Aligning Together
Child protection organizations ask practitioners to make consequential decisions in circumstances that are uncertain, emotionally demanding and constantly changing. Yet the organizational conditions surrounding those decisions do not always make it easy to question an assessment, acknowledge an error or raise a concern before there is clear evidence that something has gone wrong. When staff anticipate blame, admitting uncertainty can feel professionally dangerous. A practitioner may hesitate to challenge a supervisor’s interpretation. A supervisor may quietly resolve a recurring problem without escalating the conditions producing it. Leaders may receive reassuring reports while remaining unaware of the difficulties people are managing underneath them. These conditions can leave an organization poorly equipped to recognize emerging problems. An error that could have prompted an early conversation may go unexamined, combine with other difficulties, and contribute to serious situations.
Aligning Together is ATA Consultancy’s organizational development framework, built from the ground up around the ideas in Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe’s Managing the Unexpected and translated into the responsibilities, relationships and realities of child protection. It helps organizations develop the structures, culture, and everyday processes needed to notice concerns, discuss them honestly, respond effectively, and learn from what happens (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). Its purpose extends beyond encouraging people to behave differently. It helps organizations change the conditions that shape how people work.
Why the organizational environment matters
Within children's services, the tendency to blame others has always been a concern. In Munro’s review, it discusses how if there is a blaming culture, it stops people from highlighting issues, and we can't learn from mistakes or how those situations came about (Munro, 2011a). There are ways to learn from incidents in children's services, and we need to do so and build on our knowledge through daily practice, supervision, and leadership, while still allowing space to highlight concerns before they become incidents. If your workforce is scared to use your incident reporting system, it won't be as useful. An organization can say it wants to learn and develop, but when faced with hard truths, it acts defensively. Promote curiosity, but praise staff for closely following procedures and agreeing with the status quo. All of these factors play into what someone feels comfortable asking or highlighting to others.
Aligning Together will help close this gap. By changing the culture, we can review our structures and ways of working to support learning. This includes giving time to reflect, having routes in place to raise concerns, and management supporting staff and addressing issues fairly. Knowing that we all make mistakes, we need to be able to pick up on them, learn from them and act upon them swiftly. We should also be held accountable, but we should also look deeper into what was going on for that person that led them to make decisions and act in a certain way (their workload, the information given to them, supervision). All of these factors can affect and influence the decisions they make. We strive for a work environment where, if I felt I hadn't picked up on something, I could raise it with my manager, and they would take me seriously and give me the tools to resolve it while we still have time.
The foundation in Managing the Unexpected
Weick and Sutcliffe investigated how organizations can be reliable in high-risk situations by examining how humans work together to identify issues, update their mental models, and act on them before they become catastrophic. They believe reliability is achieved through ongoing organizational work, not by assuming practitioners are reliable because they follow policies and procedures or because errors are not perceived. (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). They identified five tenets that all go hand in hand to create High reliability. These are Preoccupation with Failure, Reluctance to Simplify, Sensitivity to Operations, Commitment to Resilience and Deference to Expertise. These allow an organization to detect and respond to change and recover when needed (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). Aligning Together uses these principles to identify and review how child protection systems apply them by assessing, questioning, and enhancing leadership, supervision, decision-making, and learning processes.
The following outlines the ways we apply these at ATA.
1. Make early concerns visible and useful
A child protection organization needs ways to learn from difficulties before a serious incident causes potential harm to children, families and systems. An unclear handover, an unavailable network member, or a practitioner repeatedly having to rescue arrangements may reveal a vulnerability worth examining. Even when the immediate outcome is positive, the organization needs to understand what made that outcome possible. Aligning Together supports processes through which staff can raise uncertainties, near misses and recurring workarounds. These might include regular opportunities in supervision and team discussions, accessible escalation routes and a clear responsibility for responding to concerns.
The cultural change depends on what follows disclosure. When difficulties are identified and raised, leaders need to demonstrate curiosity, take appropriate action and explain what was done as a result. Repeated experiences of being heard help make reporting a useful professional activity. This also changes the questions asked about organizational performance. A low number of reported concerns cannot, by itself, establish that practice is dependable. Leaders need to examine whether staff recognize concerns, feel able to report them and see meaningful responses.
