Abstract
This paper makes the case for reframing public services in Ireland as Relational Public Services (RPS) that take a Human Learning Systems Approach (HLS), which describes a way of organising viable services built around relationships and collective learning, as distinct from transactions, targets and standardised processes.
The approach centres on developing an understanding of complexity, raising capability for systems thinking and learning to create the conditions for people to thrive at a personal level and within the wider systems of support. This paper explores the importance of relationships, complexity, and how taking a systemic approach to learning can contribute to understanding how policy-making and practice can work better to serve all the humans in the system.
Introduction to Relational Public Services
Relational Public Services (RPS) start from organising services around what matters to people and amplifying the importance of the relationships that help them define what progress looks like in context. In this, it draws on the tradition of “New Public Service” (Denhardt and Denhardt 2007). RPS emphasise that good outcomes emerge from trusting, human relationships and continuous learning rather than from rigid targets and standardised transactions, so practitioners work with people as whole persons, adapt support to local contexts, and collaborate across organisational boundaries to address complex social issues (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2024; Lowe, 2024; Wilson, French, Hesselgreaves, Lowe, & Smith, 2024). It starts with the recognition that human wellbeing is fundamentally relational — produced through ongoing connections between people, between people and their communities, and between communities and the institutions that are meant to serve them. Relationships are not a soft add-on to “real” service delivery; they are the mechanism through which good outcomes are achieved.
The focus on relationships is a way of prioritising the human in the system, understanding what matters to them, and developing responses that fit with their life circumstances, rather than expecting people to fit into services. An understanding of the nature of complexity supports reengaging with our inherent “systemic sensibilities”, which describes an innate capability we all possess to see and feel our way through the world that focuses on patterns of relationship, feedback and context, so that individual events are understood in terms of the wider systems that give rise to them (Ison 2017). It supports the ability to be with the complexity of people’s lives, reduce the complexity of the systems people interact with, without trying to reduce the rich complexity of being human. The emphasis is on learning together, which involves creating spaces for continuous learning through practice.
Relationships
There is always some kind of relationship between the giver and receiver of a public service, whether coercive (e.g. safeguarding, criminal justice), transactional in low‑stakes settings (e.g. driving licence renewal), scripted through bureaucratic norms, or more humanising (eg. in social support services) (Taylor, 2026). When relationships are treated as the foundation of services, they become legitimate work in the exchange between state actors and citizens, that operate along a continuum from using good listening skills to changing the governance arrangements to enhance community‑led services. Trust‑based relationships create psychological safety and respect, which underpin wellbeing and the ability to tackle hardship, and they are central to the outcomes many services seek (Lowe & French, 2021). Where relationships are meaningful, they foster a sense of mattering and belonging and support people’s agency to take control of their lives (O’Donnell, 2024).
Relational approaches start with dialogue, legitimise taking time, and acknowledge complexity and uncertainty, calling for a different way of being with people rather than new tools or procedures. Practitioners accept that life paths are non‑linear, especially where there is trauma, chronic illness, disability or poverty (Cottam, 2018; Sanderson, 2009). People are treated as experts in their own lives, with capabilities and assets as well as challenges, and meaningful change is defined by them and emerges through ongoing, trust‑based interaction (Bovaird & Loeffler, 2012). Attending to what matters to the person or family is the starting point for a relational dynamic that supports people to take agency, and shifts practice towards creating spaces where people feel safe enough to engage and be honest about what they need.
