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What if we organised an entire council around building social connection?
In this episode, Joe sits down with Tony Clements, Chief Executive of Ealing Council. Tony explains why he's placed social connection at the heart of the council's purpose, and how a Connected Communities approach is reshaping everything from children's services to emergency management.
Drawing on the evidence that loneliness can be worse for health than smoking, Tony argues that local government has a unique locus to build the relationships and community resilience that transactional services alone can't deliver. He shares how Ealing achieved its lowest-ever number of children in care by investing in kinship networks, why emergency management teams are treating the community as the real first responder, and what it takes to shift thousands of daily interactions toward building connection.
This is a deep dive into relational leadership, complexity and why the language of KPIs and "clarity" often gets in the way of the work that matters most.
In this conversation, we explore:
- Why the evidence on social connection rarely reaches public policy
- How kinship networks are reducing the number of children in care
- Why emergency response depends on community resilience first
- The limits of KPIs in relational, complex work
- How to balance short-term savings with long-term transformation
- Why the bar for change is higher than the bar for the status quo
- The bravery it takes to stop doing good things
- What AI tools are actually changing inside a council
- The chief executive as "rewilder" of the system
This episode is especially relevant for:
- Public sector leaders and chief executives
- Local government commissioners and directors
- Policy and systems-change professionals
- Service designers working on complex, human problems
Stay connected:
- Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-badman
- Read the latest chapters from our upcoming book: https://relationalservicedesign.com
- Master the methodology: https://basistraining.co.uk/
- Partner with us: https://basis.co.uk
