What are the conditions in which people share their learning?

In person centred approaches, we rely on lots of different people sharing their learning, including people who previously may never previously have been asked about what they have learned. We ask people, their families and their frontline supporters what they have learned about the person, and what is working and not working in their lives and supports.

In my experience the times and spaces where people actually share their learning in everyday life are extremely rare. Usually conditions mitigate against this. Where the conditions are not right and people don't feel included on an equal footing, they wont tend to feel inclined to share learning, even if they're asked. Learning tends to get shared better horizontally in circles than vertically in pyramids, between equals, rather than in situations of imbalance of power and knowledges, and such equal situations are themselves all too rare.

If we think someone is much more knowledgeable than us, we tend to clam up, let them do the talking. In general we would be nervous to share our ideas with someone if they are going to think us naïve or that we have missed the point. Nobody likes to feel stupid.

If someone is more powerful than us, is hugely influential in our lives, then our strategy tends to be very similar.  It does not always  seem wise to share something that might contradict somebody with great sway over your destiny.

What we have learned from our experience is precious to us, when we share it, we feel exposed, at risk. Most of us need to feel confident that what we are sharing is going to be heard, valued and appreciated, or we keep it to ourselves.

 

Because most organisations contain hierarchies and silos, and because of the inequalities in society, person centred practitioners try to work out in our practice ways of temporarily short circuiting these hierarchies, bringing people out of their silos in order to connect them on a more equal footing and to allow learning to be shared between them.  We find and wedge open gaps and spaces in the formal structures of organisations attuned to the needs of bureaucracy and market instead of to people, and while in these interstices, we aim to create 'power with' rather  than 'power over'.

 

In person centred planning, and in training, we rely almost totally on people we call 'content experts' sharing their learning for these processes to work.  In person centred thinking and planning it's the learning of people closest to the person from their direct experience that we truly value. In the training we lead, it's about unleashing some of the tacit knowledge that lurks in people who have years of experience, deep values, different ways of seeing the world, so that everyone in the room learns from themselves and each other.

 

I've found in my most successful trainings 80% or more of what people have learned comes from each other, rather than from me. This is also true in the best planning sessions and coproduction exercises. As facilitators and trainers we feel a real buzz after events and processes that achieve this. After such sessions we feel that we have also learned a great deal ourselves, we yearn to achieve this again! This 'buzzy' feeling is a sign that learning has been successfully shared, that for a short space of time the conditions for sharing learning were successfully in place.

 

As facilitators and trainers one really key role is therefore to create the conditions where power and other imbalances are addressed so that sharing of learning can happen.

 

In both planning/thinking and in training we achieve this by a variety of methods – which include
 

 

·         Establishing a clear purpose for the session, so that everyone participating understands where to focus  their thinking
·         Involving the  right people: in PCP the people most directly involved in the person's life
·         A hospitable space that makes people feel valued, comfortable, safe.
·         Rituals and routines of demarcation at beginning and end that separate learning space and time from work or leisure time.
·         Ground rules (as few as possible, and each one designed specifically to  help people be included and involved)
·         Equal space and time for each participant, so that everyone gets a chance to contribute. (Delivered through techniques like 'rounds')
·         Mutual respect
·         Using the communication methods most appropriate for the person/participants
·         Listening Mindfully
·         Incisive questions
·         Appreciation
·         Valuing each contribution
·         Being prepared to  act on learning and turn it into concrete change

It's worthwhile spending plenty of thought on what the conditions are that enable people to share their learning. If we're to achieve genuine engagement from citizens in the production of their own lives and services, if we're going to listen to people well, if we want to create organisations that learn and change, then a grasp  of how we create the conditions for people to share learning is fundamental.

Person Centered Approaches to Conflict with Max Neill

Explaining 'Important For' with a camping hat

This is the first of a series of occasional articles that share some of the stories I personally use to train the concepts in Person Centred Thinking.

