Organising Principles
I've become slightly obsessed with organising principles.
Not the phrase itself, which admittedly sounds like something you'd hear in a boardroom rather than a conversation about healing. I'm talking about the handful of ideas that help us make sense of something much bigger. The principles that don't attempt to explain everything, but somehow make everything else easier to understand.
I've noticed that the people whose work stays with me longest almost always have them.
This month, I recorded two podcasts that couldn't have been more different. One was with psychiatrist and researcher Russell Razzaque, talking about the future of mental healthcare. The other was with Dr Joanna Cheek, exploring the relationship between ecology, spirituality and mental health.
It wasn't until afterwards that I noticed the parallel. Russell used three organising principles to explain Open Dialogue. Joanna used three to explain ecology. Neither suggested that three principles could capture the entirety of either field. But they gave me something invaluable: somewhere to begin.
Russell spoke about Open Dialogue, a model of mental healthcare that began in Finland and has since spread across the world. It wasn't simply the evidence behind it, impressive though that is, that stayed with me, but the shift in perspective it invites.
Treat the whole network around the individual, not just the individual themselves.
Replace hierarchy with genuine partnership. Rather than positioning the practitioner as the expert with the answers, begin with a different question: "I haven't had your experience. Help me understand it."
And prioritise continuity, because healing isn't something that happens through a series of appointments. It grows through trust, familiarity and time.
Taken together, they offer a fundamentally different way of thinking about care.
A few days later, Joanna introduced the organising principles of ecology.
Everything is connected.
Diversity is essential for survival.
And every living system has feedback mechanisms that tell us when something is out of balance, allowing it to adapt.
It was that final principle that I kept coming back to. The idea that every living system has feedback mechanisms, signalling when something is out of balance and allowing it to adapt, offered me a new lens on an idea that has long sat at the heart of trauma-informed care. We often encourage practitioners to move beyond asking, "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" Joanna's ecological framing didn't challenge that understanding. It simply widened the context in which I was seeing it. Ideas I'd long thought about separately suddenly seemed to belong to the same conversation.
It also brought to mind a conversation we recorded last year about whether human beings can really adapt to the extraordinary pace at which our lives have changed over the past fifty years. Evolution works slowly. Human society no longer does. Our biology has had little time to catch up with the way we now live, work, communicate and relate to one another. Viewed this way, I found myself wondering whether anxiety, exhaustion, hypervigilance and even disconnection might sometimes be less signs that something is wrong with us, and more signals that something is wrong around us. They may not always be pleasant or helpful, but perhaps they are, at least in part, attempts to help us adapt to conditions unlike any our species has experienced before.
On the surface, these were completely different conversations. One explored a model for mental healthcare, the other the principles that govern living systems. Yet both left me with the same feeling. Neither tried to explain everything. Instead, they offered a handful of ideas that made a complex subject feel more accessible without making it simplistic.
Perhaps that's what I've been noticing all along. The people whose work stays with me aren't necessarily the ones with the most answers. They're the ones who know where to begin. The best organising principles don't pretend to be the whole story. They simply offer a way into it, and leave you curious enough to keep exploring.
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