Tag Archives: practice

Myron’s Maxims – this weeks discovery

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I came across this concept last week – Myron’s Maxims – and thought I’d have a delve into it and do some thinking!

Myron Rogers is an expert in organisational development and systems thinking, known for his work in helping organisations manage change and complexity. He is particularly recognised for his application of systems theory to organisational leadership and change processes. He explores  the importance of understanding organisations as complex systems and looks at how change emerges from the interactions and relationships within systems.

He is best known for articulating Myron’s Maxims, a set of principles that guide organisational change and leadership but also tell us a lot about life – and for this article – social work! Here they are….

– People own what they help create

– Real change happens in real work

– Those who do the work, do the change

– Connect the system to more of itself

– Start anywhere, follow everywhere

– The process you use to get to the future is the future you get.

Let’s look at them….

People own what they help create

Here he emphasises the importance of participation and co-creation in achieving lasting change. This resonates for me in life and social work practice. We know co-creation of strategies for change or care planning lead to better outcomes for people and they engage better with self-created options. And we know that in life in general we do better when we do things with other people – or at least doing things with other people is an important component of our well-being. The other being time on our own!?

Real change happens in real work

This suggests that transformation comes from actual, hands-on practice, not from abstract plans. Christine, my wife, is always saying to me, ‘ok then – just do it!’. And she’s right I often procrastinate in the thinking stage. There comes a point where you have done enough thinking and know enough so you then must do something. That’s where the real change takes place. Eileen Munro made this same point in her review of children’s services – you need to figure out when you know enough and then actually do something. I’m not saying that’s easy, but it is essential.

Those who do the work, do the change

This reinforces the idea that people directly involved in the work are best positioned to create meaningful change. We can’t have someone else go to the gym for us. We must go. We can’t do the work for people we are working with. They must do the work. That’s the only way to make true change happen.

Connect the system to more of itself

You need to be focusing on leveraging existing networks and relationships within a system to foster change. The idea is that systems (whether an organisation, community, or even an individual’s life) are made up of interconnected elements. When you strengthen these connections, you enable better communication, collaboration, and shared understanding, which ultimately leads to more sustainable and effective outcomes. In social work, consider a case where a client is facing homelessness, unemployment, and mental health challenges. Instead of addressing each issue in isolation, the social worker connects the client to a network of services—housing support, employment counselling, mental health services, and peer support groups. By linking these different services (parts of the system) and encouraging them to collaborate, the client receives more comprehensive support. This holistic approach, which “connects the system to more of itself,” ensures that the various agencies don’t work in silos but come together to address the client’s needs in a coordinated and integrated manner, leading to better outcomes.

Start anywhere, follow everywhere

This maxim encourages a flexible approach to change, allowing it to emerge from any point within the system. Making a starts the hardest part I’m fond of saying but simply doing something creates momentum and motivation. And then follow where the momentum takes you. Consider a case where a family is referred to a social worker due to concerns about a child’s behaviour at school. The referral might initially focus on helping the child with behavioural interventions. However, as the social worker engages with the family, they might uncover other underlying issues—such as financial stress, parental conflict, or untreated mental health challenges in one of the parents. Rather than rigidly sticking to the initial issue (the child’s behaviour), the social worker “follows everywhere” by addressing the broader context, helping the family with financial resources, referring parents to counselling, and working with school staff to support the child holistically.

The process you use to get to the future is the future you get

This highlights the importance of the methods and processes used in shaping the desired outcome. You fall to the level of your systems rather than rise to the level of your goals. Systems, planning, and routine are everything. What you look for you see. Be careful what you look for and always have a system or plan.

Myron’s Maxims and Living a Good Life

Myron’s Maxims emphasise the importance of ownership, process, and interconnectedness, all of which are key to living a fulfilled and meaningful life. The principles acknowledging that people own what they help create and that real change happens in real work. They highlight the value of personal involvement in shaping your own path. A good life is not just about outcomes but also about the processes we engage in daily—the relationships we build, the systems we connect with, and the ways we contribute. The idea that the process you use to get to the future is the future you get underscores that living intentionally, fostering positive connections, and remaining flexible in adapting to life’s challenges are essential for achieving long-term satisfaction and purpose.

Myron’s Maxims in Social Work Practice

In social work, Myron’s Maxims align perfectly with empowering individuals and communities. People own what they help create speaks directly to participatory practice in social work, where service users are active partners in decision-making, helping them take ownership of their lives and outcomes. Real change happens in real work resonates with the importance of practical, hands-on interventions and ongoing reflection. The maxim those who do the work, do the change highlights that transformation in clients’ lives occurs when they are deeply involved in the process, rather than simply being passive recipients of support. Finally, connecting the system to more of itself and starting anywhere, following everywhere encourage social workers to view their interventions holistically, understanding the client as part of a wider system and recognising that change can begin from any point in a client’s journey. Ethical, collaborative, and systemic. Thanks Myron!

Professional Identity – defining the box.

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Professional identity in social work is complex and multifaceted, encompassing more than just desired traits or competence. It reflects not only the personal sense of self that a practitioner develops through experience and growth, but also a collective identity shared within the profession. This collective identity binds social workers together through common values, ethics, and professional expectations. The process of shaping this identity is ongoing and evolving as individuals navigate the challenges and responsibilities of the field. Given its depth and fluid nature, professional identity in social work is difficult to define, as it is more than simple characteristics and involves the integration of personal, professional, and societal dimensions.

This article looks at this through the lens of the Fran Wiles journal article from 2013 ‘Not Easily Put into a Box’: Constructing Professional Identity, which appeared in Social Work Education: The International Journal

Personal and professional identities differ in several key ways. Personal identity is shaped by an individual’s unique experiences, values, beliefs, and personality traits, which are influenced by factors such as family, culture, and personal history. It represents how a person sees themselves outside of formal roles and in various aspects of life, reflecting their sense of self, relationships, and personal goals.

In contrast, professional identity is the sense of self that is constructed within the context of a profession. It is shaped by the norms, values, ethics, and expectations of a particular field, in this case social work, and reflects how individuals view themselves in their professional role. Professional identity also involves adopting the standards, skills, and competencies necessary for success and credibility in the workplace.

While personal identity is rooted in individuality and personal history, professional identity is shaped by external structures and collective expectations. The two identities can overlap, especially in professions like social work, where personal values often align with professional ethics. However, they do remain distinct, with professional identity being more defined by the responsibilities and behaviours required in a work setting, while personal identity reflects your core self across various contexts – your whole life.

In social work practice, being part of the profession inherently brings an individual’s personal identity and behaviour under scrutiny. This is because social work operates within a framework of high ethical standards, values, and responsibilities that require practitioners to align both their personal and professional identities with the core principles of the field. Social workers are expected to embody qualities such as empathy, integrity, and social justice not only in their professional tasks but also in their personal conduct. This expectation places a spotlight on how personal beliefs, values, and actions intersect with professional responsibilities.

Given the nature of social work, where relationships, trust, and ethical decision-making are central, a social worker’s behaviour in both the personal and professional is continuously evaluated. How we manage our biases, boundaries, and emotional responses can significantly impact our effectiveness in practice. Social work practice often involves complex human interactions, where personal values may come into conflict with professional codes of ethics. In such instances, practitioners are expected to prioritise the values and standards of the profession, ensuring that their behaviour aligns with ethical guidelines.

