Can love actually be a legitimate—and measurable—policy goal for public services?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Carly Glover, founder and former CEO of Jersey Cares, to explore the profound impact of love, advocacy, and human connection within the care system. Drawing from her transformative work in Jersey and Scotland, Carly shares how shifting from a transactional "Victorian model" to a relational approach can fundamentally change lives for those with care experience.

Key discussion points:

• The Foundation of Jersey Cares: How a diverse "band of unusual suspects", from Chief Ministers to community leaders, came together in a noisy Portuguese cafe to redefine advocacy.
• The Power of Love in Policy: Why the core mission of "children in care should be loved" became the non-negotiable golden thread that influenced government practice.
• Brutalising vs. Tender Environments: Carly discusses how high-pressure, back-to-back professional schedules can "brutalise" staff, making it difficult to deliver "tender" services to vulnerable families.
• The Promise Scotland: Insights into the radical commitment to ensure all care-experienced children are loved, safe, and respected by 2030.
• Ceding Power & Agency: A look at why public services must stop "pretending" to have total control and instead empower individuals to exert their own agency.

Stay connected:

• Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-badman
• Read the latest chapters from our upcoming book: https://relationalservicedesign.com
• Master the methodology: https://basistraining.co.uk/
• Partner with us: https://basis.co.uk

Carly.

Hi. Hello.

Thanks for joining me.

Oh, you're very welcome.

So look, I want to start with Jersey Kears. That was an organization that until recently, you were the chief executive of an organization that you founded.

Yeah.

Can you tell me a bit about the work of the organization? What was it, where did it start and what was your role?

Yeah, so it is. So it's still thriving, really, which is nice.

An advocacy and influencing organization as well as sort of community mobilizing organization for people with experience of care, and that's people of any age. So it may be babies who are currently in care, right up to older adults who have been in care at some point. So anyone with an experience of care.

So that's what the organization does and why it does it, I guess, is twofold. At its core, it's super simple. At its core, its children in care are often not loved.

The system doesn't enable them to be loved and doesn't enable people to give love. So that was the why, the sort of emotional why of why we did it. And it's what pulled together a range of actors to develop Jersey Cares.

And I was new and naive in Jersey, so didn't know any better. But the people who came together hadn't spent time, time together previously.

So we had Jersey's Chief minister, who's Tory leaning, and we had Jersey's leader of their only political party, which is left wing, Labour leaning, come together and meet in the top room of a little Catholic cafe of noisy Portuguese older women. And over the sound of their voices and the noisy coffee machine, we developed what we wanted this organisation to be.

There'd been a push for such an inquiry for a very long time that had been resisted, but they finally agreed it was terribly expensive. It was 30, 40 million pounds in a jersey context that's referenced often. And its findings were.

They were catastrophic, though arguably not that deep, different to what a deep dive might have shown in lots of other places. And Jersey was described as a neglectful and indifferent corporate parent who hadn't listened, who hadn't loved.

So the work of Jersey Cares came out of that. I just moved there. I had a settled, happy, working from home, other job that I enjoyed, but I saw this and there was the Chief Minister.

So the Prime Minister of Jersey was on Channel 4 news, which is unusual in itself.

Yeah.

Under cover of darkness. And they said to him, what are you doing about this? And he said, we're spending £4 million on. And I thought, that's not the question they asked.

And I saw quite quickly that what would happen is people would come into Jersey and make a sort of a false promise, really, that everybody knew was false, but believed in crisis and chaos, that for this amount of money we will fix this discrete aspect of the system. And I knew from the work I'd seen in Scotland and other professional experiences, that was a fallacy.

And in Scotland, there'd been some work where people with experience of care had approached the then First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and said, just come and listen. The first task is just listen. And she listened to 500 people at length. Some of them were my friends.

And she developed a deep sense of, gosh, what have we done? People aren't loved routinely or often in the care system, and not the sort of love that we might know from a family member.

So someone who loves you because they love you, because they love you, because you're kin, and they're going to be there not just till you're 17 or 18, they're going to be there when you get married, they're going to hold your hand when you have a maybe they're going to be there when you come around from an operation. Not that sort of love. And who are we without it that people in care are stigmatized?

There's this awful sort of ricochet of you've had a tricky home situation, you come into a tricky system and you're stigmatized because you're in that system. And that the way out of that would be to listen to people's lived experiences and act because you'd listened.

So that was my background in Scotland that informed how we set up Jersey cares.

It's a very evocative image of you all sitting together in the little sort of Catholic. Was it the Catholic Church, you said?

It was a Catholic church that had a little cafe and it was always older Portuguese ladies who would all shout at each other. And the coffee machine was just unfathomably noisy, so they would shout over the coffee machine. And we were in a small upstairs room thrashing out.

What we wanted to do on the basis that what we knew was we thought children should be loved. I mean, we all know that children should be loved, children should belong and children in care should have lots of opportunities.

So we got there and then we were thrashing out and how do we best do this?

So how did that journey start, then?

I mean, I want to get into the detail of the work, but I think it's very interesting that the start of that work is a conversation between people of potentially very different political views that perhaps you might imagine would hold their ideas of what the right thing to do was very tightly. How did you get started in that context? Or am I sort of misimagining, I suppose, the situation?

No, I don't think you are. I think in Jersey, the. The extent to which the CARE system was laid bare by the CARE inquiry created sort of fertile ground for coming together.

So I think that was the. I think that was the starting point. Jersey's nine miles by five miles and its capital's sort of one, one and a half miles in.

You know, it's the furthest you'd go in any direction, so there was an ease there. So it began with a conversation with a Methodist vicar in his front garden around some of the learning I spoke about from Scotland around this.

Gosh, children need to be loved and they're not. And everything else that comes out is by and large a result of not mattering to anyone. It matters less what you do if you don't matter to anyone.

