My friend, Dr Sammy Batt-Rawden knows only too well the dangers of just keeping her chin up and carrying on. In this beautiful, but heart-wrenching TEDx talk, she tells her story.
Staff in the NHS (and indeed all our public services) are working against a tide of a huge rise in public demand, funding constraints and dangerously low staffing levels for what is required. The old edict to ‘keep calm and carry on’ simply misses the point. There isn’t a culture of shirking responsibility in the NHS. People are going way above and beyond every day, and it is taking it’s very real toll. Yes, we need to increasingly develop cultures of joy and kindness in how we work, but there must be determined change by leaders in the Government to ensure that the buck is not passed when it comes to who is responsible for ensuring the wellbeing of our clinical teams across the UK. Teams are already doing much to take care of each other and themselves, and yet staff surveys across the UK show that absenteeism is increasing, along with burnout and morale continues to decline. Do the maths!
Listen to Sammy’s story and let’s change the tone of the conversation so that we can work on practical solutions together. Those solutions will include everyone. Part of the solution lies with learning to work radically differently with our communities. Some of it lies within our choices of how we use the health service. There is of course work to do in how we care for people who work across the NHS and set good working patterns. But there is still much work to be done by those in power to think more carefully about where and how budgets are spent. The new spending plan for the NHS pays very little attention to safe staffing levels or staff development – it needs much more care and attention.
I’m so grateful to Sammy for changing the nature of this increasingly important conversation:
I am a massive advocate of a Culture of Joy! I really enjoyed listening to the lovely Yusuf Yousef at TEDxNHS 2019 and his incredible ability to build relationships, cross barriers and connect people together. This is exactly what we need more of in the NHS and across our public services.
Simple, but brilliantly effective! There is so much inspirational practice everyday in the NHS – but if you don’t have humility, you will miss most of it!
Last year, I was invited to submit a proposal for a TEDxNHS talk. TEDx are independently organised TED events, and it turns out that TEDxNHS is the biggest of these in the world. I submitted two ideas – one around how we can work radically differently with our communities and one around how we create great working cultures in the NHS – both huge passions of mine. I was well excited to get through the process of selection, but was not at all prepared for the work ahead of me!
I do quite a bit of public speaking and really feel alive when I get to communicate things that I’m passionate about. I had no idea how different it is to prepare for a TED talk though! I read Chris Anderson’s book over the summer, and had several anxiety-related dreams . I genuinely thought I was never going to be ready! I couldn’t even really decide what I was going to talk about, let alone get it into an engaging piece of prose, whilst sticking to the all important 18 minute timeframe. Thanks to my amazing coach, Zara Brookes (can’t tell you how grateful I am!) and the kindness of Charlotte Hall and Shane Costigan, with hours of patience and encouragement from my lovely wife, Kat, I finally got it ready – an amalgamation of my passions. I hugely enjoyed the discipline and the focus involved in preparation, and when I got onto the stage at Indigo at the O2 Arena in London, this is what happened – hope you enjoy it:
The final speaker at our ‘Love Ecology’ was the wonderful Gabriella (Gabi) Gilkes, Head of Ecology and Health and Wellbeing at Eden North. Gabi talked to us about the real nature of ecology, connectivity, community and friendship. She also took us on an amazing tour of how the Eden Project will help the people of Morecambe Bay and all those who visit, reconnect with our Ecology and get involved in falling in love with and taking care of our environment, with a strong emphasis on the creative arts, story telling and beautiful experiences. Having been involved with various members of the team from the Eden Project over recent months, I am seriously impressed with their ethos, their kindness and their genuine sense of partnership with our communities, here in the bay. It really is a wonderful world! This talk is really worth 30 minutes of your time:
Having heard from the masterful wizard that is Alastair McIntosh, we also welcomed the earth-stewarding, foraging genius, who is Miles Irving. Miles, one of the leading foragers in the UK, talked to us about breaking the silence. With song and sensational wisdom, he spun out several threads, before catching us all in his web of interconnected beauty! Watch, listen and embrace the reality of our recoverable relationship to the ecology.
At the start of October, we hosted ‘Love Ecology’ in Morecambe Bay. We started the day by reminding ourselves of the journey so far, through Love People, Love Society, Love Economics and Love Politics (I’ll be writing a separate blog on this soon).
We then welcomed the force of nature, who is, Professor Alastair McIntosh, aka Radagast the Brown (!), who is an incredible mix of Academic and Activist. He took us on an amazing journey of our disconnection from the land and how we can reconnect to it. This is seriously worthy of your time! Listen – this is so good!
In my view, it would be impossible to host a day on ‘Love Politics’ without it including my great friend, Roger Mitchell. He is a brilliant thinker and one of the kindest people I know! His thesis, ‘Church, Gospel and Empire’ (or ‘The Fall of The Church’, if you want an easier to read version!) is vital reading for anyone who wants to seriously engage with the idea of a politics of love. Here, drawing in his own work and that of Luke Bretherton, he gives an absolutely brilliant insight into why love is such a powerful foundation and force for a new politics. This is really worthy of your time and energy!