Being a social worker means accepting that your actions, decisions, and even personal beliefs may be examined to ensure they do not compromise your role or the welfare of service users. This scrutiny underscores the need for ongoing reflection and self-awareness to navigate the complexities of integrating personal identity with professional expectations.

In the article Wiles states that their ‘analysis showed students constructing their professional identity in relation to desired traits, or through developing a sense of shared identity with other social workers; alternatively, it was portrayed as a process of individual development’.  Some main themes emerge.

Complexity of Professional Identity

Wiles emphasises that professional identity is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process that evolves throughout an individual’s career. It involves a combination of desired traits, collective identity within the profession, and personal development as a social worker.

Reflection and Identity Work

The article highlights the importance of reflection in the construction of professional identity. Wiles notes that social work students engage in identity work, particularly during their final stages of study, where they reflect on their professional development and prepare for practice.

Support Mechanisms for Development

Wiles suggests that social work educators should provide support mechanisms for students to continue developing their professional identities after qualification. This includes professional supervision, team collaboration, and opportunities for continuing professional development.

Cultural Understandings

Wiles explores how students’ conceptualisations of professional identity reflect broader cultural understandings within the social work community and society, showing that these identities are influenced by various social discourses.

It is evident then that developing a strong professional identity in social work requires cultivating several key traits. Adherence to professional standards, such as those outlined by Social Work England and the Professional Capabilities Framework, is fundamental to ensuring competent and ethical practice. A solid foundation of theoretical knowledge and expertise is essential, enabling social workers to make informed decisions and apply effective interventions. Additionally, a genuine commitment to serving others – maybe grounded in altruism – forms the ethical core of the profession, driving practitioners to prioritise the welfare of individuals and communities. Social workers also enjoy a high degree of autonomy, allowing them to exercise judgment and flexibility in their roles, while being guided by a code of ethics. The use of research and the ability to engage in critical thinking are vital, as they enable professionals to stay informed about best practices and continuously improve their skills.

A shared professional identity in social work is both collective and shaped by the specific settings and specialisms within the field. Social workers have a common professional foundation, but distinct identities can form around specialisms such as child protection, mental health, or adult services. These specialisms allow practitioners to develop expertise and tailor their approach to specific areas of practice while maintaining the core principles of social work. However, working within multidisciplinary teams can sometimes challenge or erode professional identity, as the distinct role of the social worker may become blurred when collaborating with other professionals.

Drawing on Goffman’s ideas of identity work, becoming a social work professional involves a significant transformation of one’s personal identity. Experiences from personal life are reshaped and reframed through education and professional training, as individuals learn to navigate the complexities of social work practice. A key component of this transformation is the “use of self,” where practitioners integrate their personal experiences and qualities with professional skills in a reflective and intentional manner. This process of becoming a social worker requires not only the mastery of theoretical knowledge and practical skills but also the internalisation of a professional identity that aligns with the values, ethics, and standards of the field. Goffman’s concept of identity work underscores the fluid and ongoing nature of this process, as social workers must continually balance their personal identity with the expectations of the profession. As a result, professional identity not only shapes how you perform in the role but also impacts how you view yourself personally. For students, this identity work is critical—they must evolve from learners to professionals by integrating knowledge and embodying the core principles of social work in their practice.

Students need reflective space to actively explore and rehearse their emerging professional identities as social workers. This reflective practice is essential for allowing them to integrate theoretical knowledge with real-world experiences, critically evaluate their actions, and align their personal values with the ethical standards of the profession. In these spaces, which are for the most part their practice placements, students can safely explore different approaches, receive feedback, and refine their understanding of their role within the social work field. Reflective space also helps students navigate the complexities of their identity work, as they process the emotional, intellectual, and ethical challenges they encounter. By engaging in regular reflection, they become more self-aware and better prepared to handle the nuanced demands of social work practice, ultimately shaping a stronger, more confident professional identity.

Biology’s Challenge to Social Work – Embodying the Person-in-Environment Perspective

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The Body’s Role in Social Work: Integrating the Person-in-Environment Perspective

Dennis Saleeby is a bit of a hero of mine. Particularly his writing about strengths based practice. Definitely worth checking out – and I love the article Biology’s Challenge to Social Work – Embodying the Person-in-Environment Perspective about the importance of the physical body to social work practice so I thought I’d share with you the key points he makes from my notes. In social work, where the aim is to understand and support the individual holistically, there is a lack of attention to the body’s role and this can be problematic. Our physical bodies are more than mere vessels—they are deeply intertwined with how we experience the world and engage in social relationships. Ignoring this aspect in social work practice misses an essential part of what it means to be human. I go further than this and say that our psychology is stacked on our biology and we then take this biology and internally created psychology into the social world to present ourselves and then have ourselves (our psychology and biology) altered by our experiences in a circular relationship. But it all starts and ends with our biology.

The Body as a Social Being

The human body is not just a biological entity; it’s embedded within the social and cultural fabric of our lives. Our physical presence is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the social contexts we find ourselves in. Our relationships, roles, and even our ability to function in institutions are influenced by how we inhabit and understand our bodies. As thinkers like Michael Gazzaniga and others have pointed out, how we exist in society depends greatly on the sense and capabilities of our body, whether we realise it or not.

Survival, both biological and social, are inextricably linked. The types of relationships we have, the ways in which institutions interact with individuals, and even the opportunities available to us often hinge on the condition and perception of our physical selves. Social workers, therefore, must consider the body as part of the broader social environment, not as something separate or secondary to the person’s social experiences.

Unlocking the Wisdom of the Body

Our bodies hold a deep, intuitive wisdom that, when tapped into, can foster healing, transformation, and personal growth. The body isn’t just a passive recipient of care—it actively participates in its own healing. This understanding mirrors ideas from holistic medicine, where a good physician recognises the healer within the patient, acknowledging the patient’s inherent capacity for self-recovery.

In social work, the concept of the body’s wisdom is valuable. When social workers build therapeutic relationships with clients, recognising the body’s role in this process can be profoundly transformative. Whether it’s through somatic practices, or simply acknowledging the physical experiences of trauma, stress, or resilience, social workers can work with clients to activate their own healing potential.

Mind, Body, and Environment: A Complex Relationship

The interaction between mind, body, and environment is dynamic and ongoing. In social work, this interconnectedness forms the basis of the person-in-environment perspective, which emphasises how individuals are shaped by their surroundings and vice versa. This idea resonates with the ecological or life model, which stresses the importance of “goodness of fit” between the person and their environment. The ability to adapt to changing external demands is not only a practical matter but also a moral imperative within this framework.

Adaptation is about more than just survival. It involves growth, development, and the successful navigation of life’s transitions. But adaptation is not just a mental process—it requires the body’s active participation, which we must acknowledge when supporting clients through challenges like illness, aging, or trauma.

Critiquing the Medical Model: Where It Falls Short

The traditional medical model tends to objectify the patient’s body and overlooks the personal knowledge and experiences of the individual. It reduces people to a collection of symptoms, stripping them of agency, autonomy, and responsibility. This model is problematic for us, where the goal is to empower clients rather than pathologise them.

Social workers understand that a person’s body and mind must be integrated, not treated as separate entities. Clients must be seen as more than their illnesses or deficits – the cornerstone of strengths based practice. Empowering clients involves recognising the strength and capacity within their own bodies, rather than assuming that only professionals hold the key to healing.

