Knowledge comes from learning, Wisdom comes from living.
Meet Cath
Meet Cath
Knowledge comes from learning. Wisdom comes from living.
Research and Evaluation
We combine fine grained methods of exploring lived experience and place this in relationship with the Balanced Scorecard. We’ll explain using the Balanced Scorecard categories how this delivers benefits to our clients, partners, and communities below.
Clients– We work closely with our clients, which allows us to take an ethnographic approach. Ethnography can be described as exploring the world through social relations and we examine this on three levels-
1) How individuals are feeling and behaving. Is life going well for them?
2) How individuals are relating to other people. Are their relationships going well?
3) How are individuals relating to the future. Do they have goals for the future and plans in place to achieve them?
The levels create a picture of how our work impacts people and organizations from a relational perspective.
Learning and Growth– Drawn from our ethnography ideas for innovation emerge. How could barriers clients perceive be removed or reduced? How could be enable people to achieve their goals? These questions allow us to look at novel effective ways of making lives better.
Internal Process– Ethnography provides insight into how our operations could be improved. How could we communicate better? What are alternative or complementary methods of delivery? Ethnography means our continuous improvement cycle is based on lived experience.
Financial– It doesn’t matter what ideas we have; they need to be affordable. Once we have generated ideas, we examine how they could be delivered within budget. This also provides further opportunities for innovation- how could we adapt this innovation with the resources we currently have? This allows us to be responsibly innovative.
Our Partners
Organisational Culture
Organisations thrive on routines and processes. These are needed to make sure the organisation and the individuals within it are safe and that we meet quality standards. The problem is that they can blind us to changing situations and in complying with fixed and constrained processes which do not reflect the complexity of our systems, we feel overwhelmed.
To overcome this problem, and increase innovation and positive communication, we have promoted:
Active Open Mindedness- Our minds zero in on what is most relevant because the alternative is being overwhelmed. We introduce practical tools and models which allow us to quickly and effectively review our own thought processes so that we can benefit from zeroing in, but also be sensitive and adaptive to changing situations and avoid fixating. This encourages people to refit themselves continually and optimally to situations and avoid decision traps such as the confirmation bias.
Participating with others– Once we recognise our own thought patterns and how they can be fitted to situations, we can share them. We provide people with tools and models which allow people to articulate their ideas, and the reasoning behind them, to others. This allows us to gain insight from others and as we listen to alternative perspectives. Our communication models allow us to share thinking, respond to feedback, appraise the thinking of others, and adapt our thinking to accommodate new ideas and insights. We call this approach distributed cognition.
Participating with the world– Now that we have become a better friend to ourselves, and developed methods of sharing our thinking, and benefiting from the thinking of others, we need to apply it, to move beyond thoughts. We provide tools which allow people to think through plans, ideas, and strategies so that they can be adapted to real world applications. This includes appraising three types of barriers which are personal, inter-personal and ecological (the result of external structures and decisions). This approach allows us to recognise opportunities to remove or reduce barriers, and when this isn’t possible, develop resilience so they can be skillfully coped with.
If you would like to know more, get in touch.
How we Work
LIVED EXPERIENCE
Lived Experience Mentors are our secret. We are inspired in all aspects of our work by those who have lived experience of disadvantage.
CO-CREATING
Co-creating - Our projects are co-created with other charities, the public sector and the communities we serve.
Reverse mentoring
Mentoring can be an effective way to provide a safe space for discussion enabling leaders in organisation’s to feel empowered by their mentoring relationships and develop greater confidence in decision making.
Reverse mentoring initially engaged junior staff to be paired with a senior leader, but increasingly has included diversity in the mentoring process, presenting a unique window of opportunity to influence change and provide insight.
Our trained mentors allow reflection, challenge and to explore alternative viewpoints, often without the burden of understanding the systems and silos that exist.
“Reverse mentoring is demonstrating itself as an efficient tool for navigating biases, sharing knowledge, creating engagement and building relations based on mutual acceptance and trust,”
Progressing through education fairly
The Maslow Inspire Programme is aimed at supporting those with lived experience of workforce exclusion to thrive and burst through the glass ceiling in your organisation.
The Peer Worker Apprenticeship is now available and we look forward to the opportunities this will bring
https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-standards/peer-worker
Creating Quality Improvement, Research and Open Source Resources
Our unique research team are designed to innovate co-creation and ensure learning is freely shared, truly giving back to build stronger communities and organisations through collective wisdom embedding those with lived experience as action researchers
“Everyone has something to say and something valuable and something important or interesting… The more people, I think, are invested in making space, new stories and new ways of telling stories, the better off we all are.”
— Hank Willis Thomas, interviewed in Collective Wisdom
Resources include:
- Our human library
- Safer handover template
- Using distributed cognition to explore incidents and complaints
- Supervision template based on meaning making
- Service evaluation models
Our Projects
REGISTERED CHARITY NUMBER: 1197354