It matters less what you do to yourself if you don't matter to anyone. So there was that core of things that we didn't move from. And I've thought of the.

That with a lot of other areas of work, we're going to hold onto this thing tight. This thing is true, and together we're holding that thing tight.

So with that connection, he invited me to a policy forum that was senior policy officers meeting third sector CEOs to look at how to work more closely together, and told this story again. And that led to a senior civil servant policy officer, the new Children's Commissioner, Jersey's first children's Commissioner, kind of joining us.

And that story brought in the then Chief minister, so a man called Ian Gorst. And people had, again, because Jersey was small, their own felt and lived connections to people in care.

They'd have gone to school and played football with children who are no longer there. And so there was those kinds of connections.

And then we worked with Bernardo's, and through Bernardo's, we worked with young adults who were leaving care. And the Director of Children's Services came and worked with us.

And a very, very sort of senior corporate person who'd reached the top of the real top of the Jersey tree joined us and talked about her own lived experience of her parents coming to Jersey with nothing and making something and wanting to give back.

So we became this band of unusual suspects that Jersey folks said hadn't happened before, but I think Core to that and I think core to the things that Jersey Cares did best, which isn't all the things, but the things we did best was never, ever deviating from that core, whether it was called naive or unachievable. And it brought in, like you say, it brought in people whose. How are we going to get there?

Varied, but the core of it must be done meant they came together and worked towards a tangible thing which we built.

So let's talk about that. What did get built as a consequence of those initial conversations?

So initially it was that. It was that network and it was that foundation that moved to some degree, not completely at all away from a sort of Victorian model of charity.

It wasn't let's help the poor orphans and give them shoeboxes and gifts at Christmas, and it had elements of let's give people gifts at Christmas. But there was a sense of us about it.

So, for example, we invited some Scottish peers to come over and we held conferences for professionals led by young adults with experience of care.

And we then held dinners and we always made sure they were beautifully done, beautifully done, as beautifully as you do for your own family, because the symbolism of that matters. And I remember the senior corporate person I mentioned sitting down and she sat with some senior professionals and.

And in between some young people who had care experience but were also working in the field. And she turned to me and she said, I can see our Jersey Cares community coming together.

And I thought there was something really important about the level playing field of that or more level. Not level, but more level. So that was the sort of sense of network, the sense of vision.

So we started to see the Sam Mezek, he was called, still leader of Jersey's only political party, became the children's minister. So we started to see the language of home and love and stability weave through into policy space to influence that.

They then become measures and they then become practice. So we started to see those things. We started to see Jersey's media as small, so they've really taken interest.

I think why people took an interest was because it had a golden thread all the way through. We knew what we were for. And that was interesting and, I hope, compelling.

And then we, in that little room above the little cafe, we thrashed out what did we want to be? Did we want to be a campaigning organization or did we want to be commissioned by government and provide independent advocacy?

Did we want the inreach that that would give us and the breadth of people we could work with, or did we want to be outside the system? And I remember because we literally voted with our feet.

Group went one way, group went the other, and we decided to be commissioned by the government. And that sliding doors moment took us in a particular direction.

So we became Jersey's first provider of independent advocacy for children in care and care leavers that could offer that widely. We got some incredible independent funding from a philanthropist who recognized his own childhood.

He had nothing, but he was happy and he wanted that for children and adults who were able to offer advocacy to anyone with an experience of care of any age.

We were able to run various campaigns and we were able to directly influence government because it was also small and localised and the civil service and government would often work in the same buildings. There was a relative ease to that as long as we led with why it mattered.

If you're still here, my assumption is you're finding this conversation useful.

We're recording these interviews because we think it's important to share stories of people who are leading and designing more human impactful and relational public services. And we'd like as many people as possible to see them. If you think you can help us with that, then I'd be so grateful if you did one of three things.

You can, just like the video, and that'll help other people to find it in future. You can leave us a comment and let us know why you stuck around, or you could subscribe to the channel.

And honestly, I've got no good reason for that other than it would cheer me up. Okay, back to the interview. I'm thinking, as you're talking about geography to a certain extent, because Jersey's a pretty unique place, isn't it?

And I don't know the island I've not visited, but I'm from a relatively small town in Wales and I spent lots of time in small Welsh villages where you know people in a way that you don't in London, for instance, where I lived for a long time afterwards, and I'm interested. Yeah. What role the geography of the place had in the development of the work and in the relationships that existed between people.

Because there was something that you said about, you know, people in the work having, you know, experience of care, if not themselves, but through people that they would have known at school, within a very defined geographical area. There's sort of no. There's no escaping the good and there's no escaping the bad, I imagine.

And I wonder if you've got any thoughts on that, what role that plays, that dynamic played in the work.

I think it certainly did. So I recall A conversation with a minister, a newly appointed minister. And he said.

And you might not have thought it on first appearances, to be honest, but he said, I get this. I get this. There's been jerseys divided into 12 parishes.

Right.

And he said, you know, my parish, there were children and I saw them with no food at 2 and 3, and I saw them graffiti him with bad spelling at 7. And when I saw him jacking cars at 12, I got it. Something he was good at. I got it. So you could have whatever political leaning that you had. But.

But an experience of your community that meant you could be to some extent politically agnostic on the approaches used, if they worked. At best. At best. So it certainly meant those things. But.

But something I've been thinking about is I'd argue that we've all got access to that kind of congruence.

Yeah.

And I think there's probably something about bigger systems, and I think Jersey's fallen foul of adopting bigger systems in a small place that allows you as a professional not to connect with those experiences. So I found speaking one to one with ministers for good, bad or indifferent, most of them would cry at some point in the conversation.

Yeah.

Because they. They'd held onto a felt sense. And I. I think that was a. A strength that wasn't always fully explored in service of.

