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There is no outside: two systems practice labs at SysPrac26

I’m running two genuinely practical labs at SysPrac26: one on helping without taking over, and one on making relational, place-based public services stick. Both begin from the same awkward truth: the consultant is already in the system, and good practice is already entangled with …

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I’m doing two workshops at hashtag#SysPrac26; a slightly alarming pair (as the performance artist said to the episcopal authority figure)...

‘The consultant is in the system: a practice lab for helping without taking over’
‘The system is inside the practice: making relational, place-based public services ordinary’

There is no outside!

In the first workshop, we’ll look at what happens when we offer help.

Every question, diagnosis, suggestion, and contract shapes the situation. When things get awkward, consultants are easily pulled towards one of two positions: the expert who takes responsibility for solving the problem, or the servant who takes responsibility for doing what the client asks. Neither position leaves much responsibility with the client.

We’ll practise inquiry, contracting, reframing, authenticity, and working with resistance. We’ll look for the client behind the client, the problem behind the problem, and the patterns in the wider system which are turning up in the consulting relationship itself. hashtag#SystemsPractice

The second workshop begins from the other end.

hashtag#Relationalpublicservices and hashtag#placebasedpublicservices often produce good work in a protected space. People respond intelligently to lives rather than processing cases. But budgets, measures, assurance, professional boundaries, 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.

So we’ll work on the double task: changing what happens in people’s lives, while changing the conditions which decide whether that work is legitimate, resourced, and able to endure.

The connection between the workshops is stronger than I first realised. A consultant can't stand outside the system being changed. And good practice can't stand outside the institutional machinery which authorises, measures, and funds it. In both cases, the intervention is already entangled with the conditions it's trying to change.

Neither session will be a presentation with some small-group exercises glued on - they're practice labs. Bring a live, awkward situation and come prepared to do some work on it.

Join me: 21–22 September 2026, Cranfield University sign up at www.systemspractice.org/SYSPRAC26
(I'm hoping at least one person will attend both, and help me see the deeper links)

Which is harder: helping without taking over, or changing the conditions around good work without having that work absorbed by them?

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Thoughts on Renaisi’s pattern book for place-based change

The Renaisi Pattern Book is excellent, but patterns are not the place operating system. We need sharper distinctions between mechanisms, actors and effects, with power and equity running through the whole thing. Scale is about spreading the conditions for good local judgement, not r…

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'Epistemological closure'. I'm writing about it a lot, and I see a lot of it around - I think LLMs often help people see it! It's the process through which a person, institution, or society loses the ability to encounter reality outside its own categories, incentives, language-games, legitimacy structures. What Boyd called 'locked orietation'.

Highly-educated systems can become epistemologically closed precisely because they are so internally coherent, so professionally validated, so optimised around maintaining stable interpretive frameworks. Closure happens when a system's ability to process signals according to its own assumptions outweighs it's ability to revise those assumptions. Anomalies become irritants, not learning opportunities. Tacit, illegible knowledge is excluded. Boundary-crossers are a threat. Institutions recruit for conformity to epistemic style rather than sensitivity to reality. This often feels, on the inside, like rigour. And it's needed to some extent for institutional/social reproduction.

Versions of this idea are all over. Kuhn paradigms absorbing anomalies until crisis is unavoidable. Polanyi saw tacit knowledge formal systems can't fully capture. Hayek saw that knowledge is irreducibly distributed and local. Scott showed states privilege legible abstractions over lived complexity. Beer described institutions attenuating variety until they can't absorb the complexity of their environments. Luhmann argued systems sustain via communicative closure. Illich saw schools harming learning, medicine harming health, transport destroying mobility. MacIntyre described bureaucratic modernity severing practices from the goods internal to them. Lacan understood how symbolic systems defend themselves against encounters with the Real. Chapman writes that systems mistake their maps for reality because ambiguity and unformalised pattern become intolerable.

You can see it almost everywhere now. Political parties increasingly can't perceive realities outside media-conditioned ideological frames. Public service categories often displace lived situations. Consultants substitute frameworks and slideware for contact with operational reality. Academic disciplines, software, internet discoure with alogrithmic capture. The emperor has no clothes.

It's a weird mixture of certainty and incapacity: overconifdence matched by inability to act effectively in the 'real world'.

