WHY DOES ANYONE EVER AGREE TO CHANGE ANYTHING?
1)Transformational change is not incremental change. It ultimately calls for us to agree to change our organizational identity and our organizational culture.
2)Whenever our identity and our culture are called into question, we can get very defensive: “You mean that what we used to believe is no longer valid?”
3)If we present organizational transformation as a forced choice between what we have believed and what we are being asked to believe we will often fail.
4)Transformation is really just about agreeing to take the next step. We have taken such “next steps” before. We have transformed many times before.
5)In the beginning we were all called orphanages. Then we were asked to be residential care facilities. Then we became residential treatment centers.
6)Each next step was a struggle. Some have said that we never agree to make the next step change until we conclude that we have to make that change.
7)Many believe that organizational transformation tends to follow a seven-step progression. Most of us have to struggle through each of those seven steps.
8)It all starts when we get scared because we are acutely aware that things are changing very rapidly. What used to work so well just stops working for us.
9)Then we accept that we have to transform our organization if we hope to remain viable. We accept that things won’t go back to being how they were.
10)Then we decide that we have to find a way to transform what we do. This is hard because we have to understandthe change before we can accept it.
11)Then we develop a clearer sense of the changes we will need to make. We gain confidence when we can narrow down the field of available options.
12)Then we design a plan to allow us to make those needed changes. This plan becomes a source of hope because it breaks transformation into doable steps.
13)Then we work to find effective ways to actually implement our plan. This is when we come to understand that we have to adapt our identity and culture.
14)This is also when we ask ourselves, “Why does anyone ever agree to change anything?” It’s much easier for a leader to accept a change as the“next step”.
15)It’s more challenging to find ways to help our staff to understand the changes and to agree to accept those changes as the “next step” for our organization.
16)The stage for the resistance our staff offers to any “next step” change was set in the past when we established the identity and culture of our organization.
17)We trained our staff to preserve, protect and defend our identity and our culture. We taught that we are what we do. We taught certain behaviors.
18)Those behaviors stemmed from some patterns of thoughts and beliefs that were reflective of the values that underpinned our identity and our culture.
19)Those thoughts related to our beliefs about the lives of the youths we serve, the families of the youths we serve and the communities in which they lived.
20)Many of us came to believe that it was our job to replace theirparents, raise their children and keep them safe from their parents and their communities.
21)We tend to behave in certain ways when we believe it is our job to raise children. Our commitment to behavioral approaches came from this belief.
22)We have no sense of time or urgency when we work to raise children. We can come to believe it as our job to shape a wide range of youth behaviors.
23)And since we are raising children in a congregate care setting, we can come to believe that behavior management is an essential element of our work.
24)That’s where “tough love” entered our patterns of thoughts and beliefs. We came to believe that “aversive discomfort” was needed to manage behaviors.
25)We attached consequences to violations of our expectations. We believed that “aversive discomfort” would help youths to learn from their mistakes
26)We also worked to shape behaviors under a belief that “one size fits all.” In order to be “fair,” we enforced all expectations the same way for everyone.
27)And we carefully managed all contacts with families under the belief that their families were the source of their problems and not of their solutions.
28)We marginalized the families of the youths we served because we believed that their children would not return to them. But they did return to them.
29)85% of the youths we served eventually went back home. We hadn’t worked with their families so nothing much had changed. Many were not successful.
30)Much of our work was child-centered and campus-based, so the youths lost contact with their communities and any natural supports they once had.
31)What we did and the ways we did it stopped working when we were asked to serve more traumatized youths with higher levels of emotional disturbances.
32)Extensive research into trauma helped to propel the changes. Youths who had been traumatized were often triggered by our tough love approaches.
33)Helping them required much more individualized approaches. And these youths often needed the involvement of their families to allow them to heal.
34)And long stays in congregate care settings tended to deprive them of hope, limit their normal development and often didn’t prepare them for the future.
35)For many years we tried to make the old ways work. But these efforts were largely unsuccessful. The old ways were making our environments unsafe.
36)The often-violent adaptive behaviors that the youths had developed to keep them safe before they came to us were often being triggered by our actions.
37)We came to understand that we had to individualize more, shorten the stays, deeply engage their families and help to lead their families toward stability.
38)This meant that we had to find ways to engage the families of all the youths we served or we had to help find families for youths who could not go home.
39)And we had to work with the families that still had their own children to help them to safely keep their children and prevent the need for out of home care.
40)We also had to develop connections with the communities where the families lived so we could help families to meet their basic safety and security needs.
41)We saw that a family that is cold, hungry and homeless cannot be stable. We saw that it was our responsibility to help families to meet their basic needs.
42)We only change when we accept that we have to change. And we can only accept the change when we can come to understand it and what it means.
43)We have to take these discussions directly to our staff. We have to find ways to walk them through the patterns of thoughts and beliefs we currently hold.
44)We have to helpour staff see that our patterns aren’t working for us as they used to. We have to help them see what our communities now need us to do.
45)These new patterns are not a repudiation of our past. They are responses to emerging community needs. We have always responded to emerging needs.
46)Now we are being asked to become family-focused, community-based centers for family healing and wellness. This is just the “next step” for us.
47)Successful work, going forward, will be much more family-engaged, much shorter in duration, much more focused on stability and crisis stabilization.
48)We will learn to help our staff and those we serve to feel safe, secure, calm and well. We will all teach belonging, forgiveness, gratitude and hopefulness.
49)We will also teach emotional regulation, problem solving, seeing things as they are, making good decisions, learning from mistakes, and relationships.
50)Many believe this next step will help us achieve more durable results: safe children, stable families, strong communities and reduced levels of poverty.