Yes, but we've got to get on and do. And the disconnect between that, gosh, we know what matters, and the getting on and doing.

I think sometimes in that space is where falls we fall short.

I wanted to ask about something that you. That you said at the relational public service conference that we were both at in Manchester.

You said, the reason I'm asking this now is because maybe there's a link to what we've just been talking about and maybe not. But you said that sometimes when we argue amongst ourselves as a system, there perhaps isn't anything left for the people that we're trying to help.

And the reason why I'm connecting these two things now is you said something about sometimes small places can try and adopt ways of working that are appropriate or make more sense, maybe in bigger systems, but perhaps not so much in smaller communities. So I suppose the question is very complicated and very difficult to actually decipher, but maybe it's twofold.

What was behind that, what you said at the conference? Because it really did stick with me. And are those two things linked?

I think because my experience is not talked about enough, and yet it's glaringly obvious and those things interest me and they trouble me. And because I've experienced it and I've surprised myself, the amount of energy I've spent on.

I don't agree with that person or this and this and this has happened, and I'm going to struggle to be in a room with that person.

Yeah.

And the ways in which sometimes silos are created simply because this director can't work with that one. And we don't talk about that. And yet we commission someone to teach us about restorative practice or, or clean language. And so I think it's.

I think it sits in front of us and deserves looking at.

And it really, as Mark Smith and I were preparing that input, it really struck me, you know, that we've got finite amount of energy, and if it's going there, I can almost visualize, like, the children and the families that need that energy and clarity of thought to plan to assist them in the best way possible. And then I guess after our initial conversations, I thought more about it. I thought, but what are you saying, Carly?

Because I, you know, I'm still certainly victim to those sorts of behaviors or victim. Or victim's. Not quite the right turn of phrase, but certainly experienced those feelings myself.

And it isn't as simple as saying, well, let's all get on, or it isn't as simple as saying, I think it's part of it, though, if you're going to have a complex project, involve elements of mediation because you're going to need them. Yeah, I think that's. That's a little part of it.

But the bit that I've been thinking about more is what is it about the way we work alongside each other that's brutalizing.

What kind of brutalizing?

Well, if you are working from home back to back, and you're talking about bins and then adult social care and children's social care, but you're also asked to be relational and engaging and dun, dun, dun, dun. And there's no stopping.

There's few good mornings, or you're in an office and you can't be offered water because, you know, there's sinks downstairs and no one's got the fob to get in. Or you have to go through four fob doors as a guest to get in somewhere.

And I was thinking, you know, brutalizing environments are used deliberately to brutalizing effects in some prison systems and that kind of thing. But if we work like that, we shouldn't be surprised that there's little time for connection and restoration.

And that bit that I think Helen Sanderson spoke to, well, in the Changing futures, Northumbria work of starting with what are we all here for? And without that, we just bounce and we bounce.

And a brutalizing environment is going to create people who are a little bit brutal, at least to themselves and to each other. So I think that's a part of it.

Yeah, I sort of wanted to applaud you as you were talking about those things, because I think some of what you're talking to there is. Is almost so obvious and borderline trivial that it's not even on the table. We just sort of.

Yeah, just sort of brush it to one side and carry on because we've got another five meetings to get through. But unless. Cause I think a lot about. I worked at the job center, my first job just out of university, during the financial crisis.

And it was very difficult to be helpful in that context. Very, very difficult. I was sometimes, but usually despite the system, but only when I had the personal resilience to do it, to think right.

I do have another five appointments today, but over lunch I'm going to speak with the council to try and fix this person's housing benefit, because I don't think they're going to be able to do it themselves. And it's going to take a lot of effort. I'm going to be on hold. I'm probably going to have to argue, I'm probably going to have to justify.

I'm probably going to get told off when I go back to my desk because I'm late for my next appointment. And that's just one person.

And you think about senior leaders trying to make progress, trying to work with people across the system on really messy issues.

And making progress requires them to be nice to each other and civil and kind and considerate and, you know, to remember why they're there in the first place. And if they can't, because their work environment is brutalizing, as you put it, then that's a big problem.

Then it isn't trivial all of a sudden, is that.

Yeah, and I think it's. I think it. I think it could be batted off as trivial.

So it could be, you know, if we only bought a Tupperware box of brownies in, then the world would be a better place.

I mean, I want the brownies, but.

Yeah, also the brownies. But I think it's a lot more than that. And in fact, I know it's a lot more than that.

You know, you can't think well if you're furious with the person in front of you. You can't make good decisions and you can't think about tender things. I heard a lovely.

It was a series of videos with a 94 year old man in Northern Ireland that's always lived in the same house and his granddaughter's doing little snippets of his life wisdom and he said, I just want to leave the world a little more tender. And how can we do tender things like support elderly people or little children without mums and dads?

How can we do tender things if we're so tense and angry? They're not the. That's not a small thing, it's a big thing.

And I think we can ignore that because we're in professional roles and I think too that we don't afford that same leniency to families in my world in situations of vulnerability. So, you know, in order to get your children back, you must be able to liaise with dad about shared care.

Oh, but dad, you know, we've got this dynamic. No, you must, without any help, without all the sort of trappings that we might have.

So that need to be relational or that need to step forward is, is handed over to the people with the least resources and energy and time to deal with it for the most critical reasons.

In that case it's, you know, you must do these things in order to keep your child or to regain your child or whatever that might be, or to keep your house. Whereas as we sit in our own comfort, and I think that's part of it, we simply must address these things.

Yeah, you're completely right. And I think that's incredibly concisely describe such a complex, complex issue.

I work mostly in local government and I think part of, and I worked a lot in local government before working outside of local government.