The real problems we face are the type where closed epistemologies fail: complex, recursive, transdisciplinary, tacit-heavy, dynamically changing. Climate, AI, institutional trust, housing, migration, public health, social fragmentation. None fit inside existing boundaries of expertise or legitimacy.

The challenge is designing conditions under which systems can remain epistemically open without dissolving into chaos. What do you think?

(Image courtesy ChatGPT - I love that it can't properly distinguish or differentiate all the old white men on which I draw...)

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Where political control really sits

I’ve regrouped the UK public-sector workforce by where ultimate political control really sits. The picture is strikingly centralised, and “local delivery” is not the same as local control. A place that cannot move money, authority, measures or rules has delivery responsibility, not control. https://www.l…

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Relational public services are no longer short of advocates. What they’re missing is an account of why they collapse.

We keep showing the attractive picture. The walls are down. People work across boundaries. Staff use judgement. Citizens are encountered as people rather than cases. Help is earlier, more human and often less expensive. Then, months or years later, the walls return.

The usual explanation is that risk-averse leaders, bureaucratic managers, or an old culture blocked the better way. That’s inadequate.

The walls were built to do work. They ration finite resources. They assign statutory and professional responsibility. They make decisions auditable. They contain financial and political risk. They protect some forms of consistency and equity.

They also split lives into categories, suppress judgement, generate hand-offs and create failure demand. Both things are true.

A relational pilot can remove the walls locally because trusted people carry the risk. It may have a committed sponsor, informal permission, and temporary money and freedom from ordinary measures.

That can produce excellent work. It isn’t, yet, a new public-service model. It is a temporary suspension of parts of the existing one.

When pressure returns, the system asks: who authorised this? Who owns the risk? Which budget benefits? How do we know it is fair? How do we hold it to account?

Without answers, the old arrangements also return. Not necessarily because people reject the results, but because the experiment never replaced the functions those arrangements performed.

Every serious proposal for relational public services therefore needs an account of sustainment.

Who can decide at the point of knowledge? What capability can they draw on? How will judgement remain visible without being strangled? How will rights and equity be protected? Where will financial risk sit? What survives when the founding leader leaves?

It is irresponsible to advocate for relational public services without an account of why the surrounding system repeatedly rebuilds the walls.

Bring them down where they cause harm. Understand why they were built. Design how their necessary work will be done differently.

Otherwise they will return.

A fuller post on this is on my blog – link in comments.

#relationalpublicservices #publicservices #systemschange

Have you seen this happen?

The walls come back

Relational pilots repeatedly show what better public services can look like. The harder work is replacing the functions performed by the rules and boundaries they suspend, so that the host system does not simply recreate them under pressure.

A relational model is not sustainable until the surrounding system changes what it funds, counts, authorises and protects.

Benjamin Taylor • August 2026

Relational services aren’t short of proof

Public services are full of people trying to help other people. And most are organised around services, departments, thresholds, statutory duties, budgets, eligibility rules, measures, professional roles, risk systems, and lines of accountability. All of those have functions. None of them is the same thing as the life being lived.

Relational public services start from that life. They listen for purpose rather than forcing a situation immediately into a service category. They use judgement. They build trust and agency. They coordinate around a person rather than expecting the person to coordinate the system. Done well, this can improve outcomes, reduce failure demand and make work more humane.

We have enough examples to know that this can work. The real question is why it so often remains exceptional.

The recurring pattern is recognisable. A small team gets permission to work differently. It succeeds. People involved become enthusiastic. Leaders ask whether it can be scaled, evidenced, governed and made safe. The pioneers explain that judgement, trust, context and relationship are part of the method. The organisation hears ambiguity and exposure. The work either collapses, becomes a protected subculture, is translated back into ordinary process, or survives as a heroic exception.

Months or years later, much of the old machinery is back. The people who held the exception together have left, burnt out or become permanent translators between two incompatible operating systems. The organisation concludes that the model was hard to scale. Often the experiment worked. The host system did not change.

Why the walls were built

The easy account says that bureaucracy, risk aversion or bad management defeated a better way. That is too convenient for relational advocates.