The Body as a Site of Struggle

Many clients we come into contact with in social work have experienced their bodies as a site of control and oppression, whether through institutional practices, societal ideologies, or interpersonal violence. This loss of control over their bodies can diminish their sense of self-worth, power, and capability. For instance, societal expectations about gender, age, or ethnicity often dictate how people should inhabit and experience their bodies, leaving many feeling disconnected from their physical selves.

For social workers, part of the healing process is helping clients reclaim their sense of agency over their bodies. This may involve confronting issues like body image, disability, or trauma, and helping clients re-establish a positive, empowered relationship with their physical selves.

Reconnecting Mind and Body in Social Work Practice

To fully support clients, social workers must recognise that the body holds significant restorative powers. Healing is not just about resolving psychological issues—it’s about engaging the whole person, including their physical body. Forming an alliance with clients that acknowledges the body’s role in this process can open up new avenues for growth and recovery. This requires a practice model that respects the body’s role in a person’s overall well-being.

This approach doesn’t mean treating the body like a medical object rather, it involves inviting clients to engage with their bodies in a way that fosters healing. Touch, physical presence, and bodily awareness—when used appropriately—can be powerful tools for affirmation, comfort, and emotional connection.

The Strength-Based Approach: Honouring the Body’s Resilience

Social work prides itself on being a strength-based profession, and this applies as much to the body as it does to the mind. The human body is a source of resilience, vitality, and strength. When social workers recognise the body’s potential, they can better support clients in tapping into these resources to navigate life’s challenges.

Whether dealing with illness, trauma, or everyday stress, helping clients understand and reconnect with their bodies can lead to more profound and lasting changes. This holistic approach not only helps clients heal but also enables them to experience the joy, freedom, and empowerment that comes from knowing and inhabiting their bodies fully.

In Conclusion: Embodying Wholeness in Social Work

Ultimately, social work is about fostering wholeness in the individual. This requires an integration of mind, body, and environment. By recognizing the body’s importance in this equation, social workers can deepen their practice, enhance the helping relationship, and more effectively empower their clients. The body is not merely a backdrop to social and psychological issues—it’s an active, dynamic part of the healing process, and when integrated into social work practice, it can open the door to greater transformation and growth.

If you want to read the whole article by Saleeby – here it is

1992 – Biology’s Challenge to Social Work Embodying the Person-in-Environment PerspectiveDownload

Strengths based practice – Verbs and Powerlifting meet social work.

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Verbs

As a solution focused social worker, I am interested in supporting sustainable positive change.

However precisely what activity (in the broadest sense) do we offer as professionals to achieve this. 

To describe our activity we use a set of transitive verbs (a verb that requires a direct object to implement an action) that have barely crawled out of the wishy washy swamp – Support, Refer, Talk, Visit, Advise, Signpost, Engage…………………….

Oh the insipid horror………………………

Our profession is distinct from say teaching that has its own patron saint Bloom of the verb, who passed down from education paradise the demonstrable language of, Analyse, Memorize, Classify, Measure, and Recall (amongst a list of dozens). Teachers plan lessons with activities that achieve Blooms outcomes. For example, if the lesson plan says the learners need to memorise and then recall the formula, that is explicitly what they must do.  In social work our verbs fall short, what does support look like, how can we say X (support, engagement etc) has happened or not, how much variation in practice between workers should we tolerate?  Social workers seem to do far less planning than teachers for their core activities, but then we do far more writing up of outcomes and case notes.

One cynical interpretation here is that we can only justify our roles within chaotic settings with a large dollop of hindsight.  Walk in a room and most of us would recognize when “teaching” was taking place, but I would defy most none professionally qualified to identify a social work session from observing its activity. It would look 90 % similar to the activity of the housing worker, the therapist, the probation worker or the mental health nurse.

Fit for practice, how can  the world of strength training help Social work.

Allow me to introduce the gruff, acerbic Texan Mark Rippertoe or Rip for short.

Rippertoe is an author, gym owner, podcaster, and ex powerlifter. His books offer the definitive guide to barbell or weight training. There are no flabby terms. Each element is articulated precisely and scientifically. For example, his opus work Starting Strength (basic barbell training) takes 66 pages to describe the mechanics of the squat, his empirical approach echoes Betrand Russel’s 360 page effort on showing how 1 + 2 = 3.  Russel and Rippertoe’s approach is to build an encompassing method that rests on precisely defined key terms, which allows for a successive accumulation of confidence for the trainee.

Betrand Russel

Two terms that Rippertoe defines and differentiates (thanks Bloom) are Training and Exercise.   Exercise is the verb that happens when you walk into a gym or lace up your trainers with no plan in mind, no time limit, no body part focus. Exercise’s only goal is to Exercise.

Training is a verb that happens only when it is planned in advance, through progressive overload. Through the performing of effective exercises the athlete gets faster, stronger or more powerful (whichever is their specific and defined target). 

Any improvements that are achieved through exercise (even if performed with significant effort and intensity) will be short lived and will quickly plateau. Most runners are not getting faster most folk in the gym are not getting stronger as they are only exercising.

As social workers our activity is so ill defined, we suffer a risk of “exercising” with our clients due to very little planning, a low willingness to tackle resistance and no forensic measuring of outcomes.  This malaise is linked to repeated referrals, disguised compliance, high levels of staff turnover and a lack of public and professional confidence.  The families we work with will mostly only experience short term change as there has been no depth to the work, no professional triangulation of the issues. Families have been ‘Visited’ and little more.   Being explicit, children or vulnerable adults are not made safe by being ‘Visited’ but by the resultant safeguarding actions, ringing the police, physically removing the risk and asking the revealing question.  This “exercising” offers only a corporate cloak of risk management. Serious case reviews often focus on the bean counting – how many visits? In what time period? They focus less on the modality of the intervention or its efficacy.

Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne, aka the god father of transactional analysis, offers up the term of “pass-timing” to describe the discussion of activities without any meaningful actions or purpose. Pass-timing can be a meandering discussion of the weather or past events that serves little direction or purpose to either side of a relationship with this shielding them from the experience of true intimacy and honesty. As social workers on visits we must be aware of the proportion of our time we spend going over past events, discussing minor matters, or in idle conversation with the families we help.

As social work practitioners we perhaps have more freedom than any other profession to direct an intervention a certain way. This freedom can lead to “exercising or passtiming” or it can lead to tremendous insights and breakthroughs through creative practice. This creative practice may seem like some ephemeral fire that we can catch just for a brief moment in a session, however it is only available to those who have done the hard yards of learning, being mentored and getting it wrong. Just like an amazing feature of strength (like the picture at the opening of this article) quality social work practice only comes after a series of planned and measurable steps where the complexity and depth increase incrementally.

To sum up, social work activity, just like walking into a gym, will not be productive unless it is planned for. And significant positive results require many ingredients –

Clarity on the activity and its purpose

Access to a mentor (shortcutting mastery)

Some form of measurement (or how can you say progress has been made)

Any pass-timing should be done mindfully and not as a means to avoid the harder more demanding and rewarding actions.

Forming our views; Rishi, social workers, and primates.

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In the caring professions our experiences are the cornerstone of our practice, setting our moral compass and future decision-making processes (heuristics). Despite each individual experience being important our brains are designed to weight and recall some experiences, including our practice ones, more readily than others, such as ones that trigger powerful emotions like fear, disgust, and anger.  Practice ‘stories’ can be filed in our brain inside a red binder with ‘MUST RECALL REGULARY’ in bold marker. Out of a plethora of old cases we may remember only a handful in five to ten years’ time. Put simply, as professionals, we may only use a small proportion of our past experiences to develop a way of working with all future cases – a potentially skewed schema.

