Learning regarding regional care cooperatives from a systems psychoanalytic evaluation

The following brings learning for providers, local authorities, and government from a systems psychoanalytic evaluation of regional care co-operatives.

It is by way of a tribute to David Armstrong, ex Tavistock Institute and Grubb Institute, who devoted his professional life to systems psychoanalytic thinking in the heart of organisational life, and especially of democracy releasing energy for innovation while improving efficiency.

NCERCC are not aware of such a systemic evaluation being publicly available, though it needs to be an essential part of any impact risk analysis by government (local or national) and providers.

What would David Armstrong make of regional care cooperatives determined and deliberative defining of placement making for residential child care? 

What are regional care cooperatives?

Government reports in its February 2026 policy statement “early signs of how a more coordinated regional model can support better outcomes” by “pooling resources, improving forecasting, strengthening multi-agency collaboration, building expertise and capability and acting collectively as a single customer and provider.”

There have been no evaluations published that can verify this being the case. There is informal reporting that disputes the engagement and planning. Neither regional care cooperative has functioned in any way, the effectiveness and efficiency have yet to be determined. In spite of it being an unproven model, usually new models need testing, the government have “accelerated” roll out to other regions.

 

Part one

Applying Armstrong’s core concepts from his seminal work, Organisation in the Mind.

1. Reclaiming the “primary task” from social defences

In traditional, centralised local authority models, placement making for residential child care is often paralysed by what Tavistock thinkers call social defences against anxiety. Anxiety is not only an individual experience but also held socially. Organisations develop structures, routines, and roles to manage this anxiety collectively, often unconsciously. These defences can help maintain functionality in high-stress environments but may become dysfunctional.

With child placement carrying immense systemic risk, rigid hierarchies and command-and-control cultures emerge in many forms to protect the ‘institution’ (in both local authority and provider) rather than the child.

The cooperatives’ shift: It might be argued that by moving decision-making to a regional, cooperative model, a shift in focus from self-preservation, a social defence from the keenly felt anxiety of being a single local authority or provider, enables refocussing to the primary task, that is, finding the right home for a vulnerable child.

The primary task can be defined simply as the task which the enterprise must perform in order to survive, what is it that cannot be compromised. Leaders will uphold the culture and articulate ‘what is going on here’ and ‘what can be done about it,’ in such a way staff know what it is they are supposed to be doing, they are kept ‘on task.’ Without this there is little hope of their doing it effectively. In a social defence what is being described might not match the reality and the organisation drifts ‘off task’ or even becomes ‘anti task.’

Armstrong’s view: He would argue that a “determined and deliberative” structure allows the collective to contain the profound anxiety of placement-making constructively, rather than passing it up a bureaucratic chain.

2. Overcoming “psychiatric disinheritance” via workplace democracy

Armstrong frequently quoted Eric Trist’s warning that society can be organised in a way that its members are “psychiatrically disinherited”, meaning they are cut off from the opportunity to shape the decisions that impact their work.

• The power of deliberation: In a deliberative cooperative, social workers, care providers, and potentially families are given genuine democratic authority.
• The release of energy: For Armstrong, this localised democracy is precisely what dismantles institutional inertia. When frontline workers are “enfranchised” to define placements based on clinical reality rather than rigid corporate frameworks, their psychological energy is freed up for creative, nuanced solutions.

3. Re-aligning the “Organisation-in-the-Mind”

A central tenet of Armstrong’s consultation practice was analysing the “organisation-in-the-mind”—the emotional and conceptual image of an institution that an individual carries internally.

Under a fragmented market procurement model, workers often perceive the organisation as cold, adversarial, and resource-starved.

By structuring placement making as a ‘cooperative’ the internal image shifts to one of partnership, shared accountability, and systemic containment.

It should be noted that ‘the cooperative’ only includes local authorities, it has no provider ‘member’ participants. This absence becomes an important dynamic as we will see later in the analysis.

Armstrong would see this shift in the collective unconscious as vital for fostering the trust required to innovate under pressure.

4. Maximising efficiency through socio-technical realignment

Armstrong rejected the premise that top-down managerialism drives efficiency. Drawing from socio-technical systems theory, he argued that efficiency is a byproduct of aligning human emotional needs with structural tasks.

This is an important observation given the asymmetrical membership of the regional care cooperatives, which is excluding of providers from decision making.

The intention is that by using deliberative methods to define placements regionally, cooperatives would reduce the “friction” of disputes, provider rejections, and placement breakdowns.

