systemic and relational change, theres a serious challenge here. What would our management, commissioning and transformation practices actually look like if we took this seriously? How much control would we have to give up – and where would we still need to exercise it?
Listen to the conversation. Peter is in outrageously good form, and Richard and Tim ask excellent, grounded questions.
…the other episodes of the podcast are excellent too!
