What does it take to grow Relational Services?
The Agile Service Triangle: foundations for relational services
“We want to work relationally, but we’re caught in a jetstream of demand.” Adult social care manager to Virginie Clarke, Service Design Lead at the London Borough of Ealing, after enquiring what prevented their teams from taking a relational approach.
This experience is common and not new.
Over a decade ago, Children’s and Adult Services in Hillingdon Council, a local authority in West London, were struggling.
Support for residents was fragmented. Teams were overwhelmed by demand. Staff turnover was high. Leaders and practitioners had no bandwidth for change.
And things were getting worse.
Each time a new problem was discovered, making improvements became harder. New failures triggered more controls. More assessments. More sign-offs. More checks and balances. All designed to make repeating the same failure impossible.
But, with less trust and autonomy, the quality of work with families suffered and social workers began to leave. This, in turn, resulted in more problems. The council was stuck in a vicious cycle.
Example Vicious Cycle of a Service (here: Children's Services)
Several people within the council, including the then Head of Transformation, Aileen Carlisle, recognised that frequent handovers, repeat assessments, and ever-growing management control were driving many of their challenges. These practices prevented social workers from doing what they thought was right and from being genuinely helpful.
Although the conditions were difficult, getting a commitment to radically rethink how services were designed and operated was incredibly challenging. Change would necessitate an overhaul of entrenched management structures, commissioning practices and performance monitoring protocols.
Aileen believed that the organisation, its leaders, and its politicians needed to truly see and feel the negative impact its services were having on residents before there would be a mandate for change. With support from Dennis Vergne, she set out to gather the evidence needed to make that case.
Building the case for radical change
The team began by trying to identify families who were receiving support from multiple services.
They contacted them to ask if they would be willing to participate in improving local services. About half a dozen volunteered.
Working with the internal transformation team, our colleague Daniel Nisser led workshops with each family to map their life journey. Using sticky notes and a five-meter-long piece of brown paper with a line drawn along its length, families mapped out their most significant life events. Positive events above the line. Negative events below.
Following the workshops, the team trawled through case management systems to identify each family's actual interactions with local services. Any time a family member had been in contact with the council, health partners, the police, etc., the interaction was added to the journey.
The findings were both revealing and difficult to process:
In the preceding 10-20 years many families had experienced over 1,000 significant interactions with public services.
By calculating the unit cost of each interaction, it appeared that spend on around 4% of families accounted for about 50% of the council's children’s and adult services budget.
In most cases, at no point did one professional or team maintain an overview of the family's circumstances and needs. Most interactions with public services had happened in isolation from each other.
With permission from families, leaders, politicians and practitioners were invited to look over their journeys.
Without spreadsheets and graphs to obscure the reality of these families' lived experiences, most found the experience upsetting.
At multiple points along a family’s journey, there were clear moments where services had failed. Where help might have prevented needs from escalating.
Following this work, Aileen was given the green light to test a radically different approach.
Getting started with a prototype
From our life-journey mapping, we could see that many of the negative events experienced by families coincided with handoffs between teams and services. We also knew that many opportunities to provide practical help were missed in favour of assessing and re-assessing risk.
Although we better understood the challenges, we didn’t know exactly how to solve them. But we did know we needed to start small to ensure we could get quick feedback on the changes we were making. By doing we’d learn what worked in practice and not only in theory.
We decided to start in children’s services, focussing on early help and triage to assessment. Triage to assessment was a particular, but common challenge:
Triage
Previously, triage was conducted by less experienced staff using a checklist. It was clear that this approach was not compatible with the complexity of families’ needs. We decided to test putting the most skilled and experienced people up front. Rather than limiting their role to referring and signposting, where needed, they would also start providing help and support during the very first conversation.
Assessment
The team’s primary role was to assess families, allocate cases to the appropriate team depending on the level of risk they’d identified, seek approval for funding and review progress at a later date.
Over a few months, we prototyped a completely different way of working. We started with one social worker, Patrick, and grew the practice gradually:
The social worker receiving the initial referral would work with the family regardless of their level of need and would not hand over to another team.
They would act as key workers, building relationships with the family and staying with them as their needs changed from start to finish.
Social workers would be supported by a small Agile team of seven people (referred to as a ‘pod’) who knew about families on their colleagues' caseloads and who could provide support and supervision.
Rather than conducting an initial and a full assessment, the social worker would start providing help immediately by conducting a dynamic, ongoing assessment in response to the family's progress.
To begin with, the prototype team shared learning daily, including what was working, what wasn’t, and what changes could be tested the following day. In response to this learning, the minutiae of how the service would operate were developed iteratively.
