• Active Planning can be seen as a practical application of Holding the Balance from The Therapist's Mentalizing Stance
• An important part of it is about a team adopting a "style-of-working" that attempts to BALANCE three elements of the work:

1. Setting objectives and plans
2. Sustaining sensitive attunement
3. Broadcasting intentions

• Balancing is necessarily a dynamic state
• Sometimes one or other element will be more dominant, but over time there is a balance.
• What is important is that the team does not allow the relationship between these to become RIGID or FIXED.

Holding Balance between three functions

	ACTIVITY	PURPOSE	RISK IF UNBALANCED
1.	Set objectives/plans (or Aims and Goals)	Support effective change (Governance and Managing Risk)	Teleological thinking
2.	Sustain sensitive attunement (Mentalizing Stance)	To hold Engagement and improve Relationship to help	Pretend mode
3.	Broadcasting Intentions	To elicit support (Scaffolding existing relationships)	Psychic equivalence

This Holding the Balance between different functions is somewhat analogous to the interaction of the three main functional modules of mind-brain described in Johnson, Baron-Cohen et al (2005) emergence of the social brain network.

Video examples:

Much of AMBIT working is with young people vulnerable to crises, and these may at times threaten to undermine the "best laid plans" of the therapist. Balancing sensitive attunement with the need for work towards planned objectives is a constant dilemma for the worker, and one which may need help from SupervisoryStructures in the team.

Here, a worker's initial plan of work is clearly Non-contingent with the actual dilemma that the young person is wrestling with, and adjustment is required:



Again, here, an initial plan needs to be adapted "on the fly" - the worker will need to hold onto the original planning, but to address that in this session would likely undermine the therapeutic relatio:ship.

Getting into Planning

"Having a plan is better than 'winging it'!"

See the separate section on Developing a team culture of planning.

Well-connected team members regularly uphold and support each other in:

• making
• broadcasting
• using
• and reviewing progress against

...explicit plans.

These might be applied from the length of time it takes to conduct a phone-call, to the weeks or months of a whole therapeutic journey.

NOT getting out of Responding!

"Sometimes mentalizing means DOING the right thing!"

Given the risky nature of the environment and the predicaments that many young people in treatment with AMBIT-influenced teams are facing, Active Planning refers to the maintenance of a culture that, while sensitively attuned to the young person or family's needs, holds to proper Governance (doing things 'properly' - safely and effectively) alongside the need to engage with these imperfect realities (see Scaffolding existing relationships).

Slides and notes:

PLANNING, not PLANS

(Map-reading, not Maps...)

Active Planning seeks to emphasise the activity of planning, rather than the holding of plans-as-things. This is not to say that it isn't important to have the appropriate documentation, just that the documentation is only worth anything if it is a record of the work of thinking...

An analogy: In the days before Satellite Navigation, the map itself was important, but not as important as the skill of map-reading: the constant taking of bearings from the landscape, and triangulating these to check the true position on the map... allowing the adjustment of one's course; in wild country it is rare to travel from point A to point B "as the crow flies". Likewise, Active Planning facilitates the kind of strategic route-planning (taking the longer route, that avoids the swamp) that makes safe arrival at treatment goals more likely.