Ep 3 David Rock's SCARF model

The podcast explores how David Rock's SCARF model can enhance social work practice in New Zealand. Social work aims to promote social change and empowerment, but practitioners often face challenges and negative emotions. The SCARF model identifies five domains that influence behavior in social situations: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. When these domains are threatened, the brain triggers a fight-or-flight response, reducing rational thinking. To create psychological safety, social workers can respect status, provide clear expectations, offer choices, show empathy, and be fair. The model helps understand and manage social interactions, minimizing threat responses and maximizing reward responses. Psychological safety is crucial for team performance, learning, creativity, and innovation. Strategies to create psychological safety include providing feedback, coaching, effective teamwork, compassionate leadership, fostering inclusion and respect, and managing psycho Kia ora, and welcome to Belbird's Social Work Squawk, the podcast for exploring all things social work. The purpose of these podcasts is to talk about social work practice, explore our thinking, and to generate conversation. So please do post any comments or thoughts, tell us what you're thinking, what you'd like us to talk about, what you'd like to hear more of, because that's the kind of stuff we want to hear more of. My name's Rachel, and in this podcast I'm going to explore how David Rock's SCARF model can enhance social work practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Social work is a profession that aims to promote social change and empowerment for individuals, groups, and communities who face various challenges and difficulties in their lives. Social workers need to be able to engage effectively with diverse people and situations, and use their knowledge and skills to help them achieve their goals and aspirations. However, as we know, social work practice is not always easy or straightforward. Sometimes social workers can encounter resilience, conflict, misunderstanding, or mistrust from people that we work with, or from other professionals or from stakeholders. These situations can trigger negative emotions and reactions that can affect the quality and outcome of the social work intervention that we're trying to provide. When we experience social threat, our brain's threat response is triggered, and our adrenaline levels are increased. This reduces our effectiveness at collaborating, at thinking, at focusing, planning, making decisions, and otherwise being rational, because our executive functioning in our brain slows down because we're in a flight or fight response mode. We experience negative emotions, thoughts, and feelings, and generally, we start to feel pretty unhappy. Different individuals respond in slightly different ways to these social factors. However, if people experience frequent social threat, then stress and anxiety does become likely. So as a rule, we seek to avoid situations where social threats exist. Similarly, we seek to move towards situations where they do not exist. Unfortunately, social and emotional threats are common in many workplaces, and especially in our line of work. This is so much the case that the concept of psychological safety has become hugely popular and important. Psychological safety is all about helping individuals and organisations understand what non-threatening environments are like. Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or exposing mistakes. It is important to team performance, learning, creativity, and innovation to have a psychologically safe environment to work in. Psychological safety can enhance the delivery of social work by creating an environment where staff and our FANO that we work with can speak up, share ideas, learn from mistakes, and collaborate effectively. So some strategies to create psychological safety in our social work settings, providing regular feedback, coaching staff, working with FANO effectively, encouraging team working, compassionate leadership, and mutual support, fostering a culture of inclusion, diversity, and respect, measuring and improving psychological safety through surveys and interventions, creating a culture of speaking up, learning from errors, supporting each other, and managing those psychosocial hazards like our job demands, low control, poor support, role ambiguity, high caseloads, high levels of stress. So we need to develop leadership skills that foster psychological safety and innovation within teams, reducing stress, and promoting well-being among social workers. So what is a tool or framework that social workers can use to overcome challenges and enhance their practice? And one possible way is to use David Rock's SCARF model as a framework for understanding and influencing human behavior in social situations. By using the SCARF model, we can make sense of our social interactions and build psychological safety for ourselves and others. For example, we can avoid triggering a threat response by respecting people's status, providing clear expectations, giving choices, showing empathy, and being fair. The SCARF model can also help us to identify our own triggers and how to cope with them. So in essence, the SCARF model seeks to create psychological safety by helping us understand and managing our social brains. So what is the SCARF model? So the SCARF model was developed by David Rock, an expert on neuroscience and leadership, in 2008. He proposed that there are five key domains that influence our behavior in social situations. