Cross-sector Partnering for Change in Health and Care
The King's Fund
Below are some expressions of rank (and therefore power) to pay attention:
Experience and expertise (lived and learned)
Social hierarchies (eg, race, class, gender, age and disability)
Earned status (reputation, history, past achievements)
Interpersonal preferences (extroverts, introverts, biases to action or thinking, charisma, energy, physical presence)
Positional authority (seniority in an organisation)
Organisational size and status
Sector (statutory, voluntary, private)
Financial (eg, who holds the resources to make things happen, funder/provider relations)
Geographic (eg, urban and rural differences in status)
Stories are how we make sense of the world. They help us give meaning to the endless flow of experiences and information we are exposed to.
Big complex human systems, like those for health and care, are filled with lots of different stories. A story with this kind of power is an emotional and human one about what really matters to you and why.
Systems and partnerships aren’t neutral - there are winners and losers, insiders and outsiders.
Your partnership is a microcosm of the wider system. And because systems are organised in ways which mean that power, resources and influence are unevenly distributed, this inequality will also be true of your partnership.
Stories are the currency of human systems, and so storytelling is change-making. Rank is the power we have relative to one another in relationships, groups, communities and the social world. In a way, our rank is the sum of our privileges, and while some kinds of rank are gained through life experience, others we are born into. Our rank is often fluid and depends on both the immediate context and the wider context we’re living in.
12 сен 2024
