Even as we type, my colleague and good friend David is in Portland Oregon, teaching a couple of courses on facilitating family decision making group-based service teams. What a mouthful THAT phrase was! These courses are based on work he and I have done here at CFRP over the past dozen or so years.

He took along one of my favorite little ditties: a matrix I created that offers comparisons between four program models.

Now that there are a number of models to use — and many variations within the models — the question people ask me now is: which one is best? Well, I’m not in the model-pimping business, not even for my own. But here’s what I WILL do: let’s think together about how to think about choosing a model…

Every model has strengths and weaknesses and no model is a panacea. So don’t go drinking the kool-aid; don’t stop being a critical thinker when it comes to models of any kind, OK? A model is a structure and every structure has a frame. That frame is going to circumscribe what is thinkable, sayable and perceivable. Social realities are constructed within frames.

Take Team Decision Making (TDM). This is a decision-making model constructed within a children’s welfare agency framework. It is used to make a decision about the placement of a child. It aspires, by virtue of certain of its practices, to employ certain values in the service of making this decision, such as “family empowerment”, “inclusivity” and “strength focus.”

So first off: are you in a child welfare agency about to make a decision about the removal of somebody’s child? If not, then you’re trying to lift TDM out of its frame. This is not a bad thing. It’s only bad if you try to transplant it into another frame that conflicts without knowing what’s not working or why.

What the “frame” does in this case is force you to think about “the family” in a certain way and “the worker” in another certain way. Your talk and behavior will follow accordingly. When model makers use terms like “family empowerment”, they are inferring that “power” is something to be given to a family by someone else in authority. Gotta watch out for that one; it’s full of pitfalls if you don’t consciously choose a model with practices that are proven to mitigate the power imbalances between the family and the system (and its attending professionals).

In choosing a model for your program, ask yourself the tough basic questions:

1. Who do I think I am? (How do I define myself? as a friend? a helping professional? a governmental authority? etc.)
2. Who do I think the other people in the room are? (How do I define them? Are they “clients?” “Perpetrators?” “Victims?” etc.)
3. What do I think I’m doing here? (Has someone appointed me to “help” in some way? Did someone invite me to come as moral support? Does someone want my expert opinion? Am I here to change someone’s opinion, feeling or behavior? etc.)
4. What do I think the other people are doing here? (Are they here to get support? To be appeased? To be coaxed into compliance? To bear witness? To offer help or advice? To work out agreements? etc.)

Your honest answers to these questions will guide you in your choice of models — or in your development of your own models.

To the degree that you’re here as part of a government intervention (say, from child welfare or the criminal justice system), then chances are you’re here to get someone to do something that, in your opinion, will protect someone from harm (say, keep a child safe or keep a criminal from re-offending). Any of the family conference models (Family Group Conferencing, Family Unity, Family Network) can work for that if you genuinely believe that the people at the center of the situation are the best people to decide the right way to go about that.

To the degree that you’re here as part of a treatment-style intervention, the person(s) at the center of the matter are “clients”. Wraparound exists within a treatment frame and is likely a good choice.

All of the models have overlapping practices and principles. To varying degrees, they try to mitigate power imbalances and eye-to-eye relationships of equality and mutual respect. Yet all of the models rely on a certain amount of “as if” to get there. The truth is: all of these models are constructed by experts within expert systems of some sort — and that means that there are power imbalances and relational inequities that cannot be removed — they can only be wielded responsibly and mitigated.

This, too, is not necessarily a bad thing. It just is what it is.

All of our practices within any given model have an effect of stacking the deck. In choosing a model, ask yourself how you want the deck stacked and which trade offs you’d rather make. Here are a very few examples:

And the trade offs? For example:

This is just a sample. You can think of more. Hopefully I’m helping by telling you not WHAT to think but HOW to think about choosing a model.