I think part of the problem in government generally, and I suspect this is the same in Jersey, was that many of the services that local government and government in the case of Jersey run are just transactional services that just need to be good. They just need to align with people's expectations of existing in the world and going to the shops and using their bank and all that stuff.

And we should be striving for operational excellence on those things. They just need to work.

And we probably, yes, we need to be nice to our colleagues in the design of those services, but actually we can just be pretty matter of fact because there are right or wrong answers. Difficulty is that an enormous chunk of the services that we're talking about don't work like that. They're not those kinds of services.

They don't have right or Wrong answers. There are multiple right answers and they require a completely different mode of thinking.

I said something earlier on about, about holding ideas tightly or loosely. I really like that, that idea. And it is right to hold tightly. How to go about setting up a online form to report your Ms. Bin.

It is not right to hold light, to hold tightly. Exactly what is required for this family that is in crisis at this moment.

Because we don't know, we're probably gonna have to work with them to figure that out. And what we think is right to begin with probably won't be right in a few weeks time.

So it's a really, really difficult ask, isn't it, for people working in public services to sort of straddle these two ways of being this moment I'm gonna be professional and I'm gonna say what the right answers are. In this moment I'm gonna be vulnerable and I'm going to say, I don't know. I don't know what the right answer is.

But let's, let's work that out together.

Yeah.

Anyway, I should probably get off my own soapbox because I am interviewing. I'm interviewing you. I know a lot of the work of Jose Cares and a lot of your work generally has been around.

It's been around listening, it's been around sort of agency and seeding power. My background is as a service designer.

And a lot of the methods that you learn as a service designer to listen to give agency or create conditions where agency is possible, or to seed power, they can become very sort of clinical and mechanized, like, well, this is the technique to do that. And I'm interested in your experience of, you know, what does that look like, all that stuff when it's done well, what's the practice of it?

It's an impossible question really. But perhaps there are some examples that you can think of that illustrate what that stuff looks like when it's done well and authentically.

I've been thinking about it a lot and I think some of it is it's a discipline. Like it's hard.

So my academic background was it's called community education up in Scotland and community development down south and the practices of working with groups and individuals to develop, to develop ideas that will work for them individually or collectively and is cognizant of power. Like it's, it's a practice is the first thing. So, you know, if you're going to put in. I was going to say Joan from accounts.

I don't mean Joan from accounts, but if you're going to Put in somebody in your team and go and talk to them. You've got six weeks and find out what you think about that. That's not going to work any more than if I was to ask you to extract some teeth.

It's hard to do well if you want to do it in a way that's cognizant of all those things. And sometimes you don't need to. It will be transactional. You just need to know, should we be open a bit later? Fine.

But when you want to do messier things, and in the world I've worked in, around children, in care, around families, on the edges of care, when the power imbalance is so acute and when things are working so poorly, and when the difference between how acutely that matters to mum or dad or the wee boy or girl you have in front of you versus, you know, it's your professional life, when that chasm is so wide, tread carefully is the first thing.

So I was reflecting back on various roles and when I was 21, so I can barely see it, some time ago, we did a piece of work with Women's Aid, and they only worked with women and the children were there and they knew the children had needs, but they were an uncomfortable truth because they were busy with the women. And to acknowledge the children meant acknowledging dad, and that was uncomfortable for a feminist, flat, structured organization.

And so I did, at the time, I could have talked to you about it as, like, this triumphant project. I took in a mastermind kind of chair to the houses and I made this book with stickers, talk about how you feel.

And the little ones did the book and the bigger ones did the mastermind chair. And we all seemed to have a good time.

And it went from there being no service for children to a service with four or five staff for children that was well used and I was involved in running it. So there was a continuity of relationships. So that's good.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought, knowing what I know now, you know, we ask little children to draw things and you don't need to describe what children who've experienced domestic violence might draw, but do I have any clue of the impact on that on Mum or on that wee child or on what happened in the household? What did they do when I left? What did that little child do when I left? And I don't. That's the thing. I didn't need to know. No one told me.

And they said yes, for lots of reasons linked to power, I'm sure, yes. And that doesn't mean everything else is negated, but it means again, do a lot of work beforehand on the ethics. But ultimately it's going to be.

It's going to be down to you, whether you. What you choose to do.

So that links back to if you've got a brutalizing system that bounces you from thing to thing to thing to thing, you're not reflecting out of badness or your personal resilience point. You've got personal resilience because you've got personal practices that you choose to do, but your workplace hasn't enabled that.

So there's that, there's that thought and reflection and tenderness.

And I was thinking in this about that permissions bit. So the pre work of going, hang on a minute, can we change anything? Oh, we've not thought about that. Like, what are we doing then? Mining your trauma.

And again, mining your trauma is a loaded phrase for certain types of consultation. It isn't the same if you're saying, would you like us to open an hour later?

But where it is that kind of work, be really clear about that and do some. You're going to need to steady and ready system.

And I heard a quote the other day and it was like, you know, reform without that readiness isn't necessarily progress, it's peril. You know, that bit around, we're going to listen, but if you can't do anything, why. And there might be a reason, but I'd articulate that.

So I was thinking about the Women's Aid work I did, the Jersey Cares work and a sort of piece of work around family learning and adult learning pathways. What made those congruent was there was resource and money and time and willingness to do stuff with people afterwards.

So I think there's a lot of that pre work that gets missed. It's not funded, it's not considered because things are done in a rush.

And I think there's a real risk around sort of push at the moment for we must involve people with lived experience to do more harm than good and to create a lack of congruence amongst professionals that they find difficult to talk about because in saying, oh, I'M uncomfortable with this. Are you saying you don't think these people with lived experience of whatever it is, should. Should, should be there and that.

Yeah, that lack of congruence and borderline dishonesty with each other then ricochets into its own problems, I think.

Yeah. And this. So this is part of the problem with, with my, My training as a.

