Mental Maths, Truth Tables and Making Partnership Choices: Part 2

In my last piece, I wrote about using a simple truth-table approach to think about partnerships.

The basic idea was straightforward. Start with the problem, identify what it requires, then ask what we have, what a potential partner has, and what neither of us has. It is a useful exercise because it forces the logic of the partnership into the open.

Now, let’s take this a step further.

What happens when the thing you have just analysed becomes the thing you analyse next? Ha-ha! This sounds abstract but it is actually quite simple. 

Take a healthcare example: suppose an NHS organisation wants to improve access to cancer care for people from ethnically diverse communities. A cancer charity might bring trusted relationships with communities, lived-experience insight and the ability to convene community organisations. The NHS might bring clinical expertise, patient data and access to cancer services.

The first calculation is fairly simple: What does the problem require? What do we have? What do they have? You can see where the partnership might add value but then, that is not the end of the calculation.

The next question is: What can these capabilities actually do together? Perhaps they can improve cancer information, redesign referral routes and help services understand why some communities are not accessing care.

Now we have learned something about the partnership itself.

So we can ask another question: What is stopping those changes from happening?

Perhaps the problem is not simply a lack of information or community engagement. The data may not identify inequalities properly, different organisations may control different parts of the referral pathway, funding may sit in separate budgets, etc., etc. 

Now the partnership is no longer the whole problem. The partnership itself has become something we can examine as part of a larger system of problems/solutions. So, you stop seeing the partnership as the whole solution and start seeing it as one part of a system of cause and effect.

So, in our healthcare example:

First: What does each organisation bring?

Then: What can they achieve with those capabilities together?

Then: What else in the system affects whether that achievement actually leads to the outcome we want?

Then: What needs to happen beyond our partnership?

Notice what has happened.

We have not abandoned the first question. We have simply built on it.

The community relationships, data and clinical expertise are still there. But once we understand how they combine, that combination becomes part of the problem/solution we want to understand.

This is what I mean by moving between levels. You can think of it almost like mental maths. You do one calculation, get an answer, and then use that answer as the starting point for the next calculation.

Assets → combination → partnership → wider system.

Each step gives you a bigger picture of what you are dealing with.

Partnerships can look perfectly logical when viewed in isolation and quite different when viewed in context. Doing this gives you a critical lens of where your partnership solution sits and gives you sight of the issues it can’t solve and a wider system that might dislodge it.

Two organisations might have everything they need to run a community cancer information programme. But if the underlying problem is a referral pathway that people cannot navigate, the partnership may be solving only part of the problem (and it needs to acknowledge this).

The question is therefore not just: “Do these organisations fit together?” It is also: “What is this partnership part of?”