This is the second of two posts reflecting on recent conversations I’ve been involved with about relational care and how more effectively its reflexes and practices might become more embedded in our care systems. The focus is especially on out of home care as a particular domain in which its absence is widely recognised as both a challenge and in need of urgent change.
The reflections explore the significance of four factors – risk, safety, accountability and time.
The first part looked at safety and risk. Here I’ve added some thoughts on accountability and time and recognised the wider application of these four things in human services reform more broadly.
You can find Part 1 here.
Accountability: when, how and what for?
Most public programs, services and systems run on the basis of an accountability framework that is predominantly, sometimes exclusively about being accountable up the political and bureaucratic chain. The target is usually the Minister, the Parliament, the media – have we done enough to claim we have achieved the result we said we’d achieve and have we done enough to protect the Minister and the government from undue criticism?
[No-one’s suggesting that good accountability for basic things like proper systems for spending public money and the pursuit of high standards of probity and integrity across all aspects of public programs and services are not important. But these aren’t the full accountability story either.]
Traveling the relational road implies the need to privilege accountability down, out and across, as well as appropriately, but not necessarily primarily, up. That means making sure that no matter how well or badly we’ve hit the target, we don’t miss the point – how have we done in terms of the sustained impact on the lives and opportunities of those we’re supposed to be helping or supporting?
Meeting targets or completing tasks can’t be assumed to be commensurate with a full discharge of the service or function.
A working principle here might emerge here along these lines:
Accountability for the service is to the people receiving the service first and foremost (has it made a noticeable difference as opposed to were all the tasks and activities completed), and then to the health of the wider system as well as to the Minister and the other agencies of government.
Time is the enemy (but doesn’t have to be)
Traveling the road to relational implies a different conception of time.
The basic premise is that programs and services need to be measured and tracked to accommodate the rhythms and reflexes of the relationship, and not the other way around (that is, the rhythms of the relationship being forced to fit the timeframe of the system and the program).
The problem is that human service systems are designed and delivered to reflect the rhythms and reflexes of the political and bureaucratic systems from which they emanate. That includes things like election cycles, budget and funding cycles and a range of accountability mechanisms designed to provide performance checks to suit politics, budgets and auditors.
This is a conceptual chasm about different definitions of time between the relational reflex and the largely transactional imperatives of current systems and processes of public policy making. It’s a chasm in which perhaps the single biggest obstacle to embedding a relational instinct as a dominant force in so many of these service contexts lies.
The time framework for most human services serves information, knowledge and accountability artefacts to meet the timetable of politics and public administration. At a high level, that means the political and electoral cycle. Things need to get done – designed, agreed, funded, delivered, evaluated – to be capable of being absorbed into a single cycle.
Other cycles that have to be accommodated include evaluation and reporting on KPIs and other measures of performance, the cycles of accountability mechanisms like Senate Estimates, the Public Accounts Committee and the Auditor-General for example.
For the most part, these are mechanisms and processes that run on relatively short cycles. The problem arises when short term, transactional requirements to feed the political and electoral cycle interrupt, as they inevitably must, the “rhythm of relational”, whose time requirements are longer term, unpredictable and non-linear.
The simple point is that the time framework for politics especially and for much of the policy process doesn’t sit well with the more meandering time frames that reflect the way relationships grow and are nurtured.
An emerging working principle here might be something along these lines:
The parameters of time for programs that aim to help and support young people in the child protection system have to be set, tracked and measured to accommodate the rhythms and reflexes of the relationship, and not the other way around.
Purpose and power
Which brings us inevitably to the two P words.
It will be obvious to anyone who has spent any time thinking about these complex human services systems, and certainly to those who spend their lives working in and with them, that deep reform requires a lot more to sort out than the four things we’ve discussed thus far. They seem to me to be foundational concerns, for sure. But these are some of the spaces and dilemmas in public policy that pretty much invented the concept of “wicked.”
What’s really at stake are big, difficult questions about purpose and power.
The language we use around concepts like risk, safety and accountability derive their significance and meaning from the way we define the purpose of the systems they serve. And questions of purpose tangle with contests of power. Who gets to define purpose is a question of power, of who is at the table and whose interests are being served.
[Note: one of the big insights from especially the Ministerial roundtable discussion was the importance of language and how much of the language into which these human system lapse can start to feel a lot less than fully human – plans, priorities, placements as opposed to trust, connection and love for example. As we all agreed, you don’t need a Cabinet submission or program funding application to stop using the wrong language and start using more helpful, human language – NPR, No Permission Required.
The point here is not to suggest that these four things – risk, safety, accountability and time – represent a simple and singular agenda for successful change.
But unless we find a way to shift our sense of what these four things mean and how their current definition and practice hold in place many of the dysfunctional conditions that define the way these systems currently work, we’ll remain stranded – as we have been I would argue for decades – between ambitious promise and permanently disappointing performance.
Luckily there are some terribly good people trying to do just that,
More power to their collective elbows.
The Four Working Principles
RISK The primary focus has to be reducing risks for the young people involved including the risk of the sustained and structural absence in their lives of meaningful connections to, and relationships with other adults who are reliably and consistently in their lives over time.”
SAFETY The central concern is the true safety of the children or young people involved, which means their psychological, physical and emotional safety; that has to be the yardstick against which interventions, decisions and actions/behaviour by all other players needs to be measured.”
ACCOUNTABILITY Accountability for the service is to the people receiving the service first and foremost (has it made a noticeable difference as opposed to were all the tasks and activities completed), and then to the health of the wider system as well as to the Minister and the other agencies of government.”,
TIME The parameters of time for programs that aim to help and support young people in the child protection system have to be set, tracked and measured to accommodate the rhythms and reflexes of the relationship, and not the other way around.”
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