You don’t have to use these stories yourself, in fact I’d prefer you to find your own stories. I’m sharing these stories because they work for me. If you can work out WHY they work,then you’ll be able to come up with stories that work better for you.

The ideas of 'important to' and 'important for' and the skill of seeking a way to find a balance between them that makes sense in the person's life is right at the heart of person centred thinking, so finding a way to explain them that sticks in people's minds is important for a trainer.

When I’m explaining the concept of “important for” it’s easy to say “Important for means all those things that keep us and others, healthy, safe and acceptable within the community.” And that it’s usually other people who are good at spotting what’s important for us. (Which is why self advocates from ‘People Planning Together’ use the gesture of a wagging finger to sum up what ‘important for means to them).

I think telling a story around important for helps  people understand it better than just at this abstract level. I also think telling stories from your own experience works best. So I tell the story of my camping hat:

When I go camping, I love to wear my camping hat. It makes me look like a proper veteran camper. It keeps my head warm and dry when it rains. It keeps me in the shade when it’s sunny. My camping hat is therefore brilliant at keeping me healthy and safe, and is just excellent to wear on a campsite. I really love it!

When I get home, I want to carry on wearing my camping hat. I’ve got used to it. I like how it feels to wear it. But my wife Lorraine tells me “there’s no way you’re going out that front door wearing THAT!” In regular life, it’s important for me NOT to wear a camping hat. It makes me look outlandish and a bit unkempt. My neighbours would talk about me behind my back. My boss at work would not be happy about the impression I’m making to others. The person I care most about would feel unhappy (and Lorraine is very important TO me!)

I thought this was a great story to explain ‘important for’, I told it recently to Julie Malette, and with the expertise she’s built up over years of excellent training she immediately pointed out a way I could turn a good training story into a great training story: BRING IN THE  HAT! Then people would understand just why Lorraine dislikes that hat so much. They would remember how daft I looked wearing that hat in the context of a training. The story would stick in their minds.

So I’m going to have to find a new hat. My old camping hat mysteriously disappeared one day.

Lorraine denies all knowledge…

Portland Gathering 2013: Wednesday: Keeping the Fidelity of Person Centred Practices



Michael Smull talking on the history of
 Person Centred Thinking and Practices
 

The theme of Wednesday's session of the Portland Gathering was to discuss how to keep true to the core values of person centred practices.

Shae Dotson and Sherry Anderson began the day, exploring the role of planning in enabling people to live better lives. Shae quoted Antoine de St Exupery: "A goal without a plan is just a wish"

Michael Smull gave a comprehensive account of the history of the Learning Community for Person Centred Practices.

5 common dreams: all from us!

He explored the problem of trying to discover what a person's dreams might be when that person had spent an institutionalised life with no opportunity to develop dreams beyond "to get the hell out of here". Back in the 1980s Michael and his colleagues had been talking to people who had remained 'stuck' in institutions because the information that accompanied them focussed on the most negative and embarrassing aspects of their history, often going back 20 or 30 years.
"These were people who if you read what the assessments said about them you would not want anywhere near you, but if you met them and spent time with them, you knew they were cool"

"The people we talked to came up with 5 common dreams, and we realised that these dreams didn't belong to these people, they were really our dreams for them. They were watching our faces very closely, and trying to help us by telling us what they thought we wanted to hear. We realised that dreams come from experience - from opportunities to get a little taste of something and say "I'd like more of that", so we started to realise that before you get a dream, you need to get a life, so we were grappling with the question "How are we going to figure out how people want to live if they don't have dreams?"

The questions and approaches they developed to answer this question began to form the basis of Essential Lifestyle Planning around 88-89. Michael shared that one parent had told him "PATH got my daughter her apartment. ELP got my daughter her life in that apartment", showing how the two approaches complemented each other.

Michael recounted how implementing ELP however was not plain sailing, and had several 'false starts', including many states trying to implement ELP without any training for those who would put plans into practice, imagining that plans could be 'self-implementing'.

