Can we design services that are genuinely relation, or are we just making bureaucracy slightly more efficient?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Virginie Clarke, a service design lead working at the heart of local government to make services more human by putting people and relationships first.

What you’ll learn:

• How Virginie’s background in performance and theatre helped shape her approach to service design.
• Why holding space, reading the room, and modelling vulnerability are critical facilitation skills.
• What it takes to build trust with people facing complex challenges—and with the staff supporting them.
• How the Havelock project is building something better from the ground up by listening, adapting and acting.
• What it really means to design relational services in practice.

Virginie’s story - pivoting into local government during the pandemic, building a new team, and learning by doing, shows that creating better public services isn’t about perfect plans, but about people, relationships, and staying open to what works.

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

Thanks so much for joining me, really appreciate it. Let's get straight into it. Here's what I want to know. What are you doing now and what's your career path been to get there?

Because I know it's pretty unconventional. So let's, let's get into that.

So I am the service design lead at Ealing Borough Council, which means that I lead a team of service designers and we have a researcher. And I've been at ealing for about 18 months.

Prior to that, I was at California Kent County Council and I'd had a couple of roles essentially in change and transformation, children's services. And then I did a much broader project around community assets. But I'm still fairly new, I would say, to local authority.

It was a Covid pivot, I like to call it.

So I, whilst I had job applications at the time, slowly I was just getting these email notifications that they were closing their recruitment process. But, and this is a kind of a random. The way that fate, luck, the universe, whatever you want to call it, deep.

Stuff, very deep stuff.

Deep stuff.

I had basically already started the ball rolling with buying my first flat and that meant that I was moving to Kent because that was where I could afford. So that train was in motion and so I had to think very quickly about, right, so what are my other options?

And I was like, okay, stop just looking for jobs in London, since you are moving to Kentucky, look for jobs there. And I saw a job at Kent County Council, it was actually a graduate scheme. So I was like, well, rock and roll.

The great way to like learn a new, learn a new industry, I guess.

And because I am someone that has started again, kind of started again multiple times, I didn't have any particular, like, concerns or I guess, ego about doing that. And so that was my Covid pivot.

And I suppose the skills that I had from previous roles and experiences meant that I could hit the track running, like maybe kind of an unconventional graduate in terms of other people. On the scheme were university leavers, et cetera, et cetera. So I did feel like a bit of a cuckoo in the nest.

But, hey, if you can be helpful, you're helpful in a team. So, yeah, yeah, that's been the last five years, basically.

So originally you had a bit of a performance background, didn't you?

Yeah, so I studied theatre and French at university and my. I suppose my obsession or my conviction was around theatre making as a tool for learning. That's broadly kind of what was my motivation.

So at the university, I studied applied theatre. We studied a practitioner, Augustus Baule.

Wow. Yeah. The Brazilian theater. Yeah.

So theater of the oppressed. So doing applied theater, doing forum theatre workshops, precursor in communities. I was like, this is my bag. Like, yes, please.

Absolutely wanted to do that.

What's. What's in your bag about that?

There's something about people that aren't there to do theatre.

Like, even with amdram, I just think the most adorable thing is like a small community theater with people who are just, you know, doing their best to do a thing together. That kind of collaboration, it just gives me the, like, you know, gets you in the field as well. And.

And so especially when you're doing projects that were about, you know, elderly people getting to know and understand younger people and vice versa in their community, or I did a project with migrant workers who didn't necessarily have legal status and just getting them to open up and kind of share their stories for, you know, I'm not going to talk about all the projects, but those moments where you are helping people to express themselves in an unexpected way, in a playful way, in a relaxed, safe space, just really enjoyed it.

I mean, I know those skills are absolutely invaluable in the kinds of work that you do.

And I have a performance background as well, and I really rely on those skills very, very heavily, particularly in workshops and particularly when I'm trying to build rapport and, you know, empathy with people. But tell me about that. How have those skills helped you in the work that you're doing now?

Well, I mean, running workshops is the same idea, but I think. I suppose what I learned when I was studying or doing workshops for the first time was the sense of holding people. So you're not the.

You're not the kind of the owner of the space, but you are welcoming people nonetheless. There's a kind of. Kind of strange power dynamic in the sense that, yeah, you create boundaries which are there for people to feel safe.

Yeah.

And also modeling behaviors as well. So even this is a Kind of a different topic of conversation.

But clowning, for example, I've always referenced as a kind of skill set of a way to show failure, a way to show a relaxed state, a way to provoke.

I think those are also interesting kind of skills which have served me in all sorts of things, whether it's workshops, presentations, just getting to know people quickly.

I want to know more about this because.

So I studied clowning as well, and I think in the general population, most people, I think, would see a clown as sort of at the bottom of the ladder of performers. Whereas anybody that knows, you know, anything about performance knows that those are some of the people that have put in the most work to their.

