Towards the end of my London book launch, the fabulous Maff Potts mentioned his frustration with “positive language”. It was lovely to be able to show him the ‘recommended resources’ part at the end of my book, where I wrote “Maff Potts’ beautifully human Friends and Purpose has only just been published, so as yet I haven’t included any quotes from it in my writing. Let’s change that. His chapter on ‘Talking bollocks’ explores ‘the idea that how we speak to people is awful. Even the positive stuff’. He writes that ‘deficit language is quicker and simpler and so the system loves it’, but also suggests that ‘the positive, “aspirational” language can be almost worse than the deficit words, because they are somehow more dishonest and manipulative’. I couldn’t agree more.” [1]

There are so many examples of these words. Me and Tricia Nicoll refer to them as ‘deceptive words’ in our Gloriously Ordinary Language programme. Angela Catley calls them ‘code words’. And John O’Brien likened them to balloons.

“What happens to lots of those words is they become abstract. They are like a balloon that gets blown up with too much helium and starts to float around and sound funny. So, words like person-centred planning have life in some contexts and in some contexts, they’re just filling out a form. And the more intention, mindfulness, is lost from what we’re doing… the more the word floats away, and then it kind of runs out of steam and it’s like a balloon that collapses and falls back to earth.” John O’Brien [2]

They are the words that shine out of vision statements and practice frameworks, glow in improvement plans and transformation plans, and glimmer in job adverts and applications*. 

They are the words whose use – Edgar Cahn observed – “certified one as morally pure and appropriately avant-garde. Behind the curtain, though, business was proceeding as usual: preserving one’s turf, creating dependencies, and protecting a livelihood earned by catering to people’s needs, deficiencies and problems.” [3]

They are the words that prompted Mark Neary to reflect, “I’ve been constantly fascinated by the ability of social care to reinvent it’s language but never its values”. [4]

They are the words that led Alex Fox to write, “Changing the language used within organisations and systems can often be a substitute for changing behaviour and beliefs, with the new softer-sounding language adding a coating of irony to unyielding bureaucracies.” [5]

They are the words that float away.

Independence

When I talk to groups of people working in different social care roles, I often quote point 1.1 of the Care Act 2014 statutory guidance: “The core purpose of adult care and support is to help people to achieve the outcomes that matter to them in their life” [6] and I ask people what matters most to them in their own lives. Family always comes top, along with references to friends, relationships, pets, home, work, community.

Connection matters most.

And there are also always references to freedom and autonomy. To independence.

This is what a good life looks like. This is what matters most to us.

I also often refer people back to the way their own organisation defines it’s raison d’être – why it exists. To sentences like these:

“Our aim is to support you to be as independent as possible.”

“[We] support people to live their best life independently at home”

“In Adult Social Care, our aim is for residents to be safe and live a healthy and independent life in their home.”

When I ask them what ‘independent’ means in these statements, a minority refer to being in control and making decisions about your life. Most people say things like “not relying on others”, “being able to do things on your own without assistance”, “not needing social care”. 

If we genuinely believe our purpose is to promote self-sufficiency rather than choice and control, and rather than interdependence – the relationships and connections and networks of support that sustain us – this has significant implications for the way we view anyone seeking some assistance for themselves or the people they love. And serious implications for practice.

“When I say I want independence my social worker tells me she will end my social care package then I will have independence.” Julie Sharp [7]

Choice

Rather than floating away, I think the ‘choice’ balloon has burst. This fundamental principle of the Independent Living Movement, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Care Act 2014 has been prodded and ultimately popped by our obsession with classification and consolidation and compliance and cost.

Neil Crowther suggested recently that policy, and the national debate about adult social care, is “implicitly hostile to the idea of choice and control.” [8] That may sound extreme, but not so long ago I was working with a council who ruled out describing the purpose of social care as ‘supporting people to live the lives they choose to lead’. They genuinely feared explicit references to choice because, I guess, acknowledging that we should all have choice over our lives threatens the people and institutions who believe their purpose is to control our lives. 

And in its most recent State of Care report, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) expressed concerns about the financial resilience of “small services (providing care to 4 people or fewer)” [9], prompting Neil to write that “when the regulator starts to argue that small, community led support is too fragile for the market, it too has become the enemy of choice and control.” 

And so instead of a guiding principle of equal rights and equal lives, for too many people, ‘choice’ has drifted far closer to Mark Neary’s definition – “an opportunity to pick between one thing or nothing.” [10]

Strengths-based

So, if we believe self-sufficiency is our goal and we don’t really believe in choice, no wonder the ‘strengths-based’ balloon has also become untethered. Strengths-based approaches should be rooted in capacity, capability and possibility rather than in deficiency. In ‘what matters’ not ‘what’s the matter’. They require time and trust. Connection. Curiosity. Compassion. Care.

