Complex practice needs healthy systems
Spotlight
The Space Between: complex practice requires healthy systems, not just good services
- By Clare Ryan
Recently in a meeting with my ThinkWell partners, Jessamy used the phrase “the health of the system” and I quickly wrote it down. Why? I think it’s because it captured what I believe ThinkWell is increasingly seeing in our work: when the systems around the clients are in poor health, predictable dynamics emerge that then cause ruptures in the relationships that need to be fostered in order to provide the best service response to the client. Paying attention to the health of the system is integral to good collective service delivery.
The challenging bit about this is that the “health” I’m referring to here is primarily the emotional and relational health of a system. That’s something that we can’t ignore when we work with populations who experience trauma, adversity, marginalisation and disadvantage. The work is inherently emotionally, psychologically and relationally impactful. Yet while most services do their best to provide safe, attuned, empathic, non-judgemental services to their clients, this can come at great cost to the practitioner and the system around that client unless there’s a parallel attention paid to their functioning.
Let me give a couple of examples. We do some work facilitating sessions with care teams where there is often compassion fatigue, relationships between organisations or individuals are fracturing, and a sense of hopelessness is emerging. These care teams centre around clients who experience co-occurring severe mental health issues, disability, substance abuse, housing instability and offending behaviours. The client’s needs are extremely complex, and their multiple challenges lead them to repeating anti-social, criminal and self-harmful behaviours over and over again. They evoke strong reactions in the community, and in the people tasked to support them.
When we meet with the care team and provide them a facilitated space to step back from the “doing” - the planning, the strategising, the advocacy, the risk-management - to focus on the “being”, the conversations have strikingly similar themes. People name the fatigue they experience at having to turn up again and again to manage what feels like the same intractable problems. They question their own efficacy and impact, and that of the team. They talk about losing sleep due to pervasive anxiety that the client could die, harm someone else, or end up incarcerated. They allow themselves to put into words these heavy feelings, which in the usual pressured context of care team meetings there isn’t space or shared permission for.
The other example is a senior leadership group of a statutory organisation. This group meets regularly for facilitated reflection, as do each of the layers of the program hierarchy below them (i.e. team leaders also meet regularly to reflect, as do teams). This is a very clear example of one strategy to demonstrate and deliver systemic congruence. A recognition that the stressors faced by senior leaders may differ from those experienced by front-line or mid-level leadership staff, but that if those senior leaders don’t engage in intentional strategies to manage the emotional, psychological and relational impacts of the work on themselves, they will be less equipped to support their direct reports to do the same.
From both examples, we see some strong outcomes. In both, we often hear participants reflect as they finish up the sessions that they came in feeling stretched, overwhelmed, “too busy to reflect” etc, but that by the end they feel calmer, they feel more connected to their peers, and they hold more hope. They appreciate having the opportunity to think about a problem from different perspectives, and they acknowledge the value of perhaps allowing themselves to be a little more vulnerable in order to gain shared support and feedback. And by having the space to voice their own experience, they are motivated to bring their clients’ voices into the centre of the system’s activities.
I guess that’s the crux of it really - by giving the professionals in a system the experience of being heard, empathised with, being vulnerable and naming the hard feelings, we enable them to keep on providing this to each other and their clients. So when you’re in your next meeting, or care team, or leadership forum…consider the health of that system.
Our impact in practice
Clarity in complexity: ThinkWell’s services
ThinkWell’s unique value is - in our opinion anyway 😀- the fact that we are three social workers who understand complex and challenging work through a relational and ecological lens, using collaborative, trauma-informed and strengths-based approaches.
Our services are designed to support teams and organisations grappling with complex, people-focussed work. Not with one-size-fits-all packages that promise easy solutions and quick-fixes, but with thoughtful conversations, consultation and content development grounded in our sector knowledge and experience.
Some of our services include:
Have a look at these and others on our website and of course, get in touch with us for a chat to discuss how we can support you.
The brain building bit
Choreographing some fancy footwork: How to tango with the service system
At ThinkWell we provide services to organisations and teams sitting within dense, sometimes stressed, and often complicated service systems. We know that to achieve high-quality outcomes our customers must build social capital within these networks based on trust, reciprocity, and demonstrated expertise. This is no small task, and is not always approached in a research-informed manner.
Over at Complex Psychology, a customer of Thinkwell and a private, allied health organisation providing a range of services to clients with multiple needs, they have committed to understanding and articulating their approach to navigating complexity in care teams. In their presentation to the Complex Needs Conference 2026, they put words to the sometimes ineffable factors that address frequently emerging systemic problems like poor group cohesion, interpersonal conflict and reactive responding.
Using the evocative metaphor of the tango, in a helpful and practical manner the authors describe how to dance together as a system without stepping on toes or twisting an ankle. We encourage you to pop over to their LinkedIn post to have a look.
Thanks to the authors of this work, Sarah Fritsche and Irene Economou, for letting us spread the word.
State-dependent functioning: understanding how stress impacts on systems
Dr Bruce Perry, neuroscientist and psychiatrist (and huge influence on ThinkWell’s approach) has a You Tube clip where he talks about how the functioning of individuals and groups (i.e. their thinking, their relational interactions, their behaviour etc) is impacted by their physiological and emotional “state”.
At 17 minutes and 48 seconds he shows a fascinating image of state-dependent organisational functioning and talks it through in some detail. Whenever we have shared this concept with our audiences it generates a lot of interest - check it out!
Dr Bruce Perry: State-dependent brain functioning