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Nearly all the articles you read in journals are about people's successes. Are they keeping quiet about their failures? Many of these success stories form the basis for theories or models that are intended to be used, but when was the last time you successfully used a model as a predictor before the event?

The succession of the chief executive of any organisation is a critical event. In 1971 a study revealed that in the UK, management succession was almost equal to financial failure as the major cause of firms ceasing to exist as independent organisations. Dun and Bradstreet calculated that in the USA, 45% of all business failures are caused through the appointment of incompetent managers to chief executive positions.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether incorporating a 20-week Kundalini yoga programme into a residential home for children improves well-being outcomes.

This is a mixed methods feasibility study. Feasibility was assessed through recruitment and retention rates as well as participants’ self-report perceptions on social inclusion, mental health and well-being and through semi-structured interviews on the benefits of the study. Mutual recovery entailed that children in care (CIC), youth practitioners and management participated together in the Kundalini yoga sessions.

The study initially enrolled 100 per cent of CIC and 97 per cent (29/30) of eligible staff. Attendance was low with an average rate of four sessions per participant (SD=3.7, range 0-13). All the participants reported that the study was personally meaningful and experienced both individual (e.g. feeling more relaxed) and social benefits (e.g. feeling more open and positive). Pre- and post-yoga questionnaires did not show any significant effects. Low attendance was associated with the challenges faced by the children’s workforce (e.g. high levels of stress, low status, profile and pay) and insufficient consultation and early involvement of stakeholders on the study implementation process.

Because of the chosen research approach (i.e. feasibility study) and low attendance rate, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, further research with larger samples including a control or comparison group to pilot similar research questions is mandatory.

This study has generated a number of valuable guiding principles and recommendations that might underpin the development of any future intervention for CIC and staff working in children’s homes.

The concept of togetherness and mutuality within residential spaces is discussed in the paper.

The effects of Kundalini yoga have not been reported before in any peer-review publications. This paper fulfils an identified need (i.e. poor outcomes among CIC and residential staff) and shows how movement and creative practices can support the concept of mutual recovery.

This paper considers the demand for evidence‐based practice in mental health communication and describes how evidence from studies of health communication, as well as recommendations from educational models, professional bodies and policy directives have been incorporated into our ‘Brief, Ordinary and Effective’ model for communication in nursing. A key challenge in putting evidence to work in health care and bridging the theory‐practice gap concerns the social and organisational context that may not always work to sustain new initiatives. Accordingly, we will describe an attempt to support and consolidate awareness of the role of evidence in health care communication via a Managed Innovation Network and the development of the Brief, Ordinary and Effective model of health care communication. This enables us to align the quest for new knowledge and insights that are practice‐congruent with the kinds of applicability criteria that modern health care providers set out. This has yielded important insights about how research can be embedded in informed practice and how evidence‐based communicative practice can be nurtured and made viable in communication in mental health care.