Differentiating between transactional and relational service design
At least in the countries that we know best, The Netherlands, Denmark, Australia and the UK, people are slowly starting to distinguish between transactional and relational services.
There has been a lot of good thinking, stretching back several years, in various think tanks and pilot programmes around this distinction and its implications for policy and practice. For us, five influences in UK public services stand out:
Changing Futures Northumbria and the Liberated Method;
Wigan Council’s The Wigan Deal;
Radical Help and the Participle initiatives under the leadership of Hilary Cottam; and
The Human Learning Systems guide and cases driven by Toby Lowe and colleagues.
These works all recognise that helping people with complex needs requires a fundamentally different practice.
Over the last twenty years, we’ve been developing relational services, building on the thinking of these influencers and many others. In doing so, together with our colleagues at Basis, we have honed the practices of Relational Service Design.
Before sharing the practices, we need to differentiate between transactional and relational service design.
The table below summarises the main differences as we currently understand them:
Transactional vs. relational service design © Basis Ltd
*In line with Jon Alexander's terminology of moving away from customers towards citizens.
A relational service in practice
Here is a real experience from Dennis’ life
A few years ago, I noticed my mental processing was becoming difficult. I wasn’t ‘sharp’. Most nights, I got at least seven hours of sleep but felt chronically tired.
I went to my GP, who organised some tests. She gave me some nasal spray and asked me to return a week later to discuss my results.
When I returned, I explained that I was still exhausted. She reviewed my results, signed me up for a sleep study, and discussed which lifestyle habits I could change. She also suggested I add more magnesium to my diet.
I returned three more times, and every time, the conversation and results triggered new ideas to try. As the weeks went by, I started to recover.
Although my GP didn’t know exactly what was required at the outset, this didn’t stop us from making progress.
She had hypotheses and tested them through experiments. She checked which of these experiments were moving us in the right direction, stopped the ones that weren’t, and slowly, things improved.
Although many people were involved, she maintained an overview of my progress. She took the time to get to know me and to understand my lifestyle. Even though she couldn’t reassure me that her proposed treatment would definitely work, nor tell me exactly when I would recover, I trusted her. I could see she was trying to be helpful and did what she said she would. So I followed her advice.
My GP was taking a relational approach.
In an alternate universe, I might have received a transactional service. She might have:
Tried to diagnose my issues in one assessment and establish a detailed, long-term step-by-step plan.
Awaited approval from a practice manager to proceed with a treatment plan.
Referred me to a specialist to treat my issues in isolation rather than holistically
Handed me over to a colleague without a detailed knowledge of my unique circumstances
Why a relational service approach, in this case, gets the best results
These transactional approaches seem reasonable. But only if they are feasible in the first place.
Transactional approaches prioritise getting a person from A to B as quickly as possible. But what if the route between those two points can’t be mapped out?
And what if we discover along the way that B was the wrong destination all along? Prioritising speed, economy and efficiency in these circumstances risks overlooking the root causes and missing potential solutions.
Piecing together the myriad factors at play in Dennis's life was only possible through conversation. Understanding cause and effect was only possible through experimentation.
In relational services, ideal customer journeys cannot be designed upfront. Not knowing exactly the goal or destination at the outset is normal. Expected even. And we can’t know for certain how many interactions are likely to be needed.
A relational service design should embrace these realities. It should bake in time for front-line helpers to develop relationships and trust with citizens.
This trust makes the ambiguity of testing and learning tolerable.
Dennis's challenges were infinitely less complex than those of someone dealing with substance misuse issues, gender-based violence or struggling to support the needs of a child with SEND. However, a similar approach to the one he experienced is usually required.
Complex needs are often funnelled through transactional services
And public servants are bending the rules to make it work
Most public services designed to support citizens with complex needs are designed in such a way that assumes those needs can be dealt with in a transactional manner.
In the last month, we’ve been involved in several conversations about designing services for people with complex needs through a transactional lens.
“The five-step plan for children on the edge of care”
“The seven-session offer for an adolescent mental health crises”
“The nine-step process to avoid becoming homeless”
It’s not to say that people within these kinds of services can’t help those in need. Many do. But they do so by bending the rules. In the face of a jetstream of demand, they help despite the system and not because of it. Most people working in public services feel the unease caused by the straightjacket of transactional design. We hear this every day.
Helpers need the time and space to build relationships and trust with the people they are there to help. They need the autonomy to exercise their judgement in response to unpredictable and unstable needs.
The service must worry less about optimising every step and more about creating the conditions for those closest to the work to self-organise and be helpful.
No matter how well you understand the needs of citizens generally, you cannot design a perfect customer journey for the individual.
They cannot be funnelled through a transactional, step-by-step process. When you try, it often makes things worse.
So what does it take to design and develop more relational services?
The process of testing and learning iteratively is what we, and many others, call being “agile”.
The language of ‘test and learn’ is commonplace in children’s services and is being used widely in the implementation of the family hubs programme to name one example.
However, these approaches are focused firmly on the design of or change within the service. It’s a project approach, underpinned by principles set out in the Agile Service Manifesto.
However, there is much less consideration for the potential of agile approaches in delivering services.
We believe that effective relational services need to be designed in an agile way and need to embed the principles (and not the methods) of agile in the delivery of the service.
Much like we would expect an agile team to test which types of intervention have the greatest impact on the whole, helpers should be able to test which support has the greatest impact on the individual.
There is complexity both at the project level and in the citizen’s life. Without testing and learning, progress is slow, ineffective and sometimes harmful.
Designing relational services in the way we’ll advocate in these articles also requires a different organisational design, at least in parts of the organisation. One that is capable of embracing uncertainty and absorbing both the complexity of the project and of the front-line practice.
Governance arrangements, management structures, commissioning, IT, policies and protocols that exist to enable the work, will also need to adopt agile practices.
This is easier said than done.
Effective relational service design requires agile practices to be embedded:
As part of the project that designs the service;
In the way help is provided to citizens; and
In the way public service organisations are designed and governed
For most organisations, the change in practices required at each of these levels represents a fundamental shift.
In future articles, we’ll explain how this can be achieved in practice.
Written by Dennis Vergne and Joseph Badman
© Basis Ltd. 2024