Something stayed with me after our recent Fundamentally Different event. Like an earworm you can’t quite place or shake off. It made me think about the quiet craft behind ‘this work’ (aka the real, human skills that hold complex public services together) and how the same set of skills show up everywhere.
I’ve been trying to make sense of a few threads – the skills, attitudes and craft behind ‘this work’- and using this blog to help me get there. Stick with me.
‘This work’, whether it’s on the frontline, in design teams, leadership or running a service – the reality is the same. It’s a hell of a lot of relationships. It’s trust-building. It’s transparency. It’s showing up consistently. It’s listening properly.
The parallels are clear. The same relational and adaptive skills that help a practitioner work effectively with families are also what leaders need to create space for innovation, shape culture, and hold teams accountable. The craft isn’t tied to a role, it’s tied to the work itself.
And this is the insight that’s been buzzing in my head. If we can name and articulate these skills, the glue that holds messy, ambitious change together, we can grow more of it, celebrate it and notice when it’s missing – anywhere in the system.
What do we mean by ‘this work’?
At Capacity, ‘this work’ is about helping public services and organisations do things fundamentally differently. Shifting from designing systems for people to designing with them. Working in the messy space between organisations, communities and services to change how things actually happen.
But it isn’t just our work. It’s the work of:
- The frontline teams holding complex relationships with families.
- The heads of service trying to reshape how teams operate.
- The charity leaders navigating partnerships across systems.
- The community organisers building trust where institutions haven’t.
- The local authority leaders trying to shift culture as well as process.
- The work of designers, link workers, social workers, youth workers, commissioners and community leaders.
‘Systems change’ can sound grand and abstract. But the reality is much more human. It’s the work people do every day – navigating complexity, making hard calls and building trust.
The same set of skills is visible across the system. Frontline teams rely on them to support families and communities. Leaders rely on them to create space for innovation, shape culture and hold teams accountable.
It’s the same craft, expressed differently depending on the role, but grounded in the same principles – relationships, judgment, curiosity and courage.
Once you start to see these patterns, you can’t unsee them. It helps us name and value the skills that matter. The glue that makes the work stick and spread it beyond isolated pockets of brilliance.
Ten years of messy work
Both Capacity and AllChild turn ten this year.
When we started out, the truth is we didn’t fully know what the work would look like. There were job descriptions, but they hardly scratched the surface of what the roles would demand. Louisa Mitchell said the same about AllChild in her keynote. The initial team had to figure out what the work actually was as they went along. This wasn’t about filling roles, it was about shaping the work itself.
Our initial team needed more than qualifications. They needed curiosity, courage and the ability to hold uncertainty without being paralysed by it. They needed to be comfortable making decisions without a clear blueprint and to adapt on the fly as problems and opportunities emerged.
We were stepping into the unknown, trying things, adapting quickly and learning in real time. Over time, we realised something critical – this way of working isn’t for everyone. Some people need structure and clear rules; others come alive with ambiguity, complexity and room to shape the direction.
But that’s only part of it. There’s also the relational craft, the judgement to know when to step in or step back, the courage to have hard conversations and the discipline to follow through on commitments even when you don’t have all the answers.
Relationships aren’t a soft skill, they’re infrastructure
At the event, someone joked it felt like dating, the early phase of trying to understand people’s motivations, pressures and perspectives. But this relational work isn’t just about the beginning. It’s ongoing, dynamic and central to everything we do.
It’s the glue that allows people to navigate complexity together. From the outside, it can look warm and fluffy, easy to overlook. But as Sophie Clarke pointed out on the day, strong relationships are what make the hard work possible.
They give teams the confidence to have difficult conversations without breaking trust. They allow people to challenge each other constructively. They make it possible to make tough decisions collectively and hold each other accountable when things don’t go as planned.
This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s not a ‘soft’ skill. It’s infrastructure, the framework that allows the craft of the work to actually hold. And it’s a skill that matters just as much for leaders shaping culture and strategy as it does for frontline teams.
Shared vision and shared accountability
A clear theme from the event was the need for a shared understanding of what we’re trying to do. Not in some abstract, slogan-y sense, but in a way that shapes day-to-day decisions and actions.
It’s not just knowing the destination; it’s noticing how everyone contributes to getting there – even in messy, unpredictable situations.
That shared sense of purpose doesn’t happen automatically. It grows in spaces where people can test ideas, challenge each other and work through disagreements together. And it isn’t just for leaders. Everyone plays a part in keeping the vision alive and making sure it informs what actually happens on the ground.
It also raises a question we can’t ignore. How do we make this part of everyday work, not something that only shows up in workshops, planning sessions or ‘pockets of brilliance’? How do we notice and nurture it across the whole system so it sticks, even when things get busy or uncertain?
Time and space to do the work
This work needs time and space that the system doesn’t have. And not just time to plan or reflect, but the conditions that allow people to actually do the work. In a world where demand outstrips supply and regulatory or inspection pressures dominate attention, this space doesn’t automatically exist. It has to be deliberately created and protected.
Time and space aren’t luxuries. They’re the conditions that make the work possible. Without them, the skills we value across the workforce can’t fully flourish.
This work has a cost. In time, attention and energy. Someone has to ‘pay’ for the space, but there’s always a tension – what are they actually backing? Experimentation, relationship-building and the craft that holds change together, or just the visible outputs that are easier to measure? Recognising that tension is part of understanding what it really takes to do this work well.
The craft behind the work
Inside Capacity, we’ve been wrestling with similar questions. We’re building a capability framework, essentially trying to identify the superpowers we need across the team. And it’s raised bigger questions for us – maybe for you too.
What are the skills behind the craft? Louisa’s description of link workers made me wonder.
- Are these the same capabilities our design and doing team need?
- Are they the same capabilities leaders need?
- What might this look like across an entire workforce?
Because if this craft is the glue that holds change together, we need to be much clearer about what the glue actually is.
The human craft in an AI world
AI accelerates tasks like case notes or routine decision-making, it creates an opportunity to let AI do what it’s good at, freeing up people to focus on the human work that actually drives change.
But it also raises a question: as we rely more on these tools, will the need for human craft become even greater? The skills that get systems unstuck – curiosity, empathy, judgment, courage, relational intelligence can’t be automated. They’re what allow hard conversations to happen, trust to be built and complex decisions to be made thoughtfully.
If AI speeds up case notes, it’s only valuable if that time is used to strengthen the human work – noticing patterns, connecting with people, navigating complexity and making judgments in the moment. Does increasing reliance on AI heighten the need for the craft, and if so, how do we make sure we protect and grow it?
Naming it and making it real
Sometimes, teams we’ve worked with finish a project and say ‘could you run a workshop to teach us how to do your work?’
The honest answer is not really. A day’s workshop isn’t enough. This isn’t just a checklist or a toolkit. It’s something learned over time, in the human spaces where decisions are made, relationships are built and trust holds things together.
We’re starting to see how naming these capabilities can shape the way we recruit, appraise and grow our teams and we’ll be sharing what we learn along the way.
But it also sparks a bigger question: what could this look like beyond any one organisation? If we can recognise, celebrate and deliberately grow this craft across teams, sectors and communities, how might it accelerate change for the people and communities that rely on public services most?
That’s how we make change happen for people and communities, not by chance, but by design.
Get in touch if you’d like to know more about the work we do.