To give a simple example let’s say you go fishing off a pier and you know there are only cod and mackerel in the sea. What you don’t know is that cod are ten times more common.  On the first day you catch 4 fish; 3 mackerel and 1 cod, then on the second day only 1 fish – a mackerel. If Captain Birdseye asks you about this fishing spot you will say that there are loads of mackerel and hardly any cod, having no perspective on how rare your catches were. Similarly, we would lambast a scientist for not having a large enough sample size to support their research conclusions, or for not correcting for some statistical selection bias. So, equally, we should ask ourselves, “are we asking ourselves enough questions about how our practice views and how they stack up into a working model?”

It does not take too much of a salmon leap to switch to the Social Work context here.

Let’s say in all your past experiences of working with single fathers in relation to child protection they have all been difficult to engage and show signs of physical abuse. When allocated your next similar case your past experiences will undoubtedly skew your future expectations. The question is, “how many similar cases will it take to cause a permanent belief system switch (conscious or unconscious)?”   

One particularly influential belief system is the one held by our current PM (at time of writing Mr Sunak). His family settled in East Africa from India, with this community becoming an economically dominant force in both Kenya and Uganda. Roughly Asians where 2% of the population but they owned 66% of all the wealth.

When these African countries achieved independence from the British Empire the vast majority of Asians left with many using British passports to come to enter the UK. Sunak’s family did just that with his parents settling in Southampton. His mother was a pharmacist and his father a GP.  Sunak’s parents had three children, one is our prime minister, one is the head of strategy at the UN and the other a psychologist.  Sunak when interviewed always points out that nothing was handed to his family on a plate, but it was all achieved through hard work and sacrifice.

Sunak therefore believes that the government should support and not restrict hard working families as they could achieve outcomes similar to the Sunak’s.  To use the earlier fishing analogy Sunak’s family were successful in catching some of the rarest fish in the ocean. Now their son, the prime minister, hands out rods for others expecting them to do the same.  To illustrate this point, look out for the many stories about children from poor backgrounds getting straight A’s and going to Oxbridge…… You won’t find many. The success stories that there are have the perverse effect of keeping the lid firmly on the social mobility box. A few plucky stories block out the reality that there are a majority of hard-working families who barely make ends meet.

Why could a smart man like Sunak make such an error in assuming his specific experience can be generalized to the entire population. Well, like us Sunak has a brain that is hardwired to hold a finite number of peoples’ tales. This was famously proven by Dunbar’s work on monkeys and group size. His work demonstrated a link between neo cortex size and how many individuals could be in a primate’s social group. The larger the cortex the greater the potential group size. Even though humans have a larger brain than other primates there is still a hard limit to social group size Dunbar’s work suggests. We can only integrate so much social context and so many stories when we function in such a group. Our brains are ultimately finite. Whilst modern critics have latterly ganged up on Dunbar’s work for being statistically flawed, I feel there remains some truth in the general conclusion for us humans and our relationships. The relationship as found below in the graph is made more significant when you consider that the majority of us humans live in highly selective groups – rich alongside rich, or poor alongside poor, older people, young people, or selection around race or sex. In other words, we are limited both by absolute number and by variety. Can social workers hold in mind only a finite number of case stories that are highly likely to have some selection bias in terms of their characteristics?  

Much of what we do as social workers involves hypothesising about situations based, often, on limited information. We start to build a hypothesis at the earliest point of contact. In fact, maybe even before the first physical contact. We maybe start to make assumptions from case recording or referral information. Daniel Kahneman, author of the wonderful ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, has concluded we have two aspects to our brains. We can let our automatic brain – or ‘System 1’ as he refers to it – run riot, jumping to conclusions! This automatic system is like being on autopilot. This part of our brain likes routine things and easy solutions. It relies, when thinking about people, on stereotypes that have been constructed for us and that we have added to. Ideas that sit in our subconscious mind. He says that we don’t like using ‘System 2’, our ‘deliberate’ brain, because it’s hard work. It takes effort to get this part of our brain going so that we can consciously and logically think things through. So, his idea goes, why would we not use a ready-made ‘model’ from our automatic brain like ‘all fathers in child protection cases are like ‘this’ or ‘that’’.

This can lead to bias in our hypothesising that we might not even spot. Confirmation bias is an operational mode where we select information from that which is available to ‘confirm’ the position we want it to. We form a view early on and then select information that supports that idea. When we fall into this trap gathering more information doesn’t necessarily yield a better decision. In fact, more information means we simply have more to select from to confirm our bias. As practitioners it’s important we consider whether we are relying on archetypes we have constructed from past experiences, or whether we are seeing the reality of the situation as it truly is.

Metal anchor near river on sunny day

We can also become anchored to a first impression – called the Anchoring Effect – which leads to that first impression becoming the only one relevant. Or, we anchor ourselves to a single factor as a root cause and miss others possible causes of the presenting circumstances. A famous experiment conducted by the magazine The Economist on MIT students gave an interesting insight into this. Initially they offered their publication as Web Only at $59 and Print & Web at $125. 68% of people went for web only version and 32% went for the Print + Web option. Wise MIT students! Same information, half the price! They offered their publication again, this time at three rates – Web Only $59, Print Only $125, and Print and Web $125. What happened? Well, no one went for the Print Only option. Why would you when you can have Print and Web for the same price. However! 84% chose the Print and Web option with the rest going for Web Only. This trick apparently is often used in marketing in a range of ways. People were anchored to the Print option thinking they were getting a fabulous deal – Print and Web for the same price as Print. Without this option in play most people went for the sensible Web only option. When we become anchored to a piece of information it exerts undue influence on us and clouds our judgment

With Sunak going to elite universities and Winchester college I wonder how diverse the ‘clan’ of 150 individuals housed in his brain is. How skewed is his idea of how the world operates. Is he anchored to a particular idea born out of his emotional attachments, role models and major life events. Does he have a ‘confirmation bias’ toward things that he will share (to a significant percentage) with the striding elite class who are a tiny majority of the population but constitute the votes Sunak needs to win a General Election in two years’ time.

As social workers we work at the total opposite end of the social mobility scale. We encounter the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable. Whilst the families we support are a growing proportion of society they still represent a minority. 95% of children do not have involvement from social care.  As social workers do we have two world views? One which is narrow based on possible biases rooted in a ‘professional world’ view and one for the people we come across in day-to-day life where we pause and suspend judgment before deciding anything about them?

The Social Work superhero skill here is reflection.

Reflection is crucial to avoid the bias trap. Critical reflective thinking is essential in relation to each family, service user, or child to avoid falling into automatic thinking. Critical thinking is deliberate thinking. Critical thinking is disciplined thinking. It needs to happen before action so we can identify any potential for bias. Then, in action, so that we don’t seek out only the information to justify a predetermined decision. And finally after action to ensure our decisions are rooted in a solid rationale devoid of bias.

This article was written by George Bull and Stephen J Mordue

George has been a social worker for 10 years working mainly in child protection and Early Help. He has lectured with Jamie Scorer at New College Durham, University of Sunderland and University of Northumbria in solution focused practice.

