What is professional curiosity?

[Introduction] 

This is a Research in Practice podcast, supporting evidence informed practice with children and families, young people, and adults.

Dyfrig: Hello everybody and welcome to the Research in Practice podcast. I'm Dyfrig Williams, I'm the head of learning at Research in Practice. In this podcast we're going to be delving deeper into professional curiosity. In this podcast I'm talking with Emily who recently led a session on professional curiosity. Emily, can you please introduce yourself?

Emily: Yes, hello, my name is Emily Smith, I'm a social worker by background, I worked in children's social care and I now work for Research in Practice as a research and development officer.

[What is professional curiosity?]

Dyfrig: Brilliant, thanks Emily. So, what can you expect from today's podcast? Today we're going to be looking at what professional curiosity is and who it affects, what can get in the way or support professional curiosity, and also helpful resources that we have that you can use to support and develop your practice. So, first thing's first, Emily, how would you explain the concept of professional curiosity to someone listening who may or may not be familiar with it?

Emily: I suppose, to start I just wanted to say that what I'm going to share today is based on my practice experience as a social worker and the reading and learning that I've done as a research and development officer with Research in Practice about professional curiosity. I'm aware that professional curiosity is really core to practice in social care and that views about it can be really strongly held. So, this is very much my view and my take on it, and I hope that some of the things that I say will be useful to other people listening. Saying all that, I think professional curiosity is actually a really hard thing to define and people use it quite broadly to refer to lots of different aspects of practice in social care. I attended a recent conference about trauma-informed practice and while I was there, Danny Wolstencroft, the co-founder of Lads Like Us, spoke about professional curiosity in trauma-informed practice. Lads Like Us, if you haven't heard them speak before, they're absolutely fantastic. They call for professionals to be both trauma-informed and professionally curious, and really tie those two things together. He was talking about the impact of professional curiosity for him on his life and he said something that really struck me, which is, 'When someone asked me those questions, it didn't open a can of worms, it opened a door to healing.' He was talking about the importance of people being curious and asking questions, and the impact it had on his life. It really reminded me of a quote from the Tackling Child Exploitation Multi-agency Practice Principles, they're principles for multi-agency groups looking to tackle child exploitation and one of their principles is about being curious, evidence-informed and knowledgeable.

They imagine what that might feel like for a young person and they say this, 'I feel properly seen because the people who are there to help me put in the effort to understand me and my life. They are knowledgeable and always learning about how to help me feel safer.' I suppose, I wanted to start there because I think that professional curiosity is often discussed in a safeguarding context, often when a child or adult has died or been seriously harmed. While that's really, really important, what both those quotes emphasise is that professional curiosity is fundamentally about relationship-based and strengths-based practice. It's about understanding and seeing people as worthy of our curiosity and is really a way of understanding what social care practitioners and occupational therapists are doing day in, day out, working in partnership with people to make sense of what's going on in their lives with them and trying to provide support. It's a way of recognising, I suppose, that nobody can know everything and we need professional curiosity at every level in an organisation to really challenge assumptions. I also think it's really useful, in understanding what professional curiosity is, to think about it from the perspective of people who are working in social care. A recent literature review looked at the experiences of health and social care practitioners exercising professional curiosity. It was for work in children's social care but I think it's really broadly relevant across both the children's and adult sector. They framed the experience of being curious in three steps or stages, they talk about the first step as noticing what doesn't fit, they call it noticing dissonance. It basically means noticing the things that somebody says or what they do or how they appear, the, kind of, small details and non-verbal cues that you might pick up.

Often when people think about curiosity they talk about an analogy of an iceberg, and I suppose, this step is recognising that there's a lot going on under the surface, it's not just what's on top. The second stage they talk about is about exploring evidence and managing tension, so you recognise in this iceberg, say, that there is an underneath, that there's something going on underneath that's actually creating the whole structure. Your second step would be how you actually explore that and how you manage the uncertainty of not being certain what the underneath of the iceberg actually looks like and what it's doing. Exploring it might look like asking sensitive questions, reflecting with colleagues, talking to multi-agency partners, and managing the tension will look like managing the uncertainty of knowing that there's a lot you don't know, and the real discomfort and risk of asking questions that might feel difficult, and maybe getting it wrong. Then they talk about this third step which is making sense of what's happening using reasoning, critical thinking and reflexivity to really think through what's going on here in partnership with the people that you're working with. I guess, returning to this, kind of, analogy, it's actually using everything that you've gathered to try to work out the shape of the whole iceberg. So, perhaps in a roundabout way that's what professional curiosity is and how it impacts on people's lives.

