Too often, the organisation believes it handled the complaint, while the person who made it knows the harm wasn’t addressed. We help organisations see what their complaints are really telling them, and put it right.
Educating the public on harm. Creating pathways to repair.
An organisation may have the authority to close a complaint. But does that give it the authority to declare the harm resolved?
Complaints are commonly measured through response times, procedural compliance, decisions issued and cases closed. These measures show whether an organisation followed its process. They do not show whether the person affected experienced the outcome as fair, accountable or meaningful.
Organisations also hold most of the power to decide when their own process has ended. They may define the complaint narrowly, control the evidence and language used, assess their own response and record the matter as resolved. The person who made the complaint rarely holds equivalent power to influence what resolution means.
When these experiences are considered only as individual complaints, wider patterns can remain hidden.
Tap the squares that ring true. A line fills quickly, because none of this is unusual.
The people’s test for resolution
We are developing a free, public framework for judging whether a complaint has been meaningfully resolved rather than merely closed. It is built with people who have been through a complaints process, not written for them. It asks:
Was the harm acknowledged?
Was responsibility addressed, rather than avoided through procedure?
Was repair considered?
Did the organisation test its own definition of resolution against the experience of the person affected?
The people’s resolution challenge
Once the test exists, we will put it to organisations publicly, and invite them to answer three questions:
How do you know a complaint has been meaningfully resolved, rather than merely closed?
What role does the person affected have in defining resolution?
What will you change after applying the test to your current approach?
Their responses will be published. Organisations are not asked to agree with every conclusion. The challenge is to engage openly and explain where they stand.
Complaints contain knowledge
Complaints are usually dealt with individually. Collectively they can tell us something much bigger. They can reveal who is repeatedly overlooked, where processes unintentionally make things worse, why some people lose trust altogether, and where small changes could prevent the same thing happening to the next person.
Complaints are not simply problems to resolve. They are one of the richest sources of organisational learning available.
What we do
Our work connects three things that too often sit apart.
Public voice
ensuring lived experience helps shape the conversation about harm and meaningful resolution.
Organisational learning
helping organisations understand what their complaints and feedback are telling them that they cannot currently see.
Research and influence
building evidence, sharing transferable practice across sectors and turning learning into wider change.
What we are building
Over the next three years, Address the harm® aims to establish a national centre for organisational learning, trust and repair.
Our emerging programme includes who gets to say it’s resolved, the people’s inquiry and the people’s test for resolution; our beyond complaints organisational-learning programme; demonstrator partnerships across public and commercial sectors; and university and research partnerships.
Our ambition is not to become another organisation that handles complaints. We want to change what organisations learn from them.
What we are
We are not another complaints procedure, advocacy service or regulator.
Address the harm® exists for public benefit. We help people, organisations and society understand harm, learn from lived experience and improve future practice.
We ask not only whether the correct process was followed, but what happened to the person affected, what the organisation can learn, and what needs to change so that the same harm is less likely to happen to the next person.
That is what we mean by creating pathways to repair.
Get involved
This is repair by design: not investigation after the fact, but a public standard for what resolution should mean, held by the people it is meant to serve. Our white paper, From harm to healing, sets out the case.