In socially inclusive practice, workers often begin with the person and then try to invent suitable approaches to support them to engage, belong and contribute to community life beyond the service. This approach starts with a blank canvas and is very person-centred, since it is shaped by a profound understanding of the person and their gifts and strengths.
In this process, the habits and skills repertoire of the worker are in shadow. In reality, of course, the worker is very likely to think of an approach they have used before, thereby designing the inclusion plan out of their own skills and experience rather than inventing new, innovative approaches. This is even more likely to happen in overworked organisations where people are too tired to be creative or where innovation is stifled by a blame culture.
There is an alternative. The term ‘reverse engineering’ means to take a finished product apart to find out how it was built and learn how to reproduce it, and this can be applied to the task of building an inclusion plan through the use of the Social Inclusion Training Pack (SITP). This resource catalogues 113 ways to support an inclusion journey, each of which is described on a SITP Card. These approaches are loosely grouped to form a seven-stage inclusion plan, with the SITP Cards colour-coded to help people see what belongs together.
During a training session, staff worked in pairs to invent an inclusion plan for a person that one member of the dyad knew well. After sharing some key facts about the person, the pair reviewed all the SITP Cards from stage one and picked the card that they thought had the best chance of success. They then moved on to stage two and repeated the exercise until they had built a seven-stage inclusion plan formed of one SITP Card from each stage.
In real life, of course, nobody is required to use just one approach at each stage, and real inclusion plans could be formed of seven approaches – or ten, or twenty. Within the context of the training, asking participants to select just one SITP Card highlighted the point that we are constantly choosing one approach and discarding another, whether this is done consciously or not. Secondly, the plan was ingenuous in suggesting that the inclusion journey is a linear exercise, moving logically from stage one to stage seven, whereas in reality, individual approaches inform each other, people circle back and revisit stages on the journey and so on. Thirdly, whilst staff were thinking about a real person that they knew, the results would have to be dismissed since the plans were formed in the absence of the person concerned rather than with their active contribution. The exercise is intended to train staff and is not intended to replace person-centred planning.
During SITP training, a total of 1,192 staff used this reverse engineering approach. Here are the first things we found:
- Workers did find it possible to build an inclusion plan for one person with one community setting in mind, and reported that they had built a plan they could believe in.
- Twelve percent of plans broke the rules of the training exercise by selecting more than one approach for one or more stages. We might consider these rule-breakers as particularly useful people for real life inclusion planning!
Workers were then invited to sort the SITP Cards they had chosen into two piles, headed ‘Familiar’ and ‘New’. A familiar approach was one that they had used before, where they knew how to use the approach to best advantage and could anticipate what might go wrong. Each member of the pair did this card sort for themselves, since, while they had coproduced the plan, each person had varying personal histories of this kind of work and so would have different scores.
A surprisingly high proportion of the SITP Cards chosen (32%) were described as new by the worker. We might hypothesise here that a traditional approach in which staff started with the person and then built a plan without the aid of the SITP Cards would have utilised many more familiar approaches – that, by looking at the cards and considering the approaches described on them, they ended up with a more creative and imaginative outcome. Of course, some pairs of workers would be in a situation where one member of the dyad was familiar with an approach and sold it to their partner, despite its unfamiliarity to the other. But the fact that so many SITP Cards, picked as being the most likely to succeed with the person, were unfamiliar to the worker, suggests that this training approach substantially broadens the repertoire of staff.
Twelve percent of the plans were made up entirely of familiar approaches – all seven SITP Cards chosen were judged as familiar by the worker. These workers may have an unusually broad skillset in which they deployed a vast array of approaches to support inclusive lives, or they may have adopted a cautious or defensive approach by building their inclusion plan using only well-tried, familiar approaches.
The trainer then invited participants to select a single SITP card that represented an approach that was personally new to them and which they could focus on over the next few weeks. By asking each participant to choose a single approach to learn about and add to their repertoire, the overall team competence can grow. No one during training claimed that they were familiar with the whole pack and participants found it easy to select a card representing an approach that was new to them.
A smaller sample of 112 plans were then studied in more detail. Asking workers to choose the seven steps that would be most likely to succeed for a particular individual resulted in very diverse plans. Only 13 of the 113 available approaches were unused in any of the plans in our sample, meaning that 100 different approaches were picked as just the right thing for at least one person’s seven-step plan. The unselected approaches were distributed across all seven stages of the inclusion plan, showing that all stages benefit from rigorous reflection and intentional skill building. Offering clear descriptions of individual approaches and inviting staff to work in pairs to review a real person’s circumstances can help staff to move away from their familiar responses and build creative and innovative plans. The unused strategies can then be reviewed to find out if they were neglected because they were known to be ineffectual, appear in other plans not analysed in this tranche, or alternatively should be introduced via a further training exercise to assist staff in broadening their repertoire of available approaches.
So, in conclusion, reverse engineering provides a way to audit, broaden staff competence and encourage creativity. In this example, it was used to examine socially inclusive practice by describing all available interventions on sort cards and then inviting workers to combine them into believable plans. The approach could easily be adapted to examine other practice areas, such as reasonable adjustments, counselling interventions or responses to human rights. Like other approaches, it carries risks of mechanising human interaction and so should always be used thoughtfully and in balance with other models.
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