How can we balance the need for structure with the flexibility required for human connection?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Meilys Heulfryn, a leader driving change in social care and health by focusing on relationships over rigid systems.

What you’ll learn:

• Why understanding people’s real experiences is the key to effective service design.
• How relational approaches help move beyond transactional, process-driven public services.
• The balance between structure and adaptability—and why both are essential for meaningful change.
• Why change isn’t about having all the answers upfront, but about learning and adapting along the way.

Meilys’ career journey - from accountancy to leading transformation - offers a fresh perspective on why public services need to prioritise human connection over bureaucracy.

Join the mission:

• 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

Meilys, so nice to see you.

Hi, Joe.

Usually we will be speaking in Welsh and I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I feel like I'm gonna get told off by some hidden teacher or something. So I'm gonna have to get over that.

Yeah, I think so.

And time has flown.

Yeah.

But I'm not 100% clear on what your career path has been up until now. So can you share what are you doing now and what's the been the sort of twists and turns to get you there?

Yeah, I'll try and summarize because I'm getting on a bit now. Yes. Currently I've got a team of people working in a team that we've called Supporting Communities, Health and well Being.

And our sort of purpose is that we're there to try and help people have a good life in their community. And as you can imagine, that covers a whole range of stuff.

So some, some of the team members are supporting people who are unpaid carers, other supporting people living with dementia and their families. We're supporting the aging well, communities agenda in Wales, in. In our county in particular.

And then I've got a team of people doing sort of developmental stuff, projects, transformation, change, whatever you want to call it, but just helping other parts of the social care and health system develop and change. So that's what I'm currently doing. But quite surprisingly, maybe when I was very young, I wanted to become an accountant.

Did you?

Yeah.

That is surprising.

Yes. I was about 13. Yes. And I still love that sort of work, if I'm honest. And I'd never say never I would go back and do that kind of work.

But that's where I started. I did my degree in Welsh because a local accountant said the most important thing is to have a good degree, not a relevant degree.

So that's what I did and then went off to Liverpool and trained for three years with a very, very large firm. And then everybody else were going on and thinking where they wanted to head with their career and I thought, I want to go home.

And the only sort of large organization I could think of was in the public sector and ended up in the local authority. And that's where I've been, I suppose, for most of my career. I've been out to work in audit for a while.

So I have left for a while and got a lot of valuable experience and links and worked, I think, in 18 or 19 of the local authorities in Wales during that time, which was quite inspirational, just to learn how people do things differently. But I've been now for the past sort of 15 years in social care. When I.

When I first came back to the council, I went into accounts and then into sort of financially based roles, looking at opportunities for efficiency, savings, you know, all those years ago, we're back back there again now, but then ended up doing projects, management programmes, management work, performance management at a corporate level and just stumbled into a role as senior business manager in social care. Adults and children knew nothing virtually about that field previously and that's where I've been.

And after eight years of doing sort of operational management work, as what I'd call it, I suppose was seconded, and to become a whole range of things over the past few years.

It doesn't really matter what the job titles are, but all those pieces of work I've been involved with have been to do with trying to change, change mindsets, change the system, change the way that we work. Yeah. So that's where I'm at currently and super interesting.

So when I think of people that are working on kind of complex, messy problems where, like everything is messy, I think of you. That is your whole life, isn't it? Is working, working on problems that don't have obvious or easy answers.

And most of the people that come into contact with us are interested in our work because we're trying to explore methods that help in that context, that help in the context of complexity. And I'd be interested to learn a bit from you about, from all this experience, what is it?

What kind of ways of working actually help to make progress on some of these problems that are never going to go away, they're intractable, they're wicked. What actually helps?

Yeah, I think the first method I came across which really got me interested in all of this and which sort of helped me make sense of the person I was professionally, which was, I suppose somebody describes a little bit of rebel, was the vanguard method.

So quite a few years, about 10 years ago now, we started working with that method which was all about forgetting, trying to manage things as a manager and trying to think what was right for the organization with a sort of citizen's lens, but really put yourself in the shoes of that citizen and the minute you do that, because people's life are chaotic, we've all got sort of chaos and mess going on in our lives. No two days are the same, our emotions are all over the place.

So regardless of whether or not you've actually got any serious issues going on in your life. You need people designing services who understand that chaos and understand that people are people.

So I'd say that was life changing, becoming involved with that method. And I think once you've been exposed to that sort of method, you can't hide away from it.

And then over the course of time, started to apply that method to review some of the systems and some of the services that we were preparing and commissioning. And I think that's when I met you and the colleague of yours in a conference, Dennis, we can name Dennis.

It doesn't have to all be about me.

Okay, Yeah, I think I met you and Dennis in a workshop, in a conference, didn't I? And you were there talking about a particular way of delivering home care for people in communities in other parts in Europe.

And I thought, oh, wow, this resonates.

So even though you and the people involved in that sort of way of working hadn't necessarily applied exactly the same method, what was evidence evident to me was that a lot of the same sort of mindset was behind it, the same kind of approaches was behind it. And, yeah, I think the rest is history really, isn't it, Jo?

