Families and Larger Systems Forum

By Howard Weiss

By organizing its annual conference as a Meeting of the Americas, AFTA embedded larger systems into its theme and energized the meeting by ensuring interaction of members and guest colleagues from North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Diverse language, cultural, political, economic, spiritual, ideological, organizational, community, and personal contexts across the Americas were ever-present aspects of all interactions at the AFTA conference. In fact, throughout the conference, members and guest colleagues were commenting on how the expansion of the meeting to include colleagues from all the Americas was a change intervention for AFTA itself.

The Larger Systems Forum provided an opportunity to make these factors explicit in the discussions among participants who demonstrated their eagerness to engage each other from the outset. In fact, once small discussion groups were formed, the participants resisted attempts to have them reconfigure into other groups, preferring to stay engaged with those with whom they had begun to share. Approximately seventy participants attended the Larger Systems Forum, reflecting a very high degree of interest in larger systems issues.

The Forum was moderated by Larger Systems Committee members: Pat Romney, chair, Jay Lappin, and Janine Roberts. Over the last year, Pat Romney chaired the organizing committee which included: Pat Romney, Gonzalo Bacigalupe, Jay Lappin, Roman Rojano, Jo Vanderkloot, Howard Weiss, and Mary Whiteside. The committee members facilitated the Larger Systems forum, interest group, and consultation group during the conference.

The focus for the forum was to identify the different types of larger systems with which participants are working and to identify both general and specific issues involved with larger systems work. In addition, the Committee had prepared for distribution to participants a "Starter Kit" for larger system work including brief essays by members of the committee and a bibliography. Participants were encouraged to submit additional essays on aspects of larger systems to enlarge the "Starter Kit" for next year. A syllabus for a course on collaborative consultation in larger systems has been put on-line to help those who are teaching family therapists to work as consultants with larger systems.

Committee members began the forum by offering their own reflections on how their interests and work with larger systems developed from their base in family therapy. Some family therapists are giving increased emphasis to larger systems in the ways that they intervene with larger systems to help specific client families. Others are working more and more as systems consultants who offer training and consultation services to organizations and communities. These changes in the field reflect greater focus on issues of class, race and cultural contexts, recognition of the powerful impact of larger systems on the lives of our client families, and the desire to enlarge the impact of our professional work. Many participants acknowledged that their work with poor families has necessitated an increased attention to the impact of larger systems and to how making direct interventions in larger systems can generate positive changes for their client families and for people in general. Several committee members noted that their work on behalf of individual families with specific larger systems (e.g., social services, agencies, or health clinics) led them to realize that finding ways to make these institutions more "family friendly" was a natural outgrowth of their involvement. They found themselves tracking how issues initially defined at the family level could be reconceptualized as aspects of the relation between families and larger systems at organizational and community levels. The position of systemic consultant with larger systems has begun to take more prominence than family therapist for many participants.

After the introductions, working in groups of 6 to 10 persons, participants shared their work contexts, the arena of larger systems work for which they have a passion, and specific issues that are prominent in their work. The reporting out period for the ten highly engaged groups offered a sense of the issues and agendas that participants would like to see elaborated in future forums, in on-line exchanges, and AFTA's work as an organization. All reporters began with apologies for oversimplifying the rich and complex discussions in their group.

One area of consensus among the groups was a desire for creating linkages within geographic areas among persons within AFTA as well as with our colleagues from Central and South America. Interest was expressed in having AFTA Larger Systems Committee create mechanisms for bringing persons with common interests together to share information and pool resources, e.g., participants want to find out about models that have been demonstrated to be successful in working with larger systems. Participants also suggested that AFTA make links to other organizations focusing on larger systems issues (e.g., Society for Organizational Learning in Massachusetts).

Another strong theme reported from several groups was how satisfying consultants find larger systems work because they can make a significant difference for large groups of people coping with specific problems. Participants spoke of intervening in the larger systems as a way of helping subsystems within organizations to communicate more effectively among themselves and with their clients. Using collaborative approaches with clients was seen as a more effective way of building trust compared to taking control as the outside expert, especially in situations where the consultant is not in a position to have a direct relationship with important constituent groups. Sometimes consultants have to find ways to overcome barriers to achieving good results for consumers caused by conflicting goals of the CEO and others within the organization.

Consultants who work at the interface of two or more systems with different aims struggle with multiple tensions deriving from countervailing change and resistance forces. For example, students may be referred to the judicial system for illegal actions at school. While the judicial system focuses on achieving justice related to the transgressions, the learning institution may be more interested in what the students will learn from the situation. What is the appropriate position for the consultant to take in either system or between the systems to achieve a useful outcome?

Some participants focused on the field's failures in getting family therapy established as a primary mode of treatment in mental health systems. They discussed how the different perspectives held by front line therapists and clinic administrators have created barriers to adopting a family systems perspective. For example, the administrators may assume that training is completed when a staff member is hired and that there is no longer a need to give time or money to staff development in family therapy. Line workers may see family therapy training not only as a benefit for skill enhancement, but also as a form of support and encouragement in their work

How do consultants find appropriate positions to work with different cultures and across multiple interfaces? Referring to a quotation associated with Benjamin Franklin, "Blessed be the bridge builders," one group encouraged the forum participants to dedicate themselves to being effective bridge builders in their organizations and communities. A Brazilian participant offered a powerful example of how difficult and important it is to find appropriate bridge building positions among various cultural contexts: "6000 organizations working with street children, but none of them talking to each other." Being appreciative of the resources of other organizations and seeking to foster consensus about purposes and the need to integrate diverse resources is required to achieve effective community level change.

How to build larger systems that can provide help effectively seemed to be the general question participants sought to answer. A related question was how to get budgets to do what must be done and sustain the effort? A third important question related to how to avoid burn out from frustrations inherent in larger systems work.

Experienced larger system consultants in suggested that we need to be clear about our goals and find appropriate positions from which to relate to the different constituencies in a larger system. They described choosing between two different strategies. In the first, the consultant proposes a specific program and then works to get everyone clear enough to implement the program. In the second, the consultant starts by determining the needs of the constituent groups and then gradually helps them to generate novel solutions.

Maintaining a passion for larger system work requires a "politics of optimism," based on a sustainable sense of hopefulness. To help students learn to work with larger systems, trainers must encourage them to think and act with "benevolent opportunism," a perspective which emphasizes taking advantage of opportunities to use one's knowledge and skill in real situations (e.g., influencing a judge who expresses interest in a particular case).

Looking to the future, we need to discuss how to develop programs for the future which give students direct experience with larger systems work during their training. We also need to consider the kinds of research we need on working with larger systems and on how to sustain these change efforts. Using the web to share case situations and to explore the issues they raise was the challenge posed to the Larger Systems Committee to move our work forward over the next year.

Howard M. Weiss, Ph.D. is a psychologist, family therapist, and senior faculty member at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York. Since 1981, as the director of the Institute's Center for Family-School Collaboration, he has worked to foster a climate of family-school partnership with hundreds of schools and community agencies in New York, nationally, and internationally. He also has worked for many years in political and community change efforts related to desegregation of housing and schools. He has an active private practice in New York City and Westchester.