As a service designer and that I. I observe in the service design profession generally, is that there are phases to a project. We're going to do a discovery, because that's what's necessary. That's how we understand people's lived experience.

That's how we understand what's happening closest to the problem that we're trying to make progress on. But it can be very problematic because if there's no thought into what comes next, then, then it can end up doing a lot more harm than good.

Because we set an enormous amount of expectations. I mean, even things like, let's say you're going in to try and understand the lived experience of people that are living in temporary accommodation.

Well, just by you being there to try and understand what's going on, it implies that something's going to happen, that something's going to get better.

And very rarely are the people who are having those conversations, often they're very good at having those conversations, relational conversations, where they're really building trust. Very often do they know whether it's going to be possible to do anything afterwards. So those expectations can't be.

I don't like the phrase managed expectations in this case because it sort of feels overly clinical, but that's kind of what it is. You know, we're not saying to people what to expect next. And that's. That's hugely problematic, isn't it?

And sometimes where we are. But they're about a kind of discrete element of the system where it's already fairly tightly defined and you're just asking for kind of minor tweaks.

That can be deeply problematic too, because you've got. In the world. I've worked in Children in Care. What do you want?

I remember the CEO of a similar charity in New Zealand said she came into the work newly and said to a child in Kenya, what do you want? And the child said, a chest of drawers. She thought it was the saddest thing that she'd ever heard. And that's some of that emancipatory practice.

You'd have to work with people for a long time to see that's what you need. But what do you really, really want? And when you get to that, it's what you'd expect it to be. On a family. My own, often my own.

If circumstances had been other, we'd be supported. That would be my own. But I want someone to whom I belong. A lovely young man I knew who's had a series of jail sentences now.

But he used to say, you know my friends when they say mum and dad and they moan about them, they don't know how lucky they are, that's what I want.

So when the wanting from your lived experience is so jarring, with the system saying, we can adjust how Social Security and this other department work with you to secure your first home at 17. And then what I've seen as well is what that can lead to is a sort of socialization in what's called participation.

So asking people stuff with lived experience, where you learn. Oh, you mean I'm supposed to answer this? So I had a conversation with my 10 year old son yesterday. He was, he was.

He was you asking me questions or I was you? I'm not really sure. He's not, he's not got a twirly mustache yet. It may come. I could see it. But I was saying to him, so little Johnny's in care.

How do you know if Johnny's loved? He's lived in three homes now he lives with this elderly couple. Would you know if the policy said he is?

Would you know if the CEO of the council said he is? Would you know? Would you know? Would you know? And on I went, and his answer was no. And I said. And he said, well, you'd know if Joe told you.

And I said, what about if Joe was asked every three months if he was loved and settled? He went, oh no. Because then Jo would just start to say the things that adults want Jo to say. So there's this.

Yeah, I just think wherever we look, there's a lack of honesty and candor about what we're doing because we're busy, because we're flailing, because we're in crisis and because we're not stopping.

And I think some of those examples from Changing Futures Northumbria have just stopped briefly stop for a few minutes and remind ourselves that that in itself, that holding on tightly to what matters, I think is one of the keys to unlock doing meaningful things, because we're doing things.

Let's talk about seeding power, because we had a brief conversation before, before this podcast. I'm really interested to know, what does that look like? What does that mean?

So I've been thinking about Seeding power an awful lot. And People's Agency. I've spent some time with and read about some of the work of Donna hall in Wigan.

And when she talks about it, she's like, we didn't have a business plan. We went and there was me and the other sort of most powerful woman in the council.

And every two weeks we talked to a bunch of folk from the community and community leaders and actors every two weeks. And then we had the power to make things happen. So we acted and we. And we did.

But she also talks about the time when they were facing severe budget cuts.

And she, and I'm paraphrasing, hopefully reasonably accurately, defunded some bigger things that weren't helping people demonstrably enough and funded lots of little things that could do stuff in their local communities. And I've been thinking about some of the work of Toby Lowe and Kathy Evans on like outcomes and this sort of.

And again, you know, fallacy, a bit of a lie that we get into that our work, my work makes Jo 4 points happier on a 10 point scale, 4 points more employable. What a silly thing to say. But also, if you make that my organizational goal or my goal in order to win the next tender, what's going to happen?

Yeah, but to achieve that, Jo has to have less and less agency because I have to make that happen for him.

And I think that's why a lot of the work we do can feel in a way that I don't know that we've always got words for, can feel desperately jarring and frustrating because we're pretending, we're pretending we have much more power and influence over the life of someone else than we do by a long way. And we're not working in a way that enables them to exert their own agency.

As you know. I'm talking with Ron later on this afternoon.

I'm really interested to talk to him about the role that data plays in either creating kind of virtuous cycles and useful feedback versus creating a system that has to sort of justify itself regardless of whether the work is actually being helpful or not. And it's a perennial challenge that all organizations face that are publicly funded. I mean, how did you experience that in Jersey?

Did you have a sort of. Yeah. Did you have a sort of amnesty on that kind of stuff or did you have to work with KPIs that were sort of tricky to, to respond to?

How did you get around that or how to deal with it?

Yeah, there were different iterations, I think there were, there were Times where they were meaningfully co designed between us and the government and based on we'd, we'd done a report called called Listen Louder about what care experience people wanted to to see and wanted to to happen. So it's based on those things. So it's stuff like do you measure on do you trust your advocate? Does your advocate do what they say?

Do you feel more able to do stuff for yourself? So some sort of straddling ever so slightly better but still not great.

And sometimes it felt like it controlled you too tightly and your time was spent measuring things that didn't matter.

Yeah.

And that then over time and again Kathy Evans speaks beautifully to this you run the risk of not holding onto your own red lines and you become an organization that does something else. But you do it for each other. The government gives you some money and for you and you do things for for them. But that's not who you.