[What can get support or get in the way of professional curiosity?]

Dyfrig: Thanks Emily, that's really helpful, I personally found it really helpful to think about it in a proactive as well as a reactive way, you know, what can we put into practice to think about making people's lives better as part of a helpful process? So, now that we have a sense of what professional curiosity is, what can support practitioners to be more professionally curious or, alternatively, get in the way of that?

Emily: Great question, and it won't surprise you to know that the literature really speaks to this, this is what people are really interested in knowing, how can we support this to be more effective? Research on this tends to split up those, kind of, factors that support or get in the way of professional curiosity. They talk either about, sort of, individual practitioners and the relationship dynamics that they have with adults and children and families, and then they also talk about organisational factors, so seeing individual practitioners situated in organisations and wider structures, and they tend to divide and think about factors in both those settings. I think it's probably a bit of a false division and it's probably more helpful to think about all these factors as very interrelated between individuals and organisations, and adults, children and families. It does make it a little bit easier to talk about if we split it into those, kind of, dichotomies. Thinking about those individual factors, of course the experiences and values of individual practitioners are going to affect the way that they see, and understand, and act in a curious way. There are a couple of things that can really get in the way of professional curiosity for individuals, although as I've said, both are also really influenced by context as well. I think the first of those is normalisation, when practitioners become used to high levels of risk, and vulnerability, and need, and also become used to high levels of poverty, and discrimination, and systemic injustice, when you've been exposed to these things day in, day out it can be become hard to, almost, see them, they become normal. There's a really great quote from a 2018 paper about social work and deprivation, 'Poverty is the wallpaper of practice, too big to tackle and too familiar to notice.' I think that, for me, really explains what normalisation is.

When thinking about things that are too big to deal with, something else that really affects individual practitioners' ability to be curious is avoidance, this sense of emotional or physical disconnect as a means of managing adversity, anxiety and hopelessness. That's something that comes up over and over again in the literature and the research on professional curiosity. I've started with individual factors but I'd suggest that organisational factors are as important, if not more important. In thinking about organisational factors that enable or get in the way of professional curiosity, there were just so many. I suppose, a few to think about, you might think about organisational culture, does your organisation have a culture of taking responsibility or a culture of shifting blame? How is hierarchy managed, are there easy and clear ways to challenge decisions made by people in a more senior position to you? Does the organisation show empathy towards the people working there? You know, is support available to them? What value is placed on colleagues? Is an assumption made, particularly about experienced practitioners, that they can just cope whatever the demands placed on them? Another significant factor is how organisations work with other organisations, how is partnership working supported? There's some really interesting research by Thacker, who talks about the value and importance of partnership working in promoting curiosity in adult social care. How are systems set up? How is access to records managed? Digital environments, physical environments, all of that's really significant when thinking about people's ability to be curious. Really crucially, how do organisations give practitioners opportunity and time to reflect on the work that they're doing and think really critically about it?

Dyfrig: Brilliant, thanks Emily, that's really helpful and it ties into some really interesting stuff, I think, about what it means to be, kind of, the learning organisation there in those organisational steps. You mentioned avoidance and fear, can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Emily: Yes, absolutely, so Harry Ferguson, who's a researcher in children's social care, did some really interesting ethnographic research where he was embedded in social work teams and went out with social workers, and observed, and really was part of their work. What he found is that the same practitioner would be able to explore and see children, and if you like, be curious on one visit, but not on another. When he's explaining this, he talks about organisational factors and he talks about the practitioner's individual qualities but he also talks about what he terms 'Visceral experiences and emotional states' of people during face to face encounters, and the atmosphere within which practice occurs. He talks about this idea of detachment, which is when workers reach or go beyond the limits of anxiety and complexity that are possible for them to tolerate, overcome by the sheer complexity of interactions they encounter, and the emotional intensity of the work, and resistance from tense atmospheres in homes. All of that makes it really hard to go under the surface, ask curious questions, be curious and reflective. There's a really useful quote from a briefing that Research in Practice have done on professional curiosity and adult social care organisations, and in it, the author quotes a practitioner in adult social care. They talked about an experience they had where they'd been out for a home visit to see somebody and they admitted to themselves afterwards that they'd knocked on the door deliberately quietly and left quickly, telling themselves that the people they were there to visit weren't in. In reflecting on it, the practitioner says that the client's husband can be quite aggressive and it's hard to have a constructive conversation with them. I really related to that as a social worker, that feeling of going out for a visit and actually hoping that somebody's not there, or picking up the phone to make a call, and actually hoping it goes to voicemail.