You know, we got, we got working together and then you helped open my mind to the fact that there's many, many methods, most of them, when you delve far enough. I'm not really into sort of the historical theoretical side of these methods, but it is interesting when you go back.

They're all sort of related, aren't they? Lots of the theorists are common between some of the methods. So the vanguard method, the Agile method,.

What was it about this sort of more agile way of working that was interesting or not interesting? But what did you think was useful? Because I know you're always looking for practical application of this stuff.

What was it about this way of thinking, way of working that you thought, actually there's some practice here that's useful?

I think I'd worked quite a lot with more traditional project management methods. Prince 2 so typical. One, and I can't think of many projects that I was part of that was started and they actually finished and they were successful.

And I think that's true of many, many projects. And I think those sort of methods are fine if you've got some certainty about what you're trying to build.

So if somebody's building me a house, then I think it's appropriate and I do hope that they use that kind of methodology because time is of essence. So the time scale, the budget and the exact specification is very, very important. Or the roof is going to fall over. Yeah, over my head sort of thing.

But with, with People Centered Services, I think it's a big mistake to think that you can plan something and have a very clear idea of where it's going to go because you need that element of adaptability.

Circumstances change, you don't know until you go out with people and experience what they're experiencing, what you're going to find, what's most important to people and you need to be able to change and adapt all the time. But I think you still need to have some sort of boundaries around it or, or else you're never going to achieve anything.

So you need the balance between achieving something but being able to adapt and being comfortable with the idea that you might, might adapt as you go.

But what, I mean, I got answers to this, but I'm interested from your perspective. What's, what's hard about that?

In practice it's expectations.

If your leadership expect something tangible that they can sell to people if they want something on their cv, if they want to sell something to elected members or to the chief executive, or if they're very nervous maybe about the budget overspending or things getting out of hand, then it is very difficult. There is a train of thought that thinks that the traditional project management and budget management is the right way to do it.

So leadership, the nature of the leadership around you can either facilitate that way of working or make it very difficult.

Yeah, really tricky, isn't it?

Because we've spent without making it sort of too theoretical and academic, sort of the last 40 years believing that the numbers and hands on management of stuff and competition between providers and all that stuff, that's what's going to get us the good outcomes. And I think all the evidence would suggest that's not actually true.

The evidence suggests that getting out there and testing stuff and iterating and learning that seems to make more of a difference, but doesn't really fit with the way that public services are organized. But I mean you're in a leadership session. How do you get sort of comfortable with that ambiguity?

Because you're accountable for all kinds of things, but still the things that within your control you encourage that testing, you encourage iteration and adapting. How do you get comfortable with it? Or are you just sort of wired in a weird way, do you think?

No, I am comfortable because I root everything I do, in people's experience and in trying to make sure. And it doesn't always work out, but trying to make sure that people in communities have the best life possible.

So it's not about not measuring, it's about measuring differently. So in the past, we might have counted how many people did X, Y or Z, or how many hours of this was done, sort of approach.

Whereas now we'll go out and we'll talk to people, we create stories with people, we'll. We'll listen, find out what worked, what didn't work, and amend the approach as we go. And I think that's really important.

And nationally, there are some people now who are recognizing the power of stories. Thankfully, in Wales, I think that's a good direction that we're going in.

But there are other people who expect really ridiculous things to be measured. And once you abide by those requests, your time is very quickly taken up trying to measure stuff that means nothing to anybody at all.

So it is challenging.

Yeah.

And I think just by virtue of measuring certain things, it creates a weird incentive, doesn't it, for the people that are capturing the information to present it in a certain way or to massage it.

And I'm certain there's some kind of law that dictates that will happen, and then stuff gets massaged to the point of meaninglessness, and it's not serving the purpose that it was designed to serve anyway. But I wonder if you could talk about that, some of the stories. So what kind of stories are you, or how are you going about it?

How are you going about capturing these stories and what kinds of stories are emerging from some of your work?

It all comes down to creating space in your day to talk to people who are involved. So talking to the people who need services, talking to all the professionals involved.

Because a few years ago, one of the realizations for me in social care was that I'd always assumed that everybody who was supporting an individual were almost like part of a family. In the same way that in a real family, all.

All members of that family talk to one another in an ideal situation, and they all support whoever needs the support at the time. But in the world of social care and health and housing and education and these organizations, that's not the way it works.

All the teams have got their own processes, a way of doing stuff, and they don't engage with one another very often, and that's what we're trying to change. So the way that I go about it, when, you know, when I've got the opportunity and when I make the time is to bring people together.

And it's fascinating how when you piece together the information that lots of individuals have got, that the story you tell is very, very different and that the solutions you put in place are also very, very different.

So, thinking of an example, some work I've been doing recently, we were having a conversation about a young gentleman with quite, quite serious medical conditions and issues, and he moved to live near where I live from a very, very different area in the uk. And what we found was that he was being kept safe at home. He was receiving care that I suppose a lot of people would say was adequate.