Stephen J. Mordue Stephen is a lecturer in social work at the University of Sunderland, in the North East of England. He was a social work practitioner for 12 years working on an Older Persons team. His particular areas of interest are communication, how organisations function, and the application of the Mental Capacity Act and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards. He is passionate about being organised, productivity and self care – ask him about diary management and spreadsheets! 

Language and Power in Social Work, a fresh perspective from the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Social work can be seen as an endeavour of attempting to grasp at another person’s reality. We assess people and families striving to be as faithful as possible.  In this article I will discuss how Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein may assist in providing some warnings and possibly a map of where the limits lie in attempting to describe another human’s existence.

Wittgenstein is often seen as a totally impenetrable and unnecessarily difficult thinker, whose tomes are the jealous property of grey faced professors at posh Universities.  I aim to hopefully present some straightforward uses for his philosophy on language and how it can help social work practice.

Life and Times

Wittgenstein’s life story would not fit into one film! Don’t believe me? Here goes!

He was born into a large super wealthy Jewish family in Austria with their wealth matched only by the Rothschild’s (them of the Illuminati). He went to primary school with Adolf Hitler.  As a toddler he made machines out of scrap discarded items in his home, he designed a new method to heal wounds after car accidents, he invented the corner radiator, created a precursor to the jet engine and liked a pint round Jesmond when working in the RVI.  Despite this list he was the least famous member of his family. One his brothers was the best concert pianist in the world which he did playing only with one hand (strangely there is an episode of MASH based on his life).

Despite his wealth he left the 7 palaces and even more grand pianos (his siblings had one each) and served in the first World War with him single handily diverting machine gun fire on the Russian front and being awarded medals for bravery. During this time on one of the most brutal campaigns in WW1 he wrote one of the greatest works of philosophy the Tractatus.

However the true genius of Wittgenstein is that he is two philosophers in one as his later work comes to re-meet and reinvent (or more accurately decimate) his earlier work, with this hinging on language being variously limited, meaningless and redundant.

Our Language Affects What We See - Scientific American

Language according to Wittgenstein is best seen, and perhaps can only be seen, in the context of a game, with a game being described as an activity where participants have a pre-understanding of some commonly held rules. The important point here is the meaning is held only between the active participants. To an outsider it is meaningless.

This chimes exactly with a recent Radio 4 documentary about a young parent’s experiences of the family court where their children are removed. One quote in particular about the barristers and the social worker struck me – “it was like a play where everyone but me had a script and knew their lines but me(sic)”.

This highlights a true Kafkaesque nightmare. This parent does not understand the very language that is being used to deny her of her most basic right to be a mother to her child.  How do we, in the most caring of professions, engage in such a cruel language game?

It is highly likely that the barrister, the judge and the solicitors have never seen one second of the parent being a parent yet they are able to make complex arguments, statements and decisions on that very matter.  Their Jargon is as removed from the reality as their experience is.  ­­­­The below attempts to formalise this picture.

This frames language as being the main agent of oppressive practice. Power is held by those whose professional and remote jargon trumps real experience every single time.  This reminds me of an old thought I had at my first Section 47 strategy meeting when I realised (despite being a newly qualified worker), I was the only person in the room to have seen the family, but everyone else’s perception held much more sway and influence.  What a strange set of affairs! It’s all a bit like reviewing a film without seeing it. At best you will only offer a derivative generic version of what’s come before, which is shorthand for terrible social work practice, “I don’t need to visit the family I have worked with neglect etc for over twenty years” is surely the defence of the team manager.  Do we overvalue an argument from career experience at the expense of the view from the practitioner who has seen the “whites of the family’s eyes” and visited their home? If good social work aims to get to the essence or the true nature of a child and their family’s life this cannot be done from a remote place. You’ve got to be sat at the board to play the game.

Wittgenstein provides a good example that chimes well with social workers, that of the family resemblance.  Look at the family picture below:

It is clear that they are all related and resemble each other; however their quality cannot be pinned down to a few simple elements. It is a collective range of positive and negative features that create a very real but fuzzy concept.  This feels familiar. As social workers we often have to describe things like the mood in the house or the relationship between individuals, how close are we getting to the real picture, especially when we only demonstrate our evidence through written assessments.

Indeed, as social workers we must be cautious that whilst we strive to understand the context of the child and the parent, our language can only grasp at their reality fleetingly. To say we have fully captured (the language of a bounty hunter??) the child in our assessment is to crush their experience into oblivion. ‘I know better than you about your own experience’, is a disturbing thought in the extreme. Conceptually this can be seen as Naïve Realism (see poster). My world view is the solely correct one.

I’ll close on one of Wittgenstein’s most famous quotes, “If a Lion could talk, we could not understand him”

The message here hinges on a double meaning of understanding. Whilst we could understand the grammar, words and sentences if the lion spoke perfect English all of the common concepts would not be shared ones. Their lives as a lions are inaccessible to ours as humans with no common rules for the exchange.

Luckily as social workers we do not have such a chasm to cross, however, we must acknowledge there remains differences and fuzziness that cannot be fully held by our assessment and certainly cannot be got at remotely by professionals who have never met the family. So, tread carefully, meet families where they are (actually and figuratively) and be cautious of language’s exclusory and assumptive power.

You might also like the following from George and the Social Work Shorts Team talking more about Wittengstein’s Lion

https://anchor.fm/socialworkshorts/embed/episodes/Social-Work-Shorts-Episode-10-Presents-Beers-and-Ideas—Philosophy-and-Social-Work—Wittgensteins-Lion-e10sbfi

George talks about Poverty in this Social Work Shorts Podcast

https://anchor.fm/socialworkshorts/embed/episodes/Social-Work-Shorts-Episode-15-Insights-1—Poverty-and-Children-and-Families-Social-Work-e14i2k7

Or listen to George talk to Stephen about Risk

https://anchor.fm/socialworkshorts/embed/episodes/Social-Work-Shorts-Episode-25-Insights-8-Stephen-in-conversation-with-George-Bull-about-Risk-in-light-of-the-murder-of-Arthur-e1bfo48

About the writer…..

George Bull

George has been a social worker for 10 years working mainly in child protection and Early Help. He has lectured with Jamie Scorer at New College Durham, University of Sunderland and University of Northumbria in solution focused practice.

Solution Focused Gorillas

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In 2006 Cadburys poisoned 37 people with Salmonella and the treasured British company was brought to it knees. Fined millions, reputation in the trash, hostile take over talk, how could it ever recover…………….

Cadbury’s response was marketing genius they ran one of the most famous adverts of the past twenty years.

[You really should watch it (below) –  it’s amazing! It’s 4 and half minutes long (this link is a shorter version – but if you have the time watch the long one – it is sooooo worth it!]


The advert features no humans (Phil Collins excepted) and no chocolate, it just creates a warm positive enjoyable feeling exactly the feeling that Cadburys wants associated to their brand.

By honing down to base psychology Cadburys have distanced themselves from their Salmonella existential crisis.  The advert was entirely positive, feel good and very importantly simple. Cadburys chocolate will make you feel like the advert does.

The next video….. well…. watch it then I’ll tell you….


It features the very same gorilla as in the Cadbury advert (honest!) in the now famous experiment by Simon and Chabris (2009). In the experiment the focus of the viewer is requested to be entirely on the white team passing the ball, the human brain squarely focuses on its target to the deletion of everything else.