That's not who you who you serve. And often I think we ought to be more modest. Again Mark Smith spoke about maybe we should like give up on being so ambitious.

We're not going to make this place or that place great and marvelous and the best place ever.

We might create normal humdrum lives and people need to be given the conditions to do that, to do that themselves with the people around them, the real people. I met someone recently who was in a community group that I led 20 years ago and they've been an alcoholic for 25 years.

And they said the sort of deciding point was they went out and one of the pals said you just can't do this anymore. You reckon everything.

It's hard for your social worker to say that to you but a pal can do that and then pick up all the pieces with you and come over the next day and make up. But you need the conditions where that can happen and it's unsexy. It's dipping pavements where I live so you can cycle about.

It's not introducing parking traffic so you can park for free and go to places is some of the stuff you were talking about earlier is actually the really unsexy good bureaucracy done well as the enabling context for people to do more stuff by themselves. And you won't get terribly much credit for it but it'll be more honest and it'll be cheaper.

Yes. And I want to talk more about ceding power because there's something to be thought about in relation to ceiling power.

Every single level of an organization. Right. Sort of closest public facing workers consciously avoiding the sort of Use front line.

But seeding power from me, knowing what you need to, you know, figuring that out together and increasingly less involving me over time. But then that also needs to happen from, you know, middle managers to people in those teams.

You know, from saying what the answer is, what the intervention is, to coaching you through the process of figuring out how to be most helpful to the community that you serve, to more senior people in the organization still being much more adaptive in the way that they lead, much more curious, much more open to challenge about the beliefs that they hold.

And this is something that I want to think about a lot more over the coming year is what about the governance arrangements of organizations either promote or inhibit the ceding of power just in the same way that KPIs can either promote useful behaviors or unhelpful behaviors?

I think so too, do the structures that are just so embedded in large organizations, in large bureaucracies, they can just, they can have such pernicious consequences that sometimes we just accept because, wow, these are sort of old institutions, that this is how it's done. This is sort of part of the fabric of society and democracy, and those things are sacred.

Yeah, I don't know what the answer is yet, and I don't think I'll be able to figure it out either. But noodling on it feels like an important thing to do.

Yeah. And I guess it's the backdrop to the society that we live in, isn't it? Particularly if you're someone that doesn't.

Doesn't interact in professionalized forums. We spoke earlier about my cockney grandma. Wonderful, wonderful cockney grandma.

And I remember as she was older and she was sat in a hospital bed and she had this bag of medications and each one did a different thing to her, which is why she needed the next one. But there was wasn't that voice to express that. And a junior doctor came and he spoke to her and said some stuff in big words.

And I said, did you understand what he said, grandma? And she says, oh, no, darling, no darling. And I said, and would you like me to ask him to come back so he can explain?

And she said, oh, no, darling, he's busy. And there was that reverence for someone in a position of power. So yeah, there's that. How much more?

So if you're someone that doesn't interact with, you know, it's difficult as a professional with other professionals. I think that was something that I used to have really mixed feelings on as I talked to different people in our work in Jersey.

A sense of Kind of co. Victimhood, you know, I am a very senior person. I work on behalf of these people who are in situations. They're not vulnerable people, they live under a bridge, they're not vulnerable.

It's tough, but they're in situations of vulnerability and I feel like I've got no voice. I feel like you can't adopt their position. You've got a bit more agency than that, but it is. Yeah, it is hard. But how much?

How much more so if you're not used to those forums. I was at the Solace Conference the other month and the CEO of NHS 4th Valley, a guy called Ross McGuffey, he spoke about this.

He did things like his speech and language teams. He's like, they know they wanted to go into all the schools and catch people early.

So he created the permissions and conditions where they could go into the schools and catch people early.

Yes.

And he had this data that, again, you know, I want to pin it on my walls. It was just absolutely marvellous because, of course you caught people early, but the teams got to know families as well.

So the highest number of referrals started to come from parents. And you saw how that changed.

The early stuff that cost less and the very sharp, expensive services could be provided quicker and again, there was less need for them, but that was simply creating the permissions for what is known to work. And yet I'm curious about the role of. The role of power and co. Victimhood, I think, in there not being more of that.

Yeah. So I think it's. Ceding power is part of the equation. Another part of the equation.

And obviously I didn't hear this conversation or this presentation, but is about sort of boundary setting. Like within these boundaries, you have an enormous amount of autonomy.

Because I think autonomy without boundaries is very difficult because all of a sudden you can stray into territory that actually you don't have influence. Maybe it's not even legal, maybe there are some statutory reasons why you can't do that.

But if you can be really specific about certain things that make it possible for people to use their agency, well, then it can have a transformative impact. In social work teams, you have autonomy within these boundaries that we have agreed.

And you know what the answers are working with people in your community and that that makes possible things that could never be made possible in a boardroom by a group of leaders.

I think that is right. And I think in Jersey, absolutely, with autonomy, with no borders or parameters or regulation, the CARE inquiry showed quite how dangerous that is.

But in addition, I Think to those parameters. There has to be a culture of reflection.

Yes.

And again, not going back to why. What are we doing?

So I had a conversation with someone who's just starting out as a residential childcare worker, and they're obviously naturally good at this job. And they said to me, there was a little boy and it was his birthday and I wanted to buy him a present. And I got.

Not exactly my knuckles wrapped, but kinda because the manager said to me, oh, that would be perceived as grooming. And it really stopped me in my tracks. Cause I thought there's a kernel of truth to that.

If you buy presents just for that little boy or for everybody of your own money, that could be perceived as grooming.

But a step back is what you're thinking perhaps, is this is a little boy and it's his birthday and he's in a children's home and that might be hard and maybe he'll not get a nice present. And the impulse to care for him is a good one. And what I would suggest needed to happen is not don't do that.