To their craft and are able to do the most moving things with the people that they work with and the audiences they perform for. So what is it about those skills that you think are interesting and, you know, you draw on in these workshops a bit more detail?

Yeah. P.S. I haven't done a lecoq, like, you know, away week or anything, you know, like some of my friends have. I think the clown is incredibly subtle.

I know people think it's the most ostentatious thing as well, but it's actually drilling down to the very, very smallest gestures, sometimes sensitivities. I mean, there's a whole. There's a whole breadth of the clown.

Yeah.

To look at. But I just think it's a. It's an interesting kind of form. And I do pride.

I don't know if I do pride myself on having actually described myself as a clown. In a job interview. In a job interview. I did that once.

Why are you wearing the nose?

Terrible.

Take it off.

Yeah.

No, I think it's really interesting, isn't it? Because. Because a cl. Really, at least in the sort of.

I went to go and see the Slava Snow show recently in, I want to say, Drury Lane, and he involves people in that show and gets them to do things that are sort of pretty outside their comfort zone, but never in a mean way. And it's always clear that he would be willing to do any of the things that he's asking other people to do, too.

And I think there's a bit of a parallel there in workshops, you know, if you can be really self aware about, you know, people's boundaries, really try and encourage them to explore things that maybe would be considered taboo or they would be a little bit reluctant or often feel unsafe to explore. Yeah. If you can demonstrate that, you know, their boundaries and show people that you are willing to go there with them.

Those are all skills that sort of clowns have.

And you would never talk about those kinds of things in building capacity among people that work in service design or that run workshops or facilitators. But I think they're wildly important. Such an interesting parallel.

And there's something about the character that you take on when you're running a workshop, right. It depends on who you're running the workshop for.

If you are in inviting, you know, a small group of people from a residence association who, you know are a bit coy or anxious about talking about the topic, there's something that you need to do that's very like welcoming, gentle.

But if you're doing something with senior leaders and you know that there's going to be maybe a lot of ego or a lot of conflict in the room, maybe you need to do, you need to hold, hold the space in a different way. And so that's part of the, I suppose, experience design, which is adjacent, I think, to theatre making.

Even outside of the clown, you've got the kind of, have you sat in every seat? Which is a kind of classic technique in the theater, which is to say, what does it feel like to sit in that chair?

Can you see, you know, the actors block themselves to think about whether people can see whether people can hear. And I try and do that as much as possible in, in my work as well.

I think that's lovely. So tell me, tell me about your work then. What's a, what's a typical day? I'm sure it's very, very varied. But what happens? What's the work?

It's super varied. We as a team have tried to a, have those rituals that mean that we feel like a team.

So we have a Monday morning, kind of coffee, catch up with the whole team, kind of just talking about what their week looks like, what they're hoping to achieve, what they need help with. Same on a Thursday. Those are our two in person work days. We sit together at the end of a Thursday and kind of go, this is what's happened this week.

This is what I'm going to be concentrating on tomorrow in kind of planning ahead for next week.

And so that in person time I think is really important as well to be able to share, to be able to float questions, concerns and just have like a really good healthy team culture and relationship. And then the rest of the week it's just rodeo, like it could. Apart from those two things.

What kind of rodeo?

So for example, next week we're running a workshop.

Well, some of the team are running a workshop with adult social care to go over a design of the referral form that people fill in when they hit the website.

We are running a whole day workshop with partners as well as in external partners as well as council staff from various departments on kind of how might we write an anti poverty strategy or a mission that gets us to either tackle eliminate poverty and that is very much about what language do we want to use, what goals do we want to set ourselves, what are we currently doing, what needs to be done differently, etc. Etc. We're having a team away day.

I might have several meetings either with a director of housing about that's another thing I'm doing is a workshop on the Grenfell report and just giving, facilitating a conversation about what did that report bring up? How does that make us feel as an organization about what we could do differently so that it's, you know, nothing like that would ever happen again.

So it can be, you know, we can be brought in to facilitate those kinds of conversations, but it might also be interviewing members of a team about what their current work processes experiences are, or going out in the community and doing a workshop in a library or visiting a community centre to think about what could be popping up there.

So trying to keep it as diverse as possible, I think is something that I quite like because it keeps the energy and the visibility of the team as well, because we're still a relatively new team. So you want to be generating those kinds of like conversations and relationships with people at this stage.

Definitely.

I, I think there's something interesting and hard about your work in so much as you are very much in between senior leaders and people that are helping folks in the community. And often, not always, but often those groups of people hold very different assumptions about what's required.

They have very different understandings about what's hard, what's not hard, what's possible, what isn't. And you can get a little bit trapped in the middle sometimes. Is that, is that your experience or how do you experience that?

People often just value the reflective space.

