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I have recently had a discussion with a colleague of mine who was retelling a story told to him by someone who had been shadowing someone who was teaching a physical intervention course.
What he told me of highlighted an issue of what has been happening in therapy for many years now and reminded me of a situation we were asked to resolve a couple of years ago.
The situation we became involved with was as follows. Joyce [name changed for data protection reasons] was a manager of a children’s home. She had been involved with looking after children for approximately 20 years and was committed to her job. She is motivated by a desire to look after disadvantaged children, especially those with challenging behaviour, as she feels that she can relate to the children and to date she has had exceptional results in children she has successfully rehabilitated back into normal community life.
Recently her home was inspected by CSCI inspector and the management were advised to provide physical restraint training for the staff as part of their commitment to health and safety. The inspector even advised the management of the home as to which organisations to approach that the inspector considered to be ‘appropriate’ providers of physical intervention (advice and guidance which is actually outside of a CSCI inspectors competence and re-affirmed in correspondence between NFPS Ltd and CSCI. This is further supported by reference to the identification of Effects and Casual Factors Analysis, a method of collating data from incident investigations).
As a result of wishing to ‘comply’ with the inspector’s recommendations a training provider was engaged to run a physical restraint course for the staff of the home, and at the end of the course the training provider submitted feedback to the management of the home regarding how staff did on the course.
The training providers feedback stated that Joyce had difficulty in performing the physical techniques to an acceptable standard. The feedback stated that Joyce found ‘doing the techniques’ difficult and that she had to be ‘continually shown what to do as she was always getting the techniques wrong’. The feedback also stated that Joyce also had difficulty in ‘getting her body into the correct position for some of the techniques because she couldn’t bend properly’. (This was subsequently found to be due to a permanent back injury that the training provider failed to identify as no pre-course medical and fitness questionnaires had been completed by delegates attending the course.) As such they (the instructors) had serious reservations about her competence.
However, this was the best bit – they actually made a recommendation to Joyce’s employer that Joyce was possibly ‘unfit to work with children’ as because she obviously couldn’t do the techniques in the physical restraint programme she would not be competent at physically restraining a distressed child. In short, because of Joyce’s difficulty in being able to perform the physical restraint techniques within the course framework (as the course is a ‘recognised course’), she [Joyce] must be incompetent and as such a risk to children, her colleagues, herself and her employer.
As you can imagine this feedback had a devastating effect on a woman who had committed most of her adult working life to looking after children and who now faced the prospect of not being able to continue in her chosen vocation because of her inability to be able to do certain physical restraint techniques.
In short the foot didn’t fit the shoe.
Now let me tell you a story that has similar aspects to it.
In the field of therapy a major factor that increases therapy being effective is the relationship between the therapist and the client. To build that relationship successfully therapists must have the requisite variety in their communications skills to be able to communicate with their client in language that the client understands.
As many of you that practice NLP or Cognitive Hypnotherapy will know, each individual has their own unique way of making sense of their world through their range of representational systems which are visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.
For example, people whose primary representation system is visual in a given situation will make pictures or movies in their mind and communicate what they ‘see’ in visual predicates (words) in their sentence structure. For example, a client may say to the therapist: “The situation doesn’t look good for me. Every time I think of doing it I can see myself failing.”
A client whose primary representational system is audible may present the same limiting issue in this way: “The situation doesn’t sound good to me. Every time I think of doing it I can hear myself saying that I’m likely to fail.”
A client whose primary representational system is kinaesthetic may tell the therapist about the same problem in the following way: “ It doesn’t feel right, I can’t get a handle on it. Every time I think of doing it, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”
If the therapist doesn’t have the skill to identify the clients representational system and respond in kind then the client may not respond effectively to the therapy being offered by the therapist.
Lets take for example a client who is using their visual representation system to explain a problem to a therapist who is predominantly stuck in an auditory rep system.
Client: “The situation doesn’t look good for me. Every time I think of doing it I can see myself failing.”
Therapist: “I can hear what you are saying and that doesn’t sound good. Tell me some more.”
In this type of communication transaction the representational systems are crossed and are not compatible with one another. In short the client may not feel that the therapist can see where they are coming from. And likewise the therapist may feel that the client isn’t listening to him/her and isn’t hearing what is being said.
