One of the things I love so much about my job is working with entrepreneurs who have radical vision.
People who dare to believe that things can be different. People who can see the difference real change can make, but who need some support in geiing there.
People who understand that:
"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got"
The famous and oft-quoted quote, attributed to Henry Ford
Or, as we say at Insight2Excellence:
“We don’t need more of the same. We need bold, human-centred approaches that help people—and systems—thrive.”
Certainly, in social care, we can’t have more of the same because we know that what we currently have isn’t working. For social care entrepreneurs with vision, the question is always:
And if we’re not asking that question, then something is seriously wrong.
The effective leader of any social care organisation is working to put themselves out of business, walking alongside people as they move toward a place where they need less support as independence grows through innovative design.
That design shouldn’t just rely on digital initiatives but also harness community assets and make co-production a reality, resulting in citizen support, naturally occurring support where neighbour looks out for neighbour.
For providers of social care, the mere fact that provision sits in the marketplace means that time is taken up with profit margins, staring at spreadsheets, drawing up profit and loss reports, and asking questions such as “Is it cost-effective for me to provide a service to this person?”. For the person supported, this is about a service; it’s about living a life.
I have sat in Multi-Disciplinary meetings where the provider downplayed the progress someone had made, just to hang onto a lucrative “care package.”
Vision shifting from supporting people to lead great lives to business survival.
When I was directly involved in providing support, I lost count of the number of times I received phone calls from distressed parents, carers, and sometimes the person supported themselves, saying:
“My provider has just served notice on my support. Can you help me?”
What are we doing that people find themselves in this position? What are we doing when the progress of someone drawing down on support becomes a threat and not an outcome?
For managers, it’s about the stressful day-to-day business of ensuring people get support. I heard one manager say:
“I spend all day staring at a rota. This isn’t why I came into social care.”
If a manager spends all day staring at a rota, the person they support will likely have a stranger knocking on their door that day. And that undermines the very foundation of social care, relationship. Without relationship, there is no social care. If relationship is removed from the equation, the person will experience a transaction, not genuine interaction, and this will be from someone glancing at a care plan that details a list of needs, with the outcome being a series of tasks.
Someone said to me a couple of days ago,
“When someone calls in sick, managers just call the agency. Agency isn’t a last resort anymore; it’s the first port of call.”
And this was said with deep regret and genuine care, but the individual was so caught up in trying to maintain the status quo that they could not see the wood for the trees. They were lost in a system not of their making.
Genuine social care isn’t about systems; it’s about human beings.
And yet, saying that today has become a radical act where the human being is seen as a unit or an output.
I don’t believe that this is what society wants.
It’s certainly not what people supported want.
Driving home on Monday afternoon after an exciting mentoring session with an entrepreneur who can see how things can and must be different, I was both excited and reassured that there are people who are awake, and who know it doesn’t always have to be this way.
And this starts not with the provision of services, but with understanding who the person is and how they want to live their life and gathering together all the ingredients through genuine co-production to make this happen.
I remember talking to a provider some time ago about someone we supported in the CIC I was running. I had attended a review, and it was clear that support wasn’t delivering the life this person wanted. I sat with the person, we went through his support, and together we identified a micro-provider,a volunteer, and others who could support him, alongside the CIC, but with reduced hours. The provider I was talking with thought I was mad, but the person supported got his life back.
We can still make a difference.
It’s an honour to be able to play a small part in enabling that.
