This paper was a keynote presentation at the Connections in Practice conference in Stirling in March 2000, organised jointly by AFT Scotland and the Scottish Executive, who provided enough funding for places to be free. AFT is The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice in the UK. The focus of the day was primarily on the application of Family Therapy ideas to other helping professions, which AFT now calls Systemic Practice. In particular this event was about Social Work, which is what the Scottish Executive wanted from us. That event was also the low-key launch of the Systemic Practice Network of which this web-site is a part. Other presentations that day are to be found here too.

Whatever your job as practitioner or manager or academic, I think our work is increasingly like serving drinks in a storm tossed ship. Storms knock us from all sides, but we've to smile and deliver the drinks without spilling a drop! We have to find ways to do this ever more difficult juggling act.

A lot of what I have to say is unapologetically to do with us workers rather than what we do with clients. So let me start with a client's voice: I was in institutional care as a child from the age of 5. As a result I know a lot about a lack of care presented as if it was care. And about mystique and the absence of knowledge and authority presented as if the words were clear and the knowledge absolute. Like Orwell's 1984 Newspeak, the word 'care' comes to imply its opposite when used in the phrase 'in care'. The newer UK term 'looked-after' was no doubt intended to revive the more 'caring' meaning. I gather that already social work is avoiding the words and idea of being 'looked-after'.

Words and meanings and helping professions and their methods are so slippery. As I tell you that my 'in-care' experience was in boarding schools chosen for me by my parents, notice your mind slide into an 'oh, well that's not so bad, is it?' mode, even though boarding school reasons and family dynamics and trauma and bamboozlement are potentially far worse 'in care' experiences than the normal social work controlled version.

They say we're ruled by concepts, cognitions, words, labels - language in general. Words is mostly what we've got at conferences and on the internet. Theory and thinking are important. But we've all seen people who have very fine theories - written textbooks even - but who are not so good in practice with colleagues or clients. And we've seen highly skilled practitioners and ordinary human beings who do it without any apparent theory behind them. Please get behind the babbling labels.

I've spent my professional life de-constructing and re-constructing ideas about life and the helping professions. This is about three big labels - Family Therapy, Systemic Practice and Social Work. These certainly have their differences, but basically, in practice, good Family Therapy IS good Systemic Practice IS good Social Work. They're all about relationships and communicating and positive functioning in systems - all kinds of human systems. They're all about good 'systemic practice' - bringing out, sharing, and respecting everyone's views and stories, while integrating a way forward.

There's a better, less slippery, term than Systemic Practice; but it has already been taken - 'Social Work'! Family Therapy, Systemic Practice and Social Work are all 'Work' that is 'Social'. Family Therapy itself is the natural child of Social Work. Found on psychiatry's doorstep and brought up in a different family, here I ask those of you, in Social Work, to meet your own now grown-up offspring, Family Therapy, afresh. You may not like the way she's been reared, nor the way she talks - far too jumped up! - but blood is thicker than water. Please reclaim one of your own! She won't mind if you change her name back even!

Originally, as child psychiatry's adopted child, you need to know that Family Therapy has been a bit of a misfit there. Extra measures of care and protection have been required. Various voluntary organisations and training institutes have provided the misfit child, Family Therapy, with financial support, respite, befrienders, IT (intermediate treatment) groups, and generally preparation for premature independent living. AFT, IFT, Barnardos (in Cardiff), the Scottish Institute of Human Relations Family Therapy Project, and the ubiquitous Brief Therapy Practice are some of the UK providers. Unfortunately, this adoptive status and special support has rather narrowed Family Therapy into a corner of overly wordy theory, and a middle-class, private practice framework.

Systemic Practice is what we call adapting Family Therapy ideas to work in other mainstream helping professions, mainly health, education and social services. In these services, a rather wider range of clients and motivations and problems come through the door, than those ready, willing and able for 'therapy'.

So we are not proposing a new profession or job title 'Systemic Practitioner'. We are talking about the application of family-systems approaches to ensure that your 'day' job goes really well - productive, intelligent and enjoyable, on task for your agency, ensuring morale, quality and quantity of work. Systemic practice's main strength is to promote, at ground level front-line, skilled ordinary good practice. You may be doing good Systemic Practice already - it won't be a waste of time if you find this validates what you're already doing. But many trainings do not include learning about life and ordinary good practice. Each training and its academia, naturally focuses on it's own specialist area, assuming we know the rest naturally. In this respect Social Work training often does much better than other kinds.

In case you need reminding here are some everyday examples of poor practice. Ordinary bad practice is obvious when you see it, but it is seldom mentioned - for good reasons; it is better to accentuate the positive when e-lim-i-natin' the negative! The following examples are about us workers, not clients - clients are allowed poor functioning! I mean only to illustrate, not to damn. And some of the mud I'm slinging sticks to me too.