2. Build inquiry into decisions
Child protection requires you to account for what you do, though that account can shut down curiosity and critical thinking. Statements like “this family won’t work with the practitioner” or “we didn’t work with the process” can end our enquiry. They can create communication issues, expectations on both sides, workload, and more. By working together with Aligning Together, we can explore these theories. Through supervision, case discussions, and organizational learning.
Questions include:
What supports our current understanding?
What does not fit it?
Whose perspective is missing?
What would lead us to reconsider?
What organizational conditions influenced what happened?
The structural change is to make these questions part of how decisions are developed and reviewed. The cultural change is to treat reconsideration as a professional strength. This does not require agreement on every interpretation. It requires differences to remain visible long enough to be examined, with decisions and their reasoning clearly recorded.
3. Connect leadership with everyday practice
Leaders need to be aware of what is going on within their teams. How processes are modified to allow services to be delivered. Having a referral done does not mean that support has been delivered. Having a network meeting minutes does not mean that members know what they are to do. Having a supervision note does not mean that the worker has felt able to voice uncertainties. Aligning Together establishes mechanisms for organizations to promptly document and share information received from leaders, supervisors, workers, partners, children, carers and networks. Organizations must also examine their intent and link it to practice reasoning, such as what is being delivered, whether services are being accessed, how much work people have, and what people think about their experiences. This may require different ways for communication to be gathered and for information to be disseminated. Leaders may need more visibility into front-line conversations and clear methods for reporting workloads and feedback that do not dilute concerns but allow them to be voiced. The final Munro report also identified the importance of having organizations in place that will promote skill and knowledge and monitor the support children are receiving. (Munro, 2011b)
4. Create the capacity to respond when arrangements change
Within child protection, we know things can change following an assessment, meeting or decision. An agreed-upon network member may no longer be able to offer support. There may be delays with the service. Someone may leave a post. A caregiver’s mental health status may get worse. Aligning Together questions whether arrangements will still stand. What can organizations consider when planning for backup: who can step into responsibilities, how to hand over information, how to respond, and what powers people need to do this? By using fictional scenarios, teams can explore these situations and how they would respond without putting the child/family at further risk. This could be used if we have created a fictional scenario that we have identified, where a plan was sustained over a weekend. Organizations should always ask: how does our network respond if no other worker is available? Who else could provide support? How can we make sure workers can respond, and why didn’t we know about this situation?
From these inquiries, organizations can make systemic changes that ensure a commitment to what they can deliver, provide a way for workers to respond, and build space into the process to speak with the family/network about these situations. Organizations need to consider what will help people stay resilient when situations arise, because they can’t keep expecting staff to work harder and absorb more pressure.
5. Ensure relevant knowledge can influence action
Knowledge about a developing problem may sit with someone who has little formal authority. A child may describe something missing from the professional account. A caregiver may identify why an arrangement is impractical. A practitioner may recognize a pattern across cases. An administrative colleague may notice repeated delays at a handover point. Aligning Together examines whether this knowledge reaches people who can act and whether it receives serious consideration.
Practical changes can include routes for professional disagreement, accessible family feedback, clearer escalation arrangements and decision forums that involve the people with relevant knowledge. Formal responsibilities remain clear, while the information informing decisions becomes broader and more grounded. This reflects the book’s concern with letting expertise shape responses rather than relying solely on organizational rank. Its wider argument also emphasizes updating assumptions and responding to emerging difficulties while they remain manageable (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001).
How restructuring and cultural change work together
Aligning Together builds capacity within an organization by altering structure and culture. Asking people to be open won’t go very far if they don’t have time to talk about things, a way to raise them, or confidence that their manager will address them fairly. Introducing a system to report something can also be useless if you get embarrassed for raising it, or it’s seen as if you’re automatically at fault. So Aligning Together links culture change with structural change.