Nearly all test subjects fail to spot the gorilla but can count accurately the number of passes of the ball, as soon as you are told of the gorilla it is 100% obvious, as gorillas always are.

Before the gorilla starred in adverts and experiments, he used to live in the jungle where he met famous primatologist (monkey expert) Diane Fosse.

The male gorilla before Fosse (and others Sigourney Weaver etc) had always been considered to be totally dominant in sexual situations with the female subservient and vulnerable.

As Matthew Syed points out in his excellent Rebel Ideas (2019) however, primatology was full of stuffy bearded men in the Charles Darwin mould who had a massive blind spot about female activity. They accepted the dominant view and importantly had no interest in challenging it creating a jaundiced perceived wisdom. Syed observes that it was not until a critical mass of female scientists entered the field that the frame of reference shifted and female gorillas were found to have agency and power, and, could select a range of sexual partners.

The story of this gorilla I feel is useful to solution focused work as it makes clear a very important point.

“You see what you aim at”

This quote by, at times controversial, psychologist Jordan Peterson I feel holds a lot of weight for social care. The power, and indeed ‘blindness’, that can be achieved by a clear focus is both useful and dangerous.

Here are some examples –

The social worker whose main focus is the assessment rather than supporting lasting and client led change, or the family whose only focus is to seek the end to the intervention never questioning or considering possible future directions or opportunities.

Conversely the focus on one particular issue for a period of time can yield results as nobody can deal with many problems all at the same time (I’m sure many of us have all been to child protection or adult safeguarding meetings where the list of identified issues is long).

To balance this I feel as social workers we need a wide lens to be open to risky ideas that will reverse challenging situations (Cadburys),  we must be brave not to fall under the cloak of perceived and dominant thinking (Dianne Fosse) and to be focused on the detail but not to miss the gorilla in the room (Simon and Chabris).

George Bull

George is a Social Worker at the Connected Carers Team South Tyneside. He has been a social worker for 10 years working mainly in child protection and Early Help. He has lectured with Jamie Scorer at New College Durham, University of Sunderland and University of Northumbria in solution focused practice.

References:

Simon and Chabris (2009) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p281059

Rebel Ideas, Syed (2019) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rebel-Ideas-Power-Diverse-Thinking/dp/1473613914

Forming our views; Rishi, social workers, and primates.

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In the caring professions our experiences are the cornerstone of our practice, setting our moral compass and future decision-making processes (heuristics). Despite each individual experience being important our brains are designed to weight and recall some experiences, including our practice ones, more readily than others, such as ones that trigger powerful emotions like fear, disgust, and anger.  Practice ‘stories’ can be filed in our brain inside a red binder with ‘MUST RECALL REGULARY’ in bold marker. Out of a plethora of old cases we may remember only a handful in five to ten years’ time. Put simply, as professionals, we may only use a small proportion of our past experiences to develop a way of working with all future cases – a potentially skewed schema.

To give a simple example let’s say you go fishing off a pier and you know there are only cod and mackerel in the sea. What you don’t know is that cod are ten times more common.  On the first day you catch 4 fish; 3 mackerel and 1 cod, then on the second day only 1 fish – a mackerel. If Captain Birdseye asks you about this fishing spot you will say that there are loads of mackerel and hardly any cod, having no perspective on how rare your catches were. Similarly, we would lambast a scientist for not having a large enough sample size to support their research conclusions, or for not correcting for some statistical selection bias. So, equally, we should ask ourselves, “are we asking ourselves enough questions about how our practice views and how they stack up into a working model?”

It does not take too much of a salmon leap to switch to the Social Work context here.

Let’s say in all your past experiences of working with single fathers in relation to child protection they have all been difficult to engage and show signs of physical abuse. When allocated your next similar case your past experiences will undoubtedly skew your future expectations. The question is, “how many similar cases will it take to cause a permanent belief system switch (conscious or unconscious)?”   

One particularly influential belief system is the one held by our current PM (at time of writing Mr Sunak). His family settled in East Africa from India, with this community becoming an economically dominant force in both Kenya and Uganda. Roughly Asians where 2% of the population but they owned 66% of all the wealth.

When these African countries achieved independence from the British Empire the vast majority of Asians left with many using British passports to come to enter the UK. Sunak’s family did just that with his parents settling in Southampton. His mother was a pharmacist and his father a GP.  Sunak’s parents had three children, one is our prime minister, one is the head of strategy at the UN and the other a psychologist.  Sunak when interviewed always points out that nothing was handed to his family on a plate, but it was all achieved through hard work and sacrifice.

Sunak therefore believes that the government should support and not restrict hard working families as they could achieve outcomes similar to the Sunak’s.  To use the earlier fishing analogy Sunak’s family were successful in catching some of the rarest fish in the ocean. Now their son, the prime minister, hands out rods for others expecting them to do the same.  To illustrate this point, look out for the many stories about children from poor backgrounds getting straight A’s and going to Oxbridge…… You won’t find many. The success stories that there are have the perverse effect of keeping the lid firmly on the social mobility box. A few plucky stories block out the reality that there are a majority of hard-working families who barely make ends meet.

Why could a smart man like Sunak make such an error in assuming his specific experience can be generalized to the entire population. Well, like us Sunak has a brain that is hardwired to hold a finite number of peoples’ tales. This was famously proven by Dunbar’s work on monkeys and group size. His work demonstrated a link between neo cortex size and how many individuals could be in a primate’s social group. The larger the cortex the greater the potential group size. Even though humans have a larger brain than other primates there is still a hard limit to social group size Dunbar’s work suggests. We can only integrate so much social context and so many stories when we function in such a group. Our brains are ultimately finite. Whilst modern critics have latterly ganged up on Dunbar’s work for being statistically flawed, I feel there remains some truth in the general conclusion for us humans and our relationships. The relationship as found below in the graph is made more significant when you consider that the majority of us humans live in highly selective groups – rich alongside rich, or poor alongside poor, older people, young people, or selection around race or sex. In other words, we are limited both by absolute number and by variety. Can social workers hold in mind only a finite number of case stories that are highly likely to have some selection bias in terms of their characteristics?  

Much of what we do as social workers involves hypothesising about situations based, often, on limited information. We start to build a hypothesis at the earliest point of contact. In fact, maybe even before the first physical contact. We maybe start to make assumptions from case recording or referral information. Daniel Kahneman, author of the wonderful ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, has concluded we have two aspects to our brains. We can let our automatic brain – or ‘System 1’ as he refers to it – run riot, jumping to conclusions! This automatic system is like being on autopilot. This part of our brain likes routine things and easy solutions. It relies, when thinking about people, on stereotypes that have been constructed for us and that we have added to. Ideas that sit in our subconscious mind. He says that we don’t like using ‘System 2’, our ‘deliberate’ brain, because it’s hard work. It takes effort to get this part of our brain going so that we can consciously and logically think things through. So, his idea goes, why would we not use a ready-made ‘model’ from our automatic brain like ‘all fathers in child protection cases are like ‘this’ or ‘that’’.

This can lead to bias in our hypothesising that we might not even spot. Confirmation bias is an operational mode where we select information from that which is available to ‘confirm’ the position we want it to. We form a view early on and then select information that supports that idea. When we fall into this trap gathering more information doesn’t necessarily yield a better decision. In fact, more information means we simply have more to select from to confirm our bias. As practitioners it’s important we consider whether we are relying on archetypes we have constructed from past experiences, or whether we are seeing the reality of the situation as it truly is.

