Richmond and Wandsworth Council Children’s Services
More Than an Away Day - Strengthening partnerships through creative collaboration across services.
Beginning.
Richmond and Wandsworth Council’s Children Services away day was an opportunity to bring together its partners from the Voluntary Sector, Strategic Partnerships, Community Involvement Links, Safeguarding Children, Commissioning and Contract Management.
They brought us in to facilitate a story workshop that would enable them to look, in small mixed agency teams, at wicked problems, relevant to those taking part. The activities would forge better awareness of each other and stimulate the agencies to work more collaboratively and effectively.
Middle.
We led the newly formed cross-sector partnership teams through a full day process to see how they each impacted and could benefit particular individuals, their families and the communities they belong to. Our story structure enabled them to have new and different conversations, seeing aspects of their subject and those involved and affected by it in a new light; which in turn informed how they addressed the solutions. The stories they built and told at he end of the day illustrated the context of their wicked problems, what the solutions look like, how they could be achieved and what the desired or best possible outcomes would be.
End.
Having worked together using the storytelling techniques participants gained deeper understanding of the needs of the people behind the problems that required addressing, the roles they each had to play together in the implementation of solutions and how to work with the varying degrees of constraints on budgets and resources. They found new insights on what each service could offer in combination, to ensure the end support package was greater than the previous sum of its parts.