I'm sure if the inspector came in, they'd say, yes, the care is good, the care is sufficient, all these things that are measured. But when I asked the team supporting that young gentleman, I said, well, what would make his eyes shine? You know, what would make a real difference?

What would help him have something to look forward to? They all sat back and went, oh, I'm not sure. And for me, that's really, really sad. But we managed to turn that around as part of that conversation.

They started to think, well, ooh, he used to do this and he used to do that. He used to be in a band, maybe he'd like to go to a gig. And at that level, it was sort of maybe. I said, well, let's go and ask him.

Let's not hypothesize about what he would like. And they did go and they did speak to him and the difference that's made.

And within a couple of weeks time, they've managed to find support in the community who can take him out to socialize.

And it's the beginnings, hopefully, of him having a network of friends in a new area for him and all the things that you or I would want if we were moving.

I know you've moved relatively recently and if somebody had said, you're not going to meet anybody in this community, you're going to be an island, you're not going to get to know people, you're not going to be able to go out to the local pub and all these things that you enjoy doing. And that was his life. He was living within the confines of his four walls. So that's. That's how I go about it.

And every time I make the effort to do that, it does have an impact, but you have to keep on reminding yourself. And there are people out there who don't think that's the role of leaders.

I very much believe that's almost the only role of leaders is to spend time with your staff, with a team, with people who need to be supported. It's the only way that you ever understand what really matters to people.

Yeah, I think that's beautifully put. We're thinking and writing a lot at the moment about the difference between relational services and transactional services.

And for transactional services, it's all about, how do I optimize this process?

Fewer steps as possible, Help the person do the thing they want or need to do in as quick a time as possible, without any friction, get them from A to B quickly.

But when you try and put somebody like this gentleman who doesn't have, you know, transactional services are not going to help him live the life that he really wants to live. He needs a more relational service, a more relational approach, and that could potentially really change his life.

And I wonder, taking it away from leadership for a moment, what needs to happen in those circumstances for a more relational approach to be possible, where people don't feel like they need to be counting time and task and all that stuff? What needs to happen?

I think it comes down to trust. And you're not going to get trust unless people know each other.

Say more about that.

So, for instance, if you've got social workers commissioning a service, so they commission the service and it goes into a big pipe somewhere and it ends up with a team who's tasked with finding a provider, and then the provider manager gives that work to a member of staff, you've got this huge process which by default then means that the people supporting the individual are miles apart. And what I found is that by bringing the individuals who support somebody in the community together, then they.

They get to know one another, they know what the limitations of each other's skills and abilities are. They build up the trust. And so many times I've seen the paperwork dissolve.

And what I mean by that is, at the beginning of a relationship, a professional relationship, you might hear somebody saying, well, you can't be in the room because of confidentiality, or if you want this, you must refer, you must fill in that form. It'll go into that pile, it'll reach where it needs to get to eventually.

But over time, as the trust builds, what you'll often hear is, there's any chance you can just do that.

Is there any chance you could just sort it out, have a chat, because they trust the other person who's involved and they don't feel the necessity to cover their own backs in the same way. So I accept what you say about the process, but I think it's. It's a combination of relations, building trust.

Yeah.

And if you. Very often, I think we start with a process in the hope that people have more time to spend together to build a relationship.

But if you turn it on its head and you begin with a relationship, that's when you find which bits of paper that you can actually almost forget about.

Yeah, very well put. I think I'm going to find myself agreeing with everything you say. Not that I had any other agenda. I disagree.

One thing that I've always found really curious about you is that you seem absolutely fine with the fact that that process of building relationships is quite bumpy and a bit messy. And sometimes it's right and sometimes it's not. It takes a really long time and somehow you would sort of just chipper.

And that, I think, is a part of what enables people to not get frustrated with one another and to sort of commit to that process of building relationships. I wonder, is that something that you do? Is that something you do consciously, or was there something else going on there?

Yeah, I do do it consciously, and it's something I've learned to deal with because I think maybe early on in your career, or if you're in a sort of regulatory sort of career, so as an accountant, as an auditor, as a project manager, you do find yourself wanting to please either the regulation, the regulators, or your managers, your senior managers.

And there comes a point, if you want to really be committed to change and transformation, where you've got to be true to yourself and to your values, to your purpose. And that means that nobody, not everybody will like you, not everybody will agree with you.

And I've had to very consciously tell myself that I'm at work and to do a good job, not to make friends. And I have made many friends along the way. But I've also. I think I've made some enemies as well. I know quite a few people who think I'm crazy.

You know, I'm no good whatsoever. That's what I'm trying to do. And, you know, they've got no respect for me whatsoever.

And I'm comfortable with that because if some of the people that I really respect were to feel that way, obviously I'd be very upset.

But if they are people who genuinely believe in their hearts that the way maybe that I worked 15 or so years ago is the right way to go about it, that's their belief.

