Putting relational public services into practice: psychological safety, funding and governance

Moving public services towards relational practice has to begin from the ground up. System-wide restructures and new digital platforms can help, but only if they respond to what is already being learned in the everyday work, rather than the other way round.

What it calls for is noticing where practice already works well and building out from there, which is slower and less visible than announcing something new (1).

Psychological safety

Underneath all of this sits psychological safety: whether people feel able to say honestly what is happening without negative consequences. It depends on whether a worker can say they do not know, a manager can share a problem up the line, or a policy team can admit to uncertainty without fearing blame.

In my own research, I have come to see this as the regulating force in the whole system, the thing that keeps it healthy in the way a thermostat holds a room's temperature (2). Where people feel safe enough, relationships are robust enough to hold several points of view, absorb a shock and adapt. Where safety is undermined by control, targets, fear or rigid rules, those relationships turn brittle and silence ensues.

Funding

Good intentions usually stall when the issue of resources dominates, because building relationships and creating space to reflect takes time, and time is the first thing squeezed when reporting is driven from the top and rests on quantitative data and retrospective evaluation that makes no room for capturing learning.

Three shifts would make a substantial difference. Firstly, fund learning rather than targets, tying money to a shared purpose and to evidence that people are learning together. Secondly, devolve decisions to those closest to the work, including people with lived experience. And finally, share both the risk and the accountability, through ongoing joint review rather than a judgement passed at the end (3).

Governance

Local initiatives remain fragile as long as the thinking at the top stays the same. Governance systems need trust and shared responsibility built into them, and that means moving away from managing towards leading systemically, where the job is to design for adaptive learning rather than for control (4).

In practice this looks like protecting time and space for people in different roles to reflect together, legitimising not knowing yet, and noticing where the rules, metrics and budgets are themselves undermining safety at the front line. It also means changing the accountability question, so that people account for what they learned, how they learned it, and what they changed as a result.

An example

FEABHAS, a Sláintecare Healthy Community Programme anchored in Dublin City Council's Local Economic and Community Plan, offers a picture of what this makes possible (5). Local development officers worked with communities on the social determinants of health, treating them as interconnected and living rather than as separate problems, and putting residents' own experience at the centre of what was designed.

The actions that emerged were built on local assets and relationships rather than delivered from above, and the findings now shape Sláintecare funding priorities nationally. Local work changed national thinking, which is not the order these things usually happen in.

Why it is worth the discomfort

None of this is comfortable. It asks for changes in practice, culture, structure and accountability, and it asks people to hold uncertainty for longer than most systems allow.

The alternative, though, is to carry on spending public money and human energy on systems that exhaust their workers and fail the people they are meant to serve, which is no longer defensible (6).

Anyone wanting to work through what this means, either as a policy-maker or as a service manager, would be welcome at the EPEx executive programme, Harnessing Relational Public Services for Better Social Outcomes, at UCD on 23 and 24 September, which I am co-facilitating with Professor Toby Lowe. To learn more, contact epex@ucd.ie.

Dr Joan O'Donnell is an Irish systems thinking expert, consultant, lecturer on the Open University's MSc Systems programme, and an advanced facilitator of Social Presencing Theatre (MIT). She is a consultant on the Empowering Policy Excellence (EPEx) Executive Education initiative at the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy and a fellow of SCiO, the global systems practitioner organisation.

This piece draws on Reframing Public Services in Ireland as a Relational Practice, written with Toby Lowe, Gabriel Eichsteller and Adele O'Neill and published by UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy in March 2026 (7).

References

1.  Lowe, T., & French, M. (2021). Leading public service systems: Human learning systems in practice. Centre for Public Impact. See also Ison, R. (2010). Systems practice: How to act in a climate-change world. Springer.

2.  O'Donnell, J. (2024). Safe virtual space: Taking a practice turn in psychological safety, towards systemically viable and sustainable disability supports. Doctoral dissertation, National University of Ireland Maynooth. On the Viable Systems Model, see Beer, S. (1985). Diagnosing the system for organizations. Wiley; and Espinosa, A., & Walker, J. (2011). A complexity approach to sustainability. Imperial College Press.

3.  Human Learning Systems. (2020). Plymouth Alliance for complex needs. See also Plymouth City Council. (2021). Complex needs alliance contract briefing paper; and NHS England. (2023). A framework for addressing practical barriers to integration of VCSE organisations in systems.

4.  Hobbs, C. (2019). An adaptive learning pathway for systemic leadership. In Systemic leadership for local governance. Springer. See also Ison, R., & Straw, E. (2020). The hidden power of systems thinking: Governance in a climate emergency. Routledge.

5.  Phillip, E., Keogh, E., Bachari, A., & Stanistreet, D. (2024). Community perspectives on health needs and assets in Sláintecare Healthy Community Programme areas in Dublin: The FEABHAS project. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

6.  Davies, D. (2025). The unaccountability machine: Why big systems make terrible decisions and how the world lost its mind. University of Chicago Press.

7.  O'Donnell, J., Lowe, T., Eichsteller, G., & O'Neill, A. (2026). Reframing public services in Ireland as a relational practice. UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy. https://publicpolicy.ie/papers/reframing-public-services-in-ireland-as-a-relational-practice/