Because it could be considered this a broader conversation congratulating that person on that impulse and that feeling and looking at how that might be enacted safely within safe boundaries that can be replicated for all the children and doesn't go down any of those avenues. And that can only happen if you stop and reflect on what you're doing and why you're doing it. And the Promised Scotland.

And children in care fall foul of all those things that aren't done for them or those boundaries and parameters that are put in. And some of those things are good and right. But what about the risk of not doing? What about the risks to people and souls and lives?

And I think, because without the ability to consider like that, again, the Promised Scotland talks about, your experience of systems can be ricocheting, bouncing in the hard edges of those systems. And I think that would resonate with professionals at all levels of themselves.

But imagine if that was your life, your sense of home, your sense of having a future, having a job, having your children, and all of it's hard and bouncing. And these things are being asked of you that you struggle to do.

Yeah. I think the point about what's the risk of not doing some of these things or the impact rather of not doing some of these things is very well made.

And it makes me think of sort of an argument that I get into quite frequently with people. Our work is typically trying to prototype different ways of working.

And in the language or the currency of today, that's testing and learning, trying things, trying different ways of being helpful in services, in communities, in a variety of different contexts. And one of the challenges that I often get is, well, isn't that just really risky?

Trying things out in the context of people that may be vulnerable, they may have enormous amount of challenges and if it goes wrong, well, perhaps it'll make things worse. The issue I have with that is first of all, that assumes that what's happening now is infinitely better.

And the fact that we are trying to improve it suggests that there are probably some serious problems there.

And also it forgets that in the example that you just gave, this person is somebody that cares deeply, has just had an enormous amount of training and brings with them values and skills. They're not, it's not me, I'm not a social worker.

I'm not the one that's just randomly prototyping, prototyping something in a social work service or in a homelessness service. These are people who really know their stuff. And I would argue that they see the problems, they feel the pain of it not working well.

They still maintain all the judgment and skills and values that they have.

I think that's infinitely less risky than just standing back and allowing an intervention or a service or a system that isn't working as well as it should to just continue unchecked.

We'd spoken about this conversation Mark Smith and I have started to have around. I'm not a scientist, but he is. So I use this tentatively, but apparently it's reasonably accurate.

Einstein once said, allegedly energy doesn't cease to exist, it just changes its form. And I think you can apply that to lots of things here. So when we say it's too risky, to whom?

In my 20s I worked in, I think every homeless hostel in Edinburgh. And when you've seen like 16 year olds and they look really tough, if I was at school with them at 16, I might have been a wee bit scared.

And you go in the room and they've not made the bed cause it's just not on the radar and it's just a dirty mattress and it smells and they're telling you it's nice, they're telling you they've tidied up and there's three bin bags of rubbish, but there's a whole corner of the room, a whole L shaped corner of teddies and they're barely managing.

And you've seen because you work with homeless people who are 20 and 30 and 40 and where this is probably going like status quo is safe, not safe for that girl. It's not safe for all the people that we talk sometimes a little blithely that we are, we are failing.

It's not the status quo isn't, isn't safe for them, it's not safe for the families who get help far too late. It's familiar to us and it brings burdens and struggles, but they are familiar, but it's not, it's not safe.

So there's, there's that too, that risk if we don't take it on our shoulders. We ask people at the most vulnerable points in their lives to pop it on this.

So we talked about the Promise earlier on and how that influenced your work in Jersey and you're, you're back there now.

Yeah.

Tell us a bit more about what the Promise is because it's sort of, that's unique really internationally, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. So I'm doing a contract piece of work with the Promise around their leadership route map.

So Nicola Sturgeon was encouraged by a group of care experienced people who she met through an advocacy organization to listen to them. And in listening came to understand that children need to be loved and the system routinely doesn't enable it.

And through listening to them, she came to feel and sense why that mattered. So that meant growing up with no one to hold your hand as you had a baby. No one.

Just to call that bit where you want to send a photo of your child to someone, you know them doing something utterly mundane, but it's important to you. There's nowhere for it to go, no reference point, no one to teach you to paint the walls.

You got to see and feel an emptiness, a worth, a literal worthlessness. You are worth less than other people because a group of kin hasn't claimed you. Idea of being claimed, I think is really helpful.

So not loved, stigmatised. And the way in which to change that would be to listen.

So Scotland, under their leadership of the absolutely phenomenal, tenacious and sharp Fiona Duncan, undertook a process of listening up and down across Scotland and they listened to two and a half people with lived experience of care and two and three thousand people of the workforce, broadly defined. And so the findings of that review were what needed to happen in order for children to be.

And Nicola Sturgeon said at the time, that's the goal, that you will be loved. That was the promise. That was the promise that you will be loved, which isn't, you know, isn't straight, isn't straightforward.

And she said, if we need to tear down the system to do that, then we will.

So it started with that felt emotional commitment that she talks about being the sort of strongest thing she carried from then forth and talks now about being a foster carer and a deep knowing.

And it led to a series of interactions and events with people with lived experience where they would speak in political forums about their experience and you could hear a pin drop. It had an emotional tone and a moral congruence that was unlike a lot of other reform initiatives at the time.

The interesting thing about listening to you talk, a promise that children will be loved, that depending on your professional experience, that could sound like a really radical thing, or it could sound like something just totally mundane, like, well, of course children need to be loved, but when you're sort of coming from within the system, you can understand just how much of a stretch that might be to make that, to make that happen. And I'm wondering what your perspective is on, you know, how radical is it to fulfill that promise?

I think so. When it was framed in that way in Scotland, it took a long time for that language to be accepted for those reasons.

And it's a, you know, it's an odd, slightly jarring, slightly uncomfortable thing to talk about in work. It's not language that you use, is it? So it was difficult for that to be accepted.

