Setting your principles and ways of working

Spending time on discussing and agreeing a shared set of principles you will work to, and how you expect to work together will enable you to set and manage shared expectations, build relationships and know how you will hold each other to account during the contract.

A good set of principles in a relational contract are:

• As simple and compelling as possible
• As consistent as possible across multiple contracts from one commissioner so that you are reinforcing a culture and way of working in your ecosystem
• Focussed on behaviours and include both positive and negative examples based on experience
• Pragmatic - in that they recognise and articulate any real constraints that exist
• Articulate your agreed approach to risk, reward and money
• Include how you will share information together and more widely and how you'll use them for continuous improvement and learning

• Use the process of co-creating the principles and agreeing ways of working to surface tensions and build shared understanding and alignment. Consider using a design critique approach to enable people to feed in constructively.
• Acknowledge that while the principles may stay consistent, how you work together will change over time, and build in space to reflect and proactively adapt.
• Make the principles and ways of working a key part of onboarding new staff
• Use them regularly and actively as part of your meetings, governance and work activities
• Make sure they work for everyone. Can each role in delivering the service together use them?
• Carry out scenario planning to test them under pressure - what happens when things gets hard?
• Keep it simple and short, making sure that any red lines are well understood
• Proactively introduce people to them as they join

Here are some useful examples and exercises to help you:

1. Use a team charter exercise to establish ways of working
2. Use retrospectives such as the bulls eye retro to build in deliberate reflection and adaption on your principles
3. Good examples of principles to build from are the GDS design principles and NHS design principles
4. Use Scenario planning that allows people to imagine the worst in a safe way
5. A design crit can help people feedback constructively and collaboratively

• Anything is allowed - but the work is in shaping these together
• Paying organisations to participate in co-design activities like these

• Principles and team charters are made but then not used
• Red lines are not clearly identified and understood leading to lack of clarity and tension

• Public Digital's positions guide the work they do and how they do it
• Relational contracting experts David Frydlinger, Oliver Hart and Kate Vitasek articulate six principles which parties should commit to in order to guide the terms of the relationship and avoid a breakdown in their Harvard Business Review article on "A New Approach to Contracts". These are:
  1. Reciprocity – each partner will bring unique strengths and resources that can contribute to mutual benefit and understanding.
  2. Autonomy – each partner will have the freedom to manage and make decisions that align with the collective interest.
  3. Honesty – each partner will be truthful and authentic even when doing makes them vulnerable or uncomfortable.
  4. Loyalty – each partner will value each other’s interests as they value their own, and remain committed to the relationship through adversity.
  5. Equity – each partner is committed to fairness (which does not always mean equality).
  6. Integrity – each partner’s actions will be consistent with their words and agreements, and will align with the collective interest.