The walls do work. They ration finite resources. They make rights and eligibility visible. They allocate professional and statutory responsibility. They create repeatability. They protect some forms of equity. They make spending and decisions legible to people who are distant from the work. They contain political, financial and safeguarding risk. They give somebody a route to challenge a decision.

They also split people’s lives into categories, suppress useful discretion, reward hand-offs, create queues, and hide costs that end up elsewhere. Both are true.

A relational pilot can remove some of those constraints locally because a sponsor, project leader or unusually trusted team absorbs their functions informally. Someone gives permission. Someone carries reputational risk. A budget is bent. A performance measure is ignored. Staff know who to call. Senior people defend the work when it produces an awkward exception.

That’s why the pilot can feel liberated. It is also why it is fragile. The organisation has suspended some of its usual control mechanisms without yet replacing the necessary work those mechanisms were doing.

A serious relational model has to answer the questions the bureaucracy was answering, including the questions it answered badly: who decides, who pays, who is entitled, who carries risk, how do we know, what happens when people disagree, what stops arbitrariness, and who can intervene when something goes wrong?

The double bind

The central operating contradiction is simple. Public services ask for relational work while still accounting for transactional delivery.

They ask for collective leadership and hold individuals to account. They ask people to work across boundaries and measure performance inside silos. They ask professionals to use judgement and punish ambiguity. They ask managers to invest in prevention and make them defend this year’s budget. They praise community capacity while treating it as a delivery channel or free labour. They ask for trust while retaining systems designed around mistrust.

People respond rationally. Full refusal is risky. Full commitment is also risky. So systems produce activity that looks like progress while limiting exposure: discovery, scoping, workshops, governance groups, pilots, option appraisals, benefits frameworks and requests for more evidence. Some of that is useful. Inside the bind, it can become shelter.

The sentence that needs to become discussable is: ‘We are asking for collective, relational action while exposing people to individual blame.’

Trust is not a mood that leadership can request. It is partly a property of the conditions people work in. If authority, accounting, measures and consequences remain hostile to interdependence, exhortations to collaborate become another demand placed on people who cannot safely comply.

Relational is not the opposite of transactional

There is another trap. Once people have seen what relational work can do, it is tempting to turn ‘relational’ into the good category and ‘transactional’ into the bad one.

That does not describe a competent state. Paying the right benefit, registering a birth, collecting waste, issuing a licence, giving a clear entitlement and making a lawful decision can all be excellent transactions. People often want speed, predictability, anonymity and equal treatment. A forced relationship can be intrusive as well as wasteful.

The question is fit. Standardise when you can. Personalise when you must. Use relationship where context, instability, trust, judgement or interdependence make it necessary. Use clean transactions where the need is clear and variation adds no value.

The practical problem is that the operating system tends to prefer what is legible from above. Complex situations are translated into categories that fit funding, professions and pathways. Relational workers then compensate for the information that was lost. If the surrounding rules never learn from that work, the maze remains and the navigator becomes part of its permanent cost.

Six tests before calling a model sustainable

A relational service is not sustainable because it has a good team, strong outcomes or a supportive director. Test the surrounding system.

Boundary. What is the real system whose performance is being improved: an organisation, a pathway, a place, a neighbourhood, or the person’s life? If leaders say ‘whole person’ while budget and accountability stop at the organisational boundary, the contradiction will return.

Demand. What are people actually asking for at first contact, in their own words? If the system only sees coded service demand, it cannot learn where its own processes, thresholds and failures are creating work.

Authority. Who can act when the system first knows enough to act? If the least authorised people are placed at the most important sensing points, relationality will degrade into triage, referral and escalation.

Capability. Authority without skill, time, data, relationships and access to resource is abandonment. Capability without authority is decorative. The people expected to respond to variation need both.

Measurement. What behaviour do the measures produce? If staff are rewarded for throughput, referral, short contact, service-specific savings or a narrow acute outcome, those measures will eventually dominate the relational purpose.

Sustainment. What happens when the founder leaves, finance tightens, an inspection goes badly or a political controversy lands? A viable model has a budget, governance, delegated authority, workforce arrangements, information, interfaces and leaders who can explain its trade-offs in public.

What responsible advocacy requires

It is irresponsible to advocate for relational public services without an account of why the surrounding system repeatedly rebuilds the walls.