And my job is to try expose examples of alternatives, try and get them out with me, to See that there's a different way of doing things, but it's not always going to work because we've got a massive, massive system in the public services and it's not going to change overnight. We're not going to bring everybody with us, and it's our responsibility to try, but not to get upset or discouraged if it doesn't always go our way.

Because otherwise we'd just leave the world of transformation. We'd go back to something safe.

You know, I'd be back doing bookkeeping or auditing work because it was all getting too much for me and that's not what I want to do.

Yeah, I think there is something a little bit sort of strange in your wiring that you're able to remain sort of chipper in the face of that. Because I know personally, I'm very conscious leading a team, leading a company, very conscious of the effect my energy has on. On other people.

And I sort of see you in front of your. Your team, you know, relentlessly, you know, optimistic in the face sometimes of really difficult circumstances. How do you.

How do you manage that with your team? Because not everybody is wired in the same way as you are.

No, I've been supported by people who've helped me look at those sort of aspects because I do think it's important. You've got certain methodologies that feel, well, sort out the system and then, you know, everything else will fall into place. But I think it does.

It does take quite a lot of energy to work with your team. I've been really fortunate that I've been able to recruit lots of team members. So that's a good starting point.

And I think one of the things I've learned is if you end up with a team for whatever reason, maybe you've gone into a leadership role and the team are there already or you've made some bad choices maybe along the way.

If you end up with a team where you don't feel the right people for the job, you've got to be able to make some difficult decisions and you've got to help people maybe to move on. But I am fortunate. I've got a really committed team. I've got people of the right mindset, but it is difficult.

And one of the things I've learned is this idea that every time somebody leaves or comes into the team, that you think of it as a new team.

And I really love that because I used to think of the team and you might reflect and think, oh, gosh, you know, compared to three years ago, there's only three people left out of 20. And people have come and gone. But now I'll give time to working with the team anytime there's any sort of change, because the dynamics.

It's like having a new baby in the house. You know, the dynamics of the siblings change. And. And it's true about work relationships as well.

We spend a lot of time together as a team and that's helped us. And you helped me and the team come up with this plan where we meet three times a week. I wasn't sure to begin with.

I thought, that's a lot of commitment. But it's really, really paid off.

And we come together virtually for half an hour, twice for an hour, for the third session, and all of us have air time and that's really important. Every single piece of the. Part of the. Can talk about what they're doing that week, what's important to them.

And you pick up such a lot about not just what they're doing, but how they're feeling and where they're at. And then quite a lot of work around Brenny Brown's thinking, which I absolutely love, and this idea of kind of embracing vulnerability.

So I think in the past we've been taught, you know, keep your vulnerabilities at home. You can be emotional at home, but at work you need to be really professional in your suit you.

Whereas now I think we're much more accepting of the fact that work and life kind of blends into one another. And I think the pandemic has helped us in that way.

People are working at home and sometimes in the office, you've got to work harder to have that work relationship. But, yeah, I think I sort of built resilience over the years. Getting older helps. I think by my age now, you're less.

You're less likely to be too concerned about what people think. But it has been conscious. And I've had a lot of help from yourself? From other, you know, people that I work with.

And people have come in from the outside.

Yeah, I think that's really important to have external pairs of eyes and ears, because it's so easy to become very, very insular in your own world and think, oh, you know, this is. No, actually there's a different. There's always a different way of seeing the world. Always a different approach. Yeah, just keep on learning.

Yeah, no, absolutely. There's one thing that you said that. Many things that you said that that's interesting, but use the phrase airtime and. And I think that part of.

For Me.

Anyway, part of creating the conditions where change is possible is about creating psychological safety, where people feel able to, yeah, sort of stick their neck out and not worry that somebody's going to reach over and chop their head off. And sort of.

All the research says that part of establishing psychological safety is sharing the airtime, is making sure that everybody is able to contribute in one way or another. And I wonder if that's something that you think about in the context of your project as well and outside of the. As outside of your team.

Yeah, definitely.

You've got to hear what people have got to say because that's the only way that you get into the heads, which sounds very obvious, but we don't it enough.

And I can think of a meeting I was in with a group of professionals the other week where, you know, we were talking about the pressures on social care, the lack of social care waiting list, all these really, really difficult things.

And, and then we were talking about what matters to people and having a conversation about one person in particular and trying to find a way for that person to socialize.

And one of the social workers felt safe enough, I think, because we'd had regular meetings as a team and she felt part of the team, but she just opened up and said, oh, can I just stop you for a second? She said, we're here having a conversation about trying to help somebody socialise when we've got 20 people on the waiting list for care.

How is that right? Shouldn't we be trying to get that list of 20 down? And it was such a valuable contribution from her because.

Because until she was comfortable with how we were going to navigate all of that, there was no way on earth that she was going to think creatively about how that one person was going to have opportunities to socialize. And, and all it took was for her to say that.