Things began to improve for families. The distrust that had built up between senior leaders and practitioners began to erode. The foundations for a more relational service had been laid.
Scaling the change
The early success we were seeing gave us confidence that the next logical step was to scale the approach across children’s services.
We ran headfirst into several barriers, immediately.
Leadership practices, performance management protocols, the use of physical space, recruitment and staff evaluation processes would all need to change. The prototype was not compatible with the system it existed within. The wider system wasn’t fit for purpose.
Under Aileen's leadership, we worked to build an organisation capable of supporting this type of prototype at a greater scale. We made foundational changes to performance management and leadership practices in particular.
Rethinking Performance Management
The vastness of the performance management framework in Hillingdon was overwhelming, causing inertia and shifting focus away from helping families. Managers spent much time with spreadsheets, checking how long cases were unallocated, and looking at cases going to panel to see if the spend could be lower—while in the meantime, some family situations deteriorated. At the same time, there were no clear feedback loops that were essential in gauging whether the prototype was working.
So, we designed performance measures as learning tools, providing rapid feedback and acting as proxies for progress. To get started, we just decided to focus on:
Assessment Quality: Reviewed by experienced staff for improvement suggestions.
Timelines: Tracking how long it took to complete and act on assessments.
We tracked these monthly and quickly saw improvements. Assessment quality increased from 30% to 65%, and assessments completed on time rose from 60% to 79% within the first four months.
Shifting Focus to Leadership
After addressing performance management, we turned to leadership. Aileen identified individuals within the organisation who showed a high tolerance for ambiguity and were already choosing to lead. These individuals were promoted to senior management roles.
Aileen and the new Director of Children’s Services adopted two distinct modes that our colleague Rick Torseth calls the "arena and balcony". In the arena, they focused on immediate, tactical challenges—solving problems and putting out fires. From the balcony, they stepped back to reflect, learning from their efforts and evaluating the effectiveness of the changes. In practical terms, these were different meetings, workshops with different purposes and time in the diary to observe and reflect without the need to leap into immediate action.
Learning and scaling
These enabling factors, along with creating opportunities to learn at all levels of the organisation, made scaling the prototype possible. Over time, one pod became two and two became four. Eventually, all social work in Hillingdon was conducted by small teams using the same principles and practices that started with Patrick. We started small and grew incrementally. From start to finish, the programme took 6 months to achieve this scale.
The Ofsted inspection at the time concluded:
“Workers were positive about their managers, including senior managers. They value the approach of grouping workers in PODs, which provides for reflective discussion of cases and supports learning.”
In the inspection that followed a few years later, further improvements were evident:
“Services for children in Hillingdon are good and have significantly improved since the previous inspection...A child-centred approach is woven into strategic and operational decision-making. The shared determination to improve outcomes for children is demonstrated by an impressive pace of change.”
The success of the work was even featured in The Guardian.
Agile and relational service design go hand in hand
Why was this radical shift in the design and practice of the service possible? What methods and approaches laid the foundations for this change?
Hillingdon was determined to improve the lives of children, young people, families, and the staff who supported them. We constantly discussed the need for relationships, trust, and transparency to make these improvements a reality.
Although we weren’t using the language of agile and relational service design during our time in Hillingdon (at least not openly), these practices were at the heart of the work.
What do we mean when we say Agile?
If we had to guess what most people in the public sector associate our company, Basis, with, it would likely be Agile for Services.
Not in the context of IT, software development, or digital projects, but rather in bringing agile ways of working to frontline teams tackling complex, real-world problems citizens face.
Agile isn’t a method. It’s an approach. A mindset that values specific ways of working over others, underpinned by a set of practice principles. It was formalised in the software development community but its roots go deep into product development and the manufacturing industry in America and Japan. The original values and principles were articulated in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and published in 2001.
In its simplest form, Agile is an iterative approach to managing work. Instead of relying on a rigid plan, agile teams focus on learning by doing. They test ideas, get feedback, and adapt quickly. In doing so, they create solutions that closely meet people’s needs.
Agile in Public Services
Around 2015–16, spurred in part by growing interest in Service Design within government, we began noticing we were not alone in using agile practices to design public services. An undercurrent of practitioners emerged, using these practices to tackle complex societal challenges.
Within public services, Agile often feels intuitive. People with backgrounds in Adult Social Care, Children’s Services etc, working with complex needs have been used to iterative and incremental approaches. Even when projects are under a waterfall banner, when scratching below the surface, it turns out they work in an agile manner - naturally and by necessity. So, in 2017, we collaborated with about 40 people, mostly from public services but also private and third sectors, to develop an Agile Service Manifesto. The manifesto aimed to mainstream practices that help to navigate complexity. To raise awareness of alternative ways of working in a sector where linear approaches are often seen as the only option.