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. These domains activate the same threat and reward responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. When we perceive a threat to any of these domains, our brain reacts with a fight-or-flight response, releasing cortisol, which is a stress hormone, that reduces our ability to think creatively, collaboratively, and rationally. We may experience fear, anger, anxiety, or defensiveness, and we may avoid or resist the situation or the person who triggered the threat. On the other hand, when we perceive a reward in any of these domains, our brain reacts with an approach response, releasing dopamine, which is a happy hormone, that enhances our ability to think positively, productively, and proactively. We may experience joy, satisfaction, confidence, or curiosity, and we may seek out more opportunities to engage with the situation or the person who triggered the reward. So the SCARF model can help us understand why we behave the way we do in social situations. Those situations might be within our workplace, but also when working with our partner, and how we can influence others by minimizing their threat response and maximizing their reward response. So the SCARF model has these five components, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. These are the five domains of human social experience that trigger reward or threat responses in the brain. So I'm going to go through them one by one. Status is all about the relative perceived social importance of members of the group. Everyone wants to feel important. If we don't feel that we have some level of status, then we tend to feel less valued and less secure in our place in the group. And as a result, we feel less safe and more at risk of social threat to our status. When our status is threatened, we can feel strong emotions and potentially experience a threat response. The simple example of this in the workplace could be someone treating us without respect. Another simple example of this could be someone who we don't think has the right to give us feedback doing so. We subconsciously think that their action of providing us feedback is a threat to our status. And if this happens, it can make us feel indignant and we'll cease to be at our best. So what can we do to create a positive experience? We acknowledge and affirm the strengths, skills, and achievements of the people we work with without making them feel inferior or superior to others. Social workers can enhance their client's status by acknowledging their strengths, achievements, and potential. They can also avoid threatening their status by using respectful language, listening actively, and avoiding judgment. For example, as social workers, we might say, I'm really impressed by how you managed to cope with this difficult situation instead of you're lucky to have survived this ordeal. Certainty. This is the second factor of David Rock's scarf model. Certainty relates to our ability to predict the future. The better we are at this, the happier and more certain we feel. If we can't predict the future, we feel uncomfortable. When our certainty is threatened, we can start to feel unsafe. The less certainty we have, the more anxious we tend to feel and the more emotional energy we tend to spend on doing things like predicting the future and In some instances, if our sense of certainty is threatened, we'll experience a threat response. For example, if someone changes a due date on a piece of work, we can feel threatened and become highly stressed. Some of the positive steps we can take to provide reassurance is to provide clear and consistent information and expectations about the social work process. Our goals, the outcomes, and making them feel confused or uncertain has the opposite effect. We need to make sure people know what is happening and what will happen next. Social workers can increase their current certainty by providing clear information, expectations, feedback. We can also reduce uncertainty by being consistent, reliable, transparent. For example, a social worker can talk about the plan that they've agreed on, what the steps are that they need to take, rather than being ambiguous and just saying, let's see how it goes. Autonomy relates to our sense of control over ourselves and what we do in the events around us. The more control we have, the more positive we feel and vice versa. When we have autonomy, we feel safe and in control. We all value autonomy and independence. However, when we don't have autonomy, we run the risk of feeling psychologically unsafe. We feel out of control. In fact, we may feel controlled by others, which can also be quite a negative feeling. If there is a challenge to our autonomy, for example, we're micromanaged, then we can feel quite psychologically threatened. Again, if strong enough, these threats can trigger the brain threat response. An example of this in the world of work would be someone editing a presentation that you've done and making many minor changes that don't actually improve the presentation. Positive steps we can take is to involve and empower people they work with in making decisions and taking