Dear Child Welfare, I want to go home to mommy
NRK 3. oktober 2018
A car on the way away from a school sits "Marie" and writes text messages to mom. She and her little brother are sitting in the back seat, in front of two child welfare employees. The siblings will soon have a new home with a family they have never met.
"Marie" and her brother became two of the 1804 children in Norway who were placed in an emergency shelter by the child welfare service in 2017.
A few hours earlier in the classroom:
The weather is nice in the coastal municipality this autumn day. At the end of the school day, the door to the classroom goes up. A teacher comes in and asks two siblings to come out of class. They must meet at principal's office.
Inside the office, on one side of the long table, two ladies are waiting from child welfare. They tell the siblings not to go home, but rather in foster care. Because mom did not have enough ability to care.
Marie and her brother get some water in one glass. She sees that the adults try to smile gently.
But Marie is angry and tries to speak out against them.
– I was going home; they couldn't decide over me
Marie, who has just learned about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, tries to explain that she has rights. She protests what is happening, her little brother says little.
- I say there is nothing wrong at home, I feel good there and I feel safe. There is no reason for us to get picked up.
The police come to the school
The 14-year-old is getting more and more annoyed. Marie tells us that her little brother is taken out of the principal's office and into another room.
- They do not understand anything. Instead, they call the police, and that makes it even worse. The police are coming, in full uniform. "They were going to calm me down," Marie explains.
But the 14-year-old only gets more upset when the police show up. For Marie, these minutes in the principal's office at the end of the school day are stuck in memory.
- I think that they will soon lay us in the ground or what happens next?
Marie and her little brother do not know it yet. But it is going to be a long time before they see Mom again.
Example from the child welfare service in Færder municipality.
Example from the child welfare service in Færder municipality. https://tv.nrk.no/serie/distriktsnyheter-fra-vestfold-og-telemark/202001/DKVT98010720/avspiller
Lecture by #IdaSteinrem for those who want to hear more about the Færder Project (39 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa3ffnbkCB4
Team organization
The two examples above show how different team organization can be perceived. The first example appears to be a typical functional team, while Færder has established what we might call a delivery team, with close ties to the users. It is normal in most organizations to establish professional or functional teams. Large resources are often spent on building these feature teams with team building courses and team development. This is positive, but we forget that the deliveries to any organization are aimed at a customer or a customer group, and these professional teams tend to put a spotlight on their professional tasks rather than the customer's needs. Modern leadership is continuous improvement and respect for people. This involves listening and supporting rather than commanding and controlling, which is standard in old-fashioned management.
In the example from Færder, we see that it is the delivery team that is doing the job. There are those who have daily contact with their users and customers, and there are those who develop their processes and ways of working. This is modern management in practice, and it is an example of continuous improvement.
Nevertheless, we should be aware that the Færder project emphasizes strongly that there is ongoing contact with other municipalities working within the same trial project, as well as key resource persons. In other words, there are important professional teams working together to support and contribute to problem solving in the different delivery teams.
The journalist in the story about Færder questions what is really different in the new way they work. The fact is that this is radically different from traditional management.
Decentralization and future team organization.
It is a good political decision to test decentralized solutions as here, and to place responsibility for performing tasks from central agencies to local ones. Unfortunately, we see that political commentators often explain good results from such trial projects with standardized requirements for higher education, special needs educators, continuing education courses and improvement of key rules, or reforms as it is called. This indicates a lack of understanding of what is the driver and motivator in an organization and continuous improvement. It is they who work in the daily tasks who are the experts on how to work in the organization, and they will develop their ways of working all the time if they gain trust and support. The academic element can be safeguarded with good communication between professionals who often sit physically far apart and meet in a virtual professional environment. We can call this form of work a low matrix where we have daily collaboration between professional teams and delivery teams, and where the professional axis is maintained on a virtual platform.
Positive development?
The development in the use and understanding of digital platforms in the current situation may perhaps give us the opportunity to organize ourselves in a new and more efficient way? A working method with close contact with the users of our services and a good professional environment based on the use of digital platforms. This would be a revolutionary way of working for many public services instead of centralizing professional resources with a great distance to users, reforms that are extremely costly and are based solely on satisfying the leadership of the academic communities.
It would not be to despise whether we could save a few billion a year and at the same time radically improve customer service. Perhaps now we have the opportunity to have such a development?
OKTAV is a process for implementing lean, The T in OKTAV describes teams and team organization in low arrays.
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