Enabling help | Triangle

How do you deliver public services that are relational – services that recognise and respond to the unique needs and circumstances of each individual? That was the topic of the conference ‘Towards Relational Public Services’ that I have just had the pleasure to participate in.

Sam Game and I gave a workshop which explored how the Outcomes Star helps to make ‘Enabling Help’ a reality in practice. Working in a relational way is one of the six core principles of Enabling Help, Triangle’s blueprint for effective services.

Sam, who leads the implementation of the Parent and Baby Star in Health Visiting services in Warwickshire, described how using the Star has helped them work in a more relational, collaborative and strengths-based way. Parents have responded incredibly well. They are much clearer about the health visitor’s role and they love the way that Star helps them see what is going well as well as where they have needs. And it isn’t just the parents. It has also helped commissioners to understand and value the service.

Our workshop was one of more than 40 sessions which took place over two days at Newcastle Business School – part of Northumbria University.

For me the highlight was Mark Smith’s presentation on service transformation work in Gateshead. He described how they have implemented an approach to working with people with complex needs in which there are only two rules: ‘do no harm’ and ‘stay legal’. In this ‘liberated method’ case workers have a low caseload and there are no limits on how long they can work with someone or what kind of support can be provided. And case workers have budgets and the discretion to spend money to help solve pressing problems.

What I loved about this approach was that the bureaucracy was stripped out, giving workers the chance to do simple things that could make a big difference and avert much greater problems down the line.

Mark is part of a growing movement of managers, practitioners and academics who are challenging the orthodoxies of New Public Management (sometimes described as the 3 Ms – Markets, Metrics and Management). They are making the case that outcomes emerge from many interacting factors and therefore cannot be ‘delivered’ or dictated. In this complex environment, learning rather than prescription and control is the most effective management strategy. And it makes more sense for commissioners to take a relational approach and to hold service providers accountable for learning rather than targets. This new approach is called Human Learning Systems.

Toby Lowe, Visiting Professor of Public Management and the Centre for Public Impact closed the conference with a call to action – for all of us who want to see services that are more relational, responsive and effective to come together and work with a coalition of the willing to create a paradigm shift in public management. It is an exciting vision, and one that I think the Outcomes Star, a tool with flexible, relational working at its core, can play a role in realising.

Joy MacKeith, Co-creator of Outcomes Star

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Watch Joy’s conversation with Toby Lowe about the synergies between Enabling Help and Human Learning Systems

Find out more about Enabling Help here

Find out more about Human Learning Systems here

Triangle, the social enterprise behind the widely used Outcomes Star tools, is calling for a paradigm shift in social provision. In a new report to be published in September 2021, co-founder and Star co-author Joy MacKeith argues that at its heart service delivery is about meeting human needs and changing behaviour. Everything we know about how change happens points to the importance of relationships, trust and connection. Research also shows that services must be holistic and tailored to each person. But the ideas currently driving social provision steer the focus away from relationships and flexibility and onto procedures, markets, targets and standardisation. They break service delivery down into parts rather than focusing on the whole system.

The report presents an alternative vision – an enabling approach to service delivery. Called Enabling Help, this alternative puts the focus of the service delivery system on the service user, rather than the helper, the service or the intervention. Enabling Help builds relationships, trust and hope, develops skills and capabilities, is holistic, responsive and tailored to each individual person.

It also paints a picture of what it means to make Enabling Help a reality in practice. At the front-line it means moving to a collaborative approach rather than telling and directing. For managers it means changing the emphasis from managing procedures to enabling front-line workers to deliver relationship oriented, collaborative, flexible, problem-solving services. For commissioners it means shifting the focus from numbers to narratives – co-learning with service providers about what works.

‘Enabling Help’ builds on Triangle’s twenty years’ experience of helping organisations to support and measure change for people receiving services. Working with over one hundred collaborating organisations including local and national charities, housing associations, grant-making trusts, local authorities and NHS trusts, has provided a unique insight into what works when supporting change and building well-being and potential. And training and supporting over one thousand organisations to use the Outcomes Star in practice has highlighted what can get in the way of delivering what works. This report pulls all this learning together and identifies the real reasons why people being helped get stuck in services and the people delivering the help feel frustrated and de-motivated.

The report calls on all those involved in service delivery from front-line workers, to managers, commissioners, researchers and policy-makers to embrace this new set of ideas and put relationships, responsiveness and learning at the heart of everything they do.

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