But ‘strengths-based’ has floated into our social care sorting office of screening and signposting and assessment and eligibility determination. Into a domain of hierarchy and bureaucracy, where trust is in short supply and where processes and pathways and panels dominate. Into a place where we count what can be counted, not what counts, and measure instead of treasure. Into a system where autonomy and choice are often just as absent for social workers as for people seeking their support, and where we’re all preoccupied with what’s wrong, not what’s strong. And into a wider world of ever-increasing labels and diagnoses and disorders, where difference and distress are pathologized and pills, pressure, penalties are prescribed while systemic, structural, societal issues and injustices remain unseen, unchallenged, ignored.

In this context, and as increasingly tight budgets are spent on increasingly restrictive ‘care’, ‘strengths-based’ has become code for redirection and cost reduction. An approach adopted to “reduce dependence on council funded support” and “effectively manage demand”.

Flourishing

I was prompted to write this post not just by Maff’s comment at my book launch, but also by another email from Maria, who wrote her Letter to Bryony S that I shared recently. She was writing because “my adoptive mum friends and I have just been uttering a massive collective ‘hmmmm’ about the word ‘flourishing’… it feels like the term is increasingly being hijacked for the purpose of professional assessment/report speak. ‘Flourishing’ seems gradually to be replacing ‘thriving’ or ‘wellbeing’ (one of those examples of ‘professionals’ being told to use different words without anyone actually making any systemic changes to go alongside it).” 

She explains how “being asked about your child ‘flourishing’ when you know that the people asking you these questions represent the state institutions which have repeatedly plunged your child into survival mode and prevented them from doing anything that even approaches ‘flourishing’ can feel like a form of emotional abuse.”

I hated reading this. To me flourishing is at the heart of what social care should be all about, offering an alternative to the dominant focus of paternalistic protection and life-and-limb survival.

It takes a village to raise a child. But when the concept of flourishing becomes detached from ideas around mutuality, reciprocity, connection and community and attached to a system that denies not just the importance of all these things but also its own role in nurturing and sustaining them – when flourishing becomes a question in an assessment and a tick-box on a form – it becomes weaponised. Yet another word wielded to isolate and manipulate. To judge and to blame. 

Co-production

Edgar Cahn refers to co-production as “a different imagining of the world we know.” His core values require us to “start with what people can do, not what they can’t do.” To redefine work, and recognise that “being a parent, a citizen, a caretaker, a neighbor, a citizen is real work”. To appreciate the importance of mutuality. And to value and invest in social capital – in “building the village to raise the children.” [11]

But co-production has “become something else we have to do on a Thursday afternoon in a meeting room with dodgy coffee and a value pack of custard creams (if you’re lucky)”. [12] A task assigned to an ‘lead officer’, which requires a strategy and a policy and a board and a plan and an agenda and some measurable outcomes – oh and a few EbEs. And in the meantime, we continue to define people by what they can’t do (‘those with needs’). We label people who aren’t in paid work as scroungers, skivers, economically inactive. We perpetuate a system of service delivery, of providers and consumers, of packages of care. And yep, we focus on independence (the self-sufficient kind) instead of interdependence, and on better services instead of better lives.

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John O’Brien wrote that words become abstract and float away when intention, mindfulness, is lost from what we’re doing.

So, what are we doing?

Who are we being, and becoming?

How have we all floated so far away from our laws? Our principles? Our values?

Our humanity?

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*As an aside, at a recent conference a social worker told me that once she hadn’t been successful in an interview and – as part of her feedback – she’d been told that one of the reasons she hadn’t got the job was because she hadn’t used enough of the right words. These words.

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References

[1] Rewriting Social Care: Challenging and Changing Language and Practice for a Better, Brighter Future, Bryony Shannon, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2025

[2] Personhood and Members of Each Other, Neighbours International, YouTube, 2024

[3] No more throw-away people: the co-production imperative, Edgar Cahn, Essential Books, 2000

[4] The words on the tin, Mark Neary, Love, Belief and Balls, 2 December 2018

[5] A new health and care system: Escaping the invisible asylum, Alex Fox, Policy Press, 2018

[6] Care and support statutory guidance, Department of Health and Social Care, GOV.UK, Updated 22 July 2025

[7] When I say I want independence…, Julie Sharp, Twitter, 25 April 2024 

[8] Miserable thought for the weekend…, Neil Crowther, LinkedIn, 7 November 2025

[9] The state of health care and adult social care in England 2024/25, Care Quality Commission, 25 October 2025

[10] Parley Vouz Health & Social Care? (An A to Z of Carespeak), Mark Neary, Love, Belief and Balls

[11] No more throw-away people: the co-production imperative, Edgar Cahn, Essential Books, 2000

[12] Gloriously Ordinary Co-production, Tricia Nicoll and Bryony Shannon, 27 October 2025