If providers were included in the cooperative Armstrong would conclude that this democratic alignment is actually inherently more efficient than the seeming displaced command-and-control procurement of the current policy and planning. Efficiency comes through reducing the compounding systemic costs of human frustration and organisational failure.

 

Linking and thinking

Having established a foundation to the analysis we can progress to consider specific anxieties and systemic resistances currently present in and surrounding the idea of regional care cooperatives.

From a systems-psychodynamic framework inevitable friction could be predicted. The question then becomes how this can be managed.

Current anxieties of providers as resistances include staying away, non-engagement, fear of local authorities determining price and practice. More psychologically there is the anxiety of local authorities projecting the ‘bad object’ on to providers through a dominating narrative such as ‘profiteering,’ ‘cherry picking.’

This breakdown captures a classic Tavistock dynamic: a system gridlocked by projective identification, splitting, and paranoid-schizoid defences.

From David Armstrong’s perspective, the anxieties and resistances described are not only individual ‘bad’ behaviours; they are systemic symptoms of a fractured “organisation-in-the-mind.”

 

Part two

How would Armstrong and the systems-psychoanalytic framework diagnose these specific resistances, and how could a regional care cooperative conceptually process them to release innovation?

1. Splitting and the “bad object” projection

• The Dynamic: The Local Authority (LA) and providers are caught in a classic “splitting” dynamic. To manage the unbearable anxiety of failing vulnerable children within a resource-starved system, the LA splits off its own sense of inadequacy and projects it onto providers.
• The defence: Providers are cast as the “Bad Object” (an internal representation of something threatening, hostile, or rejecting), greedy, exploitative (“profiteering”), and lazy (“cherry-picking”). By doing this, the LA preserves its own image as the purely benevolent “Good Object.”
• Armstrong’s thinking: Armstrong would point out that when providers internalise this projection, they experience profound psychiatric disinheritance. If they are pre-judged as villains, their psychological contract with the task is broken. Their subsequent resistance—non-engagement and staying away—is a rational defence against what is perceived as a toxic, attacking environment. They choose psychological exile over what is anticipated to be continuous denigration.

2. The fantasy of omnipotence vs. bureaucratic defences

 

• The dynamic: LAs rigidly determining both price and practice is an expression of an omnipotent fantasy, the belief that if the bureaucracy just exerts enough top-down control, it can eliminate the inherent risk and chaos of child care.
• The defence: Price and practice caps serve as a social defence against the anxiety of financial ruin and regulatory failure. However, this strips providers of their clinical and operational authority.
• Armstrong’s thinking: True efficiency requires authority to be located where the task is performed. When LAs dominate the narrative and dictate terms completely, they take away the providers’ capacity to innovate. The “staying away” is a manifestation of learned helplessness on the part of providers; they withhold their energy because the system signals that their unique competence is not valued.

Linking and thinking

If David Armstrong were consulting on the design of this regional care cooperative, he would argue that the cooperative cannot just be a legal structure; it must function as a psychological containment vessel to process these specific anxieties.

 

Part three

How the cooperative structure could process these resistances

What are some direct strategies that move from resistance to engagement?

• From projection to joint containment (open costings & shared risk): To dismantle the “profiteering” narrative, the cooperative must replace adversarial procurement with a shared-risk model. By opening the financial and clinical books together, the anxiety of cost is co-owned. The LA no longer needs to project greed, and the provider no longer needs to defend against it.
• From dictation to co-authoring rractice: If local authorities unilaterally determine practice, providers will resist. The deliberative defining of placement requires providers and LAs must sit at the same table to define what a “good placement” actually looks like. This restores the providers’ professional authority, converting their defensive “non-engagement” into constructive, task-focused energy.
• Re-framing “cherry-picking” as systemic insufficiency: A systems-psychodynamic approach re-frames “cherry-picking” not as moral failure by the provider, but as a symptom of a system that does not provide adequate containment for high-acuity risks. When the cooperative takes regional responsibility for all children, the collective must design bespoke provisions for the hardest-to-place children, rather than what is perceived as punishing individual providers for a systemic lack of capacity.

 

Part four

The summary conclusion

Armstrong might conclude that non-engagement is the provider’s only available weapon in an asymmetric power dynamic, but a shift to a determined, deliberative cooperative changes the underlying power structure.

The situation moves from a system of coercion (which breeds resistance and inefficiency) to a system of collaboration (which releases the energy required to innovate).

Linking and thinking

How to structurally operationalise this shift requires designing the deliberative forums so that they function as a safe “containing space” where LAs and providers can air these historical grievances without the system breaking down.

