Capacity supports people to do things differently, helping public services become people-centric services. Not different for the sake of it, or because innovation is trendy, but because the outcomes for children and young people in the Liverpool City Region are shocking. And the heartbreaking truth is, despite armies of committed professionals working hard, it still isn’t working well enough.
I love my job. I know what a privilege it is to do this work alongside a brilliant (and small!) team, across local government, regional partnerships and purpose-driven providers. What we do isn’t rocket science. It’s bloody hard work, yes, but it’s not a tightly defined methodology or a fancy branded approach. We’re actually thinking a lot about what our practice is and how we describe it… But that’s a story for another time.
What has felt loud to me recently is listening. That’s where we start, every time. We listen deeply – to clients, to families, to communities.
It is a skill, but what I notice most is how rarely it actually happens. In meetings, people are waiting to talk rather than listening. I do it. We all do it. We’ve all got ideas, pressures, targets, ambitions, and all of that noise gets in the way of really hearing what someone is trying to say.
The impact of this?
We don’t truly listen to what families need; we listen through the filter of what we can offer. And we don’t really listen to our colleagues; we listen through the filter of what we need to deliver.
Deep listening means going further. It means tuning into the said and the unsaid. Picking up what feels possible, and what feels stuck. Hearing the frustration and the hope.
After a workshop recently, Chris (Chief Executive, Capacity) said to me, “Why don’t people listen more?” It’s been rattling around my head ever since. How do we develop such a core skill in a system that rarely makes space for it?
Recently, this theme has come up again and again. I spent some time with the Better Way Network, as part of their FutureGov Forum work supporting the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn, Grow programme. We ended up in a brilliant conversation with Polly Neate, talking about the skills this kind of work actually demands.
We talked, of course, about listening… not the surface-level kind, but the kind that shapes decisions, direction and relationships. We talked about coaching and how essential it is when your job isn’t to “deliver a solution” but to help people and organisations unlock their own capability. But what made us laugh was realising we shared the same formative experience: life in the third sector, where you don’t just lead an organisation, but you are the comms team, HR, finance, fundraiser, bid writer, facilitator, strategist, and the person who fixes the printer when it jams.
It’s the pleasure and the pain of learning every part of how a business runs because you’ve had no choice. And, actually, that’s part of why this work is possible. It teaches you to listen because you’ve learned that nothing works without people. It teaches you to coach because you know you can’t do it all yourself. It teaches you humility because you’ve lived the chaos of good intentions colliding with limited resources.
It reminded me again that the “skills” of Test, Learn and Grow aren’t abstract. They’re human. They’re relational. And they’re rooted in exactly the kind of practice our systems undervalue but desperately need more of.
For me, I can trace it right back to my time as a Childline counsellor, fresh-faced undergrad desperately trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up (spoiler: still not sure). Seventeen years later, I still draw on that training. And it’s still hard. I still want to jump in, especially when I’m excited about an idea. Listening is an intentional practice, and the more you do it, the more confident you get. Sitting in silence while a child builds the courage to talk; staying curious rather than advising a teenager who just needs someone to hear them. Those were formative experiences.
But it also makes me wonder: if I hadn’t started there, how would I have learned to listen? And in a sector that’s fast-paced, high-pressure and relentlessly driven toward solutions, how do we protect time and space for listening now? Because in our work, the projects that have created the biggest shifts have all started with deep, patient listening.
Family Toolbox began with a year of listening to families, practitioners and communities about what “early help” actually felt like. Not the data, not the service spec…the reality. And that deep listening is what made it possible to transform an in-house service into a VCSE-led alliance with shared ambitions, earlier support and, ultimately, fewer children going into care.
More recently, we’ve been working with the team at Sefton Council to get under the skin of the school readiness challenge. The school readiness work started the same way. Everyone was puzzled – 40% of children weren’t ready for school, yet almost all had “good” two-year checks. Listening to parents revealed something different entirely: gaps in confidence, connection, and support that the data didn’t show.
Listening is not a soft skill. It is a system skill. It’s the foundation of Test, Learn and Grow, and the foundation of prevention, early help, and every meaningful partnership we’ve ever been part of.
So the real question for all of us is this, “in a system built for pace, pressure and answers… how do we carve out the time and permission to listen more deeply?”
Because without that, we can’t test the right things, we can’t learn the right lessons, and we certainly can’t grow anything that lasts.