It undermines your ability to be curious in practice and it really reflects the way that the emotional and lived reality of what you're working with impacts on curiosity. It reminds me of a really interesting paper that looks at the experience of probation workers exercising professional curiosity, and one of them spoke about asking reflective and curious questions as sometimes feeling like opening Pandora's box. It can feel quite scary because you don't know what someone's going to say, and sometimes you might not feel in a place as the person to be able to deal with what comes out of that conversation. It can sometimes feel really risky or dangerous for you to open that box, and I think that really gets in the way of professional curiosity. It's not just about risk or about personal safety, the research also talks about what happens when practitioners can feel a bit hopeless, and can feel like they can't make a difference, and that feeling can become quite paralysing, and can really get in the way of being able to find out what's going on.

Dyfrig: So, what can support practitioners to be curious when they're, kind of, facing those type of challenges?

Emily: Professor Eileen Munro has this wonderful video on the Research in Practice website where she talks about social work expertise. She's talking about social workers specifically, and social workers in children's social care, but I think what she says is really widely applicable across social care and probably beyond. She talks about social care expertise as being made up of relationship skills, emotional wisdom and cognitive skills. She really emphasises the expertise that social care practitioners bring in the work that they do, and she talks about two really useful ideas to build this expertise. Firstly, she says that people can't do it on their own, that they need other people to help reason through things, to challenge things, to provide support and containment, and she talks about the importance of having time to reflect on your experience, to build expertise. She says that if you're rushing from visit to visit with never time to pause and reflect, and think, it's going to be incredibly difficult for you to build expertise in the role that you're doing. So, there is lots that can help practitioners to be curious here but I'd suggest that working with other people and having opportunities to reflect are really central, and that's picked up on in both research and practice experience and expertise. For example, Harry Ferguson talks about the importance of working with other people, including co-working where possible, and the importance of having opportunity to reflect safely on what you've experienced in practice, and Thacker, as I said earlier, she talks about the value of partnership working.

In that story I mentioned earlier about the practitioner that knocked on the door really quietly, they go on to talk about what helped them in that situation and they talk about having a chance to reflect in safety with their manager, and their manager asks them some really curious questions that help them to go under the surface and work out what was going on for them in that situation. So, I think that opportunities for reflection and containment are really vital in the complex work that social care practitioners are doing, and Research in Practice does have some really great resources to support reflective practice and reflective supervision that we can link to in the podcast notes that you can explore in your own time. I really recommend having a look at them, I found them really useful.

[Research in Practice resources]

Dyfrig: Yes, I agree, those videos with Professor Eileen Munro are fantastic and well worth a look at. On that note then, what other resources do we have at Resource in Practice on professional curiosity and how might people use them in practice?

Emily: There's a really great briefing about professional curiosity in adult social care, it's a strategic briefing so it really explores what organisations can do to create a culture of curiosity at an organisational level. It has really practical things that people can put into place at every level of their organisation and is really well written in a way that's really accessible. It is an adult social care briefing, I would suggest it's actually really relevant for colleagues in children's social care as well, and there's lots of really excellent practice there that could be adapted for children's social care. So, if you're listening and your organisation also has an adult social care membership you'll be able to access that resource as well, and we'll link it in the podcast notes. Another tool that I think is really useful is Wonnacott's Discrepancy Matrix, it's much more of a tool for direct practice, a really, kind of, practical tool that's designed to allow you to sort through and start to make sense of information. Again, we'll link to this tool in the podcast notes so you can try it out for yourselves. Essentially, you can use this tool in group supervision or on your own, or with a colleague, or during supervision, to sort through and start to make sense of the information that you have about that situation. You sort information into four areas, information that you're sure of, what you know, information or evidence or ideas that feel more ambiguous, information that's missing, and then finally things that you might think you know or assumptions that you're making about the situation. It not only gives permission to acknowledge that actually you don't know everything, but it's also a great prompt for curiosity and recognising what it is that you don't know about a situation, and is really fantastic to use for situations that are particularly tricky or really troubling you.

So, if you do have one of those situations that you're grappling with at the moment, it just feels really complex and tricky, I'd really encourage you to take 15 minutes to go through that tool, sort out that information and try and make a plan based on that.