 

Part five

To design deliberative forums that function as a true “containing space” capable of holding toxic historical grievances without systemic collapse, requires a turn to Tavistock group relations theory, particularly Bion’s concepts of group mentality and David Armstrong’s focus on the primary task.

The starting point is the understanding that when Local Authorities (LAs) and providers enter a room together, they do not enter as objective professionals. They bring invisible historical trauma, mutual paranoia, and deep-seated defensive structures.

Intentional psychological containment is required in order for there to be any relatedness.

Without intentional psychological containment, the forum will instantly degenerate into Bion’s “Fight-Flight” basic assumption group, where LAs attack providers as profiteers, and providers mentally or physically check out (flight/stay away).

To prevent this and foster a “Work Group” focused on the primary task, the architecture of the forum must be designed with strict, reliable psychological and structural boundaries.

The blueprint – the thinking towards a containing deliberative forum

1. Establish rigid structural boundaries (the frame)

In systems psychodynamics, anxiety leaks when boundaries are fuzzy. The forum needs strict “baskets” of time, space, and territory to make participants feel safe enough to be vulnerable.

• Role boundary: Participants must not attend as adversarial negotiators or contract managers. They must enter explicitly as co-designers of a regional ecosystem. Their authority must be clearly defined before entering the room.
• Temporal and spatial continuity: The forums must occur at predictable intervals in a neutral territory (neither an LA headquarters nor a provider’s corporate office).
• The “no-transaction” rule: No active procurement, pricing disputes, or live tender discussions can take place within this specific container. If a transaction bleeds into the deliberative forum, the containing function fails immediately, and defensive posturing returns.

2. Introduce the role of the “organisational consultant” (external facilitation)

LAs and providers cannot facilitate this forum themselves; their respective historical baggage disqualifies them from holding the space impartially.

• The facilitator’s task: The forum requires an independent, psychodynamically trained facilitator whose role is to mirror the group’s behaviour back to them.
• Interpreting the dynamic: When an LA representative subtly implies a provider is “cherry-picking,” or a provider starts “withdrawing into silence,” the facilitator must name the dynamic in real time: “I notice a familiar splitting happening here, where we are putting all the selfishness onto one side of the room and all the victimhood onto the other. Let’s look at what anxiety is causing us to do that right now.”

3. Conduct a structured “psychosocial audit” of historical grievances

The historical grievances cannot be by-passed, forgotten, or any other defence. It cannot get straight to innovation. The collective must go through the mud to clear the pipe. The initial phase of the forum should include a structured, bounded ritual for airing these grievances.

• Naming the split: Give both sides a structured space to explicitly state their “Organisation-in-the-Mind” images of each other. Let the providers voice the pain of being branded as greedy profiteers; let the LAs voice the terror of being left with a catastrophic placement breakdown and no corporate cover.
• Validating the anxiety: The facilitator must help both sides see that these behaviours were defensive responses to an uncontained system, not evidence of innate malice. This dilutes the “Bad Object” projection and moves the group toward collective mourning for a broken past system, rather than fighting over it.

4. Continuous re-anchoring to the “primary task”

Once the historical grievances are aired and interpreted, the group must be firmly and unerringly re-anchored to the Primary Task.

• The shared vulnerability: The ultimate container for both LAs and providers is the shared reality of the vulnerable child. The core question of the deliberative forum must always be reframed: “How do we design a regional structure that can hold the profound anxiety of caring for this region’s children, so that neither the LA nor the provider has to hold it alone?”
• Co-authoring the rules: Energy for innovation is released when providers and LAs collaboratively draft the placement definitions. By giving providers a deliberative voice in defining what constitutes a sustainable placement, their “stay away” resistance evaporates because they finally possess institutional agency. (This is described in NCERCC series re Relational Commissioning especially those pieces regarding establishing shared values)

The path forward

By building this safe containing space, the systemic culture is shifted from one of paranoia and evasion to one of shared accountability. The historical grievances cease to be weapons used to break the system; instead, they become the raw data used to build a more resilient, cooperative structure.

The blueprint –  the practice towards a containing deliberative forum

The first session’s agenda, specifically looking at how the independent facilitator can introduce the “no-transaction rule” without shutting down the urgent realities of budget pressures.