Relational services through a complexity lens
Life is complex and people’s needs overlap and change over time (Lowe et al., 2020; Lowe & French, 2021). Individuals hold multiple identities, are embedded in families and communities, and have unique histories, which often clash with services that treat them as having discrete “needs” mapped onto pre‑designed interventions (Bovaird & Loeffler, 2012). Navigating services adds another layer of complexity, especially for people living in poverty who face fragmented, administratively burdensome welfare, housing, health and childcare systems that deter or delay access to support (ESRI, 2025; Reilly et al., 2025; Social Justice Ireland, 2024; TASC, 2024). People with dementia and their carers struggle to access day services and respite (Giebel et al., 2024), while families of children with life‑long conditions can become stuck in “in‑between spaces” where poorly joined‑up services never fully meet their needs (Straker et al., 2024). At the same time, the discretionary space frontline workers once had to “do the right thing” has been squeezed and reframed as “gaming the system” (Lipsky, 2010; Murphy, 2022).
When both people’s lives and services are complex, they create what Ackoff (1974) called “messy situations”, with many moving parts, multiple interdependencies and unclear boundaries (Boulton, 2024; Reynolds, 2020). Inequalities linked to gender, income and social class intersect in ways that cannot be addressed within isolated policy domains, and entanglements span social, political and interpretive relationships that shape how policy is designed and experienced. Different actors bring different framings and worldviews, so no single perspective can claim a monopoly on the truth (Checkland, 1999), yet dominant framings often drive policy unless policymakers reflect on their own position (O’Donnell, 2023). Complex situations rarely map neatly onto one department because, for example, access to decent work is tied to geography, education, transport, technology, disability and shifting external pressures. Working systemically, therefore, means making explicit boundary judgements, investing time in relationship‑building, and including the voices of those most affected, while finding respectful, non‑extractive ways to understand their worlds; learning is key if we are to create viable systems capable of operating effectively in their niche (Beer, 1979; Espinosa, 2023).
Focus on Learning
Learning is not about just what is delivered, but how people, practitioners, and organisations learn together in the ongoing work of making sense of complex lives and situations (Lowe, 2020; Lowe, 2023). In this context, we ask: whose learning counts when people not only live complex lives but must also navigate fragmented systems? (Lowe, 2023). Citizens, public-facing workers, managers, and system leaders all need structured opportunities to inquire together into what is happening, what matters, and how patterns in people’s lives are shifting over time (Lowe & Centre for Public Impact, 2021). Lipsky’s analysis of street-level bureaucracy suggests that front-line workers exercise wide discretion under conditions of high demand, ambiguity, and limited resources, so their everyday sense-making and coping strategies effectively become public policy in practice (Lipsky, 2010). This makes reflective learning at the site of practice pivotal to ethical and intelligent responses that can override generic rules that do not meet real-life needs (Lipsky, 2010; Lowe, 2020).
The Human Learning Systems approach involves five phases to learning based on a shared sense of purpose: understanding the system producing current outcomes, co-designing experiments, carrying out experimentation, sense-making together about what happened, and adapting practice, structures, and resources based on what is learned. The cycle then begins again, with each iteration creating better conditions for human freedom and flourishing while connecting individual, team, and organisational learning across the wider system (HLS n.d.). The “cycle” is not a rigid sequence, but an ongoing, uneven rhythm: power dynamics, data quality, trust, and institutional pressures all shape how far people can genuinely experiment and learn, so progress often looks like partial, iterative shifts rather than clean, continuous improvement.
Haven’t we been providing relational services all along?
People working on the ground are proud of a long tradition of relationship‑centred services in Ireland, and professional standards in care explicitly prioritise relational work, without affording the space to foster it (CORU, 2020). Research highlights how the quality of teacher–student relationships is central to engagement, attainment and wellbeing, yet they vary considerably based on socioeconomic background (Smyth et al., 2026). Increased regulation has reduced discretion, added documentation, and encouraged professional distance, leaving less time and continuity for building meaningful relationships that go beyond. Where work is managed through performance indicators and risk management, “customer service” logics and bureaucracy crowd out open‑ended engagement, and people can feel processed rather than known.