actions that affect their lives without making them feel controlled or coerced by others. As social workers, we boost our clients' autonomy by involving them in their decision making, offering choices and respecting their preferences. We can also avoid undermining their autonomy by explaining the rationale behind their actions, asking for consent, providing options. For example, a social worker can say, what do you think would work best for you? Instead of, this is what you must do. We all know in social work that involving FANO in the decision making, because after all, they are the experts in their own lives, can absolutely change the dynamics of the relationship that we're working with. So, the fourth factor of David Rothschild's model is relatedness. Relatedness relates to our sense of safety with others, how we feel able to relate to them. If we're surrounded by friends who wish us well and whose objectives are aligned with our own, then we'll tend to feel safe and positive. If we're not, then we don't. Obviously, if we don't feel that we're able to relate to those around us, then we may experience threat responses. Examples of things that could lead to a threat response include a change in behaviour of those around us, from supportive to unsupportive. Our brain has a habit of sorting people into two categories, friend or foe. Essentially, everyone is a foe or an enemy until proven otherwise, and this is why we must dedicate ourselves to relationship building early and often. Social work is relationships. To encourage the supportive aspect, we can build trust and rapport with the people we work with by showing empathy, compassion and respect for their feelings, their needs, their perspectives, without making them feel isolated or alienated from others. This is something that we often see in unhealthy workplaces, is that sense of isolation from the team, the lack of support, the internal frustrations, the gossip, the negativity. So we start to generate a combative, isolated way of working. The support that you can get from your team, from that collegial mindset, absolutely enables positive social work practice. Social workers can foster their client's relationship by building rapport, trust and empathy. They can also prevent damaging their relationship by showing genuine interest. For example, a social worker can say, I'm here to help you, I understand how you feel, instead of, I'm just doing my job. So the last one is fairness. Fairness relates to our sense of justice and equity in the interactions that take place around us. If we work in an environment in which there is effort and attainment are rewarded, bad behaviour is addressed, and leaders value playing the role, then we're likely to feel like things are fair. If, instead, we sense that things are not fair, then we may feel unhappy and unsafe. Examples of unfair behaviour that lead to a threat response include things like leadership applying praise where it's not due, or failing to address bad behaviour, nepotism, social cheating. Here's an example that's particularly emotive for Brits like me. Cue jumping is a form of social cheating that can trigger a threat response through its challenge to one's sense of fairness, and I can definitely relate to that. Us Brits take cueing very seriously. As social workers, we work to ensure justice and equity for the people we work with by addressing any issues of discrimination, oppression or exploitation that they may face or witness, without making them feel unfairly treated or disadvantaged by others. Social justice is a major driver, often, for those of us who engage in social service delivery. Social workers can promote their clients' fairness by treating them equally, impartially and respectfully. They can also avoid violating their fairness by explaining the reasons for differences and being accountable and transparent. A component of this is understanding equity, where we can reconcile difference in delivery from a perspective of equity. Life is not a one-size-fits-all, but where there is no rationalising or justification for a sense of difference in the quality of service provided or the amount of resources made available, then this can be much harder to reconcile in our minds. For example, a social worker can say, this is the policy that applies to everyone and this is why, rather than just dismissing it and saying, well, this is how it is. And again, we see that quite often in the workplace where one person may get more resource, more funding, more support, more opportunity, and others don't. And that sense of unfairness can be corrosive. So, just to summarise, the acronym SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. All of us can be knocked off our perch when we feel socially threatened. Learning how we specifically respond to different threats is all part of developing increased self-awareness. We can get better at responding to these threats and managing our interactions with others by improving our emotional intelligence. As well as understanding these factors, we can get better at managing them. We can improve our resilience with effort, and we can also manage our stress more effectively. So, by using the SCARF model as a guide for our practice, social workers can create a positive and productive environment for themselves and the people they work with, where they can feel safe, valued, confident, connected, respected. And