That does not mean accepting the walls as they are. It means understanding the work they perform, distinguishing necessary protections from inherited habits, and designing better ways of carrying the necessary functions.

A relational movement should therefore spend less time proving that relationships matter and more time altering the host system. Move useful authority towards the point of knowledge. Give that authority capability. Put dependencies into the accounting rather than hiding them. Change measures before demanding different behaviour. Protect rights without assuming uniform process. Let citizen contact become a source of intelligence. Give community actors power and resource rather than praise alone. Create ways for local learning to change central rules.

The transfer object is not the pilot. It is the conditions that let people exercise good judgement without becoming heroic exceptions.

That is also a more respectful stance towards managers and political leaders. Most are not ignorant of the failures around them. They are carrying statutory duties, budget pressure, inspection, media risk, workforce fragility and vertical accountabilities. A reform that asks them simply to stop controlling is unlikely to survive. They need a different way to obtain assurance, allocate risk and know when intervention is necessary.

Bring down the walls that cause harm. Keep or redesign the functions that protect rights, equity and accountability. Build learning into the control system so that the next version can change as reality changes.

Otherwise the walls will return, and another successful experiment will be remembered as something that ‘worked there’ rather than as evidence that the state itself needed to change.

The six tests also work as a sustainment diagnostic for relational public services.

Introduction

Join the debate on linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_publicservices-devolution-systemschange-ugcPost-7492848069080809472-rh-w/

To rewire, you start with the existing wiring as it’s developed over time. It’s a blunt metaphor; I tried a blunt test. Do you think it’s helpful?

Which public b…

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On rewiring the state – travelling second class through Purgatory – (It’s not the hope series, part four)

I’m excited by the promise of real devolution, local fiscal authority and public services organised around place. But exhausted, damaged institutions cannot be ordered into another heroic transformation. The climb needs base camps: tim…

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Dante emerges from the Inferno. He looks up – and sees not the starry veil of heaven, but a mountain. It’s another metaphor for ‘Rewiring the State’.

Isn’t it exciting?! Devolution by default (I’m way of the slogan though). Local fiscal authority. Public services aligned around place. A smaller, more strategic centre. Room for prevention and local action.

After years of centralisation, fragmentation, and argument, the gate may finally be opening.

But beyond it is not the shining city on the hill. It is Mount Purgatory.
The work of undoing, unlearning what the old system has formed in us.

Public services are not approaching this climb in good shape. The NHS has carried the pandemic, backlogs, vacancies, financial recovery, repeated restructuring. Commissioning has been abolished and remade more than once. NHS England itself is now being abolished. Local government carries austerity, growing need, service failures elsewhere, unstable funding, and repeated demands to transform. Many employees are not merely tired, they’re damaged by previous promises, traumatised by what they’ve been through, morally damaged by compromise. And they’ve seen new structures with old behaviours, taken responsibility without power, been given accountability without resources.

Some will look at the mountain and say, ‘At last, we can begin.’
Others will say, ‘I haven’t got another climb in me.’
Others will wonder whether the shining city at the summit is another mirage.

‘It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope.’

Despair asks very little. Hope asks people to pick up their equipment again.
So this next stage cannot be presented as another burst of heroic transformation.

A climb like this needs many camps. Places need time to establish shared understanding before being driven towards delivery milestones. They need to map demand, money, authority, risk, and information across institutional boundaries. They need to build local capability through real work, not generic leadership programmes. They need ways to learn which change the operating system, rather than evaluations which record whether a pilot ticked boxes. They need proper supplies: resource, capacity, data, institutional memory, and political cover – to be able to trust. And they need permission to stop where necessary, recover, adapt the route and bring people with them.

The mountain is real: austerity, backlogs, vacancies, fragile morale, distrust and financial crisis won’t disappear if and when constitutional wiring changes. But obviously not an argument for staying in the Inferno.

There’s now a genuine possibility to move from a state organised around departmental control towards places able to sense what is happening, decide closer to the work, move resources and learn.

Worth climbing for! It’s great to see the stars again.

What do you need to see at the first base camp before asking exhausted people to climb again?

Imagine fighting your way across Middle-earth, destroying the Ring, and finally coming home. Only to discover that the Shire still needs saving.

