Reminders for Best Practice

In the hurley-burley of daily work with the ever-present ‘To Do’ list, it can be easy to lose track of the principles and values that guide good practice. Right in the midst of a supervision session, or when we are about to meet with a family or someone struggling with mental illness—that’s when we might most appreciate some strong and practical reminders.

Enter the tried and true, the humble yet mighty … POSTER!

Why posters?

• Posters create culture

The simple messages contained in these posters will help communicate the culture of your organisation, community service, school or business. They will help keep core values at the forefront of people’s attention. They will let staff and the people accessing services know some important aspects of best practice in your organisation. Imagine them in your reception area. What might they communicate about the values and practice of your service? These posters might just make all the difference to people as they read that they will be welcomed as ‘People not Cases, Contributors not Clients’.

• Posters create dynamic conversations

These posters work as reminders of some key values, skills and principles of strengths-based practice—working with people in ways that share power and build on strengths. They are designed to be talking points and sources of inspiration. People may find the messages reassuring, inspiring, challenging. They may cause a ruckus in the office, a spirited debate with your colleagues. Depending on where the posters are placed, people can glance up at one of them from their desk, take inspiration from one right in the midst of a meeting or discuss one with a colleague in the kitchen over morning coffee. These are the kinds of conversations that build reflective practice in organisations and teams.

• Posters are highly visual

Whatever happens, these posters won’t fade into the background. The unique, interesting and highly creative designs by Tim Lane (graphic artist for several of Innovative Resources’ card sets including Reflexions and Choosing Strengths) include a hand-made stencil; an industrial, Eastern-block-style label; a grid of watercolour circles on absorbent paper, sleek modernist stripe, and a mind-map of scribbles on a turquoise wall (Tim photographed the wall in ‘happiest place in the world’—the school in the middle of the largest slum in East Africa).

Posters may not be high-tech—but they are high-value!

Here is a set of five practice posters from Innovative Resources. Each poster focusses on a different subject including …

• Recording 

This poster challenges us to reflect on strengths-based ways of record keeping. It asks seven pivotal questions to set off a train of reflections and remind us that how we keep records has the capacity to fundamentally change power dynamics and therefore the service we offer (‘case’ notes no more!).

•  Supervision 

Do you give or receive supervision? Whichever role you find yourself in, here is a set of 12 great questions that can help guide strengths-based supervision.

• People not Cases:Contributors not Clients 

This poster challenges labels that we may take for granted. It asks how practice could be different if we changed the way we see people, and the words we use to describe them. It is crucial to remember that even though someone may be accessing a service, they are first and foremost a person, not a case.

• Feedback

Giving and receiving feedback well are certainly very useful skills, and ones that need regular honing. Here are a set of very good questions to keep in mind as you prepare to give or receive feedback.

•  What just happened?

As a human service worker, have you ever finished a conversation with a family, young person or individual and wondered why things went so differently to how you’d planned?  Here is a poster with 12 great questions to help us navigate challenging interactions with others and extract the learning that lies within these occasions.

Now available to order from Innovative Resources this set of five striking posters contains powerful reminders of good practice. Good things come in smaller packages, as the saying goes. At A4 size these posters are compact. They won’t take up too much room on busy notice boards or office walls, or in workplace kitchens, meeting rooms and reception areas.