THE THREE EPOCHS: Understanding and Navigating the Inevitable Transition in IDD Services
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Research for Social Change
The intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) human services sector has not reached a point of stagnation and potential failure due to a lack of commitment. The professional workforce in support coordinators, direct support professionals, care managers, and organizational leaders across the landscape of human service delivery organizations and locations has demonstrated extraordinary dedication despite decades of systemic underfunding and structural incompatibility.
Despite that dedication and commitment, the sector's outcomes remain stubbornly misaligned with its stated values. People in need of support and the help that human service organizations offer, particularly to people who experience IDD, continue to experience isolation, Stigma, limited community participation, and constrained self-determination. This is not due to a lack of compassion from practitioners, support staff, or leadership, but because the organizational architectures in which they operate were never designed for human flourishing. They were designed for compliance and manufacturing. The Three Epochs tell the story of human service delivery systems in transition....
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Perspective and Learning from the diaspora
Lean Management: Friend or Foe of HSO's
As the lean concepts transition from factory and production environments to human service delivery systems, it is critical to ask if principles explicitly designed for the effective and efficient production of cars and other inanimate widgets and gizmos, be applied within the context of organizations dedicated to meeting human need...
Human service organizations should undergo a continuous pattern of evolution; however, with size being one of the key determinants of HSO failure, where is the tipping point on the road to entropy? How can it be recognized and avoided...
Managing complexity poses significant challenges for human service organizations due to the diverse needs of clients, the dynamic nature of social issues, and the complexity of organizational structures and processes. When an HSO is forced to close its doors, whether through its decision-making process or at the direction of an oversight body, there seems to be plenty of blame to go around. Yet, in complex systems, failure, so to speak, is not simply the result of human error or failed leadership.
Bureaucratic structures: unfit for meeting human needs...
What was Dr. Wolfensberger leading us to in his seminal work: The Origin and Nature of our Institutional Models? When you are at work in the delivery of human services, do you get a nagging feeling "like a splinter in your mind", and find yourself thinking "something just isn't right?" The organizational structures that have dominated the landscape of human service delivery for the better part of 50-plus years were not meant to meet the needs of human beings
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