That may be the right metaphor for ‘Rewiring the State’ – and for the recent social care speech.

It’s fantastic. Real devolution, local fiscal power. Public services organised around places - many of us have spent years arguing for something like this.

But the people being asked to make it happen are not returning fresh from a pleasant walk for second breafkast. They’ve been through 17 years of austerity, the pandemic, backlogs, special measures, “Brexit”, the cost of living, workforce shortages, and restructures - oh, what restructures!

NHS commissioning? Abolished, reconstructed, abolished again, through PCTs, CCGs, ICBs. NHS England is now being abolished.
Police and Crime Commissioners arrived as a major constitutional reform - now going.

Local government is being asked to manage today’s services, redesign tomorrow’s institutions, and make further savings at the same time, with over 150 last-ditch desperate interventions every year to keep financial ruin out of the public eye.

Home itself has been stripped, damaged, and reorganised while we were away. And now it’s time to mourn the people and things we’ve lost.

‘It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope’.

Despair can be managed. People narrow expectations, create workarounds. They protect their teams and the people they serve. They stop expecting the system to help, harden the shell of cynicism.

Hope asks them to become vulnerable again, to believe THIS structure will last, THIS promise is different, and that authority and resources - and a plan - will follow the announcement.

Some will be jubilant.
Some will say, ‘I’ve heard that before.’
Some just won’t have another campaign, transformation programme or heroic rescue left in them.

Obviously we need this. But we need to approach implementation differently. Not to treat exhausted people as barriers to change, but to ask what they have been protecting, and why.
Not to clear away the informal arrangements which have kept services functioning before understanding them. Don’t ask staff to build the new system (again) while targets, budgets, risks and permissions continue to enforce the old one (again).
And don’t assume that transferring responsibilities to a place gives that place the capacity to use them.

The Shire can be restored. But restoration requires more than defeating Sauron. It requires people to organise locally, recover their authority, rebuild what has been damaged, and decide together what kind of place they want.

The opportunity is not just to transfer powers, but to rebuild public services around people, relationships and places. So, we may finally be coming home – but we should be honest about what we are likely to find when we arrive.

What has kept your place going while the formal system failed – and how do we rebuild from that rather than sweep it away?

Activate to view larger image,

At last, rain! After years of public service drought, the announcement of real devolution - and social care hope - is - just - bloody brilliant!

More local power and fiscal freedom. Public services organised around place. A smaller centre. More space for prevention, neighbourhood working and relational services.

Hoorah!

But rain falling on damaged land doesn’t produce a harvest overnight. The soil has been depleted. Austerity. Backlogs. Burnout. Damaging restructures. Moral injury. Lost institutional memory. Massive distrust.

In the NHS, people have lived through successive models of commissioning, each presented as the answer to fragmentation, each then torn down with scorn. NHS England is being abolished. Local government staff have carried expanding responsibilities while services, capacity, and financial resilience have been stripped back across 17 years.

Some roots are still alive.
Some people have nothing left to give.

‘It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope’.

Drought teaches survival; we narrow our expectations, stop planting. We protect what little remains.

Rain asks us to believe in growth again.

So, welcome announcements can produce relief, grief, anger, and suspicion at the same time.

We need the rain, however much it reminds us of all that is lost. We also need to rebuild the soil. That needs stability, time, authoritym and resources. It means protecting - rebuilding - relationships and local knowledge. It means creating conditions in which staff can use judgement, learn from citizens, and alter the system around them.

It also means recognising that workforce recovery is not separate from implementation; it IS implementation.

Burnham can’t offer security, he does offer hope, Now he needs to nurture the soil.

What would need to change, where you work, for people to risk planting again?

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We didn’t lose the technology. We lost the machinery for learning together

We keep rediscovering the same local digital problems because we dismantled the machinery for learning together. From BVPI 157 to SAVVI and Open Referral UK, the useful bit was never the target itself, but the shared standards, memory and practical infrastructure th…

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___

‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it any more’

When I joined Hammersmith & Fulham in 1998, the council ran on a mainframe. We introduced internet email that year (and I borked it: different story)...

2003-04 I was eGovernment Manager, dealing with BVPI 157: make every suitable service ‘available electronically’ by the end of 2005.

A classic: doomed to succeed, demanding gaming.