And, and then we said, ah, you know, have you thought that maybe it's not the care company who's actually going to be making those opportunities arise? And oh, oh, I haven't thought about this. So it's just by allowing people to feel safe, to talk and then to challenge in a positive way.

And it doesn't always work, does it? People get offended or. But it's again, it's those relationships, if you do offend, try again, try and reissue and make time to speak to somebody.

Don't go away and think, oh, gosh, that didn't go very well. Go back and address. Address the elephant in the room. Always.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

Because I think there are Some I think there's, and this isn't a dig at public services, this is, I think just a societal challenge, or at least a big organization challenge is that sometimes the absolute basic, foundational, fundamental things that need to be in place for teams of people to collaborate and solve hard problems are just not in place. There isn't psychological safety, there isn't good facilitation of meetings consciously trying to involve people, help them to participate.

There aren't good decision making practices and these have nothing to do with fancy change methodologies. Most people in big organizations don't really know how to involve people in a teams call.

No, because it's almost like that was something that we figured out during the pandemic. Okay, technically we can literally log on to a teams call, but then that's where it stopped.

And now we go from meeting to meeting where there are tens, 20, 30, 40 people, cameras off, not really engaging with one another. And I think that stuff is so unsexy, it's so boring. Dealing with conflict, you know, how do you navigate that?

But it's just, it doesn't get the airtime. And I wonder what that, I wonder what that is and if you've got any sort of ideas on why that is, why aren't we dealing with those things?

Oh, huge question, Jo. I totally agree with you. By the way. I think the investment in leadership is way, way, way too low. We don't invest time, we don't invest money.

I think we're in quite an interesting period where I've got my doubts about the quality of some management and leadership training and qualifications.

So I think we've got a large, a lot of people coming through who've been taught how to project, manage, how to manage budgets, the old fashioned way of managing as opposed to leading. So I think that needs to be addressed. And there are some developments now.

There are a group of influential people in Wales coming together, trying to challenge the status quo.

Things coming through from Welsh governments and some of the other large national organizations in social care are making me happier about the future. But I think we've got a shortage of leaders who value the things that, that you talk about.

They don't value relationships ultimately and feelings and, and time and, and they want to see things happen quickly. And that's part of the problem, is that we're very task orientated on the whole. The new initiatives, grant funding, conditions to everything.

But from my experience it's made a massive difference. And I go back to some of the techniques that you've taught me.

So often, and every time, for instance, you do a check in question at the beginning of a session online, you learn such a lot about the team, whichever, whether it's my own team or another team, a project team, whoever, you just learn about the temperature at the time and how those people feel. But no, they're just not valued in the sector currently. They're seen as something a bit different still. Where they should be not.

Yeah, it should be the norm.

I think there's an undercurrent of people that are starting to value those things.

I think so more.

And I think. I think it's sort of linked with this sort of movement towards more relational practices and ways of working. So I'm. I'm sort of.

I'm optimistic, but sometimes it does. It really surprises me that the things that I consider to be absolutely foundational, other people sometimes think are trivial.

Yeah, I agree.

And that's a difficult thing for us as a consultancy because sometimes the things that we think make us unique are the things that only a small proportion of people working on. Some of the problems that we're working on also think are really, really important, simple things.

For me, that really frustrates me, things.

Like, go on, let's get into it. What frustrates you?

Just offices.

Oh, go on. That's not a real downer on offices. Come on.

Yeah, I think when, when money's tight, yeah, people are inclined to say, oh, we're not going to spend the money on the office or on spaces or on hiring an appropriate place.

But where you go to work with your team is so important and just creating the environment where you can have a coffee and a sit down and a chat and it comes back to the relationship, I think, and creating appropriate opportunities to be able to just create the right environment for creativity. That's really important and for people to feel valued.

Because a member of staff said a few years ago who sat in an office and she goes, you know, look, look at the, at the wall.

The plaster was coming down and said, you know, if, if that was a council house and the tenant complained to the council, they'd be really embarrassed. But we as staff are expected to sit in that building. And I'm not saying that we, we work in that sort of environment, but it is true.

We don't invest in our, in our staff. We need to invest time in training, the cost money and buildings that cost money, but also in very simple things to create environments.

I want to get into some sort of examples of work because I think as a sort of Portfolio of work. Your team is, I think, probably a bit of an outlier.

I mean, the area of work you're working on is very complex, very messy, but you've got lots of examples where you've been able to make progress in places where other people maybe, maybe haven't. And what I'd be interested to know is if we can talk about this in the context of some projects, that'd be great.

What is it that enables progress in some of those things that people undervalue? And this comes back to some of the questions we were discussing a minute ago.

And what are some of the things that people overvalue that just really don't work?

People undervalue time. People quite naturally want things to happen quickly, they want results quickly.

Whereas I'm really fortunate now to have a team who's been there, a lot of them have been there quite a few years working on trying to help people in our community have a good life. And I think one of the things that they've done is they've looked at different parts of the system.

So it's almost like a jigsaw where one person has looked at a person's experience of their community and the support they can get in their very immediate community. Somebody else has looked at people's experience of going into hospital, spending time in hospital, leaving hospital.

