TIMESCALES of active planning:

1. Short term Care Planning:

In the minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour flow of daily work, active planning is what we are doing in Marking the Task - this is the first step in the AMBIT practice of Thinking Together that shapes our working interactions. Thinking Together is an attempt to shape a rather particular way of handling what are often seen as "everyday conversations" - so that even in very chaotic of apparently informal settings, there is a culture in the team (Rituals and Disciplines) that supports accurate Mentalization.

2. Session-by-Session:

Where Thinking Together is about the here-and-now working, Active Planning is also applied to work in the session, or in the weeks or months ahead, and this will usually involve some form of written plan (the Care Plan) - having a plan for a specific session is important.

A plan may be as general as:

"My plan is to engage this young person so that they are agreeable to meeting up again in the next week or two."

...or it may be more specific:

"My plan is to explore some of this young person's StrengthsResiliencies to see what I might try to scaffold."

(If you use this manual in its ICR mode, you can record SessionPlans within a downloaded copy of this manual/workbook.)

3. Longer-term Care Planning

The plans for a session should fit into a longer-term Care Plan for your work with the young person - which needs to be negotiated with that young person. Also look at advice on How to draw up a Care Plan as a document and Active Planning: a core process with clients that underpins the production of a Care Plan while emphasising that "Care Planning" is much more than just the production of a document!