Maggie Atkinson Consulting Ltd
Change management in a challenging world
Blog
Gathering clans and clouds: Lay on, Macduff!
| Posted on November 2, 2016 at 10:15 AM |
Day 1 of the National Children's and Adults' Services Conference (#NCASC2016.) This is the annual think and reflect, connect and learn, challenge and think deeply gathering of policy and practice in these vital service areas. We have had strong and nicely linked inputs, gauntlets thrown and challenges laid down. Oddly, I find myself reflecting in a different way as reps from these areas of service settle into our debates, coming as they do from environments hard pressed by austerity, struggling to prove the differences they make in society - until they aren't there any more, when their absence hits home.
My thinking has been sharpened by conversations with people who've said "Do you remember in 1999, we were urging the system to see intervening late was foolish, expensive, wasteful, damaging to those who waited until there was a crisis before we got to them? Saying we needed to get in earlier? What's going on that somehow we are doing the late stuff, the expensive stuff, the can't cover the bases stuff, almost as a default, all these years later?" There's a counter conversation. It revisits how hard everything is, how there was apparently a golden age before adults' and children's services went under a DASS and a DCS and if we could only go back we'd be OK. Incredulity meets that line of argument. The landscape has changed, the partnerships are different, social care for any age - certainly under a DCS's more rounded role - does not work in a bubble on its own - if it ever did, which I doubt. Expectations are light years on, the "back to what?" questions therefore being answered by a "well, certainly not what you think!" response.
What I'm musing on now is what we do with the energy generated by worrying about whether we can deliver. At what point must worrying be set aside because situations require potentially radical action, right now? What comes to mind is from the start of my career. I had the pleasure of teaching "Macbeth." Written for a nervous and troubled King who saw conspiracy to murder and supernatural influences everywhere, it is rich in action and characters displaying flaws you would expect in a tragedy. The lead characters display self delusion, rash action derived from false images of both self and the world, a self destruct button stuck "on" no matter what others try to do to unlock it, and the inevitablity of death and destruction. But look more closely at this story and make the links between even small parts of it, and your own.
Macbeth, before we meet him, is a feted hero: a leader whose soliders follow him against uncertain odds. They would die for him, and he for them. His high repute precedes him onto the stage,he is destined for and attains glory. He is supported by a wife of still greater ambitions, who, as the audience fights the urge to shout "don't listen! don't do it!" quashes his inner uncertainties, with fatal results - for the king they murder, and for themselves. Almost immediately Duncan is dead, the folly of what they have done starts to unravel the pair of them. Ghosts and portents abound. That first death has to be followed by many more for Macbeth to stay ahead of the game, supposedly to remain in control. He tries, before the first murder, to say it is too great a risk, that they might fail. At that moment Lady M looks at him and says "We, fail? But screw your courage to the sticking point and we'll not fail." That their flaws mean they do fail, does not detract from the moment of focus she captures in that line.
I am not for a moment suggesting the sector screws its courage to the sticking point so as to commit heinous crimes. But all day today we have been assured the courage, commitment, foresight, creativity and ingenuity of the people in it, their humanity and reach, are all amazing. They have been thanked as well as challenged. And they have been told, and told each other, that the courage is in their hands, not those of the people whose ideas and policieis have created the challenges and fears they now face. Over again, as people have tweeted about today, the feedback about bravery, about going out on a limb, about picking up the gauntlet and entering the fray, the will to DO, not just think or worry, has been palpable. We are, as we have also been told, the people who can make things work for a society that needs the services concerned. It's the end of day 1. I wonder what day 2 will bring of people's courage andthe need for screwing it to the sticking point so they don't fail. Bring it on, is the sense of the day. So, to end as Macbeth does, staring down his inevitable demise with open eyed and final courage, even as he fails: "Lay on Macduff, and cursed be him who first cries 'Hold! Enough!' "
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Ah, to live in interesting times!
Ah, to live in interesting times!
I'm sure that, like me, for many contacts and colleagues, working days are running in anything but the usual order, anything but the usual way. For me, business has stopped for the time being, all bar finishing off some vital tasks to conclude a great assignment with a client whose people gave, gave and gave again as I worked to help them problem solve and solution find. I am still adjusting to the fact that, the diary being on hold (not closed!) there is, for the first time in my working life, no rush. No urgency in getting that domestic business done around my business and the people who seek to use it. I can take my time in the kitchen and the garden, at the piano or in my permitted outside exercise a day. This is not my style, and it makes me a bit jumpy. It's a struggle to believe it, let alone let my clock run slower than usual. For former colleague DCSs and their staff and partners, whilst some of the everyday clutter might have set itself aside, their days are very full, their sleeves rolled up and their heroic efforts focused on ensuring the people they serve are as safe as possible, for as long as possible, with as much dignity and support as can be afforded them. I salute them, as ever. I do remember what single community crises were like when I did the job. But then there was simply nothing of the scale, or the likely longevity, of the current massive challenge facing them, and society, right now.
This period of enforced introspection has got me thinking, mostly in the researcher part of my brain. What I see on a daily basis is that, beyond the muppets who don't think Covid19 is serious or could affect them and won't modify their conduct beyond getting mad and behaving badly, thousands of people are just doing good. Volunteering, offering simple help like dropping off shopping on a neighbour's doorstep, going a LOT further and putting themselves on the line, offering free online support to parents whose children are not at school so everybody may be feeling the strain. The observer in me is starting to hatch some ideas that would bear scrutiny when this is all over. Here are some research questions you might help me think about!
Will the economy recover? Or will we have to grow to being, by necessity, a more socially aware nation that seeks out and supports our strugglers rather than blaming them for their own situations then getting on with our own lives? What will a national workforce look like when we are through the other side? Will we stay connected, or are we likelier to go back to being frantic, self-absorbed, as our pre-crisis behaviour tended to make us? Will the memory of when people pulled together, stayed local, formed bonds via Zoom or Skype or WhatsApp linger? Will we mark when we realised that "We don't need that meeting" was an actual thing? When people found both altruism and skills they didn't know they had? When all this is over, can we harness citizen research as well as that done in academia to explore the phenomena we are witnessing as people turn towards others as well as addressing their own concerns? Or does it take a serious crisis, another Covid19, to make us step into a shared mental and emotional space and capture what it teaches us rather than staying in our own, meaning we will forget? I'm working on some approaches to research bodies on all this, given this is a truly remarkable, as well as a sad, scary, deeply unsettling and uncertain - an "interesting" - time.
If you would like to co-explore what I ruminated on above, or if like me you are watching fascinated as people stop buying what they don't need and concentrate on what they and others do need? Together? Please get in touch!
And in the meantime? Stay safe. Good luck. And if you are in an organisation that's keeping us all going, thank you.
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