Meet the menders
Download the PDF
Contents

Category F: Creating the conditions

This final category is a little different to the others, in that its practitioners work within public institutions rather than civic organisations. However, they are instrumental in creating the conditions for civic organisations to start, grow and flourish.

These are practitioners who might be delivering a public service differently; acting as a leader who shapes the conditions and terms of how a place or a neighbourhood works; a frontline worker stitching services and institutions together; or someone redesigning how the money moves and the rules work. While most of the disciplines in this report are directly engaged in the work of civic renewal, these four disciplines help to make this work possible.

12 Institutional wranglers and system connectors · 13 Relational practitioners in public services · 14 Civic and place leaders · 15 Infrastructure rewirers

  6. Category F, Creating the conditions
Creating the conditions

Discipline 12. Institutional wranglers and system connectors

A Black man holding open the door of a public building, a folder under one arm.

Maturity of support

  • 1Codification
  • 1Institutions
  • 1Training
  • 3Communities
  • 2Academia
  • 1.6Overall, mean of the five

These are people who work at the seams of public institutions, helping to make them work better for people. Wranglers and connectors are disciplines that focus explicitly on seeing gaps, potential connections and misalignments, and finding ways for services and organisations to join up. This could include, for example, a school wellbeing officer who connects the parents of pupils to housing support, a hospital discharge coordinator who finds the one arrangement that will allow someone to go home safely when they want to, or a family hub navigator working across services that do not talk to each other.

The distinction between these practitioners and community and peer connectors comes down to the subject of their work. A peer connector’s material is a person and their community: they start with the person in front of them and look outward for what might help. A system connector’s material is the institution: they start with understanding where services do not join or work together, and set about making this better, often for a class of people rather than an individual. System connecting and institution wrangling is a matter of knowing how institutions actually function as opposed to how they are described, and being willing to expend significant personal energy to get them to work better.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

There is little supporting architecture for this discipline; it is the second-lowest ranking of all the disciplines assessed. Codification is largely absent: the work appears as a component of broader role profiles rather than in its own right, and there is no occupational standard for system connecting. The nearest examples would be workforce guidance attached to particular programmes and the workforce development framework NHS England publishes for care co-ordinators, a closely related role in primary care.

There is no dedicated institution; the institutional homes sit inside sectors, none of which owns the discipline as a whole. There is no apprenticeship, no qualification and no recognised university route. Sub-thematic networks exist – practitioner networks attached to particular programmes, such as the National Centre for Family Hubs and NHS England’s personalised care training networks – but no venue that brings these together.

The academic base is sparse and mostly theoretical, with lineages running back to Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy (1980) and Williams’ The Competent Boundary Spanner (2002) rather than to any single body of applied work.

Overall, our observation is that the work of institution wrangling is now widespread and critically important but happens almost entirely under the radar. It is done in the gaps between roles that are funded, and by people whose job descriptions describe something else. There is not currently a vocal push for better support.