New Public Management (NPM) reinforced this by promoting measurable outputs, standardised processes, and audit as the primary means of control, treating people as rational, self‑interested “customers” or “clients” (Stark, 2002; Stoker, 2006). In Ireland, the language and tools of NPM were adopted without fully engaging with the underlying logic (Hardiman & MacCarthaigh, 2011; Boyle & MacCarthaigh, 2011), and not‑for‑profits followed suit under pressure to emulate “successful” organisations (O’Rourke, 2020). This raised concerns that community‑focused organisations were losing their distinctiveness in favour of business‑style efficiency, while investigations into failure often concluded that “the system” was to blame, avoiding both individual accountability and systemic analysis (Hardiman, 2009, 2010; Hardiman & MacCarthaigh, 2011). As Davies (2025) argues, highly fragmented service architectures can become “unaccountability machines”: when something goes wrong, it is almost impossible to identify who is responsible.
Public-facing workers are caught in a double bind (Bateson, 1972): asked to be innovative but to follow procedures, responsive to need but to hit targets, collaborative but to compete for funding. One consequence is the growth of “sludge” – procedural frictions that waste time, drain energy, and deter participation (Sunstein, 2021; Thaler, 2018; OECD, 2024). The COVID‑19 period showed that services can cut through sludge when they must, but NPM logics still constrained flexibility and continue to undermine advocacy and community development (NESC, 2021, 2022; O’Donnell, 2024; TASC & The Wheel, 2023). Those with lower administrative literacy, poorer health, disability or limited mental energy are hit hardest by these frictions, even though they are often the people that public policies aim to support (Lades et al., 2022; Samahita & Lades, 2026).
Developing the ground for effective Relational Public Services in Ireland
Relational Public Service offers a fresh lens through which to reimagine public services. There is a growing recognition that a more systemic approach is required to tackle some of the most complex issues we face in Irish society such as homelessness (Jordan 2025), child poverty (DSP 2019), restructuring Ireland’s food system (Kenny et al 2024), and to realise a Just Transition to zero emissions while leaving no one behind (O’Donnell et al forthcoming). The Irish government has begun to explore this relational agenda explicitly through its recent initiative Serving Communities, Connecting People – A Relational Public Service Approach (Government of Ireland 2026). In November 2025, a cross‑departmental event brought senior officials and practitioners together to explore what Relational Public Services might look like in Ireland. The focus was based on a Human Learning Systems (HLS) approach, which proposes systems-informed learning processes to find out what works together. The exploration included showcasing existing Irish case studies that already work in this way (Government of Ireland forthcoming). By focusing on practical examples that make small, concrete commitments to change, the Government is creating an exploratory learning space, that suggests that services do not need to wait for policy to devolve from the centre, but that local projects can be active co-creators in a reciprocal relational dynamic with central policymakers. This suggests a shared direction of travel where learning relationships are core public‑service work; and acts as encouragement to create spaces where people across the system can experiment with more relational and systemically aligned practices. Interest is spreading across numerous domains including the development of a practitioner-led learning network.
Charting the way forward
Change towards RPS has to begin from the ground up. System‑wide restructures or new digital platforms can only help if they respond to what is already being learned in everyday work, not the other way round. RPS can be developed by treating services as living systems that continually learn with citizens, practitioners and communities. This is aligned with an understanding of the systemic nature of complex situations, where progress is non-linear, partial and often incomplete. Here, viability depends on distributed intelligence, evolving practice and alignment with shared public purpose. Learning must contribute to improving systems as much as relationships.
The Viable Systems Model (VSM) offers a useful backbone for understanding how structural and relational elements interact to emphasise coherent relationships between everyday service delivery, internal coordination, oversight, strategic learning and collective identity (Beer, 1985; Espinosa & Walker, 2011). Psychological safety within that relationship is the homeostat: the regulating force that keeps the system healthy (O’Donnell 2024). When people feel safe enough, relationships are robust enough to contain multiple world views, can absorb shocks, learn and adapt, but where a sense of safety is undermined by control, targets, fear, blame or rigid rules, relationships become brittle. Psychological safety must exist not only in one‑to‑one relationships with citizens, but also in the relationships between practitioners, managers, policymakers and community partners. If managers feel unsafe naming problems upwards, or policy teams fear political blame for acknowledging uncertainty, the higher‑level functions will unintentionally destabilise the relational homeostat on the frontline. Designing for viability therefore includes value-led ethics and asking: what do people in each role need, relationally and emotionally, to play their part well? How do we support them to stay curious, honest and connected across organisational boundaries?