So both of those groups, because of the pressure that they're under, sometimes feel frustrated at not having the time to kind of stop and think or discuss or have someone go, yeah, sounds, sounds rough, whatever, whatever it is. So just starting from that perspective is a, it's a good one. Builds that also starts building rapport. Then. I completely agree.

There is that conflict sometimes between being in service and going, sure, we can do something or we can try and help you fix that. But then also putting in, you know, sometimes boundaries of like, well, this may. Or, you know, maybe this problem isn't.

I know that you think it's that with a bit of thinking, talking research, playback, it actually might look a bit like that. Do you agree? And, you know, sometimes that. Do you agree? Might be tricky. It might be the end of the commission of the work or whatever it is.

So that's a. That's a delicate dance. And I'm not, you know, I wouldn't say that we've necessarily mastered that because every.

Every relationship, every project is different, and the, you know, priorities change all the time as well. So even when you've got someone who's all in, if something else comes along, then it's. It might change direction. So. But that's just working.

That's working with people and complex problems like standard. You've just got to accept that. I mean, we are constantly thinking about how we can do it well and do it better.

But, yeah, sometimes it just doesn't take in that way.

Yeah. My colleague, slash friend, slash mentor, Rick Torseth, I probably haven't called him that before, so if he watches this, he'll be like, am I?

I didn't realize I fulfilled that role for you. He says. He says that relationships are primary. Everything else is derivative.

And I love that, because an enormous amount of work needs to go into building relationships with people that have different pressures, people on the front line, people in leadership roles, just in order to be able to earn the space to have some of those conversations that you're talking about. I think this might be a different problem.

That is a very different conversation with somebody that you have a proper relationship with than with somebody that you have a very transactional relationship with. We talk about this in basis.

If you're not familiar with this guy, it's very worth looking at a guy called Ed Shein, who wrote this book called Humble Consulting. Brilliant, brilliant piece of work.

And he talks about different levels of relationships and how level one relationships are the kind of relationship that you have with, like, your lawyer or your accountant and sometimes even your doctor. You know, they're very, very businesslike, very transactional.

But those kinds of relationships don't serve complexity very well because the answers aren't binary. They aren't. You're sick, you're not. They aren't. You've paid your taxes, you haven't. They aren't. You've broken the law, you're safe.

You know, they're much more nuanced than that. And I think just so much work needs to go into getting to a place where you have more of a personal relationship with. And I think that can be.

It's very difficult to judge what the boundary is there and to get it right. And I frequently get it wrong because I think my personal ends up being oftentimes a little bit more personal than most people would be used to.

We're going to have to make sure that the camera cuts to you so they see your face, so that I don't immediately start laughing as I'm saying that. But I think it's necessary, you know, because then together you can navigate through those things.

Yeah. And I think that the key component and in that is candor, like, if you can have the relationship, that someone kind of goes. Real talk, like, yeah.

And, you know, I'm obsessed with the. This almost the physical space that allows that to happen in.

Yes, this is not going to sound inclusive, but the version of events or the meeting that you have in the pub after work compared to the meeting that you had in the room with the fluorescent lights, often very different.

Like the way the gump and the jargon that we use to describe a project in the HQ of the office, compared to when you go down the pub and you go to your mate, oh, what are you working on at the moment? And you kind of give them. That description of the project is so revealing.

I think there's something in that, isn't there? Because you're right, that is true. And it's also not hugely inclusive. But the question is, yeah, I don't mean, hey, you're not being inclusive.

That's not what. That's not what I mean. There's an interesting question to answer there, isn't it?

What are the places and spaces that we need to enable us to have better conversations?

And we'll talk about relational services and the design of relational services in a bit, I'm sure, but this is something that we think about in that work too, because if somebody comes in, let's say, to the. Let's say to a council, through the front door, whatever that front door is, and they clearly have. I'll back up a little bit.

We're writing, you know, we're writing a book on the design of relational services at the moment, and I'm halfway through writing a chapter with. With Dennis, my colleague, pal, mentor. Everybody's my mentor today, he actually is.

And I wrote a little story that was based on something that I've observed in many different places when I was working in councils and then observing when I've been visiting councils where somebody comes in through the front door and they present with, let's say, a problem like, I'm struggling to pay my council tax bill, there's probably a reason for that. There's probably a bunch of other stuff under the surface.

Now, the design of the space and just the amount of time that people have to get into the conversation will dictate, to a large extent whether we figure out what's actually going on or not.

If the space is a big open atrium, there's a long queue of people and some of whom are getting stuck in the revolving door, and there's all kinds of chaos going on.

Probably the person who's presented with that issue is going to want to get in and out as quick as possible, and we probably won't scratch beneath the surface. However, in another parallel universe, if the person who has that initial conversation recognizes.

Oh, hang on a minute, my antennae are sort of buzzing here. There's something more going on here. I'm going to pull in V, who's really great at having these conversations. There's a comfy space around there.

