Strategy

Three Foundational Aspects

Introduction
Historically, the field of public child welfare has been more reactive than proactive in regard to change management. From the highest level of an organization developing a budget down to direct service workers responding to allegations of abuse, being ahead of the curve on trends versus reacting to immediate needs has been difficult for public child welfare staff to master. Effective change management requires all levels of an organization to be forward thinking and willing to work towards goals and desired outcomes in a manner that connects all the way through an organization from the identified leader to their management team, supervisors, strategic support staff, and direct service workers.

“Macro” Change Management
There is a “macro” aspect of change that is best led and managed through high-level change planning in alignment with the agency’s strategic priorities and practice model. Broad, multi-year and cross-functional change planning efforts should follow directly from and be fully integrated with preceding or concurrent strategic planning efforts. While the primary purpose of strategy work is to determine what the agency seeks to do and why, the primary purpose of “macro” change management is to determine how to get from here to there. Strategy and change management work are not separate and distinct as much as they are a spectrum of work, where the greater emphasis is initially on strategic considerations and later on the change management ones. Indeed, a change planning effort can force greater strategic clarity and purpose to be defined, in turn leading to more effective strategic planning and practice model development over time.

“Mezzo” Change Management
A Change Plan also establishes priorities for continuous improvement: within and among particular agency functions, at the local office, program-specific or regional level, and with community partners. Continuous improvement encompasses both remedial efforts to “fix” something in the agency, as well as innovations and breakthroughs that make use of the agency’s strengths and capacity to reach exemplary levels of performance. Continuous improvement also encompasses both new, additional agency activities as well as activities for the agency to automate, outsource or eliminate altogether. This “mezzo” aspect of change is best accomplished through project-driven initiatives that are led and managed by continuous improvement teams that align to clear direction and guidance from the overall sponsors of the improvement priorities. Such project-oriented improvement priorities might include redesigning staff selection and development programs to be more in line with the desired practice model, or developing a system of care approach to service delivery that is well-integrated with other agency programs and functions. These continuous improvement (CI) efforts must become a “way of doing business” for an agency to succeed in the long run with making complex and comprehensive programmatic change happen.

“Micro” Change Management
As they become internalized and intuitive for staff throughout the agency, these CI methods and techniques become the basis for reflection, critical thinking, improvement making, innovation and creativity that occurs in an ongoing, organic way. These methods also serve as the foundation for the agency’s quality assurance processes and practices. Not all improvement and innovation efforts have to be programmatic and centrally managed to be important. In fact, it’s at this “micro” level of self-correction and change that many of the best ideas for improvement and innovation begin to have influence on strategic thinking and agency-wide improvement and innovation. And as this aspect of change is fully embedded within the agency, it naturally reinforces the principles and practices that are more formally advanced by the agency’s practice model. The process for supporting CI is provided in the Key Process section of this guidance.

Improving the Agency Culture
An agency’s culture both defines and is defined by how it does its work and by how leadership treats its staff. Agency leadership defines the culture of the organization by shaping the way staff think, perceive, understand, feel and act. Culture includes the norms and values of agency staff, as well as the fundamental underlying beliefs and assumptions that leadership and staff use in their daily work and interactions. Cultures can be relatively authoritative or they can be relatively laissez-faire, and neither of these options serves public child welfare agencies well. Child welfare work requires a strengths-based, solutions-focused culture that is based on empowerment: enabling staff to exercise discretion and collaborate to provide service and solve problems within well-defined boundaries such as the agency’s vision and mission. It also requires a culture that is focused on who it serves, versus one focused primarily on program or staff-driven needs and interests. The macro, mezzo and micro aspects of change outlined above, if practiced by the agency and reinforced by its leadership, will result in the most effective culture for public child welfare work.

Change Management and Frontline Practice: Parallel Processes
Within an agency, effective change management and effective frontline practice are parallel and mutually reinforcing processes that lead to positive outcomes. Imagine a direct service worker learning and applying the skills of effective change management: identifying problems; completing thorough assessments based on data and observations; developing, implementing, and monitoring real, strategic change plans; working collaboratively with children, youth and families on these steps and techniques. When effective, frontline practice unfolds in a parallel way to what an agency does to develop change plans, continuous improvement initiatives and ongoing performance and quality improvement efforts for the organization as a whole. By creating a culture of change management, leaders in public child welfare can provide workers with both organizational resources needed to perform job functions and the model for how positive change is possible for the children and families the agency serves.

