Mental Maths, Truth Tables and Making Partnership Choices: Part 3

 

In Part 1, I looked at using truth tables to understand what each organisation brings to a partnership.

In Part 2, I looked at what happens when we go one step further and place that partnership within the wider system around it.

There is another useful idea in Gibson and Isaac’s work: once you start looking at relationships, you can examine the properties of those relationships.

They use four terms for this: symmetric, antisymmetric, transitive and reflexive.

The language sounds mathematical but they are very practical.

Take our healthcare example again.

Suppose an NHS organisation and a cancer charity are working together to improve access to cancer services for people from ethnically diverse communities.

Is the relationship symmetric?

A symmetric relationship works both ways.

So we might ask: Does the NHS influence the charity in the same way the charity influences the NHS? Maybe not the case.

The NHS may control access to services, data and clinical pathways. The charity may influence community engagement, trust and lived-experience insight. That does not make the relationship bad. It tells us something important about where influence sits and that can affect how we design the partnership.

Is it antisymmetric?

An antisymmetric relationship is one where, if the relationship works in both directions, that tells us something about the entities involved.

In partnership terms, this prompts a different question: Are we assuming two organisations have equal influence simply because they are partners?

They may be partners, but they may have very different authority, resources or decision-making power. Recognising that difference can make responsibilities and negotiations much clearer.

Is it transitive?

This asks whether a relationship carries through a chain. For example: Community organisation → NHS service → commissioner

If the community organisation can influence the NHS service, and the NHS service can influence the commissioner, does that mean the community organisation can influence the commissioner? It may or may not. This question forces out the useful intricacies of the partnership. A partnership may have influence over one part of a system without having influence over the next. 

You can therefore identify where the chain breaks and ask: Who else do we need to involve? Perhaps that means working with commissioners, primary care, another NHS organisation or a community network.

Is it reflexive?

A reflexive relationship is one where something relates to itself. In partnership terms, this encourages a slightly tricky question: What does each organisation need to change about itself?

It is easy to look outward and ask what our partner needs to do but some of the barriers to success may sit within our own organisation: our data, processes, incentives, culture or decision-making. Sometimes the partnership cannot move until each organisation changes something internally.

The point is not to turn partnership meetings into a mathematics seminar. It is to give us better questions.

Who influences whom?

Where does influence stop?

Which relationships carry across the system?

Where does the chain break?

What needs to change within our own organisations?

That gives us a much clearer picture of what the partnership can actually achieve. It also shows us what it cannot achieve on its own.

Going back to our cancer example, the charity and NHS organisation might successfully improve community engagement but if the referral pathway remains difficult, the relevant data remains unavailable, or commissioning arrangements prevent services from changing, the partnership may only move part of the system.

That is not necessarily a failure of the partnership. It is information about the system in which the partnership operates and that information tells you what to do next.

You may need to negotiate with another organisation. Bring another partner into the work. Change an internal process. Influence a commissioner or accept that a particular outcome sits outside the partnership’s direct control.

This is what I find increasingly useful about moving from assets → combination → partnership → wider system → relationships between the parts.

 

The deeper you go, the clearer the boundaries of your partnership become and strangely, that can make the partnership more ambitious.

 

You stop asking: “What can we do together?”and start asking: “What needs to change across the system, what part can we influence, and who else needs to be involved?”

That is a much more useful starting point for creating change that lasts. 

I’ll be teaching a lot on these at the one day workshop on Systems Thinking for Strategic Partnerships and Convening. You can find more information here