· In my first training with live family screenings, the functioning amongst the group of mental health professionals behind the screen was appalling judged by the standards of what we were promoting for the client family group functioning. Late, bossy, insensitive, rushed, disorganised, intrusive.

· In Family Therapy, we need to remember that not all our clients are ready for some of our wierder behaviour. An English colleague was rather taken aback when asking a Glaswegian father, a circular question designed to explore a family's interconnected views. "If I asked your wife what your son might feel, what would she say?" "Why don't you fucking ask him yourself?!" came the reply. A fair question, I think, that deserves an answer.

· Silent reflection can be valuable, but there are counselling and other courses that serenely promulgate long worse than useless silences.

· I know committees of people who profess to sophisticated expertise about organisational functioning but seem hardly able to understand the basics of effective committee work and constitutions.

· Medical or psychiatric committees exist that are really not much more than very expensive siestas.

· Managers arrive like white tornados and leave as quickly destroying all in their wake.

· We're so busy we don't read the minutes and reports in our new case's fat file; but if we took the time, we'd be less busy!

· GPs never come to interagency meetings.

· But non-medical agencies and staff do important work and keep it secret too! Hardly a phone call or even an occasional brief letter to record and summarise the fact for other agencies who continue to remain irritated and negative towards them.

· A social worker seemed purposely oblivious of the other eight (than his identified child), far more out of control and uncared for children in a very problematic family where the neighbours, the school and all other community, housing and other local authority agencies were tearing their hair out. It shouldn't have been, but was eventually a local politician who organised a Case Conference.

· Appointments committees that are arranged to appoint someone to a team, yet the established team members are steadfastly kept out of the process.

· Workers throw symptomatic treatments around, like GPs who prescribe pills at the drop of a mood. This goes with the malignant growth of labelling. So a problem family gets rushed over to home help or respite, the young offender papped off to IT or a befriender, ADHD sent to the Ritalin dealer (that's me as the child psychiatrist!), anger to anger management, and risk to risk assessment. The result is often the client (and professionals) suffering AOTP disorder ('all over the place'), often alongside 'resource exhaustion and confusion syndrome' (RECS), the treatment of which requires 'domestic administrative management underpinning' (DAMU) to help the client plan for all the visiting agencies and appointments!

In contrast to this, underlying all good Systemic Practice is carefully finding good 'fitting together', positive 'teaming up' (Child 1998). 'Teaming up' describes creative collaboration, looking after each other in the way a good football team does - developing and working for shared aims; playing to each other's position, role and known strengths, and not showing up weaknesses. This reduces and integrates, but does not eliminate, the need for more highly specialist services. Ultimately, the best measure of a system's functioning is the experience of the individual in it. Do YOU work in a team and structure that liberates your best skills and energies?

What then are some of Family Thearpy's general strengths that this aims to give you a taste for?

Ordinary Good Practice
Ordinary good systemic practice, then, includes basics like creating effective committees, management that sustains morale, satisfying case conferences, team work, ordinary assertiveness balanced with friendly thoughtfulness for colleagues and clients, liaison, phoning (persistently where necessary), letter writing, organising diaries. Trainings often don't focus on these areas, even though public enquiry after public enquiry identifies them as the deficient ones. In our team, we have spoof but serious check-lists of simple essentials required for a good interview (eg informing where the toilets are), a good meeting (eg was there a good fit with the day's diary), or a good team (eg making tea for colleagues as well as your self).

Family Therapy itself is a 'teaming up' of 90 separable component parts each of which is useful on its own (Child 1989). Doing the full bhoona Family Therapy bit is a kind of 'MOT' that shows that all the parts are in good working order. Here are some of the parts - they're all good Social Work:

Problem-Solving and More
Family Therapy has always been optimistically problem-solving (where other methods may assume problems won't or can't change much). Increasingly Family Therapy is consolidating narrative and solution-focused ideas and methods.These problem-solving approaches are also modern versions of the old social work dictum: 'respect for persons'.

Formulation
Problem-solving must begin with at least some formulation of the problem. Formulations of any kind are too often hard to find. Naturally, the less formulated a case, the leakier it will be, and the more resources there may be being poured ineffectually in! Formulations are short descriptions of the presented problem containing some specifically tailored story - a 'theory' for a unique predicament - that connects it together usefully and suggests a way forward. Formulations, of course, must be open to revision. In this field, diagnostic labels usually (but not always) condense formulation too far.