Change Planning

A Change Plan lays out in a clear, orderly flow the answers to a range of questions about how an agency will “make its strategic priorities happen” and thereby achieve outcomes for and with children, youth and families. It spells out the work to be done to execute agency strategy in a way that is comprehensive and concrete, yet still flexible to the unfolding realities of any complex change effort. This results in stronger partnerships, more secure funding and other forms of long-term support, better implementation of specific initiatives, clearer roles and expectations throughout the organization and within each program and functional area, and an enhanced perception of the agency and its work.

As you read the following, please link to the Road Map for Change, a basic planning template that includes all the sections and questions that an agency should address. These areas include:

Strategic Direction Set by the Agency Strategic Plan
The leading section of a change plan must establish the path for improved outcomes to which the change efforts are aligned. This path must include an understanding of the agency’s vision, mission and values, its core principles including reducing disproportionality and disparity, its environmental challenges and opportunities, the needs of who it serves, and especially the child and family practices that are most likely to help them improve their lives. The change plan must identify any formally established strategic goals, objectives and initiatives, stakeholder mandates and non-negotiable expectations, financial or other identified resource limits. It also identifies projects already launched and other work commitments already made, established means to measure and monitor progress, and any established oversight and governance for strategic plans and initiatives.

Organizational Strengths and Gaps Related to the Strategic Direction
While the most effective strategic plans consider the agency’s workforce capacity to actually make changes happen, many do not do so. One of the primary benefits of change planning is that the agency becomes more purposeful in making changes that result in improved outcomes for the children, youth and families it serves. It also becomes more self-aware and engaged in using its strengths confidently and making improvements to its capacity to continuously improve and innovate, something we will refer to as “readiness.” Complex changes are more likely to succeed when a thorough assessment is made of the organization’s readiness for making such changes. For example:

Does the agency have the structure, culture and leadership platform in place to drive successfull improvement and innovation?
Does staff have the skills, the time, the passion and the commitment to implement strategic initiatives?
Does staff understand process simplification and streamlining of their daily efforts in order to open up capacity for new initiatives and innovations?
Are we adding things to the roles and responsibilities of staff without understanding with equal focus what needs to be reduced or eliminated from them?
What is the level of trust that staff and stakeholders have in the agency’s executive team? Why is this?

A general continuum of readiness within which agencies should plot themselves includes: a) an awareness of the need for changes, b) buy-in and commitment to make the required changes, c) developing confidence and competence for actually making the changes, and d) self-sufficiency in doing so. If the agency is confronting a crisis or a major opportunity (e.g., a significant increase in resources), the change plan considers how this might be used as a springboard for change through awareness-building that creates a sense of energy, urgency and resolve. Agencies who commit to change but have limited experiences from which to draw will include partners and outside resources in their plans to help them through the initial stages. And while any change effort will encounter obstacles along the way, these can often be anticipated and planned for proactively, often by taking advantage of one of the agency’s strengths in making change happen. If the agency’s readiness and capacity for change are stronger than these obstacles, change efforts will generally succeed.

Resources and General Tactics for Change and Innovation

Once the agency’s strengths and gaps for making change happen have been identified, it should identify how it will make use of those strengths and shore up those gaps in general, in turn improving the likelihood of successful change or of changes being made with less time and energy required. Here are the primary “readiness factors,” or areas for an agency to either make good use of its strengths or address its gaps in order to make complex changes happen:

Establishing a well-understood and practiced set of leadership beliefs and norms.
Employing communication plans and tactics for building the “public will” inside and outside the agency through shared purpose and meaning.
Enlisting stakeholders and people it serves into the agency’s change efforts, employing constructive political tactics along the way.
Building trust with the majority of staff through efforts that demonstrate top management’s caring, integrity, openness, reliability and competence.
Promoting supervisory effectiveness in coaching, mentoring and communicating with staff.
Including staff in decision-making wherever their expertise and buy-in are needed.
Empowering staff to make decisions and take action within clear boundaries.
Shifting ownership and responsibility for continuous improvement and innovation from top management to program leads and local office management teams.
Identifying and using “champions of change”- staff with passion and commitment to build up their teams and achieve the agency mission.
Employing tactics for understanding the root causes of resistance, enfranchising the constructive resistance, and then minimizing entrenched resisters to change and innovation.
Employing methods for gauging staff capacity and skills for doing more and for doing new and different things.
Maximizing staff development resources through a combination of classroom training (for primarily technical or routine tasks) and mentoring or facilitation efforts (for more relational or dynamic areas of their work).
Establishing the needed programs and systems for change and innovation through support functions like HR and Training, IT, Finance, Communication, Quality Assurance, Policy, Planning and Facilities.
Scanning and taking ideas from best practice and case study resources, both within the child welfare field and from other fields with analogous challenges.

