Helping teams and services turn relational, purpose-led ideas into practice
First Contact Clinical worked with Changing Futures Northumbria (CFN) to develop a set of practical resources to support people who are interested in more relational, purpose-led ways of working and who want to understand what it takes to move from aspiration to implementation.
At the centre of this work is the CFN open-source playbook. The playbook does not offer a model to lift and drop into another service. Instead, it shares learning from practice and invites others to create, test and adapt their own local version.
Our role has been to help make that learning more accessible and more usable for others. We have developed a companion guide, a reflection and implementation workbook, and a commissioner guide to help services, leaders and decision-makers think about what this approach could look like in their own context.
The resources
The CFN Playbook: The open-source playbook shares the learning from CFN’s journey and provides a practical starting point for teams and organisations who want to explore a more relational, purpose-led approach.
Visit the CFN website
From Playbook to Practice: Companion Guide: A practical companion guide to help teams and services understand the thinking, theory and implementation considerations behind the playbook and adapt the learning to their own setting.
Readiness self-assessment: This self-assessment is designed to help you consider whether the conditions are in place to begin shaping a local version of relational, purpose-led practice.
Reflection and Implementation Workbook: A workbook to help teams capture their reflections, work through the implementation questions, and begin shaping version 1 of their own local playbook.
Commissioner, Policy and Funder Guide: A shorter guide for commissioners, policy makers and funders who want to understand the conditions needed for relational, purpose-led practice to take root and what this means for service design, specification and expectations.
Why this matters
Many people are drawn to the idea of working in a more relational way, but it can be difficult to know what this means in practice or how to make it possible within real services and systems.
The work with CFN has shown that relational, purpose-led practice is not only about frontline skill. It is also about:
These resources are designed to help others move beyond interest alone and begin thinking about what this could mean in practice.
How FCC can support your journey from playbook to practice
Reading a playbook can spark ideas. Turning those ideas into real change is different. It takes skill, leadership, reflection, structure and support over time.
FCC can support teams, services and organisations who want to move from interest in relational, purpose-led practice to practical implementation.
Skills training to work in a relational way
We provide training to help practitioners, team leads and services strengthen the skills needed to work in a relational, person-centred and purpose-led way. Drawing on our SCIP framework, the training helps participants bring greater structure, clarity and focus to conversations without becoming scripted. It supports people to work more confidently around what matters to the person, agree and hold a clear purpose, balance empathy with direction, and use questioning and reflection skills to explore priorities, barriers and next steps. The training also helps participants think about how SCIP can be applied in their own role, team or service context to support meaningful and practical change.
Support for implementation
Relational practice cannot only shape how practitioners work with people using services; it also needs to shape how teams work with each other. FCC can support leaders, managers and teams to create the conditions that make this way of working more possible by helping to develop shared purpose and expectations, strengthen team culture and psychological safety, introduce or refine team agreements, support reflective learning and supervision, and explore more autonomous or self-managing ways of working. This is an area where FCC brings direct experience, having both implemented autonomous teams and supported services to work in more relational, person-centred ways around what matters to the person.
About the collaboration
This collaboration has been about more than producing documents. It has been about helping to turn learning from practice into resources that others can use.
The aim is not to encourage people to copy CFN’s model exactly. The aim is to help people ask better questions:
Interested in finding out more?
To find out more about the resources, the training, or FCC’s implementation support, please get in touch. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your service, your ambitions, and how we can support you to begin shaping a version that works in your local context.
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