There's not loads of people watching. There's not fluorescent lights. She has time to have this conversation.

We might, with a bit of luck and a fair wind, get to the crux of what's going on, or at least a little bit more information. And there's a parallel there in our work, isn't there?

You know, are we designing our spaces, our meetings, are we facilitating our conversations, whatever that means, in a way that enables us to, like, have a proper conversation about what's going on and are we doing the right thing?

And it's like we completely suspend our own experiences of what it's like to walk up to a desk and for someone to say, sorry, have you got a reservation? Or, you know, I was walking through a Tube station the other day and there was a desk of people volunteer.

I don't know what the organization was, but they kind of just had a big banner. Are you depressed? Question mark. And I assume. I assume the invitation was to go over and, like, speak to them.

And I was like, I'm not sure that that's. I feel like I would like to do that.

And I feel like a big arrow if you're standing here, you know, I could.

Yeah. And so I enjoy thinking about. And this is such a. This is a weird parallel. So hold on.

And, you know, to hope it doesn't upset anyone, but, you know, when you look at. Not that I'm some big five star hotel user. But when you look at that kind of luxury service, that design of service is a really interesting parallel.

How do they make people feel comfortable and inconspicuous and relaxed? But looked after those small attentions to detail, there's a lot to learn about.

You know, that's, how can we make people, that's what people need when they've got a slightly awkward thing that they need to get to about.

And I was talking to a friend whose dad volunteers for a debt advice service and he was saying to her, as he builds his relationship with people, some of the work that he's doing is basically kind of getting them to stop concealing something that they've been concealing for a long, long time. So those entrenched behaviors, we need to accept that they're part of the thing and design around them. How do you keep. It's not a one and done right.

You're not going to come in and be like, blah, here's all my, here's all my debt shame. What does it take for someone to kind of slowly loosen up and, and disclose what they need to, to get the help that they, they need?

I think you're spot on. And the, the luxury hotel or luxury restaurant example is interesting. I've, I've thought about that same example.

Because if you pay enough, you can get a concierge level service for whatever it is that you want and it will be perfectly tailored to your needs and you'll have to pay a fortune for it. Now it's very rare that you would get such a tailored service. If you are in real crisis.

Perhaps you're dealing with serious debt issues or maybe you're at risk of homelessness or are homeless. That kind of service is not provided to that individual or at least very, very rarely.

Of course there are some examples where, let's not call it a concierge service, but where there is a really holistic service available.

The thing is, or the irony is that if that kind of service is not available, then the cost to the system, when that person's needs invariably escalate is probably significantly more expensive than the most expensive concierge service that you could, you could pay for, which is, which is all kinds of wrong. And I'm not even, we're not even talking about the person's lived experience of things going wrong, which is far more important than the cost.

But, but it would, it would warrant it. You know, it would warrant spending the money on a really holistic service.

Even if we were just thinking about the cost that will be incurred when things inevitably go wrong. And I think that probably people in jobs like yours and mine need to do a bit more work in order to make that case.

So that people who are in finance director roles or senior leadership roles can feel a bit more comfortable to take a punt on. What is a very different kind of service, this kind of relational model that we're sort of talking, talking to. Am I making sense or am I completely.

I was just thinking about even. But even if you scale down the five star luxury hotel, which. Okay.

Makes it sound like impossible, only if we had millions of millions of pounds, even a well run neighborhood restaurant, that front of house service that can be so good just because they, I don't know, there's something in there, the tone or the relaxed state or the kind of like. Sure, that's not a big deal. Like there's something about. And we. P.S. We have so many people in local authority that care deeply.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do this stuff all the time. I think it's more the fact that it's the way things are oriented where that kind of, just kind of.

You've built that relationship and then now you have to go and access an entirely different surface.

Yeah, yeah.

And start again. That's the, the kind of, the tragedy. It's like having to go to several drive throughs instead of going to the nice neighborhood restaurant.

I think that's absolutely right. And there's something on the tip of my tongue which I really wanted to get into. I think it's now escaped me because.

You're thinking about drive throughs.

I was thinking about drive throughs. Yeah, that's what I was going to say because you were saying P.S. I'm going to be saying P.S. After this conversation.

There are plenty of people in public services that you know, are doing incredible work and I, I could not. I. There's nothing I disagree with in that. The thing is they're doing that incredible work often despite the system.

Yeah.

Not because of it.

And I, I remember I've told you the story of me working in, in the job center at the beginning of my career and, and I would often be working with people that clearly needed help with housing benefits, they clearly needed help with debt advice, they clearly needed a bus pass, they clearly needed help to buy interview clothes and that none of that was within my remit.

And if I was feeling resilient, like if I was not ground down by the fact that I'd just done 10 appointments before that, then I would, you know, make the time at my lunch break to try and figure those things out, or I'd stay a bit late to try and figure those things out. But I can't pretend like I would do it all the time. Sometimes I just wouldn't. I just wouldn't have the brain power to be able to do it.

