I read an article recently about how Lego, one of the most iconic toy brands in the world, was $800m in debt back in 2003. It had turned it around by 2015 to be $600m in profit! They focused on three things to turn their ship around – regaining their focus; targeting new markets; and knowing their audience. Why is any of this important to me, you may ask. As an SME with 80 staff members around Australia and New Zealand, working in the critical-yet-financially-strained space of child protection (aside from how much I love Lego…. except when I stand on it after its left out by my own children!?) why do I care about how the Lego brand innovated and changed to meet the market? Well, I’ve been busy working on our next Strategic Plan (with the amazing support and guidance of Fortis One) and they’ve got me thinking about our purpose. We have changed SO much since our first steps as a business, way back in 2009, and its important to ensure we do take moments when we can, in this hectic, chaotic industry, to pause and consider the purpose of what we are doing and why.
I’ve always been honest when I say, “I never set out to start a company of this size”. I just wanted to make a difference in the lives of children and young people in care, by ensuring I thoroughly, carefully, professionally assess their potential foster or kin carers, one assessment at a time. Over the past 14 years, we as a team recognised that while it is powerful and a great privilege to complete one high quality assessment on an applicant which could positively influence the lives of a child or a few children over the lifetime of that carer, what an opportunity it is to be able to teach literally 1000s other practitioners how to conduct high quality, evidence-based assessments as well. So, I can safely say that while Innovation was not initially part of our foundation here at SCS, the Values of Innovation and Purpose are key to what drives us today.
This is clear in the reason behind our current pilot of the Australian Assessor Preferred Pathway; a training and professional development program we are running here at SCS this year. We are in the pilot’s final stages, with the initial feedback and data being strong and very positive. Practitioners engaged (from all across QLD) are reinvigorating their passion for assessment writing, are learning new ways of thinking and approaching assessments, are honing their interviewing, evidence-gathering and writing skills and are working on that core ‘soft’ skill of reflective practice, which are so critical in the work we do. The whole reason we developed the AAPP was because we found the drought in high quality assessors to be impacting upon our ability to meet the needs of our clients’ growing demands. So, we decided if we couldn’t find people (who had the experience, the skills, the knowledge and of course the temperament) for this work, we would build a pathway for people to get there with our support.
Everything we do here at SCS is about thinking ‘outside the box’, working innovatively and creatively to address the service gaps in the sector, and to do that better, more efficiently and more effectively than we’ve done it before. And everything we do must be purposeful – our family support interventions must be intentional, our assessments must focus on the end ‘client’ (the children and young people of the sector), our projects need to be focused and driven, and our training offerings are continually growing, reviewed and evaluated, to ensure they are meaningful, evidence-based and robust.
By staying true to our Values and taking time to reflect on our Vision and Purpose regularly, we remain a highly-sought after, well-respected business delivering excellence in child protection consultancy, training and assessment services.
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