Learning through Practice: Relational public services begin in the discrete interactions that occur on a day-to-day basis, that either add or subtract from a person’s sense of wellbeing. This is the starting point for learning and experimenting about what practices work best. It is not always about developing a new shiny innovation. Often it is about reviewing where practices already excel and amplifying them, but learning always calls for creating protected spaces where practitioners, managers, policymakers, and citizens can discover together what relational approaches actually mean in their specific contexts. It also calls for pilots where the learning itself is the first product, where “safe-to-fail” experiments develop the practical evidence that is fed into creating the case for wider change (Lowe & French, 2021; Ison, 2010).
Practice Example: Enable Ireland’s Virtual Adult Service[i] is an online community where service owners co-design and often lead a weekly programme of activities. It works alongside traditional in‑person day services. It expands participants’ agency and offers paid facilitator roles, relying on strong staff–peer relationships and skilled online facilitation to sustain cross-county peer support, confidence-building and co-production, with learning now shaping a national HSE New Directions virtual services project.
Co-ordinating and cooperating across services: Change requires practitioners to have the skill to spot the systemic patterns that limit the effectiveness of working alone and create opportunities to coordinate across boundaries. This is a kind of practical intelligence: the capacity to perceive the complexity of entangled situations that are rarely linear, where a service’s interventions will impact on others and lead to emergent outcomes that cannot be determined in advance. Where practice-based knowledge is often invisible, creating mechanisms to cooperate can help surface and share this knowledge. It not only supports shared understanding of what is needed in contested spaces, it avoids duplication and competition between services and eliminates some of the sludge associated with excessive bureaucracy.
Practice Example: F:ACES (Family: Adult and Child Enhanced Services), a national pilot on child poverty in families with children aged 0–4, has made strong progress in coordinating services by using systems mapping to show how agencies interact across Bray, North Wicklow and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. These maps reveal systemic gaps, overlaps and duplications that fragmented services cannot tackle alone, while cross-sector learning cycles and focus groups build the trusting professional relationships needed for a multi-agency, Human Learning Systems approach. By fostering a community of practice, F:ACES enables professionals to share insights and co-develop innovations such as ‘one-stop-shop’ hubs and ‘Relational Navigators’, shifting emphasis from individual service performance to what matters to families and the quality of connections between services. This approach recognises effective coordination and relational working as key to addressing the complex, interconnected nature of child poverty.
Managing time and money: Developing and maintaining relationships, and creating space for deliberation and reflection, is often the greatest resource requirement, yet it is typically squeezed out where reporting requirements are driven from the top and heavily based on quantitative data. A shift from funding discrete projects, which are often set up to be in competition with each other, to creating a single local area budget, could support more timely and targeted responses with enough flexibility to respond to the needs of local people (Human Learning Systems, 2020; Plymouth City Council, 2021). Both call for a radical shift in thinking that involves reorienting how resources are devolved:
- Fund learning, not targets: Link funding to a shared purpose and evidence of continuous collaborative learning (Human Learning Systems, 2020; Human Learning Systems, 2021).
- Devolve decisions to those closest to people: Public-facing workers and people with lived experience are best placed to jointly decide how resources are used (Human Learning Systems, 2020; Plymouth City Council, 2021).
- Share the risk and build relational accountability: Share responsibility for outcomes and overspends, with accountability created through ongoing joint review and transparency (Human Learning Systems, 2020; NHS England, 2023).