And it's not reasonable to expect that people in frontline services will always be able to bust through those barriers because, yeah, it's only possible when you're kind of resilient enough to do it, which is wildly frustrating.

So the context for this whole relational services conversation is that lots of public services are organized in such a way that assumes people's needs are linear. Like we know what, where they are point A, we just got to get them to point B. And if we just follow the steps, then the problem will be resolved.

And that is true for like parking permits or registering a birth or that kind of thing. But as soon as people's needs start getting more complex, it doesn't work like that anymore.

And the only thing that really seems to cut through and help people make progress, even discover what their point A is and what their point B is, is a much more relational approach, which is, you know, literally trying to get to understand the person, build a bit of relationship with them, and slowly figure out what we can do, moves we can make to sort of move ourselves forward as defined by the person. So I know you're kind of thinking about this and trying these ways of working out what are you doing at the moment that is sort of in this vein?

Yeah, so. Well, one thing that we did last year was a big project on, well, it kind of went through multiple guises.

It was called, broadly speaking, crisis intervention. And the question, so the question, I guess was how can we intervene differently at points of crisis?

But of course, even saying that exam question felt huge.

Yeah, it's massive.

So it started.

So we decided to kind of wait, find a location, and we were pointed in the direction of a housing estate in Southall, which is part of the borough of Ealing. And so we went.

Which is in West London, correct?

West London, which is in the uk.

In the world.

In the world. Planet Earth.

Planet Earth, yeah.

Third rock from the sun. So we went to, we went to the estate and just started, you know, familiarizing ourselves.

We started kind of talking to staff members who knew the estate. What were the, some of the issues? And very quickly we, we understood it to be a problem around street homelessness.

So it's one of those mid century estates that has these kind of garages and then the flats are above and, and there was a phenomenon of people bedding down for the night under those car parks. Because it's a dry space, it's a no brainer if you don't have somewhere, if you don't have shelter, that's where you would go.

But you can imagine many associated issues with people bedding down there, which I won't go into the whole thing, but hop, skip, jump.

We, as part of our research, as part of our work on that estate, we ran a resident drop in day because we were like, well, we've done a lot of work around homelessness.

We need to kind of understand what the sentiment is with residents and just speak to them about what it's like living on the estate, et cetera, et cetera. So we did a drop in day because we knew people were hungry for access to services.

So we put a bunch of services in a space that's down there, community space and we kind of designed the day to a certain extent. So for example, we said no queuing.

We said, because we'd heard they've been drop in days before and there are people queuing to speak to repairs, for example. So we were like, no queuing. There has to be like a number system so that people can be free in the space to chat, hang out.

And our team had done some kind of engagement stuff. So there was a wall that was like, you know, what's changed on the estate or what can we be doing differently?

We had, as part of our homelessness work we'd done, we'd recorded some stories about some of the guys that are in and around Southall sleeping homeless to invite to start a conversation potentially. You know, if you listen to that, do you have, you know, what are your feelings about homelessness? No one really spoke to us about homelessness.

And I'm not, I'm not saying just on this day we figured this out. There's actually a lot of tolerance, a lot of sympathy and a lot of, there's no bad feeling necessarily about against the homeless people.

It's more just sadness that it's happening at all. But people really responded to the services being available. And again, hop, skip and a jump.

In October of last year, we took over a shop front on the estate and gave it a lick of paint, put some computer screens in there, printer, WI fi, and then we put some staff in there from various services, key services that people might like to interact with regularly.

On the basis of the research you've done and the conversations you've done.

Yeah. So on a Tuesday and a Thursday now, it was re baptized in a workshop with residents. The have, which is the Havelock advice venue.

And the services have been working in there since October. And we're slowly, you know, we don't, we're not running it. We're trying to let it be kind of self organizing to a certain extent.

We help them have kind of monthly reflectives of like, how's it going? What's been changing? What are you hearing? What are the stories? Yeah, and we go down there as well every now and again and pick up a few stories.

But broadly speaking, there's been a real vibe shift.

So when it first opened, there was a lot of kind of, well, people staff telling us there's a bit of hostility because people coming in there with maximum frustration. So when they're coming to the repairs person, it's like, I've been asking for this repair for X number of however long.

But slowly that has obviously calmed down because the repairs have been getting done more quick in a more timely way. People are coming back into the shop to say thank you.

And even that, that, that's kind of a thought that's kind of slightly obsessed me recently of like, what are the things that we're giving back to some of our staff that deal with people in crisis that gives them the good feeling back.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes they're only dealing with the, like, the negative I need. You haven't X, Y, is it, you know, the, the problem.

If they don't ever get to see the like, the relief and the, the gratitude, then that's exhausting too. Right. Like, how do you feed people and nourish them with the like, okay, there's a, there's, there's a point to this.

