Many public service reforms produce good work in a protected bubble and then fail to become ordinary. A relational team learns to respond to people’s lives, while budgets, measures, professional boundaries, assurance, and decision rights continue to organise around institutions. The better the local workaround becomes, the easier it can be for the wider system to remain unchanged.

This 90-minute practice lab is about that second task: changing the conditions around the work while doing the work.

Using a short public-service case and participants’ own live situations, we will trace what happens as a person’s account of their life, strengths, and needs becomes an assessment, pathway, record, measure, and management decision. We will examine what each translation makes visible, what it loses, where authority sits, who carries the work of joining things up, and where learning stops.

Participants will then distinguish two linked interventions:
1 what must change in the live service situation, and
2 what must change in governance, money, roles, risk, evidence, or authority for the new practice to endure.

Each participant will redesign one practical learning-and-assurance loop between citizen, edge and centre, and formulate a small institutional experiment they can take back to work.

The final move is reflective: how are our own methods, contracts, categories and roles as systems practitioners part of the situation we are trying to change?

This is systems practice applied to the conditions of change itself.

Book here
https://antlerboy.com/sysprac26/