I could spend the whole day discussing with you whether or not the chicken or the egg came first, and we probably wouldn’t come to a conclusion that we could agree on. I genuinely think it’s one of those unsolvable conundrums. To me It feels a little bit like the tension between systems thinking and relationship building.
I first came across systems thinking in the 1990’s when I was completing my masters degree in community and primary care towards reflective practice. I’m not quite sure when systems thinking began to permeate social care and health though, I don’t remember coming across it much before about 2010. Maybe it was there all along and I just wasn’t looking for it.
I’ve often said to people that systems thinking was created during the Second World War to improve logistics. That does’t mean that we can’t apply it to people logistics as well. I just sometimes wonder if as with any currently vogue way of working, we run the risk of forgetting that the most important element of any system is people and their relationships. If we don’t get the relationships right, it doesn’t matter how good our system is, It’s not going to make a great deal of difference.
Team building and team development have been a big part of many of the roles that I have held. This has led me to believe that how we build and maintain any team that we are a member of (and most of us are part of multiple teams) is the most important element of how we get things done.
Some of you may have heard me tell the following story before….
Many years ago a group of senior managers from social care and health asked me to arrange a team building day for them. They wanted something very practical that really challenged them to think differently about the system they worked in and the changes they needed to make to that system.
After much discussion -‘make the morning fun and the afternoon strategic’ and with some trepidation on my part, we decided to set up a day that included raft building at a local water activity centre. The intention was for the senior managers to spend the morning building the raft and the afternoon discussing how they were going to solve some of the current challenges around hospital discharge. As you can see we’ve moved a long way on the hospital discharge challenge since then!
Starting early, the water centre staff had prepared all the materials that we needed to build the raft. What they hadn’t done was provide any instructions on how to do it.
As the senior managers from social care and health arrived and basked in the joy of being completely uncontactable for the day (this was in the days before everyone had mobile phones), they set about building the raft.
This should have been a fairly simple task for a group of highly talented, highly motivated individuals to achieve. With their broad set of knowledge and skills obtained over many years of public service, they should have been able to achieve this with relative ease but…
Most of the morning was spent jostling over the kind of raft that the team wanted to build and the most systematic way to build it. Other tensions included trying to work out whose knowledge and skills were the most important and who had the most right to be in charge.
By lunchtime it was plainly evident that as yet they had no clear system for success and that they weren’t going to have time to spend the afternoon talking about how they were going to solve the challenges around hospital discharge.
After a late lunch – which was at least something that everybody could agree on -. It was back to the arguing, the bickering and the inability to agree on the stages necessary to build the raft. By about 4 o’clock in the afternoon the raft was finally beginning to take shape, and at around six in the evening the raft was finally ready to launch.
As the team climbed onto the raft and began to paddle out into the lake, the buoyancy of the raft began to be questioned by those on the shore who could see the bigger picture. About halfway across the lake it was evident that not everyone who was on the raft was going to make it to the other side.
At this stage it was decided to jettison a couple of the team. Two thirds of the way across the lake it was evident that the raft didn’t have enough buoyancy for anyone to make it across and the only decision left to make, was which direction the remaining senior managers were going to swim in order to get back to shore.
Now you may wonder what the point was in these two groups of senior managers coming together for the day to raft build when they didn’t find time to solve once and for all the challenges around hospital discharge. Well, the actual outcome from that day was that both teams recognised that if they were going to expect their respective teams to work together to create systems that lead to meaningful change and to the improvement of the lives of local people, then as a group of senior managers the first thing they needed to do was to learn to trust each other. They also recognised that they needed to work together, and to be honest with each other about what they could and couldn’t do.
It wasn’t the system that needed to change. It was the relationships between everyone in all the different teams they were a part of that needed to change if they were going to be successful.
In terms of their relationships with each other, it was a standing joke between them – if they couldn’t create a system to build a raft that didn’t sink, how on earth could they expect to solve the challenges they faced across the local social care and health system? They also swore that they would never tell anybody else about what had happened that day.
I was never asked to do raft building with them again.
Jim Thomas
February 2025
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