Practice Example: FEABHAS is a Sláintecare Healthy Community Programme anchored within Dublin City Council Local Economic and Community Plan (LECP). Local Development Officers (LDOs) in the council took a place-based, life-course approach to working with communities to address the social determinants of health as interconnected, living systems. By taking a community-based participatory research approach that put residents’ lived experience at the centre, they co-designed place-based actions that build on local assets and relationships rather than just delivering top-down services. The study generated both local and national actions that now directly inform Sláintecare SEED funding priorities and cross-sector decision-making (Philip 2024).
Monitoring and evaluation
Monitoring and evaluating RPS means treating evaluation as part of the system itself, with evaluators reflexively engaging with their own positionality, values, and influence (Schmidt-Abbey et al., 2020, O’Donnell et al, forthcoming). This shifts focus from making fixed judgements about performance to asking “what is of value” between diverse stakeholders (Gates & Vidueira, 2025). Here, value is shaped by changing circumstances over time and negotiated collectively rather than determined by an external authority at a set point in time (Gates & Vidueira, 2025). In practice, this means weaving evaluative questions, criteria, and methods throughout the learning cycle, as contexts, relationships, and understandings evolve (Gates et al., 2021; Gates & Vidueira, 2025).
Continuous development: A key question for services is creating the capacity to predict future needs whilst taking care of immediate concerns. Services locked into short-term funding cycles find themselves firefighting reoccurring crises, not planning for future needs. Adopting an RPS approach is an investment in continuous learning, where needs are articulated locally, fed-up through policy-making processes and corroborated with social trends, demographics, and changes in the external environment that may impact on services.
Governance practices: Ground-up initiatives will remain fragile unless NPM-style thinking is unlocked and a systemic approach to strategic governance is developed and institutionalised in central government (Ison & Straw, 2020). Governance systems need to have trust and shared responsibility embedded in genuine co-design efforts across different layers of the system. Systemic leadership marks a shift in thinking that moves away from managerialism towards systemic leadership. Systemic leaders design for adaptive social learning, rather than for control or one‑off change projects (Hobbs 2019, O’Donnell 2023, Williams et al 2025).
Practices include:
- Protecting time and spaces for joint reflection across roles and organisations.
- Legitimising “not knowing yet” and supporting safe experimentation.
- Noticing where conditions (rules, metrics, budgets) are undermining psychological safety in frontline relationships, and work to change those conditions.
- Support a tightly coupled relationship between shared purpose and practices on the ground, and ensure that management of resources and future thinking stay in an honest, two‑way relationship with work on the ground.
- Changing the accountability questions, so that people account for what they learnt, how they learnt it, and how they have adapted as a result.
Practice example of systemic leadership: A relational action-research project (convened with Northside Partnership/Preparing For Life) with five early years services in Dublin 5 and 17 explored how distributed leadership works in daily practice (Simic et al., 2025). Viewing services as dynamic systems shaped by families’ needs, regulations, and local contexts, it found that rigid, top-down compliance fails. Instead, adaptive learning and reflective spaces enable shared responsibility, trust, and collaboration—key features of a relational public service approach.
Conclusion
Public services exist to support human flourishing, strengthen communities and contribute to a fair, sustainable society, yet current architectures often work against this purpose. Relational public services re‑centre relationships, learning and shared purpose, and require systemic changes in practice, culture, structures and accountability. None of that is comfortable. But the alternative – continuing to pour human energy and public resources into systems that exhaust their workers and fail the people they are meant to serve – is no longer defensible.
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[i] https://enableireland.ie/services/adult-services/virtual-adult-service.
[ii] 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. joan@systemsbeing.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2838-9762.
[iii] Professor of Public Management, Manchester Metropolitan University and pioneer of Human Learning systems www.humanlearning.systems: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0699-9962
[iv] ThemPra Social Pedagogy CIC, www.thempra.org.uk/thempra, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9557-4896.
[v] Bray and North Wicklow Area Partnership, www.brayandnorthwicklowareapartnership.ie