Following on from our previous interview about neighbourhood working in Wigan, this month Dawn Plimmer spoke with Kristy Docherty from the Edinburgh Futures Institute and Scottish Prevention Hub to explore another inspiring example of collaborative practice.
Read the interview below to learn about how Kristy’s career led her to pursue a PhD in collaboration, and how she’s putting the theory into practice in her role setting up and co-leading the Scottish Prevention Hub.
Collaborative leadership is not about an individual being collaborative. It’s about a group learning to lead together – particularly where no single organisation holds the answer.
Kristy Docherty, Edinburgh Futures Institute/Scottish Prevention Hub
1. What is the journey that led you to your current role at the Scottish Prevention Hub?
My journey has been shaped by a consistent thread: working on complex “wicked” problems that require cross-sector thinking.
I began with a degree in social policy, which provided an interdisciplinary grounding in inequality and the factors that shape people’s lives and outcomes. I then spent around a decade in housing-led regeneration, working alongside communities most affected by inequality across the UK. In hindsight, clear themes run through that period: socio-economic disadvantage, working across sectors, convening different actors, engaging communities and navigating complexity.
I later moved into renewable energy development. Although it initially felt like a huge sector shift, the large wind, solar and hydro infrastructure projects required cross-sector working, strong relationships and an ability to operate in politically complex environments.
Across my career, I have been motivated by being part of something bigger. Contributing to systemic change – and feeling part of a broader movement or transition – has been a consistent driver.
A pivotal moment came during my PhD at Queen Margaret University ‘Leading Change in Public Services’. I had begun with a fairly traditional, heroic view of leadership, believing that leaders were expected to have the answers. However, at an event hosted by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, I encountered a senior police leader expressing a real uncertainty about what collaboration actually looks like in practice.
That moment crystallised something I had sensed throughout my career: collaboration was increasingly expected, yet there was little shared understanding of how to do it well. I shifted my PhD to focus on collaborative leadership and ‘wicked issues’. Reframing leadership as collective, relational and emergent was transformational, and it laid the foundations for my later work at Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Scottish Prevention Hub.
2. What is the Scottish Prevention Hub?
The Scottish Prevention Hub is a collaboration between Police Scotland, Public Health Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, based within the Edinburgh Futures Institute. It focuses on prevention, data and leadership across public services.
It emerged from a formal collaboration agreement between Police Scotland and Public Health Scotland in 2021. Both organisations recognised the deep connections between health and justice – particularly in relation to inequality, and the conditions shaping people’s lives. They were also keen to broaden the partnership to include academia.
Working closely with Clair Thomson (Police Scotland) and Dr Diane Stockton (Public Health Scotland) from the outset, we recognised that collaboration itself needed attention. This related to how we worked across three complex organisations, and understanding collaboration as a practice and a science.
The Hub has three core elements that support an intentional approach to designing and resourcing collaboration:
- Co-location and co-directorship: We are physically co-located in a neutral university space and co-directed across organisations. That structure allows us to role-model collaborative practice.
- Data, evidence and insight: Bringing together quantitative data, qualitative insight, and lived and frontline practitioner experience, while also grappling with issues like data sharing and interoperability.
- Capability and capacity building for collaboration: Developing the skills, mindsets and conditions required to work differently across organisational boundaries.
3. What is the role of collaborative leadership?
Collaborative leadership is foundational to the Hub.
From the beginning, we recognised and explicitly called out the cultural differences between public sector organisations. Universities, policing and public health operate with very different professional norms, epistemologies, governance structures and ways of knowing. Even within “public services,” cultures differ significantly.
Rather than ignore those differences, we named them. That created a more honest starting point.
Through my PhD, I developed a framework built around four principles for collaboration:
- Systems thinking: Understanding interdependencies and the non-linear nature of cause and effect.
- Emergence: Allowing direction to evolve through sense-making rather than relying solely on predetermined plans.
- Inquiry: Cultivating curiosity and openness; asking “what do I think, what do they think and what do we think” about any given issue.