Meeting Everyone Together
Seeing a family group together is Family Therapy's hallmark. We know how in any organisation, a good meeting of workers can help get things working well. It takes time, effort and skill, but it's worth it. So, for the client family or substitute family or group, who belong and live together every day and for much of their lives, it can be worth meeting them together too.

Working with the Functioning Group
Work with the system, means thinking in terms of how a group, family or agency organisation, teams up positively or negatively or not at all, how the organisation and its members function to help or hinder the subgroups and individuals in it.

Process
Now, this is getting to sound turgid! I'm not talking fancy stuff - it's fun, just like what you do over last night's soap-opera episode of Eastenders! Similarly, working with a group means attending to, and engaging with, the processes that happen, enjoying and following with curiosity the circle or spiral of how one person's actions and views are framed by, and how they frame in turn, other people's actions and views. The worker also looks for ways, questions and contributions that can shape and bring out the direction and potential of the family and situation - the future of the process. Some workers and some professions need to learn more how to trust that the process itself will work things through, rather than to rush or push it. Other workers and professions need to learn a more active initiative and power to intervene than they might normally use.

Seeing the Wood for the Trees
Family Therapy has developed various ways of stepping back and reflecting on a new (or 'second order') level than that a client first presents. The reflection informs or actually is the intervention. There are skills to learn, but a good starting point is to draw on that 'careful gossip' mode of teamwork I mentioned, the 'what- about- last- night's- Eastenders -eh?!', the Columbo detective curiosity, the 'will- they- won't- they?' fascination, that we all have in us without specialist training. I don't mean you talk about the telly, just that you put the same part of your brain into gear for your client's story, remembering that you're now unavoidably part of the plot too. One way to 'see the wood for the trees' is:

Family Life Cycles
Obvious though it is, we can all forget to step back and think in terms of where an individual, family, or organisation is in its life cycle. And that's where we easily assume their culture and values are the same as our own. Common to all are birth, life, partnership (or not) and death. One example of a family life cycle question (among thousands) would be: Is a parent ready for their last child to grow up and (maybe) away? The client's presented problem may itself be the solution to their life cycle task.

Reframing and Solution-Focused Talk
These are not just tricks, nor just finding reassuring ways of looking at awful situations. Let me follow a simple example through. We all know how to be positive with a client or family we've met; how, after listening properly, to validate their strengths in coping with their difficult and complex situation. Where a client feels completely hopeless, it may be best to just listen quietly. To say, in the right tone, that: "Things are really hopeless then", need not be an invitation to suicide, but a 'reflection' in a session that implies the strength to see it, say it, hear it, and work it out. You'd probably be less daring and say "Things seem really hopeless then?" which is the beginning of a more explicit reframing, implying there could be an alternative view and a different future. A more developed reframing might recast hopelessness in a new light: "Some people wouldn't be as strong as you are to face such hopelessness". A narrative or solution-focus might be more active in opening up strengths and options: "So you're feeling really hopeless just now; have there been times before when you've had to work through feeling this kind of hopeless? What worked for you then?" The point of these examples is that they show a development from ordinary skills that we all know about. But they are worth training up beyond that.

Wide Perspective
While keeping it relevant to the people in front of you, taking a systemic approach has you thinking from the start in terms of the wider system and context - of our own and our clients' wider culture, rituals, and of the wider agencies involved and their remits and values, alongside wider issues (such as gender, sexuality, race, religion, class, ability etc).

Live Teamwork
To deal with such a complex task and wide varied field, two heads are better than one. But they need to be a genuinely teamed-up team. Family Therapy particularly has pioneered working (and training) with live consultation and live supervision. (Note that live teamwork does not require one-way screens and video systems.) There are many benefits of satisfying live team work that make it essential: quality- and morale-sustaining, inbuilt direct supervision and incorporation of organisational issues and protocols, audit and training, and usually economical, not a wasteful overmanning. In terms of the work with clients, it ensures flexible openness, with focused individually tailored planning ahead for each session. If you're confident about where you're heading, you wouldn't need it every session. And remember that you don't need a live team to arrange bits like taking a five minute break - try it tomorrow and see the difference.

The Genogram
The genogram is what we call the diagram of family tree, relationships, others involved, along with notes, and symbols and dates of births, illnesses, deaths and other main events. This is our kind of X-ray that condenses and shows more of the whole inter-related and (once again) wider, picture as well as its dark or missing areas. The genogram is a brilliant routine tool that everyone can use, requiring only paper and pen. You can try it tomorrow too.