Following on from the incredible input from Zahra Delilah, we hosted a ‘panel in the round’ as the room was full of great thinkers. Then we had a world cafe conversation in which we asked the question: “What might be possible with a politics of love in Morecambe Bay?” We then challenged each table to write a poem as a summary of their discussion! They had the choice of and ABAB four liner, a limerick or a haiku! There were some truly excellent and amusing offerings.
Here are the links to the panel discussion and the poems. Enjoy!
So….as has become our custom in Morecambe Bay, we tend to deliver the ‘Art of Hosting/Art of Connecting’ trainings over 3 days, but we have a bit of a break after the 2nd day and then invite people back a few weeks later, partly to let us know what they’ve tried out in the mean time, but also so we can invite our wider community of practice back into the fray!
Or 3rd day of ‘The Art of Connecting Communities’ focussed in on how our connections create new possibilities. As a team we felt like we needed to ground a bit more of the undergirding theory that gives depth to this way of working, as well as remembering some of the great practices involved. We checked in, this time using triads, to help us get a bit deeper straight away and then we headed into a 90 minute immersive and reflective piece of learning on the four-fold practice. We drew out a quadrant on the floor to represent the four different ways of thinking about ‘hosting’ and then used circle practice in each quadrant to really reflect together on what it means to: host yourself, be hosted, host others and host together.
In each of the quadrants we put a question for the circle to explore. Learning to host and host well is a shift in practice for many of us. But it is a leadership style that is open to all and gives each person a deep sense of value and confidence.
In the ‘host yourself’ quadrant we asked: How do you host yourself well in the midst of chaos? There were some really creative insights. Some which stood out were: Breathe! Be Patient. Just be. Take care of yourself. Accept Chaos.
In the ‘be hosted’ quadrant we asked: When were you last hosted well? Our key agreements were that humour really helps, along with knowing the space is safe, there is no hierarchy, lots of voices are recognised and given space and lived experience is given space to come to the fore.
In the ‘host others’ quadrant we asked: What are your strengths in hosting others? It would be fair to say that this is the question that people struggled the most at. we are so used to knowing what we don’t do well, that we felt a bit of ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ was needed. We all realised that we have strengths to bring to hosting and it’s ok to play to our strengths. It allows us to use empathy and bee aware of the needs of others as well as using humility.
In the ‘host with others’ quadrant we asked: Why host with others? There are, of course, tonnes of reasons, but the ones which stood out for us were: it’s more fun, we learn from each other’s, we support each other, we play to each other’s strengths, we value our diversity and we make better connections.
We then had a ‘knowledge cafe’, which enables some quick space for learning about things people might want to go a bit deeper on. It’s adult-led learning! We had 3 rounds of 15 minutes in which people could choose to go to 3 of 4 options around core theory for the ‘art of hosting’:
After lunch we then had an OPERA! No – we did not all start singing (although much more the shame in my view!). Opera is an excellent way of helping to converge a conversation around consensus and decision making. It’s a beautifully relational and democratic process in which a group of people can make collective sense of the options available to them and what they feel really need to be the priorities.
We used OPERA to explore a question around saving money in the NHS locally. Basically what happens is this:
First you have to ask a good question! Ours was “What ideas do you have about how the NHS can save £120million pounds over the next 3-5 years (with some context given of the issues involved)?
Then everyone works silently on their own to come up with the OWN ideas. After this, they work in PAIRS to agree on their top four ideas. Then they EXPLAIN their ideas to the rest of the group. The group, having heard all the ideas, then RANK them in order before ARRANGING them into groups for action planning. It is quite remarkable to watch this process in action and to see participatory democracy really work in practice! I LOVE IT! There were some really great ideas and it was amazing to see what the group had appetite for and what they resisted or didn’t think would make enough difference. It’s a hugely helpful process that we will use again and again!
To finish our day, we had a ‘dream world cafe’. George Monbiot states that the only way to replace the current narrative we are living in, is not through more data, or compelling facts and figures. The only way ahead for us is to tell a better story – one that we want to live in together – one that awakens our imagination. The problem is that we have forgotten how to tell each other good stories. So, we spent some time doing just that – telling a better story of Morecambe Bay and awakening our imaginations to future possibilities. We asked ourselves: Imagine we are better connected? What new possibilities can we now envision for Morecambe Bay?
Imagine if we kept on doing this – what kind of stories might we tell and begin to live in? Here is a summary of what we came up with (not bad for 45 minutes!) – the last sketch is particularly moving:
We were thrilled to welcome Prof Katherine Trebeck of the ‘Wellbeing Economy’ to Morecambe Bay for our ‘Love Economics’ event. Katherine is a brilliant economist and has recently released this excellent book, ‘The Economics of Arrival’. You will be blown away by the hope of what Katherine has to say. Please make some time and let’s build a coalition of hope that things can and must change for good!
