The September discussion explored how offering help changes a situation. It examined the pull towards expertise or compliant service, the client behind the client, and the continuing negotiation of responsibility. Internal consulting brings additional relationships: a line manager, a sponsor, and people who can authorise or obstruct the work. Authenticity and contracting for learning remained practical questions.
The accompanying field guide develops Benjamin’s consulting teaching from 2022 to 2026, drawing particularly on Peter Block and Barry Oshry. It offers contracting questions, practice situations, a learning contract, and a one-page practice map. Readers can use these resources before a conversation, with a colleague, or through an assignment.
A question to take into practice: Who can authorise or veto this work, and what will each person remain responsible for?
Session title, sources, and scope
Advertised as ‘The consultant is in the system: a practice lab for helping without taking over’. Original workshop announcement.
The public thematic account describes the actual slide-free discussion. The planned triad practice was not completed. Later exercises in the field guide are teaching resources, not a record of completed workshop activity.
Source locations: September session account; field guide: Start with the work in front of you, Choose a way in, and Three ways to use this guide.
Making relational, place-based public services ordinary
Benjamin P Taylor · · Online
The workshop examined two connected tasks: improving what happens in a person’s life, and changing the conditions that allow useful practice to endure. Its public resource follows a fictional situation through service contact, records, measures, management decisions, and the next encounter. What survives each translation, what disappears, and who has to join things up?
The discussion addressed information that is recorded without changing the response, case closure without evidence that a need is resolved, and the gap between knowing what should change and having authority to change it. The developed resource includes a working tool, an infographic, and a facilitator guide for designing a learning loop and a bounded institutional experiment.
A question to take into practice: Which recorded fact could alter the next response, and who has the authority to make that happen?
Session title, sources, and scope
Advertised as ‘The system is inside the practice: making relational, place-based public services ordinary’. Original workshop announcement.
The guide distinguishes the recorded discussion from later teaching development. It does not establish that participants completed the loop-design and experiment exercises.
Source locations: Public resource: workshop discussion at 50:38–52:12, 1:01:06, 1:02:10, and 1:05:40–1:07:01; working tool and facilitator guide.
Six conference sessions
What makes action possible? brings these six attributed accounts together through questions about action, autonomy, meaning, and strategy. The comparison is editorial; the speakers do not present a shared framework.
Internalized Liabilities
Kai-Uwe Radde · Deferred organisational work, six kinds of debt, and questions about what a team needs to act.
This selection has six conference accounts and two subsequent workshops. Full conference harvesting and review are still in progress. The conference accounts draw on public descriptions and recovered captions, with the limits recorded in the guide; human editorial acceptance remains pending. Workshop resources distinguish actual discussion from later teaching development.
The SCiO catalogue contains the wider programme. Original sources retain their authorship, access conditions, and terms.