Funny how things happen, eh...
The journey towards an idea often has many twists and turns and happy coincidences. Several stories collide and out of the crush and mess of it all one idea seems to crystallise...
So here are the stories that lead up to today...
Story 1... On Saturday, completely out of the blue I get a Facebook message from a woman I've never met or heard of before. It seems that she has seen the little video clip on You Tube about the Values of Inclusion...she likes it...seems to speak to her about her situation with her 23 yr old son and could I come to Melbourne and would I come and hear Michael Kendrick speak in November.
That leads me to Story number 2... in which I think about Michael Kendrick a lot and wonder how he is and recall how much he taught me over the years and how I wish I could think in sentences with A Capital Letter at the Start Of Every Word because, regardless of how annoying I find it and, no matter how difficult it is to read, Clever People With Big Ideas Always Seem To Do It...but asides from a bit of gentle teasing about Michael, the story goes that I have much to be thankful to him for. He has taught me a great deal about some complicated stuff and I appreciate that immensely.
Story Number 3...As I'm thinking about Michael, I'm realising that, in some respects he pulled me away from the brink of The Biggest Mistake Ever...
Before I understood how really smart and gifted he is I had an opportunity to work with him and with Pete Ritchie who was at that time the CEO of Scottish Human Services (SHS). I was a very junior trainer with SHS so to say that I was working with them is misleading...I was making sure that they and the participants had everything they needed...Michael and Pete were working... I was getting the coffee. But I was listening, listening, listening.
The course was about leadership. Some fairly scary people were in the room as participants...heads of organisations who were influential in human services in Scotland at that time. It felt like A. Big. Deal.
It was a exciting time to be in Scotland. The work of SHS was beginning to change the human service landscape and different kinds of conversations were happening all over...'What would it take?' kinds of conversations. It was great to hear...
I had had a couple of very personal and challenging experiences that simply demanded that I change how I thought and acted in my work with people with disabilities or I just got out of the way. So I made a commitment to change the way I saw things...I was absolutely full of it...a true convert...distressed about the injustice and also delighted to be involved in something that might make a change.
The something I'd identified was Person Centred Planning...particularly MAP and PATH. I thought that if everyone could have a Person Centred Plan then life would be transformed for people, the problems we encountered in the service system would be sorted...everything would be good...sorted...done...
I said that to Michael. He quietly suggested that he really thought that it was the values that underpinned the planning that made the difference and that the Plan simply made a way for those values to become visible in action.
That made me think...
Story number 4...a colleague is visiting WA and tells me about waiting to meet someone from an organisation she was interested in finding out more about. While she was waiting she's reading the materials that are around the place and alights on the one page profiles of the staff, available for people to read.
Story number 5 comes flooding in and I remember conversations I've been having for the past 10 years at least that have been concerned with what I'm describing as the standardisation of individuality, particularly in relation to this one person at a time approach called Person Centred Planning.
Everyone trying to describe their individuality using one particular format is a bit...dissonant...for me.
I'm remembering words that really stung me from 3 or 4 weeks ago when I had felt like someone had dismissed the focus of my work...our work...as being anodyne and formulaic...and I'm wondering how it can be anything other than anodyne or formulaic if everyone has one...don't care what it is...MAP, PATH, Essential Lifestyles Plan, One Page Profile, Personal Futures Plan, Large Group Person Centred Planning...Big Plan...it doesn't matter...
These are all useful processes and, at the right time, in the right way can bring about change that has a big impact on people's lives and circumstances. When we 'roll out Person Centred Planning' we roll everyone up into a great big ball...
OK...last story by way of a conclusion...Story 6...I'm the oldest of a family of 5...if you ask my sister she will tell you that she thinks that I would have liked to have been an only child...if you asked me I will tell you that I think that 5 is too many children (in our house you could also add at various times Grannies and Aunties and cousins who came and went for a whole variety of reasons...) We're by no means the biggest family you can imagine but we're a bit bigger than average.
You could almost always get 'stuff' in our family...shoes, clothes, trips, holidays...we never wanted for any of that...we were treated fairly and kindly...but I'm not sure that any of us ever got what we needed. We never got the time we needed...or the attention we needed or if we did, it hardly ever came in the right way...we got standardised parenting...standardised love...and a kind of standardised understanding...
It wasn't until we got a bit older and then tried to get what we needed in the way that we wanted it...that's when the fun began!
One thing leads to another...one story builds on another and out of the crush and the mess here's what emerges for me...
Be thankful for your teachers…
Let the values guide you and not the forms or the pictures...however pretty they might be and what ever they might be called...
Wonder about the person standing in front of you...
Be prepared to throw the paper away and concentrate on the conversations about things that matter...purpose...meaning...and work to create that in the shape of the person in front of you...
The bigger the group the more difficult this is...
The values are what makes the difference...