[How our identity informs our analysis]

Dyfrig: Thank you, it's really helpful to think about that perspective around-, well, our own individual perspective really. I suppose, that informs something else I wanted to check in on with you about, around our own identity as a practitioner and how that might inform our analysis. I think something came up in the session around that individual perspective and our own identities as practitioners. Can you tell us a little bit more about that too?

Emily: I think, thinking about information and evidence, it's really helpful to think about our own position and our identity. It's helpful when thinking about those assumptions you might make, perhaps biases, absolutely, but also to think more broadly about how our own identity might be informing our analysis and our ability to make sense of what's going on. There's a really good tool, and again, we'll link to this in the notes, about the social GGRRAAACCEEESSS. The social GGRRAAACCEEESSS is an acronym, it's letters that describe aspects of identity that affect power and privilege. The aim of the tool is to explore those social GGRRAAACCEEESSS, to better understand our differentials and how they might be impacting on, not only your understanding of the situation but also on the actions that you're taking individually and organisationally. So, I'd really recommend having a look at that and thinking about curiosity and information and evidence. Staying briefly within that theme to, sort of, think about equity more broadly, there are so many resources on the Research in Practice website to support workers seeking to hold on to the social justice element of working in social care and challenging discrimination. Being really curious about the impact of structural injustice, being willing to, kind of, let go of normalisation maybe, to really critically reflect on the impact of structural injustice on the people that you're working with. Like I say, I'm really pleased that there are so many resources on the Research in Practice website about this. I'm aware it can feel a bit overwhelming because there are quite a lot, so we'll put in the podcast notes a couple of really good starting points. I picked some videos out that I think are great starting points when you're starting to think about this, covering both adult social care and children's social care, looking particularly at intersectionality and also at anti-racism.

There are so many more on the website, for example, there's a great briefing on equality, diversity and inclusion in the family courts, and there's also a really interesting podcast about challenging discriminatory abuse when safeguarding adults, all of which is really relevant to that idea of curiosity and structural injustice.

[Final thoughts]

Dyfrig: Yes, there's a brilliant practice supervisor development programme briefing on the social GGRRAAACCEEESSS too, and that's actually got something really interesting because it focuses on that and the LUUUTT model, which has got an interesting way of, kind of, thinking about different types of stories which can also help us to think about different perspectives too. So, I definitely recommend that people have a look at that too. Have you got any final thoughts about professional curiosity that you might want to leave people with?

Emily: I suppose, my final thought for the session, and this won't come as a surprise given the organisation I've chosen to work for, is the value of learning and development in stimulating curiosity. I think everyone has different ways they like to learn best, it might be hearing a podcast, or watching something, or reading something, and there are loads of resources, not just on the Research in Practice website, but across the social care sector to support ongoing learning and development. What I thought I'd mention, because I didn't know about it as a social worker and wish I had, is the monthly case law and legal summaries that Research in Practice publishes, which summarise key pieces of recent… not necessarily just case law but recent cases in plain English that might be relevant for practice. For example, there's a really interesting recent one on the children's side about obtaining leave to oppose an adoption order and about identifying kinship carers, and on the adults' side about the interface between the Mental Health Act from 1983 and the Mental Capacity Act from 2005. Really interesting and great for thinking more curiously about situations that you might be working with. Beyond case law and legal summaries, the opportunity to hear from different perspectives and from different people, for example, podcasts with people who've drawn from services, briefings and practice tools, blogs about different elements of the social care world, are all brilliant for prompting greater curiosity. One of the things I've found since starting this role that has helped me be increasingly curious, is learning from colleagues in adult social care. So, my background is as a children's social worker and I didn't have much involvement in the adult social care world since being a student. I've found it's really helped me to be more curious about why we do things the way we do in children's social care when I hear about what's going on in adult social care worlds.

So, I'd really encourage you just to take the time that you have to have a look around the website and pick something out that looks interesting because who knows which path it will take you down.

[Outro]

Dyfrig: What a note to end on and we do have some podcasts looking at the case law and legal summaries as well, which we can again, link to in the show notes to help you, kind of, explore and think about how you might use those as part of other pieces of work as well. So, just to say thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about professional curiosity, Emily. Like you said earlier, we'll be sure to include all the links that you mentioned today in the episode show notes. Thank you too, all, for listening too, please do share any feedback that you have on this podcast with us, particularly around how we can best support you or your organisation looking forward, thank you.

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