A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a friend who leads a mental health service. She told me about how she’d recently been presenting her ideas and work to colleagues from other localities, organisations and disciplines. She quietly marvelled at how they had received her work. They had told her that her work was inspired and that it really got them wanting to follow in the same direction in their own services. My friend reflected, her work had never been particularly appreciated by the near neighbours of her professional community. In fact, it had been something of an uphill struggle to be heard within her own local context. How could the value of her work be unseen by those close by, and yet so easily recognised by those further afield?

As my friend spoke, I was reminded of hearing about this kind of pattern again and again from different people over the years. This was clearly more than just a one off occurrence in a particular context, this is a common habit of systems. High quality work recognised more readily from afar, or on the other side of the same coin, organisational systems tend to look to others in ‘foreign lands’ for solutions to their local problems. How common, it seems, that great ideas discussed over the staff room kettle are overlooked whilst programmes from people and places far away are commissioned.

Clinical practice can make us familiar with the phenomenon that people commonly look outside of themselves for a remedy to their problems. We can tend to assume something is defunct or missing from ourselves, and to get it, we must seek elsewhere, hoping to find the person who has the missing piece of our particular jigsaw. Could it be that organisational systems also enact this same tendency; assuming our lack and fixing our gaze ‘out there’ to pursue the solutions that we want?

In terms of individual psychological development, we know that having someone meet us in a relationship, and experiencing being recognised and understood by them, is an essential process through which we humans grow. Through the experience of being recognised, we come to recognise ourselves. Through the experience of being accepted as good enough just as we are, we come to accept ourselves as good enough. We come to see that there is no essential problem about ourselves that requires a remedy that is beyond us. Freed from this existential concern, we can go out into the world with enough resource, capability and confidence to live our lives well, cope with what comes, and generate solutions to the problems that crop up.

Perhaps then, mirroring this process of individual psychological development, organisational systems also struggle alone to resolve their doubts, recognise their inherent ‘good-enoughness’, and use this recognition to effectively address problems themselves. Perhaps just like individuals, organisational systems need to meet an other in order to have their worth recognised and their capability realised.

Part of what we do at my workplace is to fulfil this role in professional systems around children who are looked after. As a partner, yet also one step removed from the local authorities who lead on children’s care, we can bring a difference of perspective. It isn’t that we have better ideas or are superior to our colleagues in social care, just that we are in a different position to them. We commonly join professional systems around children and, from that slight distance, we begin to recognise their strengths, their doubts, their sticking points. Through this process of being attended to and recognised, professional systems often respond by gaining recognition of these things themselves, plus the capability to effectively address the problems that are arising.

As individuals, we can venture outside of ourselves and meet ourselves in the eyes of another person. When we do this, we can discover the value of what was already within ourselves but previously hidden from our view. After all, as human beings, we real-ise ourselves in relationships. The same is perhaps true in human systems and networks too. Perhaps we also need to venture out beyond our own organisational human system, encounter others from different professional systems, be seen, heard and understood, and through this come to recognise ourselves, the nature of our struggles, our capabilities and our solutions.

Jael 2021