Somebody else has looked at somebody's experience if they need a social worker, somebody. A social worker.

Somebody's looked at the field of therapy, how we integrate health and social care, how it's just some simple things that have a massive impact, such as how do we allocate social workers with their work? They've looked at a whole range of stuff with some of the leaders and the staff in teams that we support or we work with.

But it's very often undervalued. The time it takes to get that picture of how things are and to kind of be able to see the links between different things.

And we're now, a few years in, we're starting to see the ripple effect and starting to see how one thing that we've learned here and one thing that we've changed there actually are coming together.

So an example of that is when one of my colleagues, she worked in my team for a while and she's now leading up the social workers for older adults and adults with physical disabilities. But she decided that she wouldn't. With her team, she wouldn't close a case.

So previously, if you were assessed by a social worker and then you had the care package of some Sort your case would be closed. So if you needed something again in the future, you'd have to ring the office and they'd reopen the case and all the paperwork would start again.

And what she did was she eliminated that bit of the process. She said, well, no, that doesn't make sense.

If, if you need somebody to support you, what's ideal for you as a person is to have consistency in that social worker. So if you ring up in four months, five months, time, time, you want the same person supporting you because they know your story.

And she changed that bit of the process. And then somebody else in a different part of the system was looking at helping to get people out of hospital quicker.

And even though the two pieces of work weren't directly related, what we found was that the practice around not closing cases meant that the social worker could be pulled in when somebody was in hospital really quickly, and very often that person could be helped to go home from hospital sooner. So, very complex world.

But what I've learned, and it's been quite a hard pill to swallow in a lot of ways, is that you've got to chip at it really gradually and someday, hopefully not always, but hopefully you'll see how the dots start joining.

I love that example because there aren't any perfect answers to some of these problems like the one you're describing. We want to help people live lives that they want to live as they would describe them in the community.

And we know they're going to probably at that stage in their life come into contact with our service. Like there's no perfect way of that service supporting them.

But what's emerging from that work and that, well, from that work is, you know, moves, you know, things you can do, patterns that seem to help. Yeah, it's not a perfect answer, but it's a move. Like the move being, well, let's not close them down. That's. That seems to work in this case.

Let's do that. But you've got to have decision making power close to the problem to be able to do those things, don't you?

Exactly.

Because if the decision making power is right at the top of the system and really worried about how many open cases have we got? If that's the thing that we're judging, success on that solution is never going to be possible. So again, that's a move, isn't it?

How do we get decision making power closer to the bottom of the system?

And that's one of the things that Dennis and I are trying to sort of capture at the moment is, what are these moves and practices and patterns, whatever you want to call them, plays that seem to help in the context of relational services. What other sort of patterns are you seeing in the work that you're doing? The things that seem to help.

It comes back again to relationships.

One of the things that I've been struggling with and still struggling with is the fact that people are quite uncomfortable with this who notion of transformation. I think it's turned into a bigger thing than, than it really is in people's minds.

All it is is leading a service and trying to do the best that you can for people all the time. And I don't think currently that it's part and parcel of managing a team, unfortunately.

And the previous example I gave, I think it's no coincidence that the leader there has got. She's got experience as a team leader on the operational side.

Then she had experience as a what we called a transformational lead and then she went back to a more senior position.

So she, she understands a lot of the transformations, methodologies and the mentality and the ideas behind it, but she also understands the challenges of, of leading and managing a sort of coal face. And there's always this tension between the operational, as it's called, and the transformation, the transformative.

I wish we could reach a point where they just blended into one thing that, you know, if you're a good leader, you do both and you do it without thinking, but we're not there yet. But if you've got relationships and it's coming back to the.

The team meetings that we've set up such a simple idea, but I wasn't able to come come up with it myself. But this idea that we meet three times a week and all we do is we go around the table.

And I said, you know, today and this week, these are the highlights. This is what I'm working on. What that's enabled us to do is for people to go, ah, I'm sure that's relevant to what I'm doing. Can we have a chat?

Let's have a chat this afternoon. Can we have a coffee? Or saying, oh, I'm leading this bit of work for so and so.

And I'm sure we need to be aware of what you're doing with, so let's bring those things together.

So it's kind of becoming comfortable with the fact that things don't have boundaries and it can be challenging because I remember working with an excellent coach a few years ago and he just drew a sort of a grid on A piece of paper, like a square. And then he put some dots all around the paper and he said, you've got people who want all the documents, dots to be within that square.

And then you've got other people who aren't really bothered where the dots appear. So there might be a square there, but they'll go outside the square.

And I think previously I was one of those kind of, I want all the dots to be in there. You know, I want to make sense of the world. I want all our programs to kind of have a theme.

Yeah.

Whereas over the years I've become the person who said, does it really matter?

Yeah.

If you can go home every day and tell yourself that actually, even if it hasn't worked, I've tried my best to do the best for other people, then it's a good things. And some of the best things come out of your biggest mistakes sometimes, don't they?

