Learning outcomes

After this chapter you will be able to:

• 1 welcome any feedback from colleagues and service users as powerful resources of professional growth;

• 2 refine feedback from blame so as to highlight the helpful advice that is always in any feedback;

• 3 respond to feedback assertively;

• 4 identify and use conceptual tools to understand the complexity behind a ‘bad’ accident rather than look for a ‘scapegoat’;

• 5 use some tools that may help in changing practices and procedures when the latter have lost their original purpose.

Introduction

So far, learning from error has been seen as an activity people carry out through moments of reflection mostly in solitude or, in quite rare and lucky circumstances, with ‘reflective friends’. However, social workers do not act alone but are included in networks of relationships with other professionals both inside and outside the organisations where they work. In addition, individual learning is part of a wider process producing organisational learning that is not the simple sum of what individuals know but includes the additional knowledge produced by exchanges and interactions between people.

This last chapter is focused on tools and strategies available in order to improve the quality of reflection and reflective practice in cooperation with colleagues or the entire organisation where social workers are employed. So the following pages are centred on some areas where reflection together with other people is especially fruitful: criticisms between colleagues and organisational processes like, for example, those involving risk management.

In every workplace there is a certain amount of criticism among colleagues and this is often seen more as a problem than an opportunity. In fact criticism is nothing more than a form of feedback, aimed at reporting an error made by one person to another, even if unfortunately it is seen more often as an unfavourable judgement on the whole person. What is felt as an attack often leads to a defence reaction that, on the other side, is seen as an aggression requiring a reaction and so a symmetric exchange of aggressive communication continues, leading, in some cases, to an escalation that is dangerous for the maintenance of peace in the workplace.