Metal anchor near river on sunny day

We can also become anchored to a first impression – called the Anchoring Effect – which leads to that first impression becoming the only one relevant. Or, we anchor ourselves to a single factor as a root cause and miss others possible causes of the presenting circumstances. A famous experiment conducted by the magazine The Economist on MIT students gave an interesting insight into this. Initially they offered their publication as Web Only at $59 and Print & Web at $125. 68% of people went for web only version and 32% went for the Print + Web option. Wise MIT students! Same information, half the price! They offered their publication again, this time at three rates – Web Only $59, Print Only $125, and Print and Web $125. What happened? Well, no one went for the Print Only option. Why would you when you can have Print and Web for the same price. However! 84% chose the Print and Web option with the rest going for Web Only. This trick apparently is often used in marketing in a range of ways. People were anchored to the Print option thinking they were getting a fabulous deal – Print and Web for the same price as Print. Without this option in play most people went for the sensible Web only option. When we become anchored to a piece of information it exerts undue influence on us and clouds our judgment

With Sunak going to elite universities and Winchester college I wonder how diverse the ‘clan’ of 150 individuals housed in his brain is. How skewed is his idea of how the world operates. Is he anchored to a particular idea born out of his emotional attachments, role models and major life events. Does he have a ‘confirmation bias’ toward things that he will share (to a significant percentage) with the striding elite class who are a tiny majority of the population but constitute the votes Sunak needs to win a General Election in two years’ time.

As social workers we work at the total opposite end of the social mobility scale. We encounter the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable. Whilst the families we support are a growing proportion of society they still represent a minority. 95% of children do not have involvement from social care.  As social workers do we have two world views? One which is narrow based on possible biases rooted in a ‘professional world’ view and one for the people we come across in day-to-day life where we pause and suspend judgment before deciding anything about them?

The Social Work superhero skill here is reflection.

Reflection is crucial to avoid the bias trap. Critical reflective thinking is essential in relation to each family, service user, or child to avoid falling into automatic thinking. Critical thinking is deliberate thinking. Critical thinking is disciplined thinking. It needs to happen before action so we can identify any potential for bias. Then, in action, so that we don’t seek out only the information to justify a predetermined decision. And finally after action to ensure our decisions are rooted in a solid rationale devoid of bias.

This article was written by George Bull and Stephen J Mordue

George has been a social worker for 10 years working mainly in child protection and Early Help. He has lectured with Jamie Scorer at New College Durham, University of Sunderland and University of Northumbria in solution focused practice.

Stephen J. Mordue Stephen is a lecturer in social work at the University of Sunderland, in the North East of England. He was a social work practitioner for 12 years working on an Older Persons team. His particular areas of interest are communication, how organisations function, and the application of the Mental Capacity Act and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards. He is passionate about being organised, productivity and self care – ask him about diary management and spreadsheets! 

Liam Neeson, ethnicity, and oppression

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Liam Neeson is in the press today (Tuesday 5th February 2019).
You may have seen that he has told a reporter that during a difficult time in his life he had walked the streets for a week with a knife hoping, he says, to take his anger out on any black man who approached him. The fuel to this fire was the rape of someone close to him by a man who was black.

What do you make of this?
Personally, I think it’s a very honest and brave statement to make. People seem to be talking about the fact that this is racist. Well, yes, indeed! It’s wrong to attach the acts of one member of any ‘group’, be that colour, religion, sexuality….. to all members of that ‘group’. But we all run the risk of falling fowl to prejudicial ideas when our backs are against the wall and we, or our ‘own’, are threatened.

Evolutionary biologists argue that the human animal is built to discriminate to ensure the survival of its own family unit and group over that of those considered outsiders. The ‘other’ in our midst. Giphart and Van Vught (in their book ‘Mismatch’) state that “in present times traces of our tribal brain can still be found in men especially, who continue to be tribalistic.” They go on to state that men are much more motivated to protect their ‘group’.

Barack Obama in his book The Audacity of Hope says “Old Habits die hard, and there is always a fear on the part of many minorities that unless racial discrimination, past and present, stays on the front burner, white America will be let of the hook and hard fought gains may be reversed….. during difficult economic times it is possible that the imperatives of racial equality  get shunted aside”. Here he acknowledges that these ideas are entrenched in some way. Do I need to point to some of the views of the latest American President?

So, is discrimination then an inherent ‘quality’ of being human…. Do we move towards people who are the same as us, whatever ‘same’ means, and exclude people who exhibit difference, whatever that means!

This idea of everybody being equal and there not being some sort of ‘natural order’ to things – man stronger than woman, whiteness better than blackness, able-bodied valuable and disabled not valuable – is actually a relatively new idea. You only have to go back to 1960’s America to find segregation based on colour, or 1990’s South Africa to see the same. It wasn’t until 1928 that women were given the right to vote. These, in the history of humanity, are very recent events. Look at the division’s based on religion we see today, and I’d argue that the Brexit vote, in the mainstream population, is founded on ideas of ‘closing the borders’ to keep the ‘others’ out.

I’m sure, as social workers, or student social workers, you feel you wouldn’t have such views, but I’d suggest we need to mindful of the potential for bias leading to discrimination and oppression if indeed evolutionists are right and we are predisposed to such bias. For me, as someone brought up in a very white Britain I live in the North East of England – not renowned for it’s mix of cultures and ethnicities – there may be a drip drip effect of racism, an undercurrent if you like, that does have an impact on my view of those of different cultures. Consciously it doesn’t, I can assure you, but maybe I need to be aware that for most of my life I may have been fed stereotypical views of people of a different colour, or sexuality, or gender, to name a few.

Let’s link this to social work practice.
If there is an inherent ‘quality’ to discrimination then we need to mindful that such things can influence our own views of others. We need to look at what we understand of the world and ask ourselves how that view is shaped. But, more than this, when we are working with individuals we are also working with people whose views of themselves have been shaped by the same forces. People are susceptible to stereotypes of others and also to being influenced by stereotypical ideas of themselves.

Discrimination is a multi faceted and complex phenomenon. It is there at the interplay between individuals but also between organisations and people, and between different organisations. As someone working in one of those organisations we may take on board the discrimination established by that organisation. Just as an example…. It’s not unusual to find the ceiling on care packages (which really shouldn’t exist) for older people to be significantly lower than those for other service user groups. What does that tell us about the value of older people in society and the readiness, based on finances, to propose a care home? Is that not discrimination?

Thompsons ‘PCS model’ explains that discrimination and oppression operate at a Personal level in individual thoughts and attitudes leading to prejudice and an inflexibility of mind. This is embedded in and influenced by Culture where a consensus about what is right and ‘normal’ is established. And for me, most worryingly for social work, this is woven into the fabric of society at a Structural level in organisations, laws, and the ideologies of those with power.

So, how do we practice in an anti-oppressive way?

Clifford (in Adams et al “Social Work: Themes, Issues and Critical Debates” 2nd edition 2002, pg. 229) offers the following principles:

We have to work with and understand social differences not as a negative but simply as a state of how it is. Social difference often leads to disparities of power between dominant and dominated groups within the major divisions we’ve just seen but it’s more complicated than these large groupings. What about the region of the country you’re from, what about your personal experience of mental health, what about what it’s like being a single parent? All of these can constitute difference but may not be as obvious as the other things.