He also discussed the difficulty of finding ways to teach ELP beyond simply demonstrating it and expecting people to copy. Here the work of Bill Allen, who introduced a whole range of teaching exercises and new tools that we now refer to as the 'discovery tools' was crucial.

By 2001 however they began to realise that there was still a major problem with implementation: In reality only a pretty small percentage of people needed to know how to write an ELP, but 100% of people needed to know how to implement a plan - how to make sure that what we learn is important to a person is present in their lives.

This led to the development of what we now call 'Person Centred Thinking', ELP was 'deconstructed', being broken into smaller and simpler skills that people could build into their everyday work, and processes like Person Centred Reviews.



Shea Dotson scribing

Alongside this it became obvious that it was absolutely necessary to involve families in planning, Mary Lou Bourne holding the first families planning together sessions with Shelley Dumas, and Sue Cullen developing approaches to enable people that use services to write their own plans.

The practices have spread out to other areas, including schools, older people, mental health services, and many other groups of people and internationally to the UK with Helen Sanderson, Canada, Australia, Europe and now India.

World Café Question

As these processes, tools, skills and learning have been developed, all intellectual property rights have been given to the Learning Community for Person Centred Practices, a not for profit organisation, and lots of people are generously feeding their learning and resources into this pool of practice knowledge, such as Helen Sanderson who is collecting examples of great one page profiles and Nancy Mills who has built a website. "Our vision for the TLCPCP is to build a worldwide hub to share learning" said Michael "This would be easier if we had staff, but we don't".

Michael said that we need to be clear that Person Centred Thinking is "Not THE answer, but part of the answer". "We're still wrestling with how to move from "Power over" to "Power with" and how we form the partnerships necessary to achieve this".

The day went on to use World Café to think about the role of planning in enabling choice and control in people's lives, in the knowledge that the future is likely to be as challenging and full of change and new learning as the past.

We moved from table to table discussing these questions with new sets of people. There was a lot of discussion around the tendency for organisations and states to find ways to dilute or pervert the essence of planning. In the feedback the loudest round of applause went to the delegate who said "The role of planning is whatever it needs to be as defined by the person receiving supports"

The next section of the day was spent in a variety of breakout sessions. I went to the 'People Planning Together' session and was blown away by the quality of a curriculum that is enabling learning disabled people and other self advocates to become trainers in person centred thinking in their own right. Some of the discussion here was around what was required of a trainer, and ways of overcoming issues of communication, such as people who don't use words to speak.

One new thing I learned was the signs for 'important to' (hands clasped close to the heart) and 'important for' ( a wagging finger).  Eddie asked us to make collages representing what was important to us, leading to a rich discussion over what worked and doesn't work in training from the experience of trainers, and the experience of learners.

From my point of view, the importance of the day's theme was given acute counterpoint when I read about the treatment of the son of this BBC blogger who was unlawfully detained in a care unit:

"One of the unit's ideas was that he should have a person-centred plan. He had to create a wish list, and came up with six things:

• Live at home with Dad
• Go on holiday to Somerset
• Have Christmas presents at home
• See Toy Story 3 at the cinema
• Have breakfast in the bacon shop
• Go swimming at Hampton open-air pool

All six wishes were refused because they were not considered to be in his best interests. To me, that's not a person-centred plan, that's a system-centred plan."

Every example of this kind of perversion of person centred practice generates cynicism and pessimism. One key role of the Learning Community for Person Centred Practices is to ensure that a community of practice exists that is strong enough to ensure that this kind of lip-service to PCP is never considered to be a true representation of the practice, and that the trainers and mentors accredited by the TLCPCP never allow their work to be perverted in this way.



Lost for words?

Nearly all these words are banned!

This entertaining programme "Splasho" tests everything you write to see if you’ve used the 1000 most common words or gone beyond that.

Very quickly you can feel frustrated that the words you need to express what you mean lie beyond the limit of what’s available to you.

Imagine how difficult it would become if this was just 500 words, or 50.

 http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

Thanks for sharing this with me Bernard!