Specific Plans and Commitments; Major Project or Work Priorities

The agency’s strategic planning activities should include a set of high-level strategic objectives and initiatives for improving outcomes, and these should be enhanced by the above-mentioned readiness assessment and related planning. Once a comprehensive set of improvement and innovation activities and projects has been identified, the agency can more thoughtfully sequence and phase these activities over time.

In a complex change effort, it is usually best to plan over a multi-year timeframe, organizing the agency’s efforts into quick wins, mid-term and long-term changes. Quick wins can be accomplished within thirty (30) days and within current capacity limits, with reasonably good staff and stakeholder buy-in. They often set the stage for more challenging change initiatives. Phases of change tend to move sequentially from efforts to generate input and buy-in, to those that build and support required workforce capacity (including eliminating legacy tasks and activities that add little value), and finally to the most complex program innovations and general projects.

Timeframes, Milestones, and Governance

At this level of change planning, specific milestone dates and detailed action plans can be developed. The key is to put form over substance, as there are many task planning and project management methods that can be overly complex and confusing. The priority is for public commitments to be made by all those with a role in a change effort, and converted to written accountabilities that connect to the performance management system. This serves to both clarify roles and strengthen follow through, in turn building trust and credibility.

Sponsor groups, continuous improvement teams and working committees must be established for the most complex initiatives within a change plan, and continuous improvement processes must be well-engrained in these efforts. Milestones such as the shift from one phase of the change plan to the next should be identified to provide an ongoing sense of progress and set the stage for periodic recognition and celebration. Effective governance establishes who is responsible for oversight of the change effort as a whole and for making any modifications to the change plan as reality unfolds.

Data, Measures and Related Methods

In developing a change plan or a continuous improvement project, agencies must have information and insights about their environment, their readiness to change, and the root causes for significant readiness gaps that their data and measures should provide. Once a complex change plan or continuous improvement effort has been launched, it is vital to capture progress, impact and lessons learned. Effective monitoring relies on having data that measures what the agency is trying to change and that encompasses data about agency capacity, service effectiveness and the impact of programs and services on child and family outcomes. Methods that agencies use to collect the needed data include surveys of people it serves, stakeholders and staff, quality control data from crucial points within operational processes, and statistical data related to ongoing experience such as staff turnover and recidivism.

Accessibility
The change plan should be portable, adaptable and user-friendly so that it is accessed on an ongoing basis and refined as continuous improvement teams and work committees “learn by doing” things more strategically and feed back to the planners. Like all effective plans, change plans are never perfect. Rather, they serve as a touchstone for organizing resources and activities, adapting and adjusting to an unfolding reality and set of insights.

Linkage to Other Change Plans
In many agencies, the public child welfare change plan is developed in accord with a broader agency or community change plan, while in others it may set the pace for such efforts, especially with private providers working under contract for the agency. Each agency’s environment presents different change management-related opportunities and challenges. The important thing is not to develop a change plan in a vacuum.

Addressing Disparity and Disproportionality
Reducing disparity by identifying and addressing its root causes is a critical priority within an agency’s strategic and change plan efforts. Effective change plans address the goal of reducing disparity on two levels. First, an agency that is identifying and addressing readiness factors for change will, by definition, be identifying any gaps related to trust, leadership, management and supervision that would in turn link to most root causes of disparity. For example, an agency whose leadership team does not value including minority or marginalized perspectives into its decision-making process will experience difficulties with generating staff commitment for change, and the agency will likely also be experiencing a higher degree of disparity.

Second, the methods used for driving continuous improvement, similar to effective child and family practice, are highly participative, transparent, include diverse perspectives and test multiple and sometimes unorthodox alternatives. Participants are “seen” not as types but as unique individuals with unique talents, norms and perspectives. Paradoxically, this way of “seeing” others and being “seen” typically enables commonalities and common ground to be discovered. This modeling of effective practice within the agency’s continuous improvement efforts should both reduce disproportionality and disparity within the organization and demonstrate to caseworkers how to do the same with the children, youth and families they serve.