A transaction could be ‘e-enabled’ (even by phone or fax!) while the service, hand-offs and failure demand behind it remained untouched.

I calculated for ODPM that collecting and reporting the data cost £200,000; the same as our eGov grant.

A small, perfect tragedy of target-based reform: spending money to make a narrow definition of success legible.

BUT the best of that period wasn’t the target. It was the learning machinery it: 22 council-led National Projects, common standards, the Brent eGovernment Register, funding for experiments and an expectation that useful work would spread.

At H&F, Alex Cousins assembled a cross-council Customer First team - me, John Collins from Council Tax, Debbie Morris from Enviroment. Agilisys’s Manoj Badale and Graham Davies worked with us on the strategy as part of the ‘strategic partnership’.

Dennis Vergne, Chris Naylor and many others turned that strategy into Residents Direct, Smarter Borough, and Community Support: different operating models for different work, rather than one contact centre treating every need as a transaction.

I want to mention Tony Ellis in this history too. Faced with 130% user turnover on the Children’s Services IT system, he didn’t reach first for more training or tighter compliance. He developed a quality-improving, human-in-the-loop view of children and families: data supporting professional attention and judgement, not replacing it.

Tony later helped Buckinghamshire establish the unitary council’s systems, pandemic working, cyber-security and practical AI. He died unexpectedly in December 2024, far too early.

Then, much of the wider e-government system was dispersed.

GDS later did exceptional work. It also helped make ‘digital’ a separate profession, often focused on selectable transactions and detached from IT, operations, data and organisational change.

The embers survived through the likes of the LGA’s data work, LeGSB, iStandUK, Open Data UK, Porism, Porge, LocalGov Digital.

Now some threads may be reconnecting.

The Data Standards Authority has published Alpha Vulnerabilities Data Standards developed through SAVVI and iStandUK. iStandUK is also convening councils around national data sources for local service directories.

Unglamorous plumbing - but serious work on making information make a difference in people’s lives.

Which shared public infrastructure have we already invented, forgotten - and now need to recover?

Two practical invitations to contribute are in the first comment.

#LocalGovernment #DataStandards #PublicServiceTransformation

What if empowerment has to pass through grief?

We often talk as though people can simply step out of powerlessness and into ‘Citizen Space’:

- Stop complaining.

- Take responsibility.

- Get involved.

But something may have to be mourned first.

- The hope that someone competent is in control.

- The expectation that institutions will provide what we need.

- The future we thought we were entitled to.

- Our innocence about our own participation in the systems we criticise.

And everything genuinely lost in the meantime.

Without room for grief, empowerment can become brisk and moralising; real loss and real powerlessness are treated as faulty attitudes.

But grief doesn’t mean remaining powerless. It may allow me to acknowledge what has been done to me without concluding that I am only powerless; to recognise what has not been provided without becoming only a recipient or complainant; and to accept what cannot be restored before asking what remains possible with others.

This helped me see something differently about Bottom, Customer and Citizen Space - the first two are part of Barry Oshry‘s work; the third is a powerful extension by John Watters.

They aren’t three kinds of person. They are three different relationships.

Each has a characteristic failure mode.

But each also contains a different source of power:

- Bottom has situated knowledge and collective leverage.

- Customer has demand, judgement and feedback.

- Citizen has association, legitimacy and shared responsibility.

Empowerment therefore isn’t necessarily a journey from Bottom or Customer into Citizen. It is a movement from being wholly acted upon towards recognising the source of power available in the relationship we are actually in.

Institutions frequently invite people into ‘Citizen Space’ while retaining every meaningful decision.

They ask Bottoms to ‘take ownership’ without sharing power.

They ask Customers to assume the obligations of Citizens when provision fails.

Or they call people Citizens while continuing to treat them as powerless Bottoms.

Adult-to-adult conversation doesn’t require pretending that power, capability or responsibility are equal - it requires telling the truth about them.

I’ve written a longer piece exploring grief, the failure and success modes of each space, how Citizen Space collapses, and what institutions must do differently. Link in the comments.

Where are you being invited into ‘Citizen Space’ when the real relationship remains Customer or Bottom?

Full blog post at https://chosen-path.org/2026/07/28/what-empowerment-asks-us-to-grieve/