THE FAMILY COURT PROJECT HAS COME TO A CLOSE.
Effective 6/1/08, Family Court Chronicles has become inactive (announcement), and
no new information will be added. The page below is retained for
archive purposes, but it could be out of date. Upon request,
the webmaster will
continue to correct significant errors and will consider
removing information that is destructively obsolete.
(Email: FamilyCourtGuy (at) gmail.com) Glenn Campbell's other websites
remain active:
KilroyCafe.com,
RoamingPhotos.com
and
Facebook
♠
crisis mode
—
A condition of continuous operational overload in
which only the most important problems are
addressed. During crisis mode, you are focussed
on putting out fires, slaying dragons and rescuing
maidens in distress and don't have time for such
minor things as cleaning house and doing the
laundry. As a result, the house goes to hell and
the laundry piles up and never gets done.
Caseworkers from the Department of Family Services often
operate in crisis mode. Every day there is a new
crisis pushing aside lesser concerns, which might
never get addressed. This is also the problem of
superheroes everywhere: When you are always trying
to save the world, when do you do your laundry?
Superheroes need boundaries to help protect them from
operational overload. In Family Court, boundaries
are defined by a person's role in the system.
Judges, prosecutors, caseworkers, and public
defenders each have their own assigned problems to
worry about and aren't concerned with things that
should be someone else's responsibility. As an
overload becomes more intense, each person
tends to view his responsibility as more and more
restricted. This means, at times of crisis, that
more problems fall through the cracks because no
one perceives them as their responsibility.
Triage demands that you always direct your
resources to the place where they are going to do
the most good, which would seem to preclude ever
doing your laundry. But it is also important to
defend the holistic integrity of the
system—both the system you are working
in and the one you are working
on.
Doing your laundry is an integrity project, as is
returning phone calls and remembering birthdays.
The cost of doing these things can be
substantial—lives lost because you didn't
help—but the cost of not doing them can even
higher. A project without integrity—no
laundry done, no phone calls returned—tends
to disintegrate quickly, because you lose the
emotional "glue" that holds things together.
You must deal with an acute crisis, like a fire in the
engine room, with raw triage—by
doing the most important things and putting
everything else off. However, as soon as the
initial crisis abates, you want to restructure
yourself so the crisis doesn't happen again. You
must redraw your boundaries and restrict your
responsibilities to things you can reasonably
manage (field
of responsibility). Problems outside of
your scope, you must decide, are not your problem.
Problems within your scope are going to get your
full attention, including relatively minor maintenance
issues.
A common criticism of DFS and many of it
caseworkers is that they are always operating in
crisis mode, which means that you can't get them
to respond to less-than-catastrophic problems like
parental visits, routine information requests or completing
any task without a specific court deadline. The
system, of course, is overburdened with cases, so
triage is the rule. Smart caseworkers cut corners
intelligently, always making themselves more
efficient and integrated. The dumb ones just do
what they are getting the most flack about and
blow off everything else.
The dumb ones, of course, just increase the burden
on the system by failing to address maintenance
issues at the early stages. Small problems are
allowed to fester until they become big
problems—full-blown crises of their
own—which now take more caseworkers to
address.
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♠
crisis mode
—
A condition of continuous operational overload in
which only the most important problems are
addressed. During crisis mode, you are focussed
on putting out fires, slaying dragons and rescuing
maidens in distress and don't have time for such
minor things as cleaning house and doing the
laundry. As a result, the house goes to hell and
the laundry piles up and never gets done.