this ultimately leads to better outcomes and impact for individuals and groups and communities across Aotearoa New Zealand. So, some real world examples of the SCARF model. A manager praising an employee for their excellent work, which boosts their status and makes them feel rewarded. A teacher explaining the learning objective and assessment criteria to their students, which increases their certainty and reduces their anxiety. A doctor involving their patient and choosing a treatment plan, which enhances their autonomy and makes them feel respected. A coach creates a sense of belonging and trust amongst their team members, which strengthens their relatedness and improves their collaboration. And a judge ensures that everyone is treated fairly and impartially, which promotes their fairness and reduces their resentment. These are pretty simple examples and likely things that most of us do instinctively. But they're great examples to show just how simple using the SCARF model can be. When we take a moment to consider some basic aspects, such as validating people through addressing their perception of status, or by explaining information clearly so people feel comfortable and certain, or enabling people to feel their sense of autonomy and be self-determining in their decision-making, creating a sense of relatedness through rapport and trust and respect, and finally upholding fairness in the work we do and the way we treat people. Using the SCARF model in social work practice can have several implications, and not just in the work we do, but also in the workplace we operate from. These implications can include improving the psychological safety and well-being of clients and social workers by reducing threats and increasing rewards in the five domains, enhancing the communication and collaboration skills of social workers by helping them understand and influence the behaviour of their partners, their clients, their colleagues, and themselves, because reflection is a really important part of social work practice too, and supporting the change and learning processes of clients and social workers by creating a positive and supportive environment that fosters motivation, engagement, and ultimately performance. It's important to acknowledge here that while the focus of this conversation has been around social work and working with Fano, the SCARF model is really important as a tool to be used by managers when working with teams, and this is just such an important part of what Bellvote is trying to uphold, that when we take good care of ourselves, of our workforce, by removing or at least addressing some of these social and emotional threats in our workplaces, we can create an environment in which the workforce is best able to be of service to our community. The SCARF model is as relevant for us as workers and it is for the Fano we work with, and that's definitely something to think about. One of the best ways to master any framework is to start to recognise and experiment with it in your personal life. Luckily, since we are constantly sorting experiences with threats and rewards, we have a nearly infinite number of experiences we can run through the five domains of the SCARF model. So next time you find yourself making a decision or feeling threatened, slow down and put that experience through the framework. I'm now going to play you a short recording of the SCARF model and how it is explained from the perspective of threat and reward. This is a speech that was designed for people working in hospitality, but as I've indicated already, really the SCARF model is so applicable in any context, in our personal lives, in our workplace, in our social work delivery. The sound quality is not perfect, but I hope that you will get the benefit of it and enjoy it. Here's the recording. In this video, we're going to give you a quick run through of an incredibly useful model from neuroscience that explains how our unconscious reactions to threats and rewards can impact our performance and how understanding and consciously managing our responses can help us to be more resilient and perform more effectively and help others to do so too. So let's get started with the neuroscience bit. The human brain is an immensely complex organ that we're only just scratching the surface of in terms of understanding it, but modern science has revealed more in the last 20 years or so than we've ever been able to discover. New technologies such as MRI or EEG scanning allow researchers to track brain activities from the inside and see a picture of the brain at work and help them to understand how our brain reacts to a particular stimulus. Talking of stimulus, our brain reaction is really quite simple. In fact, technically it's primitive, connecting us with our ancient past. Imagine a choice between running away from this very scary lion or towards this very delicious cupcake. You wouldn't even have to think about it. Already we can see that some of our responses and behaviours are incredibly predictable and as such it means we can plan, prepare and adjust where needed. It's a simple matter of survival and with other threats being adaptive in this way is key to resilience, not just physical threats that we react to in this way. Two researchers called Liberman and Eisenberger discovered the brain actually treats social threats and rewards with the same intensity as physical