The areas we can be certain about
There is a long legacy of work that the Healthy Communities Together programme builds on. This written and embodied knowledge and experience is held in all of us. We know it as individuals, as colleagues, and as systems. One example of this is the work done in 2013 by the same organisation supporting and funding the programme:
It feels important therefore not to lay claim to too much of any new insight—instead, in at least 5 areas in England (although we know there are more), this knowledge and experience has been freshly laid. So the question, as we enter the final 12 months of the programme, is how might we maximise this? What areas of certainty can we hang onto?
In the ways of working we usually use, we seek to control certain aspects of the work. We control activities, timescales, finances, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These aspects can be easily written down and counted. We can easily compare and contrast, look at before and after, and track whether it has met our initial predictions. All of this makes absolute sense. To get a sense of distance travelled, to be able to celebrate our successes and efforts, it is completely necessary to record the journey. And it helps us learn.
So what follows is not creating an EITHER/OR situation, but a BOTH/AND. We need both sets of technologies. What we are setting out, however, is that instead of activities, timescales, finances, and KPIs being used as control mechanisms, which end up being the domain of a few, not the many, and knocks us out of humility and discovery as the primary mode of operation, we use these mechanisms to observe, react, and reflect.
In the BOTH/AND place, we need to be conscious of a potential language impact. In the interpersonal, relational technologies realm, “control” is a verb—an action, a way of behaving—and is the opposite of ‘trust’. To be avoided. In the structural, technical realm, “control” should be held as a noun—measures as indicators (input into decision-making opportunities—not deciders in themselves), boundaries, predictors, etc. Valuable sources of information, not passive influencers.