Let's talk about that.

I was talking with Tracy, who's the head transformation at Newport, and I was sort of telling her that my mum was a career public servant, sadly no longer around. And I wish she was because I'm sure she'd have answers to all the problems that I've got that I'm dealing with right now.

That she would always say that you don't learn from the stuff that's easy, you learn from the stuff that's hard. Hard could be failing, hard could be succeeding, could be somewhere in the middle. Often is.

What are some of the things that have been hard for you but have actually been the biggest sort of moments.

Of learning coming back to people? I think looking back, I would have let go of some people quicker.

Right.

Because when you're working really hard to change somebody's mindset, there's a lot of other people that you're not engaging with. And it's a really difficult judgment call, especially if that other person is in an influential position or is a really important cog in the system.

You want to influence them, you want them to change. You get very frustrated. But sometimes I wish I'd have stopped earlier and put my efforts elsewhere. So that's been quite a difficult lesson to learn.

And I think another one is, is to look at your level of ambition and not try to be too ambitious. And you'd imagine as somebody's career progresses that they go on to bigger and better stuff.

And I think I've done it the other way around, that I've sort of started with this huge, huge ambition. When I first got into sort of sorry Transformation work. I'm kicking you in the table.

When I first got into transformation work, I didn't quite have the. The understanding and the personal realization around what is feasible and what isn't.

So the level of ambition was way, way beyond what we were ever going to achieve. Now, I've learned an awful lot from that experience, so it's not time wasted.

But by now I. I tend to encourage myself and my team members to chip away things. You know, they joke that. That one of my big saving sayings is just keep on chipping away at it.

And I think we've had the conversation in the past about why it's better to have a little bit of change than no change at all.

Yeah.

So even if it's not the. The perfect solution, at least it gets people curious and they feel comfortable.

A lot of this is to do with helping people be comfortable and realize, oh, actually it doesn't have to take up loads of my time.

Yeah.

It doesn't have to mean that I get rid of everything that I'm comfortable with. It doesn't necessarily mean I've got to have a new IT system, a new set of forms, a new.

IT just means I have to do one thing differently and then they want to do something else differently. So it's taken me a long, long time to realise that actually small gains can be huge wins, ultimately.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think that's true when it comes to working with residents as well as working internally in change teams.

Because I think, particularly I think in our role as consultants, we come into organizations and sometimes the team that we're working with doesn't actually want us to be there because maybe we've been commissioned by somebody else who's feeling some real pressure and needs to make some change happen. And this more agile way of working, of just starting, just doing a little bit, is part of the process, is part of the change intervention.

It's showing that you're trying to be helpful, that you're not there just to blow up a bomb in the service and make people's lives unnecessarily difficult. I mean, sometimes that does happen because. Because radical change is required.

But more often than not, just getting started is part of building trust. And it's the same with helping people.

I think it's been a long time since I've been in frontline practice, but I think that showing somebody that you're trying to be helpful and you're going out on a limb for them is part of the process of building trust. Sometimes you take a few steps forward, a few steps back. But that's part of the sort of dance that we're on, isn't it?

Yeah, totally agree.

And what's been quite shocking for me to realize is that the way that public services are run and the way they're designed has led to expectations amongst the public. So we've almost brainwashed people to expect a service that is substandard or isn't what they really need.

So the number of people try and give you an example who might complain if they don't see three or four people when they go to an office hospital appointment, because they think, well, if I, if I get straight to see the doctor, then, oh, surely you've missed something out. Yeah.

So even though that sounds ridiculous, or, you know, people who might be getting number of calls per day or a very rigid sort of care package and service, the number of people who've complained when we've suggested something different, something much more unique to them because they just don't trust the system anymore. They believe that they have to have control over something and they feel they can control something they know and they understand.

So we've got a massive task to build relationships between servants in the public sector and people in, in communities. So, yeah, it's going to take a very, very long time. But people, people very often say, oh, change takes a long time.

And my response is, it takes time. If you do something with purpose, if you do something purposeful with the method behind you or a range of methods, it's going to take you time.

If you do nothing and sit back, well, it's never going to change. It's not just time that you need it. I'm a true believer that you need method behind your approaches. And the trick is to apply those methods.

And this is something that you do do very, very well, Jo, is you've got method, you've got plans, everything you do is very purposeful. But when you're in a room with a bunch of people, it just feels like fun.

It feels like you're genuinely interested in getting to know them, helping them do something different. But there's a method that is coming back to facilitation, isn't it? Methods, thinking. How do we get people to contribute? How do we.

How do we help them talk about the things that they're passionate about?

Because people are passionate, but sometimes you've got to scrape away a lot of stuff that's going on and very boring processes that they've got to wade themselves through. But once you strip all of that away and you get to the core of the person, staff in the main are really enthusiastic and they want to work with you.

Yeah, no, thanks for that. I appreciate the, appreciate the compliment.

You're welcome.