An effective therapist with the requisite variety of communication skills would have identified the clients predominant representational system in this communication and would have responded in kind, possibly as follows:
Client: “The situation doesn’t look good for me. Every time I think of doing it I can see myself failing.”
Therapist: “I can see where your coming from, and I can imagine that things don’t look good for you right now. Can you give me some more illustrations of the situation from your perspective?”
Get the picture?
If a therapist cannot communicate with the client effectively it is very likely that the client will not respond to the therapy. However, what tends to happen in some cases is that the therapist will not see the failure of the client to make progress as a failing in the therapist’s ability to communicate or the therapy being offered. The therapist may even, very possibly, put it down to the fact that the client is the problem. In short the client is ‘resistant to therapy’.
The foot still doesn’t fit the shoe.
What we know from research into this process is that where the client and therapist’s representational systems match the therapy is very likely to be more successful. However, if the systems don’t match, and the therapy is unsuccessful, the client could be labelled as ‘resistant’ to therapy when in actual fact it is the inability of the therapist to adopt a variety of communication options that has lead to the client not responding in a way the therapist wants them to respond.
Now back to Joyce.
In Joyce’s case what we saw was the same deductive approach to the delivery of physical intervention training whereby Joyce was labelled as a failure primarily due to the lack of requisite variety in the instructors ability to provide training that matches the needs and meets the criteria of those who require training, however, the training or the trainer can’t be at fault because they are possibly ‘approved’.
Basically, in this case, what had occurred was that the trainer was delivering a standard off-the-shelf training package, i.e., a one-size fits all solution and Joyce didn’t fit the package on offer.
Any competent trainer should be able to choose or even develop the most appropriate and effective techniques to best match the abilities, or lack of, of the staff they are training. That is what professional competence as a professional coach is all about.
However, it is still the case that training programmes are being delivered in a rigid and inflexible format that pre-suppose that if staff cannot do the techniques then the problem must lie with the member of staff, i.e., the member of staff is the problem.
As Henry Ford once said – “You can have it in any colour you like as long as it is black.” However, are we still living in an age where instructors expect those they teach to be colour-blind?
In summary, many organisations are being misled into believing that certain training programmes are credible because they are approved. However, if you went into a shop to buy a pair of shoes and the shop only sold one-size and you were told that the reason their shoes didn’t fit you was because your feet were the problem you’d presume – rightly so – that they were mad and walk out.
However, the perverse dichotomy is that this is how some training is still being marketed, designed and delivered today, and companies who purchase training believing it to be ‘approved’ need to be aware that the approved person or organisation may not necessarily be competent and as such the commissioning agency may fall foul of the implications of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 as identified below:
As the legal duty imposed on employers under section 3 of the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 cannot be passed on by means of a contract, an employer will not be afforded a defence for any contravention of his health and safety obligations, by reason of any act or default caused by an employee or appointed person to give competent advice or training. The very act of engaging a training provider can serve to increase the liability of the organisation if the training being provided is unsuitable. Therefore companies who wish to engage training providers need to be assured that those persons engaged by them are providing lawful and competent advice, are competent to give that advice and are insured to that effect.
What’s is possibly worse is some trainers actually teach skills that they know do not work. I was recently approached by a trainer who informed me that he had serous reservations about the techniques that he was being asked to teach as part of a course. In short he knew that what he was being asked to teach, based on his current level of knowledge and expertise, was, in his opinion, wrong as the techniques were very likely to fail if used in situations of high emotional arousal. He knew that what he was being asked to instruct wouldn’t work, but he also knew that if he didn’t teach it he would lose the contract.
The ‘Nuremberg’ defence
He asked me whether he would get in trouble if he taught something he knew was fallible and that resulted in a member of staff being harmed if they attempted to use it believing it would work, and it ultimately didn’t. My response to him was that after World War II a number of senior Nazi’s were put on trail at Nurenberg for crimes against humanity and the defence they presented was that they were simply following orders. They were found guilty based on the fact that they shouldn’t have been following orders knowing that the orders were crimes against humanity.
Since the inclusion of the Human Rights Act all public authorities have a positive duty imposed on them to promote and protect the right to life [Article 2(1)] and such authorities must take positive steps to preserve that right.
Mark Dawes |