Briefing Note: Designing Regional Care Cooperatives

To: Leadership Teams (Local Authorities & Residential Child Care Providers)
From: Project Steering Group / Systems-Psychodynamic Consultant
Date: some time soon
Subject: Establishing the “Deliberative Forum” as a Systemic Container

1. Purpose of this Note

This briefing note outlines the structural and psychological architecture required to launch our regional deliberative forums. Traditional procurement processes are currently gridlocked by mutual anxiety, defensiveness, and mistrust. To unlock innovation and improve placement efficiency, we must build a “Re-Enchanted Container”, a safe, bounded space where stakeholders can move past historical grievances and co-author regional residential child care placements.

2. Core Diagnostic: The Current Gridlock

Our current commissioning ecosystem suffers from systemic splitting and projection. To survive the profound anxiety of managing high-acuity child care risks with limited resources, organisations have defaulted to defensive posturing:

• Local Authorities (LAs) often project a “bad object” narrative onto providers, labelling them as “profiteering” or “cherry-picking,” while tightening top-down control over price and practice.
• Providers experience this as professional devaluation, resulting in defensive resistance: staying away, withholding capacity, or completely disengaging.

This friction destroys institutional efficiency and stifles creative, localised child care solutions.

3. The Solution: The “Re-Enchanted Container”

The regional deliberative forum is not a negotiation meeting; it is a clinical and organisational workspace. It functions using three strict boundaries:

Boundary Pillar	Operational Rule	Purpose
The Boundary Frame	Strict neutrality of space; absolute “No-Transaction” rule (no active tenders or individual price disputes allowed in this room).	To remove commercial survival anxieties from the collaborative workspace.
The Psychosocial Audit	A structured process to name and interpret past grievances, projections, and institutional trauma	To dissolve historical “bad object” biases and heal the psychological contract.
The Primary Task	All discussions are rigorously anchored to one question: How do we collectively hold the vulnerability of our region’s children?	To shift focus from bureaucratic self-protection to clinical reality.

Leadership next steps

To prepare for the first forum, leadership must select attendees who can step out of adversarial negotiation roles and function as system co-designers.

Participants must accept the authority of an independent external facilitator who will actively name, mirror, and interpret defensive dynamics in the room as they happen.

 

Opening script: the external facilitator

Context: Delivered at the absolute beginning of Session 1. The room is arranged in a circle or hollow square with no head of the table. LA and provider representatives are mixed rather than sitting on opposing sides.

“Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the first regional deliberative forum for our regional care cooperative.

My name is [Name], and I am here today as an independent organisational consultant. My role is not to chair a meeting, take minutes, or help you negotiate a contract. My sole task is to help this group maintain its focus on its primary work, and to call out the hidden dynamics, anxieties, and unwritten rules that might get in our way.

Before we say anything else, we need to acknowledge the invisible elephants already sitting in this room. Many of you have entered this space carrying years of frustration, exhaustion, and mutual distrust.

On one side, there is a historical narrative that Local Authorities are rigidly bureaucratic, punitive, and out of touch with clinical reality. On the other side, there is a narrative that independent providers are opportunistic, selective, and motivated by profit over the welfare of children.

Systems-psychoanalysis teaches us that these toxic narratives are defences.

When a system is under immense pressure and carrying the terrifying vulnerability of traumatised children, it is human nature to split the world into good guys and bad guys. It is a way to find someone to blame so we don’t have to face the overwhelming anxiety of a broken system alone. But this defence mechanism has broken our relationships. It has led to providers staying away and local authorities tightening control. Ultimately, it is the children who pay the price for that division.

Today, we are building a new container. To make it safe enough for us to do real, honest work, we are enforcing three non-negotiable boundaries:

1. First, the no-transaction rule. We are not here to debate active tenders, argue over individual fees, or manage current contracts. If commercial transactions bleed into this room, the container breaks. We are here strictly to co-design the future framework of regional placement making.
2. Second, we will audit our history. We are not going to pretend the past didn’t happen. We are going to name the grievances, acknowledge the institutional pain on both sides, and consciously lay it down so we can move forward.
3. Third, we anchor to the primary task. Every idea, disagreement, and decision today must be filtered through a single question: How do we collectively hold the vulnerability of this region’s children so that no single agency is left to carry that anxiety alone?

Because I am independent, I am going to be explicitly naming what I see. If I notice us slipping back into blaming, defensive silence, or corporate posturing, I will stop the conversation and point it out. I ask that you grant me the authority to do that, and that you grant each other the grace and space to speak from a place of professional clinical reality rather than defensive survival.

Let’s begin by looking at our history. I’d like to open the floor to hear what it has felt like to try and make placements in this region over the last two years…”