One of the things that I know you're, you have been working on and it's a problem that everybody right around the country is grappling with, is what happens when somebody goes from the community into the hospital and back out again.

It's a really messy problem because it's right at the intersection of health and social care and there are so many ways that that process or that experience can go wrong and it goes wrong in a really tangible way for the person in practice. It means that they perhaps end up in hospital for longer.

Maybe they sort of sometimes pick up an infection that could be, you know, a really life changing problem that occurs from the process not working.

Well, everybody around the country is trying to do this better and I know you've done loads of thinking on this and actually spend lots of time in the community, in the hospital working alongside the people that are trying to make this process better. Would you be able to talk a little bit about that work and sort of some of the outcomes and learning from it?

Yeah, it's a really complex field, so fits in really well, doesn't it, with this conversation.

But you're going back about six years and we had one of these calls, I think I was on call from our management team and we had one of these calls from a senior person in health saying, oh, we've got 90 odd people who need to leave hospital, we're on red alert, we're in crisis. And I said, well, I'm not a nurse, doctor, social worker, I can't really help you much but I'll come in and I'll see what's going on.

And I spent the afternoon there just trying to understand the flow of information and how people got to really understand what somebody needed to be able to go home.

And on the back of that gave a proposal and, and actually went on with a colleague to spend eight weeks to six weeks on one ward and then to one another and literally spoke to every single patient and their family and their nursing staff and doctors from our local authority area and learned such a lot about the system.

But what it boiled down to really was that if you could create the time for somebody to get to know the, that person and really understand what they needed to be able to go home safely, that a lot of the things that the staff, the Professionals thought somebody needed, weren't actually needed.

Can you give an example?

Yeah. There quite a number of people who didn't know didn't need social workers, but they did need some kind of social care or community support.

Yeah, and an awful lot of that. But in fairness to the hospital staff, they don't know the difference. They don't really understand what the remit of a social work team is.

So they would refer to the social work team and then that followed quite a lengthy process and there were time delays. So that's one of the things we've been able to understand is how by having a bit of a problem solver on wards can help tremendously.

And we've met people from other organisations, local authority areas that have done exactly that, just put in somebody with some common sense to talk to people.

And we've recently done a similar piece of work where one of my colleagues has gone in because the data that we had and the information was slightly dated, we wanted to check that things hadn't changed after Covid and it hasn't.

But you know, one story from her experiences, she was talking to a gentleman and the lady, so the lady was in Hollywood Hospital and they, they lived in a three story house on a floodplain and, and he wanted his wife to be able to sleep downstairs so that he could care for her.

Right.

But she was stuck in hospital waiting for a social work assessment, waiting for a home care package. So it's just one of these many, many examples where people are staying in hospital for, for longer than they need to be there.

And what my colleague did, wearing the hat, part of that problem solver was Shirang, a National Resources, Natural Resources Wales and said, is there anything you can do here to help us, please?

Because the reason why they're not moving the bed downstairs is because they get floods in the house, right, and they need some dredging and apparently there's a waiting list or whatever was going on. They said if that dredging was done by some of your students staff then this could happen.

And the lady on the phone said, yeah, you know, now we've explained that, I'm sure that can be prioritized, we can do that for you. And within days that was sorted out, the bed came down, the lady went home, the gentleman was looking after his wife.

So it sounds like such a simple example, but that was nothing at all to do with social care, it was to do with another part of public services.

But by just applying a slightly different lens and thinking from the person's perspective and we've got countless stories like that and I'm sure everybody else have as well. You know, it's, it's going back to common, common sense, basic principles, and not being afraid to do things a little bit differently.

Yeah, I think that's lovely. I mean, try and, try and come up with a process that solves that one. You know, it doesn't, doesn't exist, does it?

I mean, we've got some, we've got some rules, you know, be helpful, keep the person safe, don't do anything legal within, within those confines. Yeah, there's a solution. I think that's a really nice, really nice place to, to leave this. But I do want to ask one thing.

So looking, looking back, knowing, knowing where you are now. What's, what's a piece of advice that you would give to a former you to help you on your. On your journey.

So maybe you, 15, 20 years ago, what would be a piece of advice you give to yourself?

Myself. I wish I'd have gone into sort of change and transformation sooner.

Really?

Yeah.

What a glutton for punishment.

Yeah, but I didn't know at the time. What I didn't know.

Yeah, but the minute I got exposed, and I'm so lucky that some of the leaders around me at the time and the chief executive at the time gave me the opportunity to start getting involved with some different ways of working.

But from that minute onwards, I'd say that most of what I'd done for the, for the years leading up to that had been complete waste of time where citizens were in the question. You know, people valued what I did and I thought I was doing a great job. Actually, I wasn't.

So I do feel now that my time has been wasted in the past. A lot of other people's time has and is being wasted.

So if I'd have had more years, my career to do the right thing for people, then that would have been great. But c' est la vie.

C' est la vie. Hey, Maelis, thank you so much. Okay.

Talking to you. Nice talking to you too.