Desired organizational capability | Structural changes to support it | Cultural shift to reinforce it |
Identify concerns early | Regular inquiry in supervision; accessible reporting and escalation routes; assigned responsibility for response | Raising a concern is treated as a contribution to safeguarding |
Examine uncertainty thoughtfully | Protected reflective discussion; opportunities to review assumptions and professional disagreement | Questions and reconsideration are welcome |
Understand everyday practice | Direct feedback from practitioners and families; review of workload, service access and workarounds | Difficult information is valued alongside positive findings |
Respond to disruption | Clear backup arrangements, handovers, responsibilities and response authority | Asking for support and adapting arrangements are legitimate |
Learn and sustain improvements | Named improvement owners, practical resources, review dates and feedback to those involved | Leaders follow through and remain willing to revise their approach |
Creating a positive culture with meaningful accountability
A positive organizational culture needs to be experienced through everyday interactions. Staff need opportunities to acknowledge uncertainty without humiliation, discuss the emotional demands of the work and challenge an interpretation respectfully. Leaders need to show that concerns will be considered fairly and that raising them can lead to practical improvement.
Edmondson’s research found an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviour. Although the study was conducted outside of child protection, it provides a relevant foundation for considering whether people feel able to ask questions, disclose difficulties and contribute to learning (Edmondson, 1999). Within Aligning Together, this openness sits alongside clear expectations. Immediate safeguarding concerns require timely action. Decisions require reasoning. Responsibilities must be understood, and serious conduct concerns require appropriate examination.
At the same time, an inquiry should consider what people knew at the time, the pressures they faced, the support available and how organizational arrangements shaped their options. The aim is to produce an account that is fair enough to support learning and specific enough to guide change. Staff well-being is part of this work. Research with UK child and family social workers identifies workload, working relationships and the management of change as relevant to their well-being (Ravalier et al., 2021). Aligning Together, therefore, examines the conditions under which people are expected to deliver dependable practice.
Making improvement part of ordinary organizational life
Aligning Together makes this happen continually through Awareness, Action, Assess, and Adjust.
Awareness: Collecting evidence about what is happening in practice, within your organization, and in people’s experience. It can highlight what is going well, areas of concern, differing opinions or areas where there is no agreement.
Action: What we will change, who will be responsible for making these changes happen with appropriate authority and resources.
Assess: Will the change bring benefit? To families, practice and organizations’ workload.
Adjust: Using the above information to inform what you will do next.
The cycle prevents an assessment from ending with a report that nobody uses. It also lets organizations start with a manageable area, such as supervision, handovers, or network sustainability, and build capability through purposeful work. The framework’s assessments support inquiry and development. They are not validated measures of child protection reliability, and their ratings cannot certify safeguarding or predict outcomes. Local evaluation remains necessary to establish how the framework works in a particular setting.
Why is this work necessary?
Child protection organizations need the capacity to hear uncomfortable information early, understand it carefully and respond before difficulties become entrenched. That capacity requires more than dedicated practitioners. It requires leadership that welcomes challenge, structures that allow information to move, supervision that supports reasoning and improvement processes that produce visible action.
Aligning Together brings these requirements into a coherent approach to organizational development. Alongside Strengthening Together, Safeguarding Together and Thriving Together, it focuses on the conditions that allow purposeful work with children and families to become dependable everyday practice. Its ambition is an organization where people can identify a concern, discuss it honestly, get a response, and help improve the conditions that produced it. Children and families benefit when the organization supporting them can notice, learn, and act while there is still time to make a difference.
To explore this work, visit ATA Consultancy or create a free ATA Connect account to explore the community and available resources.
References
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Fixsen, D. L., Naoom, S. F., Blase, K. A., Friedman, R. M., & Wallace, F. (2005). Implementation research: A synthesis of the literature (FMHI Publication No. 231). University of South Florida, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, National Implementation Research Network.
Munro, E. (2011a). The Munro review of child protection: Interim report—The child’s journey. Department for Education.
Munro, E. (2011b). The Munro review of child protection: Final report—A child-centred system (Cm 8062). Department for Education.
Ravalier, J. M., Wainwright, E., Clabburn, O., Loon, M., & Smyth, N. (2021). Working conditions and well-being of UK social workers. Journal of Social Work, 21(5), 1105–1123.
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2001). Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity. Jossey-Bass.
Comments