The personal and political need to be linked. Personal stories need to be viewed within the context of family, peer groups, organisations and communities – for example the problems of ageing aren’t just about how you as an individual view yourself but are seated within ideologies of old age, policies, practices, ideas about retirement, and health systems

Power operates at personal and structural levels and is dependent on many factors. As a social worker you may have the power of the law, or the power afforded to your status but the service user maintains the power to say no in the majority of circumstances. We should be upholding the service users right to use this power but we may act in a way that disempowers. I feel the most significant area of power the social worker has is that of information and how much they share about options. Case law around the Mental Capacity Act shows us that sometimes we only present one option where multiple options may exist.

The individual life experiences of you as the practitioner and of the service user must be placed in the context of prevailing ideas, social facts and cultural differences. The impact of someone’s situation needs to be seated in the reality of the moment it is happening in. For example, the government’s ideology of the importance of the family may impact negatively on the position of a single parent or the political view regarding benefits and the necessity of work may leave some disabled people in poverty. You need to understand this in order to understand the oppression someone may be facing while having an awareness of how your own values lead you to consider social difference and the use of power in your involvement with service users.

Part of the problem or part of the solution…..?

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When I was a practitioner and then a social work manager I was fond, when times were difficult, of asking myself, “Do I want to be part of the problem or part of the solution?” I remember this acutely during the time the local authority I was working in were ‘rolling out’ new processes to deliver the personalisation agenda. They were difficult times and social workers and care managers were rightly complaining about a myriad of things – mostly the administrative aspects of the change. During this time I was always left with that question – do I want to be part of the problem, or, part of the solution? And then, and now, I have always endeavoured, to try at least, to be part of the solution.

The problem we seem to keep returning to in social work is the misappropriation of social workers time. Social workers are directed towards report writing, case recording and a whole host of other procedural documents taking them away from relational work with service users. Those who insist on spending time with service users are then left picking up the paperwork on an evening and a weekend which is simply not a sustainable solution. Findings vary, but it is not uncommon to hear social workers talk about spending at least two thirds of their time at the computer. This position is enshrined in culturally embedded phrases like ‘if it isn’t written down it didn’t happen’ (Gibson 2016). This of course is simply rubbish. It did happen. You just didn’t write it down. And how does actually writing it down help prove anything. I ask you, – if in court, confronted with a service user who claims you said one thing, while you claim you said another – how does it being written down by you help in this situation? The reality is it probably does because you have an advantaged more powerful position. Well, after all you are a professional, and to be completely trusted, and service users in court aren’t. Is that how it is? Probably. No offence, but social workers sometimes mis-remember things. We all do. And sometimes may ‘interpret the facts’ of a situation in a particular way. It’s hard to avoid. We are both professional and human! But the mantra of ‘if it isn’t written down it didn’t happen’ forces us into an administrative approach to social work practice that demands we record it all so that our backs are well and truly covered. This happens at the expense of contact time with service user. And wasn’t that what you came into the profession for?

Gibson (2019) provides an excellent analysis of this in a qualitative case study of a child protection team. Firstly, he notes the importance of the administrative function within social work drawing on Wilson (1887) who stated that such things are a necessary part of institutional and social life in the same way that machinery is part of manufacturing. No one is denying the importance of appropriate recording and report writing.

The impact on practice though is palpable in the comments that Gibson (2019) reports from interviews he undertook. He discovered that administration was embedded as a primary task with this being prioritised at the expense of relationship building with service users. The primary focus of the social workers interviewed had to be focussed on the expectations of the agency rather than the service user. He suggests that such a focus also shifts the function of direct practice from relationship building to a more transaction based approach with the practitioner “interested in discrete transactions for the purposes of collecting information or ensuring agreed obligations had been met as laid out in some procedure or plan” (Gibson, 2019, p. 1191). This approach flies in the face of person centred work and what I personally see as the core social work task, that of relationship building in order to empower people. It hardly seems personalised to approach any interaction with a service user with the starting point being the agency requirements. Surely you start with the requirements of the person? This leads to disillusionment when professionals feel unable to make a difference in peoples lives (Gibson 2019) and leads to an ethos of ‘processing people’.

The neoliberal agenda that brought us performance indicators and what some considered the McDonaldsisation of social work – everyone gets the same but at least everyone gets something – was intended to provide fairness and equity and no ‘post code lottery’. The unintended (hopefully!) consequence of this is that what people get from social work is often, at best, adequate. And if we are happy with adequate then fine, but I don’t think most of us are. I think we want to be able to offer more. Surely we want people to thrive and achieve not get simply enough that only just suffices. The problem with such an approach is it often means we end up with practice being dominated by crisis intervention rather than supportive, life enhancing, planning.

Back to where I started this article…. my preference is always to try and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The problem and the solution were brought into sharp focus for me recently when I invited two social work practitioners into the University I work in to talk about their lives as social workers in their particular role. The contrast was different and was nothing to do with the practitioners, who are both wonderful people, with nothing but a desire to support service users and do their best for them at the heart of their practice. One seemed liberated by the way their employer was asking them to approach the social work task. They had time to spend with people and time to help people with the practical aspects of getting back on their feet again after something had happened. The agency, for a large part required only the essential recording. Many interventions were simply case recorded without the need for long justification reports. I got a sense the social worker had the capacity to get on with the job. The other social worker seemed to be working in a more bureaucratic, process driven way, and seemed less content with this. I got a sense that maybe the paperwork was getting in the way of the social work task and as a consequence the social worker was frustrated by this.

The 3 Conversations Model, which is the framework that the first social worker was working within, was developed by Partners for Change who developed the model with a number of councils claiming it “has demonstrated how you can give a better deal to people and families who need support, create liberating and exciting jobs for staff, and also dramatically reduce the costs of the overall social care system. The 3 conversations approach is a great way of delivering on the demands and opportunities of the Care Act 2014” Partners for Change (2018)

The first conversation is focussed on finding out what really matters to the person and looking, with them, to see how they can use their own resources and the community around them to meet their outcomes. The second conversation, often when there is a crisis, seeks to create stability from which people can find their own solutions with support. This again could involve their own resources and those of the community but could also include some short term commissioned services. Crucially though the social worker ‘sticks like glue’ (to use Partners for Change’s words) to the person to make sure the plan works and if it doesn’t seeks to change it. The third conversation seeks to build a ‘good life’ for the person where there has been a significant change or development. It would still start with the persons own resources and the community but may well include a more extensive package of care. In the example described to me conversations one and two rely mostly on case recording of information, decisions and services with only the ‘full force’ of bureaucracy occurring during conversation three where extensive packages of care with significant financial consequences are required.

The impact of this seemed to me to be an increase in face to face work with people and less time in front of the computer. There seemed to be a much more person centred focus starting with the strengths of the person and their networks. This was refreshing as I hear many people claim that they work from a strength based approach but then describe their work, or the work of their teams, from an assessment of risk perspective. Starting with risk rather than strength shifts the way you think and therefore shifts the way you can support the person to think.

The 3 conversations model is being trialled in several local authorities and time will indeed tell if it proves to be the ‘solution’. I’m certainly hopeful of the opportunities it presents.

 

References:

Gibson, M. (2016) Social worker or social administrator? Findings from a qualitative case study of a child protection social work team Child and Family Social Work 2017, 22, pp 1187–1196

Partners for Change (2018) Home Page http://partners4change.co.uk/ (accessed 4th Nov 2018)