Well, after several years of trying to innovate inside the social services (which has been both painful and exhilarating), we finally have a book that ...
Making the Most of a Pandemic
“Apocalypse is easy Thinking’s hard” –Maureen N. McLane, from No One Canoe We’re all tired, I think. Social services weren’t designed for pandemics. We ...
Is It Okay To Talk About Power?
In my world of support to adults with intellectual disabilities, this gets even more complicated. People without disabilities are ultimately controlling and managing the affairs ...
On the Misuse of User Satisfaction Surveys in Social Services
User satisfaction surveys are perhaps the most problematic tool used by social service agencies to assess performance. Not only is self-reporting notoriously unreliable, especially when ...
When Person-Centered Thinking/Planning Causes Harm
What It’s Supposed to Look Like Person-Centered Thinking (PCT), is a professional disposition that is supposed to ensure that people with intellectual disabilities (or seniors, ...
It’s Okay, Dad.
It’s okay… It’s all okay… Those are the last words my father heard. My sister spoke them to him several times over the last hour ...
Finding An Alternative to “Success-Failure” Speak
Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward (John C. Maxwell) Some problems remain problems because of the language we use to frame them. And ...
Prototyping from the Inside Out
It’s not that I’m not a believer, it’s just that it’s hard. I work for a social service organization (posAbilities) that has partnered with two ...
Problematizing Scale in the Social sector (Part 3): Process v. Products
This is the last, I think, in a series that critiques our preoccupation with scale, especially within the social sector. It’s not that scaling is ...
Problematizing Scale in the Social Sector (Part 2): Different Economies
Social innovation discourse has a persistent intoxication with big, scalable ideas. But in our mind, social innovation has patterned itself after idealized private sector models ...