Two Roads Converged; Vision Photography-Rigby, via Flickr
**I’m teaching a new class this semester: Human Behavior in the Social Environment: Groups, Organizations, and Communities, and it has prompted a lot of thinking about group development, in particular, and some new ideas about organizational impact on practice, too. This week, I’ll have a few posts about some of the topics that I’m raising in this class, tying in some of the reading I’ve been doing around these ideas. I (and, I’m sure, my students!) would appreciate any of your feedback, too.
In preparing for teaching this class, I had to go back and do A LOT of reading, especially about social systems theory. As in, A LOT of reading. See, it’s actually been quite awhile ago that I took my human behavior in the social environment courses as an undergraduate, and social systems theory isn’t really a daily part of how I think about my social work practice. Or so I thought.
And, so, I slogged through general systems theory, biological systems, networked systems…it was all systems, all the time. I had to help my students make sense of homeostasis, steady state, entropy and synergy, boundaries, holons, and suprasystems. And it’s not that I disagree with any of it, or with its importance within the social work curriculum (although I layer a more sophisticated understanding of power and its role in groups, organizations, and communities, to broaden students’ understanding), but I’m not exactly passionate about systems theory either.
Or, I wasn’t, until I found two long words that explain, together, a lot of what I think about social work and social change.
Equifinality and Multifinality
Yes, I know. I said they were long words.
But it’s what they mean that matters.
Equifinality (my definitions, not Webster’s): entities can reach the same state from different paths
Multifinality: similar conditions can lead to different ends (or, context matters, a lot)
So, “equifinality” is my new word for describing everything I believe about social work and the power of human resilience, really; if I thought that you had to start at A to get to C, then it wouldn’t make any sense to help those who are at B, you know? It means that, with a shared vision of social justice as our destination, different communities in different contexts can forge their own paths to reaching it–a belief in the strengths perspective and in self-determination that are, together, the core of my commitment to social work.
And, multifinality, while not as central to my social work identity, captures what I try to explain to students whose immediate focus is usually on the individual and not his/her environment, and to policymakers who seize on an approach that worked in one context and wonder why it’s not having the same result in another. It’s why the person-in-environment perspective is so important in distinguishing us from other helping professions, and why we have greater success in achieving social change when we approach problems on multiple levels.
So, there you have it, straight from systems theory, words that, while long, are certainly more concise than my roundabout articulation of how they figure into my social work worldview. Social workers, what do you remember from human behavior classes that you still apply in practice? Any systems theory concepts that really resonate with you?
There’s always a bright spot
My favorite story from Switch is about the mothers in Vietnam, and how an anti-hunger campaign there, rather than beginning with an exhaustive study about all of the factors that perpetuate the problem of child malnutrition, instead started with a search for where things were going well.
And then set out to replicate those bright spots.
Over and over and over again.
This idea aligns with how I teach social policy from the strengths perspective, taking the stance that policy approaches that build from the good things that are happening, even in the midst of social problems, will be ultimately much more successful.
It’s how I parent, too, consciously trying to spend way more time talking with my kids about what they’re doing well than about what needs to change. Because it’s really true, at least with my 3-year-old twins, that focusing on the problems mainly get you more problems.
Strengths-based social workers spend a lot of our time defending ourselves. Because, no, focusing on strengths does not mean that we ignore the problems. Or that we’re all Pollyannas. Or that we pretend that things will take care of themselves. Strengths-based social policy isn’t unrealistic.
To the contrary: it’s what works.
Because it begins from what’s working.
There are a variety of reasons why focusing on these bright spots–again, even in the context of real challenge (think: child starvation)–works, all of which will be familiar to strengths-based direct practitioners, too:
All of this has me thinking about bright spots, an exercise which, I’ll admit, is a bit foreign to me, as someone who is uncomfortably attuned to the injustices and inhumanities that populate our world.
But there are some, and I think that we’re already learning from them. What about the teenager who makes it out of a poverty-ridden neighborhood, later to credit the mentor or one caring adult who shepherded her? Why can’t we build systems that provide those shepherds for everyone? What about the welfare office that locates in a school, and sees intake rates skyrocket as barriers are erased? Why can’t we take down hurdles everywhere? What about the backpack programs that send nutritious food home with kids from school and significantly reduce food insecurity? Why can’t we make sure that every hungry child has one?
Looking for bright spots, to me, is more than just a reflection of an ideological preference for positivity.
It’s about turning technical problems into political ones.
Finding what works allows us to stop pretending that we don’t know how to solve the problems that face us–or at least how to begin to solve them–and requires that we focus, instead, on overcoming our resistance to solving them.
Which means that we need to look for other bright spots, then: the places where movements of people have, as only movements of people can, summoned the political will to light bright spots all over the place.
To light.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged social change, social policy, strengths perspective