threats and rewards. Think about that for a moment. Your brain and mine simply doesn't distinguish a difference between the physical lion that might eat you for dinner and having to give an after-dinner speech to a large number of people. For many, in fact, the thought of presenting to a full room of people would strike as much, if not more, fear into them than the lion. Obviously this is an extreme example but the fact of the matter is that we encounter countless examples of social threats every day and guess what? Another useful neuroscience finding by Elliott in 2008 found that our capacity to make decisions, solve problems and collaborate with others is massively reduced by a threat response and increased under a reward response. Clearly this is of great importance right now. Whilst we are facing a once-in-a-generation challenge it's important that we are resilient, firing on all cylinders and not inhibited by these fears. Of course the irony is that those same challenges can often create those pesky threat responses. That brings us nicely on to the scarf bottle and the work of David Rock. Now David Rock was the first person to combine neuroscience research with the world of work to create the concept of neuroleadership. He is the director of the Neuroleadership Institute, the author of the business bestseller Your Brain at Work as well as Quiet Leadership and the textbook Coaching with the Brain in Mind. The scarf bottle highlights five domains of human social experience. In other words, these domains are physical locations in our brain that activate in response to perceived or actual threats or rewards. Let's look at them one by one. So firstly status. Status is ingrained into the human social dynamics in every civilization and culture on the planet. It's huge in material terms. Think classes, wealth, cars, job hierarchies, how many people avoid ordering the cheapest bottle of wine in a restaurant just purely because they don't want to be judged. Instinctively we know this which is why we assign VIP status to certain guests, upgrade them and make sure we remember their preferences. How important is it for you to receive a pay increase and or job promotion? See, status is everywhere and it's not just the material things that constitute status. It also includes things like how we measure ourselves against others, feel successful, inclusion, feeling significant, belonging to a tribe and how we fit in. Even a perceived threat can create an enormous threat response and rewards for status are equally powerful. Things like titles, medals, certificates, praise and recognition as well as our inner response to our self-value, just knowing that we have achieved something for ourselves, feel proud or simply that we matter. The second is certainty, survival fundamental. Imagine going to bed at night and not being certain that the sun rises the next day. How the hell would you be able to sleep? Lost certainty. It actively looks for patterns, familiar things, routines and once it finds certainty, it can relax, settle down and do more important and complicated things. If it can't find certainty, sometimes it will make things up. It's how optical illusions and even some magic tricks work. Lack of certainty is closely related to some forms of anxiety. Certainty is in particular short supply at the moment. Is your job safe? Is your health safe? What will happen to that holiday you booked? All of these have the potential to generate either a threat response or a reward response depending on the level of certainty. Think how much happier you are when you're in absolutely no doubt something positive is going to go ahead and you can look forward to it. Looking forward to something creates a nice lovely pool of dopamine in our reward circuitry, whereas uncertainty about the future has the opposite effect. The third domain is autonomy. Autonomy is to do with our sense of control or actual control over events in our lives. Think about the times when you feel like you're not in control. It's very troubling and of course these domains do not activate individually, so you could be uncertain about your status and get a double dose of that response. The stress and anxiety of not being able to make decisions and plan is very current right now. Coronavirus has wreaked havoc into our lives on a micro and macro scale, affecting us globally and day to day on a very personal level. With all the restrictions and rules that are in place, we've lost a lot of autonomy. We're simply not allowed to do things that we did before. What about in the context of our guests? We're telling them what they can and can't do, even at booking stage, when this is the complete opposite of what hospitality is all about. Autonomy and a sense of agency with our own lives is very easily threatened, because being helpless could be life threatening in some situations. That lion could easily eat you, remember? The fourth domain is relatedness. Relatedness is all about our interpersonal relationships, trust and just being with other people. The reward circuitry of relatedness leads us to collaborate and form social groups, something that is common in many animal groups as well as in humans. Again, it's primal in origin, so understandably powerful. Research studies have proven over and over again that positive relationships are vital for health and well-being, even having influence on our