But I think some of that listening and learning to people with lived experience of care, and then I, I was gonna say that was what made that obvious self evident, palatable, but I think my experience of the same in Jersey was slightly different in that it was often connecting with your own life, thinking of a range of politicians and civil servants, that made that make sense, you know. Oh, of course. My sort of composite examples, my daughter's got anorexia and I've had to care for her into her 30s.

I know, I know that you love people because you love them, because you love them and you don't give up. Or my dad was in care, or I wasn't in care, but my mum died when I was four, so There was this sort of, again, just felt connection to.

Of course children need to be loved, animals protect their own. Of, of, of course. And you don't need a child development expert or anybody else to, to tell you that. So, so ultimately there was a kind of.

Well, of course about, about that which in Scotland took some time, took a few years and in Jersey didn't, didn't really didn't.

It was, it was, I think because we caught it on the wave of the, the CARE inquiry and some of the, the lack of sophistry, I guess in the Jersey's political systems made that easier for it to land because they didn't feel they double negative, they didn't feel they couldn't connect with their communities and people.

We were talking a little bit earlier on about how some of this work just maybe isn't that sexy and it's maybe a little bit mundane, but the work you're doing with leaders, maybe that does require some radical shifts in thinking. I don't know, I'm just interested in. Yeah. How radical is some of this stuff?

Yeah. And I think some of that is not terribly radical at all. And I guess in programs of change and ownership of those programs.

For example, when I approach this podcast, my natural tendency is to start from zero, to assume nothing and suddenly think I've got to start everything again. And I think that is, I think that tendency to assume you've got to start everything again is sometimes felt in our change programs.

And I wonder if there ought to be more of. In order for children to be loved. There are some things we'll protect. That hero role, that's often a really dangerous psychological trap to get into.

It might be appropriately placed there.

Let's dive on those things and heroically protect and enhance programs which support families in their home in a friendly way before something becomes a crisis. So I think there's, I think there's, I think some of that fits.

But again, to do those things, you've got to step out of crisis, panic, flailing mode and have a careful look collectively. So I think that's, I think that's a part of it. I think given what this is, it's difficult to talk about iterative change.

So for example, someone said to me, you know, in Scotland, we are, we're keeping the promise iteratively. A few years ago I remember doing this when I worked with young people, they would present children leaving care to homeless services at 17.

So somebody would have to walk that child into the homeless service and go, here they are. And as they presented and as they were homeless, they'd be prioritized, but only by becoming homeless would they be prioritised.

And this person was saying to me, we don't do that in Scotland anymore. And that's progress. That is in the cold light of day, that's, that's some measure of progress.

But once you hold the sense of a child and the totality of being loved in a family home, that feels such a sort of whisper of the progress that's needed. And so the, the urgency of change and the emotional connection for that change can, and I say this as someone who's, who's.

I was going to say guilty of it, who exhibits it. I exhibit this, I think, reasonably often.

That can become, in a sense it can become a barrier, a barrier to change because you simply can't accept, you know, you can't, you can't accept that iterative change because it's not good enough. And I think, again, I think that's not talked about enough. That's the case. It's not good enough, but it is progress.

So where are the spaces where we talk about how that makes us feel and if we don't talk about how that makes us feel, what. What happens with those feelings?

So I want to wrap it up with this. What gives you cause for optimism moving forward?

People like amazing people. So I'm doing a coaching course, a transformative coaching course. And the tour element is remarkable.

Like it's rocking my world, but it's founding premise.

What a review. Rocking my world.

Oh no, I've not even started. This will be another Mexican wave for the. It's amazing. So it's founding premise is people are resourceful, creative and whole.

I love that.

And it's. Yeah, it's brilliant.

And it counters some of the work I've been a part of that you realize it's founding belief is people are a bit rubbish, not very capable of terribly much, and just need you to come in and pull them up somewhere you think they should be.

So I think people, I think seeing community organizing and mobilizing, I think having worked with folk, touched on it earlier, who people would call vulnerable homeless people and young kids in homeless hostels and mums who've been abused. And that framing, of course you're not vulnerable. You're the most amazing people that I've ever met. We talked earlier about tenderness in Systems.

I run a, a magazine group for homeless people.

And it was the, you know, there was all sorts going on, but they were the most tender, gentle people with others and the most tender and gentle people with me. So knowing there's a foundation there and we are interdependent, we're born interdependent.

And Cathy Evans talked about the Declaration of Interdependence, and so love it.

So knowing there's those foundations to build on and seeing in the work in Scotland and in Jersey that there's a willingness and a desire to work towards people being able to thrive, and knowing and having seen that that is possible, and some of the brilliant people that are in the space in between with the curiosity of what is it going to take to make that happen? We talked about that quote about burnout, that burnout isn't primarily doing too much. Burnout is doing stuff you don't really want to do.

So you've got one foot moving forward and the other foot's trying to run away. And I think that's a quote that really resonates. So the challenge, I guess, is if you're in that space, you. You are.

Your organization is the wider systems are the sitting down and calling a spade a spade and looking at alternatives. And where I see that happen, you see what you would expect.

People begin messily, clumsily, to live better lives, to live lives of dignity and to become the self that's always in there. So some of that sounds awfully saccharine, but that's the stuff I've seen that is transformative, and that gives me hope.

Well, look, I think that's a lovely place to finish this conversation.

We talked a lot about tenderness, and I think that you are uniquely able to talk about some of this stuff, which is admittedly really challenging, quite confronting sometimes in a way that is. That is tender and makes it possible to engage with. And I think that is a talent that is sort of uniquely yours.

And I'm so grateful that you agreed to sit down with me and do this podcast. And I hope we get to do it again at some point in the future.

Thank you. Thanks for asking me.