Like, it's not just me on a computer, clicking, done. Obviously I'm being reductive, but like, I'm interested in that.

And I think it's, I think, you know, one of the housing officers that's working from there is like, there is just a different energy here to any of the other housing hubs that we have because the, you know, staff are also able to just like chat to each other and catch things.

So one of our community safety team who worked down there was telling us about a resident who's not on the system, but they just, through observation or because of something else, they'd been able to visit that person at home and realize, hey, whoa, there's a lot of vulnerabilities here. Few referrals were made and it's not all about reporting. Staff can be there to like, testify almost on behalf of whatever the problem is.

So, yeah, it feels good to have started the ball rolling with that because it's not just us going. That could be a great. Like, people are now advocating for that themselves. So the next question is, can we replicate it elsewhere? What.

What's so good about that that it should be the way of doing things?

There's so many different directions that this could go in. And I'm going to try and do two succinctly one, just give me an excuse to say something that I want to say.

There's an academic that I absolutely love called Teresa Amabile who wrote a book called the Progress Principle. And essentially. Did you just give me one of these?

Janet Jackson just came into my head.

The thesis is for people to be motivated, they do need a sense of their own progress. They need to be able to see that they're making progress in a direction.

And the reason I'm reminded of that is because if you're in one of those frontline roles where it feels like you're just dealing with crisis the whole time, you often never get the experience of seeing progress. And that must be the most demotivating experience. I mean, I feel that. But also the research would suggest that too.

And the reason why I'm mentioning it is because you were saying about how actually just people coming in and saying thank you, like that is a measure of some. Some progress, isn't it? But the.

Now that I've got that in my system, what I was going to say was, what's interesting about this, this model, and I know this from talking to you, is that it hasn't. It didn't start with, right, what's the job descriptions of these people? What's the structure?

Which probably would have killed it and would have almost certainly been wrong. But what is it? What's the conditions that allows people to get started in working in this way? Very, very different from I work it.

I'm a housing officer. I work in housing. I work in the maintenance team, repairs.

We're talking about shifting people's identities, working in a different space, probably away from their friends and colleagues that they've worked with for a long time. What is it that makes it possible to get started?

I think it was not us being like, right, this is what's happening now.

It was the same voice there. Same.

That's our very official voice. It's more that kind of, hey, we're just trying something out. And we'd like you to be a part of it. And this is what we've learned so far.

So giving them the whole.

The journey so far, really letting them in to like how we've come to this point, what are the decisions that have led to it, how are people feeling on the estate and therefore what needs to be different. But very much, very quickly, hopefully giving people a feeling of ownership as well.

So the housing officer, for example, just gently encouraging them to be like, hey, like this is almost like this is yours. Like if you see something and you want to set something up, like, go for it. Like we. And we're kind of almost the earpiece for senior leaders.

You know, you've been given permission to.

Like some air cover to go for it.

So for example, they started ESOL classes, so English lessons for some of the residents. It started small. I think they started with eight and then the last count I had it was 18. Oh, wow. So they're not using.

They're using a different space, but just figuring out that that would be popular and that that's would be helpful. And now we've got a social prescriber popping in once a week as well.

That they figured out and kind of. Yeah.

And I mean it's also us kind of going also this bit of that, like kind of showing them the kind of the canopy board of like, what else could be happening and. But it's kind of it. Yes. I suppose maybe in a coaching role.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But constant sources of inspiration. I think that's the, you know, what if. Could it be this? Why not, you know, figuring it out. Right. There's stuff that's like, no. Or couldn't.

Won't, flat on its face, but just inspiring the energy of. Yeah, why not?

Yeah. There's something about that, isn't there, that that's a really intangible thing, like. Yeah.

The sort of vibe or feeling of it that makes it possible to experiment in that way.

Yeah. And I suppose what you were saying about how you felt like that in the past, it's that you, you know, people maybe don't. Dunno.

Do people feel like they're gonna be told off for like messing around?

Cause they decided to take a half hour walk around the estate just because that's how they bump into people and, you know, talk to someone at the bus stop. You know, what people consider the work.

Yeah. Then that could be the most important thing of the day. Right.

But people have become convinced and this is the wider culture, I think that actually it's all of the emails that you are.

It's the transactions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the relationships, not the conversations.

No. And I can. Yeah.

And I think, you know, I even think that about my team sometimes, actually, the Mondays and the Thursdays, even if our Monday morning is predominantly having a coffee together and talking about the weekend first, that sets the groundwork for Wednesday, when I just message you quickly to be like, well, this thing is, you know, needs happening now, that's. We've got so much currency, you know, that I'm not being like, unreasonable, unreasonable. I'm just, you know, that's. Those.

That's the power of good relationships.

Right.

That's why you can cut to a shorthand. But I think we've almost skipped a step with some of our working relationships now. And we're just talking in shorthand.

