Practical routes
Start with your situation
Prepare a decision, conversation, or practical test using the questions, sources, and tools below.
Use these questions with colleagues or on your own. Each route includes a working note you can fill in and download, and a way to ask for support.
20 minutes with someone who sees another part of the work
Rules, funding, and responsibility
A project may help people through individual interventions or exceptions. Identify what would have to change for others to get the same help.
- Follow one person's experience far enough to see the recurring difficulty.
- Name the decision that would change it, who can make it, and who is affected but absent.
- Ask what answer is owed, by whom, and by when. Record disagreement and what would change your account.
Leave with: A short account of the barrier, an identified decision, and an agreed next conversation.
Use what helps
- Relational public services: papers and practical questions
- Systems leadership, power, and the capacity to act
- Practice accounts and evidence from RedQuadrant
Make a working note
Your notes stay in this tab. They aren't submitted or saved automatically. Download a copy before closing the page.
Five minutes alone, then a rehearsal with a colleague
Agreements and difficult conversations
Clarify what you can each do, what you need from one another, and what you have been avoiding.
- Write down the help being requested, the help you can offer, and the responsibility you can take.
- Separate what you have observed from what you infer. Include your part in the difficulty.
- Rehearse the question or request you need to put to the other person. Check what would count as a workable agreement.
Leave with: A prepared opening, a clear request, and a proposed agreement you can revisit.
Use what helps
- The systemic consulting field guide
- Productive conversations and the Left-Hand Column
- The Peter Block community exercise
Make a working note
Your notes stay in this tab. They aren't submitted or saved automatically. Download a copy before closing the page.
Half an hour with the sponsor or a design partner
Choosing a group process
Choose a process for the work people need to do, the decisions they can make, and the resources available afterwards.
- Specify the work participants need to do and which decisions are open to them.
- Identify whose knowledge, interests, and authority need to be present. Ask who might bear the consequences without a voice.
- Compare plausible processes against those conditions, and make follow-through someone's actual responsibility.
Leave with: A justified process choice, its conditions, and an explicit plan for decisions and follow-through.
Use what helps
- Search and compare large-group processes
- Breaking the Shell: exercise and facilitator kit
- Inquiry and intervention in systemic consulting
Make a working note
Your notes stay in this tab. They aren't submitted or saved automatically. Download a copy before closing the page.
30 minutes with people in different positions
Recurring patterns in a team
Describe the recurring difficulty. Use a model to examine how roles, relationships, and decisions might be producing it, including your part.
- Choose a recurring event and describe it without assigning motives.
- Use the Four Dynamics or VSM to look for a different explanation. Check it with people in other roles.
- Choose a small change to a relationship, role, or decision. Name what you will observe, including unintended effects.
Leave with: A testable account of the pattern and one change with a review date.
Use what helps
- Four team dynamics: guide and working tool
- Viable System Model: sources and practice
- Public accounts of systems practice
Make a working note
Your notes stay in this tab. They aren't submitted or saved automatically. Download a copy before closing the page.
A working session with different parties to the arrangement
Commissioning and delivery choices
Compare arrangements against the outcomes sought, the work involved, and what each would ask of the people using and providing services.
- State the outcome sought, whose experience will show whether it is happening, and the decisions available.
- Use a Compass to open the inquiry, or compare delivery arrangements with the arms-lengthiness tool.
- Record the mismatches and conditions you would need to change. Check the judgement with people who would do and experience the work.
Leave with: An options note that makes assumptions, differences, and necessary conditions visible.
Use what helps
- Choose a Compass from the Public Service Transformation Academy
- Arms-lengthiness: compare delivery arrangements
- Outcomes, complexity, and the measures we use
Make a working note
Your notes stay in this tab. They aren't submitted or saved automatically. Download a copy before closing the page.
One exercise, a comparison, and a conversation about transfer
Developing a method through practice
Try a method on a defined question, compare your attempt with the worked example, and decide what support you need before using it with others.
- Choose a method for a specific question. Say why its assumptions fit and where they might fail.
- Attempt an exercise before opening the worked comparison. Record what you changed your mind about.
- Choose a modest real-world application with someone affected by the work, and agree how you will learn from it.
Leave with: An attempted model, a reasoned revision, and a plan for supported application.
Use what helps
- Systems methods practice: alpha exercises and their limits
- Find the sources and connections in The Necessary Tangle
- Read public accounts of methods used in practice
Make a working note
Your notes stay in this tab. They aren't submitted or saved automatically. Download a copy before closing the page.
Where the different parts fit
- Antlerboy
- My public work, practical guides, and ways to work with me.
- Chosen Path
- My essays, arguments, working notes, and writing archive.
- Systems Community of Inquiry
- A broad stream of material from many authors. Follow the original source; inclusion is not endorsement.
- The Necessary Tangle
- An evidence-backed atlas of systems, cybernetics, and complexity, with sources, connections, reading routes, and events.
- RedQuadrant
- Consulting and practical support for public-service and organisational change.
- The PSTA
- Learning and development that builds public services' own transformation capability.
Browse the full directory on Greebling, or search the library, Chosen Path, and SysCoI.
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