The Meaningful Connections Model
A toolkit to help teams reflect on their service relationships
Inspiration and Collaboration
The Meaningful Connections Model emerged as a standalone product as part of a project collaboration with six organisations facilitated by CoCreate called Creating Meaningful Connections funded by CAST.
Creating Meaningful Connections itself is part of a larger initiative called The Sector Challenge Programme which comes under the umbrella of the Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19.
Creating Meaningful Connections
Note on the project itself
The collaboration has moved at pace to deliver a shared prototype that has been tested with users that speaks to Creating Meaningful Connections. In the process, we have generated combined wisdoms from shared experiences.
The Meaningful Connections Model is a practical toolkit to help teams identify and reflect on the constellations of service relationships whether 1-1, 1 to some, 1 to many, many to many and all the possible variations, taking into account service users, organisation-level, team, stakeholders, partners and other parties.
Layer this over with operation and living with Covid19, we have a service recipe to share.
The Meaningful Connections Model - The Journey
For the project, we started by sharing our personal stories around meaningful connections
Then we carried out surveys with service users and staff to dive deeper
Through a series of workshops we undertook analysis and uncovered themes and insights as part of our discovery work
Next, we moved from ideation to prioritisation with a focus on user needs
From there, we designed digital prototypes for testing, which was the intended outcome of the project
The pace was fast and although we had prioritised the right things to take forward, the group felt there were lots of golden nuggets too valuable to leave behind completely.
Six organisations collaborated and this resulted in the emergence of additional elements such as The Meaningful Connections Model demonstrating that the sum of the whole is greater than the parts.
The Meaningful Connections Model
This is a practical tool to help organisations reflect on service relationships and to identify which areas need further consideration.
In the model, we have 5 themes that are underpinned by Safety. Each theme has a subset of core elements to serve as a checklist for health with an overarching concept that addresses why is it important.
The model can be applied from the perspective of service user, team member, team or organisation; from anywhere in the constellation or service ecosystem.
We have expanded four levels to self-identify the starting point for the journey and where the ambition lies for next steps.
Safety
Safety sits at the heart of The Meaningful Connections Model. It is a theme that underpinned many of our conversations and for now we have placed it at the heart of the model as it sits across everything.
Safety considerations include:
Working with The Meaningful Connections Model
The Meaningful Connections Model holds:
Themes. These are overarching themes we distilled from our collaboration
Needs. Each theme holds an overarching need
Elements. The overarching need comprises a subset of needs that can be used for evaluation
Indicators. The indicators can be used for self-reflection and measurement regarding the current and desired maturity of the service relationship. This could be from the perspective of where am I and/or where are we?
Theme | Feelings | Space | Tools | Skills | Relationship |
Need | To have a sense of belonging | To know I am in the right place | To be comfortable with digital tools | To cultivate trust in communications | To offer hope and to surface choices |
Elements | We/I need to: feel heard feel listened to feel supported feel understood safe | The space needs to be: accessible reassuring comfortable caring safe | We/I need to invest in: time training and practice building confidence the right tools safety | We/I need to respect: diverse learning styles professional boundaries being adaptable being fully present safety | Our connection needs to be: motivating genuine focused realistic safe |
Indicators Current & Desirable | Embedded Maturing Forming Early stages | Embedded Maturing Forming Early stages | Embedded Maturing Forming Early stages | Embedded Maturing Forming Early stages | Embedded Maturing Forming Early stages |
The Meaningful Connections Model
Compiled by
Nel Mathams & Jane Salazar March 2021
For further information contact: lucy.armitage.cocreate@gmail.com
Additional resources
During May we undertook supplementary work in order to test the model further and provide a simple instruction guide for usage.
Information to follow.
The Meaningful Connections Model
user research
Additional resources
During May we undertook supplementary work in order to test the model further and provide a simple instruction guide for usage.
The Meaningful Connections Model
instructions