‘Remember, remember the 5th of November’

On Tuesday 5th November, Collaborate hosted my research event, a Word Cafe on Partnerships.  In the final blog of this series, I’d like to share some reflections on the morning.

Lord Victor Adebowale, Chair of the Collaborate Council and Chief Executive of Turning Point, opened with some provocative observations.  He challenged that in our partnership practice there is a difference between the ideal and the reality.  He reminded us of the reasons we should collaborate; 1) to make the most of the limited resources and 2) to make services easier to navigate.  He also said:

“But we are not very good at it.”

And this is at the heart of this research project,  essentially I want to know how we get better at it.

During the Cafe conversations, we looked at the 4 themes; strategic partnership,values-based approach, reflective practice and the skills and attributes of a good partner.  One of the really good things about the social sector is that we know how to talk to each other.  The flip side of this is that quite often we immerse ourselves in those conversations which can become a sort of comfort blanket.  What I wanted was to create an environment that challenged people to engage in a deep conversations in a purposeful and thoughtful way.  Each theme addressed the same 3 questions:

As I sat in on some of those initial discussions, I found them focused yet challenging; people were really thinking about how and what they wanted to contribute.  All the participants had significant experience of working in partnership which meant everyone had something significant to contribute.

There were some surprises.  Whilst it is clear that there is a need for resources, there was very little talk, if any,  of austerity.  Given the current economic environment, it is a difficult topic to avoid in a roomful of social sector professionals.  The reference to resources was generally related to having the time and space to commit to a more focused approach.  I found this really positive.  I came away with the feeling that this is a course of action which can gain commitment despite financial constraints.  People want to collaborate.

There was also a lack of discussion about leadership, which surprised me.  Throughout the initial round-table, leadership was central to many of the conversations we had.  Leadership will be key in developing partnership practice across the sector.  The environment in which we work is complex; we must seek to influence leaders from the political environment, the sectors we work in and the organisations we work for if we are to create systemic, sustainable change.  There is also personal accountability as colleagues and peers; partnerships are as much about individual responsibility as collective impact.

In earlier posts, I often link leaderships and values.  It became clear that many people felt that whilst values are important, partnerships are not dependent on shared values.  Shared outcomes are much more important.  As participants discussed began to feedback on their Cafe conversations, this idea began to take shape.  One participant challenged that often, partnerships are based on shared values, rather than shared goals.  She then went further, suggesting that partnerships might be more succesful if organisations were to  purposely seek to partner those who offer something different but who may have a similar goal.

Do shared values and similarities make us weaker partners?  Do we need to diversify more? This was unexpected.This lead to perhaps one of the most unusual phrases of the session; serial polygamy. Essentially, the idea is that organisations become more flexible in their approach to partnerships, seeking new and different partners as needs grow and change.  I have to say, I really like this.  To be serial polygamists, it would need a level of skill, agreed values and the ability to be highly skilled reflective practitioners.

Serial polygamy; is it the future?! An exciting thought.

The Cafe conversations and the plenary sessions were really stimulating and provided the perfect environment to co-create the ideas and themes for the framework for the Good Partners Charter.    Out of each of the 4 themes came 3-4 guiding principles, contributing to the Charter.  My job now is present those guiding principles into a working document; something that could be used as a guide to future practice.  

Towards the end, after sharing the 2 reasons why we should ‘do’ partnership, Victor said the most important thing, which is that we are ‘doing it for the people who aren’t in the room’, the beneficiaries.   It is really crucial that we don’t lose sight of this.  I feel passionately about this topic and this project; I believe that being good at this stuff potentially holds the key to better outcomes for our communities we live in and are part of.

I hope you have enjoyed the blog series.  I’d like to thank everyone who has been a part of the project, the round-table discussions and the Cafe on Partnerships.  Watch this space for the findings and, of course, the Good Partners Charter!

http://storify.com/Yogibear311/cafe-on-partnerships-1

Time to Reflect

As a 2013 Clore Social Fellow, I can honestly that this year’s theme has been reflection.  I have never been this reflective in my entire career.  Using reflective practice as a learning process is a core part of the programme and development process for all Fellows.

And it’s not easy.

To be reflective,  it requires us to stop doing and start being.  For me this is a challenge.  I am a doer.  But more on that later.

In this blog, I want to share some of the learning on reflective practice from the round-tables about reflective practice from my colleagues and other professionals in the business of social justice.

 Are we a sector of ‘doers’, making us more resistant to reflective practice?

Personally, the key to understanding reflective practice for me was understanding first, how we learn and then second, my preferred learning style. As a natural ‘Activist/Pragmatist’ (Honey & Mumford), I predisposed to the experiential side of learning and not a ‘natural’ reflector.  I’m most comfortable when I am ‘doing’ and really do find ‘being’ much more challenging.

I was talking with a colleague about my experience delivering action learning in the homelessness sector. Whilst this was definitely one of the most fulfilling parts of the job, it was also one of the most challenging.  If you are part of an action learning set, it is definitely a commitment; both time and resources (in the context of a set member being away from their job for a whole day, every 6-8 weeks).  Suffice to say the line managers I spoke to were not thrilled with the idea of losing staff that regularly, for that length of time.  As we spoke about this, my colleague said:

“We are a sector of ‘doers'”

This struck a chord and made sense to me.  We are trying to ‘save the world’.  There’s no time to reflect.  If only there were more time, because we really do understand the benefits to doing so.  But there is no time!

Joking aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about.  Are ‘Activists’ over-represented in the social care professions?  If so, does this mean more value is placed on doing the job as opposed to reflecting on how we do the job? These are broad questions and I don’t think it’s as simple as that but it does give pause for thought.

I asked this question at the round-table:

How does your organisation reflect and incorporate the learning from experience to inform future collaborative working practice?

The response was really interesting and varied.  A participant from a mental health background had the most experience of reflective learning and was the participant who had the most clarity on how it affected his work.  Someone else who had worked in mental health services earlier in his career said:

“…(we went) through a whole restructuring and a lot of people left and we had this big discussion about the loss of collective knowledge, so I said we are losing people who have worked in this borough for 20 years and even though there wasn’t a formal process by which their knowledge became departmental knowledge, when a colleague worked in the same room, he would wander over and say “Tom, have you ever dealt with this before?”.  There is a huge amount of informal learning and reflection that does take place but actually systematising it is more difficult”.

We went on to discuss how a more systematic approach could improve our partnership working.  Here are the highlights:

• sharing experience of partnerships and how to improve contact
• reflecting to better understanding our own practice and responses to external environment
• ensuring that experience doesn’t ‘walk’ out the door’ when colleagues move on
• build a better understanding of the relationships involved
• sharing this approach across disciplines to better understand values/motivations

We all appreciated the benefits of regular reflection but from sector to sector, the experience of it as a learning process varied widely.  An issue across the board, excluding mental health services, is the lack of a coherent approach to using reflective practice as a learning process.  Most participants felt that this was an area for personal and organisational development.

In the context of joint-working, this is an opportunity to build a better understanding of each other and the environment in which we work.  There are a range of factors that feed into our ability to be good partners.   Reflective practice, within and across sectors, contributes to the skills and attributes needed to be a good partner.

Join the discussion.  What are you thoughts? #goodpartners

Related articles

• Blogging for Reflective Practice (edu13portfolio.wordpress.com)
• The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon (graysreadinggroup.wordpress.com)