longevity. Even smiling at someone increases your happy brain chemicals, and the happy ones, like endorphins and oxytocin, are the ones you're more of. Responses of relatedness result in loneliness, fears of rejection, and reduction of stress chemicals that are quite literally toxic. Relatedness in this Covid crisis has taken a bit of a beating with our relationships with friends and family, our teams and colleagues, and all of our guests significantly compromised. Even those people you can see, you can't hug, kiss, shake hands with, or get physically close with in any way. Social distancing is unnatural and hard to maintain in some circumstances. If human beings wanted to keep a distance, they'd have never invented travel and the various ways of meeting up. Hospitality thrives on relatedness, and our whole profession is based on its reward structures in creating feelings and memories of warmth, affection, and emotional safety. The fifth and final domain is fairness. The brain is very alert about fairness, about distribution of resources and distributive justice. That's why there is a domain for it, and it gets activated by perceived threat or reward. It's a survival thing. If I'm not going to get my fair share, then I might not survive. It's pretty primitive, really, as all of the domains are. When something seems unfair, it triggers intense emotions and a strong threat response. On the other hand, results from research have shown that increasing the perception of fairness in the workplace promotes satisfaction and well-being. Whilst we're all in this together, there's very little that is fair about our current situation. Many of us have been affected disproportionately, and that is unfair. It is easy to feel resentful and envious of those who seem to be faring better. However, conquering these feelings is key to bouncing back and developing resilience. So what? What can you do with this? How does a quick tour of the scarf model help you develop resilience? Well, as Plato is reported to have said, reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind. Our mind is a jumble of things, including our feelings. Feelings are how we label our emotional responses to various threat or reward stimuli. Although they can feel pretty real, they aren't really. They're just responses. And whilst we can't always control what happens externally, we do have a great deal of control over our mindset and our responses. This control is a way of developing resilience. Resilience isn't something that we have or we don't have, because that wouldn't be fair. It's something that we can all develop and strengthen, and the key to being able to do that is to understand some of our own responses to threats. To develop your resilience, try practicing these simple things. Be mindful. When you feel something strongly, it's likely to be triggered by a threat reaction. So use what you know now. Can you pause and think before acting or reacting? Take a slow breathe in and out three or four times and just give yourself some space. Identify your feelings, but don't identify with them. Keep the feelings separate and treat it as information. It's telling you something or trying to tell you something. What is the threat causing that feeling? Think and say, I'm feeling anxious rather than I am anxious. You are not your feelings and your feelings do not define you. Writing them down and articulating them can also help separate them and get them under control. Reframe. Putting a different frame on a picture changes the look of that picture dramatically. In the same way, reframing a situation can change the way we see or perceive it. By changing the way you perceive it, you're changing the feelings and emotions that are produced. Examining it from different angles, looking at what you might be missing, and then finding the positive element or even the humour will help you enormously. Finding gratitude in situations will also be good for wellbeing. The words we use create the world we inhabit. Practice talking, even internally, in a more positive way. A constant mantra of it's going to be a disaster is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Avoid absolutes or generalisations, saying or even thinking things like it always happens to me every time or everyone else. These aspects of our thinking and expression are bridges, whereas resilience is all about being flexible, like the difference between concrete and rubber. Concrete will never bounce back. Lastly, let it go. Don't waste any time trying to control things outside your influence and don't waste your energy in harbouring resentment. As the Dalai Lama once said, if a problem is fixable and if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there's no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there's no help in worrying. There is no benefit of worrying whatsoever, or in other words, don't sweat the small stuff. So, I hope you've enjoyed this podcast as we've explored the practice tool, The Scarf Model, by David Rock. Just a short podcast, but I think these things need to be bite-sized chunks for our everyday learning. But I will leave you with just a couple of questions to reflect on. So, what has The Scarf Model raised for you? And how might you apply The Scarf Model in your work? We'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this topic, so please share your comments. See you on the next podcast.