- Relationality: Moving beyond polite transactional engagement to deeper relational work.
Together, these principles require both attitudinal and process modifications.
The co-directorship model reflects this. Claire brings 20 years of policing, justice and leadership and development expertise. Diane is an epidemiologist with deep public health and analytical experience. I bring commercial experience, collaborative leadership research and a strategic lens. We have very different expertise and backgrounds – and that difference is precisely why we needed an explicit way of working. Without shared principles, those differences could fragment us. With them, they become a strength.
For me, collaborative leadership is not about an individual being collaborative. It’s about a group learning to lead together – particularly where no single organisation holds the answer.
4. What is your role?
I lead public services work at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, where I bring together government, academia and practitioners to tackle complex challenges – from prevention and system reform to the opportunities of AI. Alongside that, as Sector Engagement Lead at Edinburgh Innovations, I build partnerships that turn university expertise into real-world impact, and I also co-direct the Scottish Prevention Hub,
Like the other co-directors of the Hub, I have a strategic and connective role, helping shape the overall strategy and sustainability. Because the architecture of the Hub is in itself an innovation and a new way of working, it needs narrative clarity, effective governance, funding models, people resourcing, emergent and planned approaches, and strategic positioning across organisations. Part of my role is ensuring the Hub is protected within our institutional structures – helping to build the authorising environment for delivery and thinking about how we work at the macro, meso and micro levels depending on what is needed at any given time.
5. What have you learnt about how to create the conditions for effective collaboration?
The conditions we create are critical. Effective collaboration depends not only on structures and governance, but on the wider environment – tone, invitation, pace, and the permission people feel to contribute.
One of the most powerful enablers has been co–location in a neutral space. Within the Edinburgh Futures Institute, there are no organisational logos. That neutrality creates a sense of spaciousness. People tell us they have different kinds of conversations here than in their home organisations.
In addition, I’ve learned that collaboration requires:
- A context – this might seem obvious but learning about collaboration as you do it and being conscious about it is critical.
- Explicit attention to culture and difference.
- The integration of both fast and slow work: seizing moments of opportunity while investing in long-term relational groundwork.
- Governance that centres dialogue and collective sense-making, rather than being tightly agenda-driven.
- Pooled funding to enable shared investment across financial cycles.
- Attention to the practicalities of collaboration, including mundane infrastructural barriers, for example, file-sharing systems which often expose the fragility of collaborative capacity.
Most importantly, collaboration cannot be treated as an add-on. It must be intentional, resourced and stewarded. Without that, it reverts to rhetoric.
6. What have you found helps people shift towards more relational and emergent ways of working, and how have you supported that?
Thinking specifically about the Prevention Hub, we work with quite a small core team from the 3 partner organisations. We have found that some people intuitively grasp emergent, relational ways of working. For others – particularly those trained in highly structured environments – it can feel destabilising. Our approach has been to create psychological safety, model the behaviours ourselves, and provide practical frameworks that make the abstract more tangible.
I’m always careful about the language of “soft skills”. These are not soft. In complex public service systems, relational capability is core capability. Ultimately, supporting people to work differently is about creating space – physical, psychological and relational – and modelling that a different way of leading together is both possible and productive. We support this in a range of ways e.g. using dialogue walks and relational exercises to build deeper trust, and encouraging inquiry-led conversations rather than purely technical and task focused meetings.
One of our workstreams in the Hub is ‘Collaborative Leadership’. This takes us into a wider advocacy and capacity building role. We recognise it is important to upskill and support people who work in complex environments and on complex cross system issues. Colleagues at EFI and Keira Oliver (an expert facilitator and learning designer) recently piloted a 2 day ‘Introduction to Systems Convening’ programme with stakeholders from across the public services, e.g. NHS, Local Government, Scottish Government, third sector etc. This drew from the four principle approach that we have been applying in the Hub of systems, emergence, relational and inquiry, within a structured, experiential course. We will be refining the programme and hope to offer it to interested people and groups later this year.