Agreeing the task

Map out existing ways that the team supports each other. Include both formal and informal aspects of the team culture. Supervision, team meetings etc. Not all of these will be particularly focusing on supporting mentalizing (about 10 minutes).
Introduce some AMBIT starting points taken from previous sessions. Mentalizing as something that is supported by relationships. Talking with person who one trusts is likely to help be able to make sense of a situation with a young person and reduce professional anxiety. Avoiding professional isolation with a case as isolation is likely to increase anxiety. Anxiety is an expected part of the work. In AMBIT asking for help is seen as a very positive part of team culture. Invite any comments about these starting points. Explain that the learning objective for this session is for the team to learn the skill of Thinking Together, a technique which uses a mentalizing approach to shape conversations between colleagues about their work, that we suggest teams might want to adopt as part of their local culture.

Explaining the issue

Use the exercise Passed-outwards Discussion to model the effects of anxiety on the transfer and reflection of important clinical information.
Provide a didactic explanation of Thinking together. See the page Thinking Together as a key starting point in the manual. There are two brief (less than 10 minutes) video presentations on thinking together in Video introduction to Thinking Together
Then show the video of thinking together, thinking apart which is in the Thinking Together page.

Practice

See also Thinking Together - Training exercise - Practice thinking together in pairs or threes. Ensure that all people have a chance to practice. Working in threes allows for an observer who can monitor the four stages of the conversation and provide feedback. After each practice (usually about 5-10 minutes), take feedback. Practice again the other way round. Again, take feedback.

Reflect

1. Whole team discussion. Enable full range of voices to be heard around this. Some people really like it but important that those who are less comfortable are heard. The aim here is to mentalize the actual experience of practicing this and not encouraging compliance.
2. Identify specific situations when this technique may be applied as part of the actual practice of the team.

Manualize

Make a sub page (Log in, switch to Edit mode, and click + Manualize our work) of Thinking Together for your team. This should capture some of the team's ideas and feelings around this practice, and then agree a plan about how the team will experiment with using this. The idea of experimentation may be useful here. The staff are not being required to sign up to something for ever!! but are invited to try something for a period of time and evaluate its value. If it does not add value, then it should not be used in the longer term. But such a judgement needs to be made on the basis of practice not prior belief!