Go take a hike! When someone at work tells you to go take a hike, maybe we all should...

Part I – Hope for today and hope for the future

I’m writing this on my way home from a two-week site visit, where I was working alongside colleagues from the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group (CWPPG) and New Mexico State University’s Center of Innovation in partnership with a state child welfare agency. As is often the case in this work, the most meaningful insights come directly from the field; from the youth, families and caregivers navigating the system every day, and the practitioners there to serve them.

During this site visit, while completing a Quality Services Review (QSR), I spoke with an early-career social worker supporting a young child in foster care who had experienced significant trauma related to abuse and neglect.

She said something that has stayed with me:



“…you’ve got to regulate, to relate, to reason.”

She was drawing on the work of Dr. Bruce Perry and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT). What stood out wasn’t the concept itself, but how she was using it, as a practical framework guiding her intervention decisions in real time.

For this young person, that meant intentionally combining play-based interventions, parent coaching, and narrative practices, alongside a stable, structured, and nurturing caregiving environment. (I’ll save the story of how dinosaurs were used to help re-author this child’s trauma narrative for another time.)

The results were significant. Through sustained, coordinated effort by the child and family  team centered on the youth and caregiver, daily dysregulation decreased by approximately 80%. What had previously been described as frequent, unconsolable outburst episodes, up to ten per day, shifted to fewer than two brief, age-typical, and consolable moments of distress.

In other words, a four-year-old acting like a four-year-old.

This progress was neither quick nor easy. It required coordination and alignment across providers, consistency in caregiving, and intentional application of evidence-informed practice. But the outcome was clear: this child was not only stabilizing, but thriving, and engaged in early learning and on track developmentally.

Regulate to Relate to Reason.

In a system often challenged by workforce turnover, workload demands, and resource constraints, this example reflects what is possible when an intervention strategy is aligned with practices known to work and supported. It offers not just a story of individual success, but a glimpse of system potential. This early career social worker gave me hope, both for this young person, and for the future workforce.  

Part II – A Brief Reset in the Mountains

There is a well-understood parallel process in helping professions: the capacity to support regulation in others is directly influenced by our own regulatory state.

Put more simply, “…you cannot pour yourself from an empty cup.”

After two weeks on the road, I took the opportunity to step away over the weekend. I headed north, out of the city, into the mountains, a place that allows me to reset.

I’m a hiker. The rhythm of walking, the pacing of breath on the ascent, and the sustained focus on the trail all contribute to something more than recreation; it regulates me.

The sensory impact and grounding of being out in nature for me is immediate:

• The feel of the trail underfoot
• The smell of piñon and pine
• The quiet of the landscape
• The expansiveness of the view

And yes, the simple reward of a cold beverage and good meal after a long hike.

These experiences are not incidental, they are functional. They restore focus, increase presence, and create the conditions for clearer thinking.

From a practice standpoint, the implications are direct; when regulated, we are better able to listen, engage, and process complexity. That, in turn, strengthens our ability to support others effectively.

Regulation is not separate from the work…it is foundational to it.

Part III – From Practice Principles to System Behavior

The more important question, however, is what happens when we extend this principle beyond individual practice and apply it to systems. While on the trail I was remembering a workshop I attended years ago at an NMT Symposium in Banff (I wish I could remember the presenters name), that talked about how organizations, like individuals, operate under conditions that influence their regulatory state. Under sustained pressure, high demand, risk exposure and limited resources, systems can become trauma-reactive.

These are not new ideas in the work of advancing trauma-informed care. These concepts align with foundational work in interpersonal neurobiology, includingDaniel Siegel’s description of stress responses, applied here at an organizational level.

Simply, when organizations and systems become trauma-reactive, excepted patterns emerge:

• Decision-making becomes compressed, urgency-driven, and centralized
• Policy application becomes more rigid, with less room for professional judgment
• Attention shifts from relationship-based practice to process, oversight, and compliance
• Organizational responses to risk become more controlling than adaptive

These are not intentional design features, they are predictable adaptations to chronic organizational stress.

Impact on Workforce and Practice

From an implementation perspective, these conditions have direct implications

for workforce functioning.

Staff experience:

• Increased cognitive load with reduced capacity for reflection and analysis
• Limited space for relational engagement with children and families
• Supervisory structures that are evaluative and oversight-driven rather than supportive and developmental teaching

As a result, practice shifts from relational to procedural.

For children and families, the impact is equally clear:

• Engagement is replaced by direction and compliance
• Interactions feel transactional rather than purposeful
• The system is experienced as something imposed, rather than collaborative

As a parent has shared with me in the past:

“…my case manager isn’t checking on me, they’re just checking boxes.”

This is not a workforce failure…it is a system telling you it’s not working.

At its core, this reflects a misalignment between intended practice (relationship-based, trauma-informed) and the conditions under which that practice is expected to occur.

Part IV – The QSR: A Method for Insight and System Alignment

This is where the Quality Services Review (QSR) plays a critical role. The QSR is a structured, qualitative methodology designed to assess how well systems are functioning in real time, from the perspective of those directly involved; youth, families, and practitioners. Grounded in the concept of Services Testing©, each youth/family/person serves as an individual test of the system’s capacity to respond to their unique needs and strengths.

Through in-depth, in-person interviews and a 360-degree view of service delivery, the QSR is guided by two core questions:

• How are the youth and family (or adult) doing?
• How is the system performing in response?

Importantly, the methodology itself reflects the same sequence:

• It slows down the process of inquiry by doing a deep-dive and meeting the client’s where they are to understand they experience the service system (regulating)
• It prioritizes direct engagement and relationship through direct interview (relatable)
• It applies structured analysis to generate actionable insights (reasoning)

This is not incidental…it’s by design.

The QSR creates the conditions for disciplined learning, allowing systems to move beyond surface-level metrics and understand how practice is actually experienced by those it’s intended to serve.

It identifies both strengths and gaps and translates those findings into actionable strategies for system improvement.

Returning to System Design

If we take this seriously, regulation cannot be treated as an individual skill alone. It must be understood as a system condition shaped by leadership, structure, and design.

This requires attention to:

• Organizational culture and decision-making norms
• How work is paced and prioritized
• How supervision is structured and experienced
• How systems respond to risk, error, and uncertainty

Without alignment at this level, practice improvement efforts will continue to rely on individual adaptation rather than system capacity.

And individual adaptation, over time, becomes unsustainable.

Conclusion

What that early-career social worker articulated is more than a clinical insight, it is a multi-level principle:

Regulate to Relate to Reason

It applies at the level of practice, supervision, organizational functioning, and system design.

When systems are regulated, they enable effective practice. When they are trauma-reactive, they constrain it.

The work of leaders, administrators and supervisors (and consultants), then, is not only to train and coach for better practice, but to design systems that create conditions make that practice possible.

So when someone at work tells you to go take a hike…it might be good advice.