Yes. I don't. Do you use AI much at all?

Yes,.

We'll disclose it. I was talking with Dennis, who, you know, the other day about AI, and I use it to. I use it to help me.

Not to give me answers, but to make the answers that I already have, that I know are correct.

Confirmation bias,.

You know, let's say, you know, how you want a workshop to be, right.

But it's going to take you a bunch of time to, like, you know, put it together and, you know, format it nicely and, you know, explain it in language that makes sense to other people. I might use AI to enable me to do that quickly.

But the thing about that is it is good and it is useful for people that know what the correct answer is to a problem. But it also, if you're a bit earlier on in your career and your journey, it does sort of rob you of the process of, like, learning what the.

The right thing is to do.

Think I know what you mean in terms of, like, the process is important.

Yeah.

Of learn. Whether it's learning. Well, learning principally, if you're just given the answers, there's something cognitively that hasn't happened.

Thanks for saving me. I'm still getting it. So let's go back to the. Let's go back to the. Have, like, what. What are some of the stories that are coming out of. Of that then?

What's working?

I think what's happening is those. Principally, it's relationships and it's learning more also about the system in motion. Right.

Because if you're working in the same space as someone from a different service, which happens less commonly now, people are learning the answers to some of the common questions. So actually, whilst it's not yet a completely holistic service. And everyone's. Everyone's role has completely blended.

Not that that's the objective, but, you know, if that's not what it is potentially actually now the. The community safety person can actually answer that kind of basic housing question that you have or they've got.

So one of the solutions we had to the repairs question of like, if the repairs officer is out because they've gone out to do something and someone else comes in to report a repair or chase the repair that they had, we've put a whiteboard in the office where repairs that are being noted or are being worked on are visible.

Yes.

So there's that feeling of like, ugh, I've reported it. It's now visible for everyone to see. And I can pop in and anyone can now tell me where it is in the thing.

Because a lot what we were hearing was people are often chasing repairs and there might be five people in the office, but if they don't have access to the repair system, it's five people going like, sorry, you've got to wait for Mark to be back. Which is annoying and adds to the frustration. So, you know, people finding those workarounds and finding those little answers just starts. It's.

I call it the. I call it the marination. The marination of people. Yeah. Marinating. Marinating. Yeah. I'll give it you.

I wouldn't count it in Scrabble.

Oh, going to have to look that up immediately when I need. Yeah. The source between people. That's what makes those kinds of relational encounters, because someone's tried to find the answer for you.

That sometimes that's also the feel good factor is like, you didn't know the answer, but I saw you do your best for me. And even if you didn't get the answer, in the end, that counts as well. That humanity counts.

Yeah, Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And the environment needs to allow for the time for that, you know, looking around, trying to be helpful. Yeah.

Just like space to breathe, you know, in the interaction between people and between the helper and the resident. So we'll. We'll wrap this up shortly. But I think you're somebody that's just really great at your job. You're just really good at it.

Thanks, Jo.

No, you are. And it's a job that has, like, there's a lot of practice to it, you know, And I mean practice in both senses of the word.

There is a practice to it, and you've got to do a lot of practice.

Y.

And I'm kind of obsessed with learning and getting better at stuff.

And getting better at the practice of working with people, understanding what people's needs are, designing new ways of working, testing them, learning, iterating, all that stuff. How do you think about that? What's the, how do you think about getting better at this stuff?

What can, what can you do if you're in a role like yours in order to improve your practice?

Oh my God, it's everywhere. So I do this. I, you know, I encourage this in the team as well. Like not the classic what are you reading?

What are you listening to, but you know, going to things, whether it's conferences or even design week.

A couple of years ago I went to something that was not on the surface at all related to what we do, but it was about design, it was about creating and co designing. And I started talking to the lecturers.

Hopefully next year we're setting up a design studio that will be for residents to create graphic design with students from that university.

So like constantly being in a state of where is where, where can I find inspiration, where can I build other relationships, how can I get other thinkers into this space?

So I'm really interested in, in cross disciplinary learning, like whether any kind of design, just flipping it and seeing things from a different perspective. So I used to work in a textiles design studio and sometimes I use that as an analogy for like how we could also approach this.

Like there are different ways of doing any design anyway. You've got designers that do tailoring, you have designers that do, it's called floo, the softer design.

Oh yeah.

You've got the sketch designers and you've got the people that pin things to mannequins. Like there's infinite ways of approaching any, any design process. And so I like to do that. I like to encourage my team to do that.

And we do a lot of sharing. So if you think that if there's five of us, how can we, we don't all have to go to that same conference. One of us can go and share their reflections.

And so there's a constant feeling of exchange, I guess. And then with the people stuff, it's again, it's observing different disciplines.

So this is going to sound funny, but I had, I'll be the judge of that. One of my teammates was talking about facilitating something where there'd been a little bit of conflict.

