Vocation innovation

Getting creative with helping professionals means engaging with the heart of their work

My first intensive strategy workshop with social workers happened a little over ten years ago. With my colleagues from Insight Labs, I had just been named an innovator-in-residence at USC’s School of Social Work. In our first visits to the Los Angeles campus, we were taking lots of meetings and sketching out lots of plans for the coming year. Typical early engagement stuff.

But as the leaders of a philanthropic think tank, we were also anxious to make an impact right away.

So we sat down with some of our first friends at USC to figure it out. With professors Annalisa Enrile and Renee Smith-Maddox, we imagined a project where we would put a select group of students through an intensive weekend of innovation training, then pit them against a real social problem: the burgeoning crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Though they wouldn’t know it until the second day of the exercise, we had flown in our colleague Arvind Ganesan, a director at Human Rights Watch. Alongside Arvind, the students would grapple with how the situation at the border was changing and what advocates could do in response.

But first I had to teach them how to think differently.

I wasn’t worried about the innovation methodology itself, which I had already taught many times. Dubbed “The Social Supercomputer,” the approach emphasized different ways of working together in groups to realize new ideas. I use a similar methodology today. Thus far, I had mainly used the curriculum with highly educated executive types. So my introduction to the material emphasized that while everyone in the room was smart, they would be learning to tackle problems where the kind of smarts that had brought them this far would not be enough to tackle complex problems together.

It had worked well enough with lawyers and engineers, but I knew social workers were different. Even though I had just started working with them professionally, I knew from my history with other helping professions that their conception of their skills was not just intellectual. The skills that had brought them this far — and that our exercises might also force them to question — were also emotional, spiritual, and even bodily in their deep-seated nature. Some of these skills resulted from their training, but they were also synthesized from diverse life experiences — everything from childhood trauma to spontaneous encounters with clients.

The simplest shorthand for this mix of traits is a “vocation,” or what more religious folks might call a “calling.” It’s a social worker’s internal sense that they are meant to work with vulnerable people, and will continue to be motivated to do that work despite significant challenges. Nurses, teachers, and other helping professionals have their own versions. And it’s more important to some people than others — I know a fair number of nurses who have opined that they don't need to be Mother Teresa to do their jobs. Fair enough.

But the idea of a vocation was the quickest way in which I could acknowledge to these students that they had something I didn’t — something I would probably never have. At the start of the session, a few of them shared the stories of how they knew they had a vocation to social work and what it meant to them. They were touching stories, but I thought of them more as icebreakers than material that would seriously affect the direction of our work together.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. As it turned out, to get truly innovative about how to help children at the border, the social work students had to wrestle with their vocations in real time. They asked themselves: “Why aren’t we running to go help these kids right now? Why isn’t social work leading on this problem?” This led them to critically examine the ways in which their profession is tied up with the structures of the modern welfare state and its limitations. They realized that whether they had intended it or not, their profession was biased toward the well-being of citizens over stateless people.

Then they dug in on the question of how to change that. I was amazed as they started to sketch out the elements of what they called “transnational social work.” They began thinking about how to build up relationships across borders to take accountability for children that nations had let fall through the cracks. They considered how to relate to institutions that might not share their culture, language, or methods. Though it was not the most actionable set of ideas developed that day, it is the one that stayed with me the most, because I could feel how this new way of thinking might play out across these students’ careers. (Indeed, I got to follow along with the ideas of a few of them who ended up in my classes in USC’s doctoral program.)

This wasn’t the last time I would encounter the idea of vocation in one of my workshops. It still makes me a little nervous every time I do — who am I to question what it means to be a social worker, a nurse, or a teacher? But I’ve come to trust that for those to whom that vocation is a living reality, such questions are tolerated and even celebrated. Asking “Why teach a child?” or “Why heal the sick?” unlocks innovation in them that is well beyond what might be achieved with a merely intellectual approach. And it’s also essential to help them imagine the future of work that they will do with much more than their minds.

Learn more about how I’m working with helping professionals at http://www.ihelpthehelpers.com.

Image source: “Allegory of Charity,” Francisco de Zubarán