Podcast: The Evolution of Crisis Management
Guest Biography
Judith Schubert began her career with the Crisis Prevention Institute over 20 years ago as a staff instructor. Today, as president of CPI, Judith advances initiatives that contribute to the creation and maintenance of safe and respectful workplaces where the care and welfare of service users is the primary focus. Judith works with organizations worldwide, structuring approaches for the implementation of meaningful training, policies, and procedures relating to behavior management, crisis prevention, and safe intervention strategies.
Prior to joining CPI, Judith worked in social service, correctional, and treatment settings, including community corrections, AODA treatment for offenders, institutional programming, residential services for juveniles, and victim advocacy. Judith received undergraduate degrees in social work and criminal justice and earned a master's degree in leadership development with a focus on organizational learning.
Podcast Highlights
This interview begins with a brief discussion of Judith’s history with CPI before moving on to its central topic: the addition of content from a British training program entitled MAPA® (Management of Actual or Potential Aggression) into CPI’s Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® training, and the benefits this brings to both Certified Instructors and participants.
Here are a few of the highlights from my conversation with Judith.
On why crisis prevention training gained momentum in the late 20th century (6:22)
In the late 90s there was a lot going on. There were issues in the headlines. There were actually some major critical events that happened and were in the spotlight around people being hurt or dying in restraint. We were part of that early dialog. So in addition to learning from Certified Instructors, I was learning from advocacy groups, from regulators, from families, people that had individuals in care or in schools that were challenged in a variety of ways—exhibiting challenging behavior—and sometimes the responses were causing more problems than being the solution, and by very well-meaning staff.
A lot of that had to do with what was in place for training. I think our standards and our expectations were in place before there were actually some national or international regulations and standards around the issues of behavior management and restraint training. That was a huge and important time.
On the origin of enhancements to Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® Training (11:32)
There's a few things intersecting over the last, I would say, five years. . . . I think one of the things that continually spoke very loudly to us was, in a very good way and a very positive thing, was more professional regulations and legislative guidance throughout North America was really setting expectation for organizations that if your staff are responding to these issues and have responsibilities to put their hands on someone because they are presenting risks, you need to train your staff. As we started to look at the trends in that, the trends were you need to train your staff yearly.
So that was one thing going on that we were very aware of, and we were doing a lot of work around trying to help Certified Instructors implement a training process and not just seeing training as a one-and-done kind of thing.
Another thing that was going on at the same time is we had really grown in Europe as well, and we joined with another company in England. They had a program that they taught called MAPA®, Management of Actual or Potential Aggression. In England, we merged Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® training with that MAPA® program.
On the response of CPI Certified Instructors to the enhanced content (14:00)
It was different than when we have an advanced course—our Certified Instructors look at a piece of something and say, “I'm going to train this particular team in this piece,” or “I'm going to use this reference point and infiltrate it into my training.” It was different because people were saying, "I want to train this version to everyone." It had the best parts of Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® training. We really used Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® training as the base, and we folded in some of the information from the MAPA® program and the skills from the MAPA® program, so it was just a different response.