And he was like, I don't, you know, how do I, how do I judge that? You know, how do I navigate that and feel comfortable?

Because I didn't feel comfortable and I suggested watching an episode or two of couples therapy on BBC.

Right.

Because I thought it was a really lovely model for how you navigate other people's conflict as a facilitator.

Like it's a completely different discipline, different field, but it gives you some, it gives you some useful maybe vocabulary, it models the kind of energy that you need to maintain when that happens and actually the boundaries that you can put in.

Because you know, once if you panic when that's happening, then the whole thing, just so you know, it's just finding different sources of inspiration and things to draw from. I mean it's the kind of growth mindset, isn't it, that learning is everywhere and drink it in.

I think that's lovely. I think a lot about how do you also create opportunities for people to have a go at the new thing but in a reasonably safe environment.

And that's something we need to do a bit better in basis.

Because when you've got people that are super experienced and then people that are less experienced, sometimes you can even forget what was scary in the first place. It might be facilitating an activity or it might, whatever it is, it doesn't really matter. And I think there's a role for that too.

And it can feel scary because I remember working in a service design team too. Going into a new service, don't have relationships with people.

You're going to ask them to do something that you're almost certain they've never done before and it's going to feel very uncomfortable. That's quite a nervous or nerve wracking thing to do, isn't it?

But it can be really powerful just to say that at the top of the workshop. Yeah, go guys. Just so you know, you're gonna hate it when I say icebreaker. And you know, you might, you might feel yourself resisting this.

But like, let's be aware that that's happening and I don't do it. Like, oh, let's be aware that that's happening.

But like calling it out from the beginning and then spotting it when it's happening and going, hey, like totally appreciate that this is like a stretch. Maybe think about it doing it this way. Or, you know, you do need to be able to pivot in a workshop for sure.

But I think people really appreciate that kind of pep talk at the beginning to go, this is not, you know, I know that this is not your, what you do in your day job. I am asking you to do something slightly differently.

Try and embrace it rather than be fearful of it or, you know, because people feel vulnerable and Exposed in those situations. That's sometimes where that's coming from.

Yeah. And there's no point pretending that that's not the case. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, it comes back to some of the things we're talking about at the very beginning of the.

The conversation, just being vulnerable and honest and, you know, generous with your own time and. Yeah. Just naming some of those things.

You know, it's part of the experience. Design as well. It's not what will happen when they walk into the room. It's what happened before they even walked into the room.

What state of mind might they be in? And therefore, how does that inform what happens next?

If somebody is wanting to do a job like yours and Covid needs to happen. Yeah, Covid. Yeah, exactly. You know where I'm going. Yeah. What. What would your.

What would your advice be for somebody that's, like, earlier in their career but is wanting to move into a space of, you know, designing for social good, that kind of thing?

I think having. Well, it depends because there are. Like I said, there's a multitude of different. Even service design has different kind of archetypes now.

You've got your kind of very digital first teams. You have got teams like ours who are doing the kind of more. More ethnographic research in and around the community. So it kind of depends what.

Where you want to. Where your natural skill set is or where your natural interest is. But with the relational stuff, it's. It is crafting that. It's.

And again, doing it in unexpected places. Are you. Do you even have the hobbies that reflect that skill set? So whether or not it's joining, I mean, you don't.

Not everyone has to join like a wacky improv group.

Yeah.

But doing something that either gets you out of your comfort, your own comfort zone, so that you know what it's like for other people or that you are building those skills to, like, run that kind of hold that kind of space for others is a good starting point. If you're not.

If you're not getting those opportunities professionally as well, I think that the other things that you do in your life are just as nourishing and important.

I think that's so true because all the methods and tools of services, you can learn all that stuff that's just in books, and it just takes some practice.

But, yeah, the ability to just build a relationship with people, hold a space, all that stuff, you can learn and practice that stuff in a myriad different ways outside of your. Outside of your current or professional role, can't you?

Yep, absolutely. And, you know, it's. It's all the more difficult as well when you're doing it online, like building rapport quickly. You're absolutely right.

You could be an absolute, you know, the service design don with all of the, like, technical skills. But if you feel. If you're making people feel, like, judged because you're asking so many questions and you're not.

You're not asking them other stuff or being a bit light at times, you know, whatever it take, whatever it needs, whatever it takes, then it's just, you know, there's a danger. People just feel interrogated and. Yeah, they might not accept the second meeting.

Yeah, great. Well, if we do this again, I hope you will accept our second meeting.

Tentative.

There's nothing more passag than the tentative. Hey, this is so good. Thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

I hope some of it made some sense.

Yeah, all made sense. I also really appreciate all the input that you've given us on our book on the design of relational services. It's far better for your fear input.

Really, really value it. And yeah, thanks so much for joining me. Pleasure.