Relational Coordination Collaborative

RCC Community Building Innovation Lab

The RCC Community Building Innovation Lab is a place for Lab members to work together to collect, create, incubate, and develop practices that build community in the RCC. These practices are intended to stimulate self-organization and are the means for creating and maintaining the energy of conversations, flow of activity around particular shared goals, and continued relationship-building throughout the year. We see this Innovation Lab as a learn-and-do space where we think and act carefully in relation to the larger RCC membership and advisory structures.

Benefits We Expect to Emerge

  • Increase the value of the RCC to members by making it easy to intentionally build relationships throughout the year through conversations, coordination of resource flow, and collaborative activity.
  • For the purposes of equity, inclusion, and increased creative generativity, leverage the RCC’s diversity of identities, perspectives, intentions, experiences, and capacities by building more connection and opportunity for conversation, coordination, and collaboration.
  • Shift the current core-periphery network structure of the RCC where most RCC activity happens within a core of members, to a network with more flow between members in the periphery and between the periphery and core (multilevel relational structures).
  • Help shift the culture beyond an entity framework (human-focused) to a more relational framework (connection-focused).
  • A chance to create structures that harvest the on-going and rich work of practitioners – to be shared with other practitioners and to become the fuel for scholarship.
  • Find ways to amplify the shift from cultures dominated by “power-over” relationships to those that enable the “power-to” of impassioned members to feed collective shared goals through “power-with” relationships.
  • A place to collect, create, incubate, and develop practices that might be applicable to RC field work.

Join this Innovation Lab where we can explore and experiment together with “Tightening the Weave” of the RCC relational fabric.

Year End Report 2023Tightening the Weave

Community Fabric Graphic

Join This Innovation Lab

manage  your member account to join this  innovation lab Resources 

Book: Barnum, J., & Kahane, A. (2011). Power and love: A theory and practice of social change. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Book: Ehrlichman, D. (2021). Impact networks: Create connection, spark collaboration, and catalyze systemic change: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Article: Krebs, V., & Holley, J. (2006). Building smart communities through network weaving. Appalachian Center for Economic Networks.

Founding Members

Jim Best

Scholar/Practitioner and Independent Consultant

Jim Best is a scholar/practitioner and independent consultant with a PhD in Organizational Systems.  His current interest is the use of Social System Maps by change agents and communities to support theories of complex adaptive social system changes like the Relational Model of Organizational Change. Social System Maps expose the relational structures and patterns of communities or social systems for reflection so that iterative adaptive action experiments can be performed and assessed in terms of the community's intention to change. He is an active member of the Social System Mapping Community of Practice. He is also a volunteer curriculum developer and facilitator for the Bay Area chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice. They focus on moving white people along their anti-racist journeys and raise funds to support BIPOC-led partner organizations. The lens of dismantling white supremacy as a critical system of dominance informs all of his work.

Richard Wylde

Deputy Director of Improvement at LYPFT; Non Exec Director at Institute for Continuous Improvement in Public Services, National Health Service

Richard Wylde is an experienced Continuous Improvement Specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the health care industry. Skilled in Performance Improvement, Coaching, Culture Change, Benefits Realisation, and Quality Management. Strong professional with a Master of Science (M.Sc.) focused in Leadership, Management and Change in Health and Social Services from University of Bradford.
Darren McLean, RCC Board Member

Darren McLean

Project Manager, Relational Coordination, Gold Coast Health

Darren McLean works as a Principal Advisor, Clinical Teaming, at Gold Coast Hospital and Health Services in Australia. In this role, Darren plans and implements a range of hospital-based initiatives to improve the efficiency of care delivery. His work includes applying Relational Coordination to improve how individuals and groups work together to coordinate the provision of clinical care within the hospital that he works.  

Darren worked as Registered Nurse for over 10 years before turning to health improvement project work 15 years ago. He has a Bachelor of Nursing Science and a Master of Public Health, and is competing a PhD part-time at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia. His PhD thesis examines how contextual factors such as the economy, professions, and gendered work affects the implementation of a Relational Coordination designed to improve patient centred care.  

Claire Kenwood

Director of Improvement at Leeds and York Partnership, National Health Service Foundation Trust

Claire Kenwood is a Senior Health Care Manager and clinician with over 25 years of experience of working in the NHS in the United Kingdom. Particular specialities and interests include mental health recovery and rehabilitation, service and quality improvement. Research interests include cultures and relationships in the NHS and related healthcare organisations, including relationship coordination and organisational improvement. Currently Director of Improvement at LYPFT. Founding cohort of the Health Foundation's Q Initiative and non-executive director of AQuA (Advancing Quality Alliance).