An RFP from the world

Getting outside a helping profession to better see its purpose

In 2016, my colleague Jeff and I got pulled into an interesting conversation. A group of academics at USC’s School of Social Work (where we served as innovators-in-residence) were wondering whether their subfield, macro social work, needed a new name. Over the next year, we conspired to instead give it a new purpose.

Since its founding in the Progressive Era, social work has been roughly divided into two spheres: “micro,” which focuses on individual well-being, and “macro,” which focuses on community organizing, systems, and management. Today most people who practice social work are in the “micro” sphere, which is also known as “clinical.” But many of USC’s faculty were leaders in the “macro” sphere. They wondered if a new name might help spark a renaissance.

As anyone who has ever worked with me knows, rebranding is my least favorite theory of change. I’m all for the power of narrative and symbols, but I also want accompanying changes of substance, so that’s what I set out to achieve. I observed that clinical social work drew its power through its alliance with a major source of power in our modern world: the clinic. I wondered what the equivalent for macro social work might be.

No one could agree on an equivalent connection, but they were intrigued by the idea, so we used it to put together a project. We wondered aloud what kind of RFP (request for proposals) from the world the macro social work tradition might today answer. In other words, we tried to position ourselves outside the profession to re-imagine its purpose.

This led to “The New Social Good,” a 2017 summit that I designed in collaboration with USC’s Prof. Michàlle mor Barak. We identified ten themes in global social change, including social entrepreneurship, data-driven decision-making, and citizenship in a global context. I analyzed the themes searching for needs that social work might address. Then we invited some of the interviewees, several social work academic leaders, and a grab bag of other luminaries to make sense of it all.

The resulting gathering led to many different ideas, but there was one big theme that cut across them all: empathy. Though they came from many different professional backgrounds, all of the participants saw a lack of empathy as a drain on the vitality of their institutions. Together, they imagined ways that social work’s expertise might enhance empathy at the level of organizations and systems, not just individuals. I still believe we need that kind of change to re-engineer our institutions for challenges like climate change and artificial intelligence.

What’s more, I also think the helping professions need this kind of perspective to stay healthy and effective. As a person with one foot in and one foot out of these professions, I cannot tell you how often they miss the qualities that other people value most about them. I think it must be because those qualities are so deep in their identities that they partially forget what it is like to live without them.

While I can’t say we reinvented macro, I know the social workers at the conference were touched by how much leaders from other fields felt they needed their insights. I think that’s true for all the professions I work with, if they can only see it.

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