Reflecting on the Democracy Network principles

Eagle-eyed readers of our newsletter will have spotted that we really love The Democracy Network's new Collaboration for Democratic Change guide, which we shared in our August edit. This guide is designed to help UK-based academics and practitioners build and develop impactful collaborative relationships aimed at producing social and democratic change.

Collaboration, developing relationships, social change, and impact are words we use at Telescope all the time. We also highly value transparency, openness, and critical reflection. Knowing that our work is very aligned with the Democracy Network (even though we don’t typically work with academics as is the focus of this guide), and recognising how much we’ve been inspired by them over the years, we thought we’d take the time to reflect on their “Top Tips for Successful Collaboration”, and share our thoughts - how much do our programmes match up to this useful guide?

Where we are strong

1: Relationships First

Relationships are how we start all our programmes, even our small taster workshops. It always comes first, because you can’t build effective collaboration without first establishing that human connection. We lean heavily into simple but effective tools like active listening to build empathy and ensure our participants are really engaged and committed. And it's surprisingly effective - 86% of our participants have made new connections that they are likely to continue with after programmes.

2: Find shared values and goals

Alongside our active listening work, we use values mapping exercises a lot. This is particularly valuable to move past the job titles and re-balance uneven power dynamics, which can pose severe barriers to collaborative working. We recently ran a taster workshop with the Carers Trust, bringing together several policy and programme staff across the Trust to brainstorm how to design a new Covenant for Young Carers (to be released by Young Carers Week in March 2024). Returning to a values-based approach in this workshop allowed the group to think more broadly about their ideal outcomes and the principles they feel should be applied to all young carers across the country.

3: Build on each other's strengths

This element is something we tackle via our focus on sharing insights from different perspectives. Journey mapping is a central tool for most of our programmes, and we have developed a preconceptions exercise that we have used both with Policy Profession and during our work on Grand Avenues to encourage people to be upfront about what they do and don’t know about the other person’s role, and what they’ve assumed. This is focused primarily on the knowledge and experience all participants have gathered through their roles - we could also be more explicit about the skills and technical expertise that exist within our groups.

6: Be transparent and realistic

Though systems change is challenging, as our co-founder Sarah explored in our recent mentoring blog, we do try to encourage participants to consider small tweaks they themselves can make, that can contribute to longer-term change. We use a simple impact/feasibility matrix that helps to sort what’s realistic as well as what’s exciting. We also focus carefully on identifying the difference between upstream and downstream interventions - which we often introduce with the much-loved analogy of babies in the river, popularised by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s. Our overall approach to programmes is loosely based on the double diamond, which includes “prototyping” and testing - but we do always encourage participants to find the low-hanging fruit that they can try in a small way before moving onto bigger things.

It starts with a man standing beside a river. He suddenly sees a baby floating down the river, and he jumps in to rescue it. But as he does so, he sees another baby floating down, and another and another. More people from the nearby village come to help him, and soon they are all in the water, desperately pulling babies from the river. They do their best, working together to develop an efficient system for rescuing the children and taking care of them, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer number that they are trying to save. 

At this point, the man gets out of the water and starts walking upstream. The others start shouting at him, “Where are you going? We need you here!” 

He replies: “I’m going upstream to find out why all these babies are falling in the river in the first place.”

7: Be your own advocate

This piece of advice resonated with us as an organisation, as well as being important for our participants. We talk publicly about our work, including reflecting on areas we’re not so strong in, but always in the spirit of learning and improving. We push for co-design and representation, and we promote collaboration, always. For example, our work with the Ministry of Justice has always been undertaken on the premise that workshops bring together mixed-seniority groups, since we believe strongly the voices of those frontline staff are just as important as those in middle and senior management. We also aim to empower everyone who takes part in our programmes to be changemakers, taking forward these new ways of working and advocating for the importance of collaboration across roles and domains.

What we’re not so good at

4: Embrace the awkward conversations

Given the nature of our work that brings together individuals across divides, we've inevitably had some challenges and antagonism between participants. But in general, we do recognise that our groups are quite self-selecting and that the policymakers we work with tend to err on the side of assuming they don't know the answer, rather than pushing back. We’d love to push ourselves to do better on this - bringing together less willing groups, more diverse voices, and having those awkward conversations that, in the end, can produce more rich outcomes.

5: Critique power imbalances

This top tip is the one that really resonated with us most. We talk a lot about power imbalances, particularly in a society where central government policy experience is typically seen as “more valuable” than frontline experience. But in a practical sense, we rely heavily on values mapping, active listening, and careful facilitation, and assume that these are sufficient to put people on a level playing field. But should we be more explicit about the way power sits with certain people? Could we challenge ourselves and our participants to call that out? How might this improve our programmes and the longer-term outcomes if we tackle it upfront?

In closing

This guide was a very thought-provoking piece for us and we’re very grateful to organisations like the Democracy Network for sharing resources like this so openly. It’s particularly fascinating to us that this guide, like many of our own toolkits, include tips and guidance that we feel should be central to how government operates. It’s evident that we haven’t quite got there yet - but we know there are so many great organisations out there promoting collaborative, innovative work in government that over time, the changes will come!