Certainly, in government services, the Agile Service Manifesto has resonated deeply, becoming a guiding framework for many.
The Agile Service Triangle
The design of impactful relational services requires the integration of Agile practices across three key dimensions: the project environment, frontline teams, and the enabling organisation. The enabling organisation is more than just a legal entity, but the combination of relevant partners in the system, including the voluntary sector and various community organisations. This holistic approach, which we call the Agile Service Triangle, ensures that Agile methodologies are not confined to the project team but permeate throughout the entire service ecosystem.
The Agile Service Triange (c) Basis 2025
Let's explore each dimension in detail:
Agile within the Project Environment
As we’ve previously set out, complex problems that require a relational service design, can’t be designed upfront in isolation from the problem itself and the people closest to it.
We’re dealing with unknown unknowns, and the most effective way of making progress is to conduct safe-to-fail experiments to learn what works in practice.
In addition to working prototypes (like the one described in Hillingdon), the project team needs a laser focus on the needs of citizens and how their solution meets them.
They need frequent feedback from citizens and experts. They need regular contact with one another to ensure they can adapt to learning as it emerges.
Agile for Frontline Teams
Just as the project environment is complex, so too are the needs of citizens.
Agile ways of working within front-line teams make dealing with this complexity, easier. Frequent interactions with colleagues enable helpers to access information, knowledge and skills beyond their area of expertise.
A mindset of testing and learning with citizens over assessing and referring starts the process of being helpful immediately. This builds trust in the process.
Agile at the Enabling Organisation Level
The enabling organisation forms the backbone of relational service design. Decision-making processes, communication methods, remote working practices, performance management, infrastructure, IT systems, physical workspaces, supplier contracts, and policies all have the potential to inhibit or promote a more relational way of working. We’ll address this in a future article.
The most relevant aspects may vary depending on the specific organisation and situation and the inhibiting factors may only be revealed once after the initiative has begun.
As Kurt Lewin noted, "You only understand a system when you try to change it." This process of change may reveal hidden resistances or unexpected areas for improvement, requiring ongoing adaptation and learning at the organisational level.
Leaders play a crucial role in creating an enabling organisation where relational services can thrive.
Despite their experience and seniority, leaders must acknowledge that the answers to complex design challenges can’t be known upfront.
This reality creates a unique tension: leaders are accountable for outcomes, yet must relinquish control to allow project teams and frontline helpers to wrestle with challenges and innovate solutions.
Navigating this tension requires them to practice adaptive leadership. To be present at frequent intervals to learn what’s working and what’s not. To provide feedback to the team based on their unique view of the challenge and organisational needs. To help them prioritise their course of action when the way forward is veiled in fog.
Changing the enabling organisation is challenging but not impossible
Changing an enabling organisation can seem overwhelmingly complex. Complex commissioning arrangements, coupled with an unshakable faith in hands-on management and performance metrics, have created an environment where many practices necessary for responding to complexity feel untenable—naive, even.
Programme boards that are easily conceived but refuse to die.
Performance data massaged to the point of meaninglessness.
Thresholds and pathways that pigeonhole human needs into pre-defined interventions.
While these structures provide the illusion of control and progress, in practice, they act like cholesterol in the arteries of public services.
They hinder our ability to learn what kind of support is helpful and to adapt as circumstances change.
They make building relationships with citizens impractical. They imply that building relationships with citizens is not important.
But as W. Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety points out:
"If a system is to be able to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges that its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses which is (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment."
In other words, "Only variety can absorb variety." Enabling organisations must be able to match the complexity of the challenges they face.
A Pragmatic Approach to Change
This book isn’t an attempt to explain how the system is broken and what needs to happen to fix it. The Human Learning Systems community and the Teal Movement (among others) are doing a far better job than we ever could.
Instead, our goal is to share practical approaches we’ve seen succeed across different contexts, offering ideas to help public services create an environment where designing and delivering services that truly align with citizens’ needs becomes a reality.
Specifically, we want to highlight the practices that enable organisations to design and deliver relational services – services built on meaningful relationships with the people they serve. Drawing on experience, we aim to show how public services can embrace agility and learning at every level of their organisation.
Examples like Hillingdon’s give us confidence that, with some adjustments to existing practices, this vision is not a pipedream, untenable, or naive. In the chapters ahead, we’ll dive deeper into the specifics of how this can be achieved.
Written by Dennis Vergne and Joseph Badman
© Basis Ltd. 2025