Integrating, Focused, Effective, Economical
So we work away at exploring the situation like a detective following leads and clues and gut feelings until the puzzling array of events fits an integrating story that takes the family and the helpers forward. We expect to develop as focal an understanding as possible. The focal understanding takes the complexity around it into account in order to find a key change that will make a wide difference. Often we're talking about helping several interconnected people and their problems in a one-er; that is, it is often effective, brief and economic. It is therefore also a good way to assess where more major interventions ARE needed, and where longer term work or multiple agency involvement IS needed. Interagency team-working clarifies and often reduces the amount and cost of conflict and duplication of multi-agency effort. This means a family systems approach is more:

Client Empowering and User Friendly
The clients hold the power and choice about active change in their lives. It respects their connection to their own families and other support, values and advice. User-friendliness has become a strong feature of family systems methods, despite or because of earlier (masterful) and present (post-modern) very non-user-friendly aspects.

New Potential For Individual Work
Noone suggests you can do all the business needed all the time with everyone in the same room. Knowing how to think of the family and their helpers as a functioning system or team gives your work with individuals in that system a new potential. Similarly, the use of the telephone and of writing letters (often with copies) develops new constructive power.

Most of that basic description of skilled Family Therapy is also a description of Systemic Practice, of skilled Social Work, and even skilled Management. Here's another way to summarise what this approach can deliver:

· A) Better and quicker decision making and budgeting by: delegating, streamlining, and improving partnerships between agencies;
· B) Caring for people at home wherever possible by: shifting the balance away from institutional forms of care, developing more flexible home care services, and encouraging health and social services to work side by side;
· C) Working together locally by: developing better targeted services, planning and delivering services based on the needs of each locality, and new approaches to service management and delivery, based on local partnerships;
· D) Assuring quality and effectiveness to improve the infrastructure nationally and locally by: 'best value' and sharing good practice, and standards and joint training.

In fact that is a direct quote from the Scottish Government's 'Modernising Community Care - An Action Plan'.

But it's all so much slippery guff if you or your colleagues and staff don't know the basics (to repeat myself) - how to listen and talk, how to enjoy and know enough about life, happiness and working with other people and in teams, how to take two minutes to iron out conflict and annoyance before it gets out of hand, how to be respectfully interested in people but also to honestly judge and positively confront, how to organise your tasks and diaries, how to convene a family session or chair a meeting, how to not get burnt out, and how to ensure that the best people are appointed to jobs and teams. These are the non-specific bits of all our jobs, and its non-specific to Family Therapy too. But Family Therapy's invisible free gift is its inherent import of this potential if you give it a go.

Finally, to explain further the title: A Huge Army of Great Workers. I recommend the book 'On The Psychology of Military Incompetence' (Dixon 1976) - but leave out the psychobabble in the middle. The accounts of incompetent generals at the start, and of outstanding generals at the end, are superb and generalisable to all organisations and life. It tells the story of the strengths and weaknesses of the military system and the training and selection for its officers, and the appalling fatally limited and idiotic carelessness and blindness of the incompetent. Only because that profession is about life and limb - of soldiers, and of nations - is such an open and honest enquiry allowed. The range of descriptions of the competent generals, in contrast to the incompetent ones, conveys how variously colourful and rich their personalities are, how they cared about their troops, had wider interests than just the military task, but were dedicated to that task and to the structures above them. But most of all, we see their individualist intitiative and readiness to bend or ignore traditions and rules that they could see were no use to achieving the overall purpose. Respecting the given system and relationships, they are able to create a new system and new relationships out of that.

Now - leaving aside the obvious job difference between killing people and helping them! - what if we think of all the helping professions and services as a huge army, thousands and thousands of us? What would a similar enquiry make of our competence and incompetence? What would it take to ensure that we don't stand judged as "limited, idiotic careless and blind" to what we could achieve. OK in the army only the generals are allowed to take initiative, while the ordinary soldier has to obey. In the helping professions, even the humblest basic grade footsoldier needs to be in a position to take initiatives within a framework of support and guidance about our task. We need to be like generals. We therefore need to be "colourful and rich in our personalities, care about people, have wider interests, dedicated to task and structure, but take individualist intitiative, and bend rules where necessary to achieve the overall purpose."

This paper has been about space and context - about finding enough space for quality thinking, talking and planning, and about understanding enough context of past, present and future stories unfolding. I have argued that there is within the Trojan Horse of Family Therapy both ordinary good practice and extraordinary good practice methods that can make a key contribution so that a future book on The Competence of the Caring Professions will have a much bigger section on our competence as an army of generals than it has on our incompetence.

Child, N (1998) Systemic Practice. At Kosice Carpathian Regional Family Therapy Conference.

Child, N (1989) Family therapy: the rest of the picture. Journal of Family Therapy, 11, 281-296

Child, N (2000) The limits of the medical model in child psychiatry. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 5, 11-21

Dixon, N (1976) The Psychology of Military Incompetence. Jonathan Cape: London

nick.child@virgin.net