Are you ‘Complaintsplaining’?

I am currently drafting the two final parts of an article with the title ‘Know that Words Matter’, which is the sixth in an ongoing series about ‘Working with Conflict: Ten Things to Think About’ (you can access the earlier articles through my Profile). These final parts are about choosing your words and in my readings for this I came across a short 2019 article by Dr John Launer, which started me thinking about whether what he describes as on #Docsplaining may also happen when working with complaints.

In his #Docsplaining article Dr Launer says that the Oxford English Dictionary included the word ‘mansplaining’ for the first time in 2018 and that this term is a conflation of the words ‘man’ and ‘explaining’. [Mansplaining in Wikipedia is defined as “a pejorative term meaning "(for a man) to comment on or explain something, to a woman, in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner.” And here is a link to a useful chart on the BBC website to help tell the difference between condescending or simply explaining-while-male].

Dr John Launer writes in relation to ‘mansplaining’ on how “The past couple of years have also seen the arrival of a parallel term: ‘docsplaining’ This is being used to describe equally unwanted, unnecessary or patronising explanations by doctors to non-doctors, whether these are patients or simply members of the general public who suffer from the lamentable lack of a medical degree.” He says that doctors like to keep control of the narrative and that they use docsplaining to disqualify alternative versions. Also, that a variety of docsplaining takes the form of a failure to calibrate our explanations with what the patient wants or needs to hear at that precise moment. This includes lecturing patients who are already deeply knowledgeable about their own conditions and bombarding people with information when at a time when they are in absolutely no emotional state to absorb or use these facts.

I still regard myself as being in the complaint handling community (though no longer an active member) and I have an ongoing interest in the work of complaint handlers – people whose job is to cope with the external concerns and dissatisfactions about their colleagues and their organisation, usually from people who need or want what their organisation produces or provides. In relation to Dr Launer’s article, my question is whether we complaint handlers are prone to ‘Complaintsplaining’? My provisional definition of this word, which is not meant to be pejorative or to offend, is ‘when a complaint handler comments on or explains something in a condescending, overconfident or oversimplified manner’. When considering your answer to this question, it may be helpful to think about whether you are controlling the narrative, disqualifying alternative versions of what happened and failing to calibrate your explanations with what the complainant (or indeed the complained about) wants or needs to hear.

I am asking this question to raise awareness, not to criticise. In my learnings and writings I often notice resemblances between the work of clinicians and complaint handlers, so it struck me when Dr Launer writes about the medical profession that “We seem to have acquired an institutionalised addiction to docsplaining, and we now have our work cut out trying to monitor and treat it.” I think that this ‘institutional addiction’ could be applied to complaint handling work – in that we draw on our own professional knowledge and expertise and so may discount the lived experiences of others. That we don’t listen deeply to what is being said – and what is not – often because there is not enough time to do this well. And we don’t explore complaints to discover the impact that they have had and the distress they have caused, because we need to fit concerns and issues resulting from often complex lives and situations into a complaint definition and proscribed process.

My particular interest is in what enables complaint handlers to work well and what constrains them from doing so – and I set out some of my thoughts on this when speaking at the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) Conference ‘Supporting Good Complaints Handling in a Changing World’ on 16 November 2023. You can find a write-up of this session on ‘Enabling Complaint Handler Wellbeing’ here and also on the SPSO website.

I said at the SPSO Conference that my experience has been that complaint policies and procedures tend to work well with concerns that are relatively straightforward and easily categorised, but that they are less well suited to concerns that are complex, multifaceted or cross cutting. I think that complaints policies can be too restrictive and too rigidly applied and that more could be done to articulate their purpose (by this I mean what the policy intends to achieve). And in my view, that their promoted approach is not keeping up with the (welcome) move to more relational ways of working. I also said that as well as complaint handling approaches needing to have more of a relational focus, there was the need to trust complaint handlers to do what is required in particular situations and circumstances. And that complaint processes had to be well-integrated with other organisational procedures and systems in order address the full range of voiced issues, concerns and hoped for outcomes, which includes those which are not considered to be complaints.

In writing this, I also wanted to share what Dr Launer has written in his article about conversational techniques, which he says are “taught religiously on courses in counselling and coaching”. This again resonated with me, and, I would suggest, are also taught on courses relating to working with conflict, complaints and mediation (including those I have delivered myself). He writes that “Personally, I have a particular distaste for conversational mannerisms such as ‘reflecting back’ (‘so what you are saying is’), reframing (‘it sounds to me as if’) and naming emotions (‘you seem to be very upset’). And he recalls when a friend saw her general practitioner after her husband had a stroke and was told ‘You must be very angry about what has happened’. ‘Must I?’, she replied, ‘I’m actually here to discuss how we can get a stair lift.’

In his article, Dr Launer says about these conversational techniques that “In practice they are nearly always used in a spirit of weary automatism, and entirely miss the point of what the patient has said.” I think there is a danger of this also happening in complaint handling if these conversational techniques are used routinely, clumsily and with little thought – and will write more about this in later articles in the ‘Working with Conflict’ series. My view for now is that these techniques do have a value when used consciously, sensitively and appropriately and where the purpose is gaining understanding and finding out more, rather than using a technique at a particular point in a process.

Reference

Launer, J., 2019. #Docsplaining. Postgraduate Medical Journal, 95(1120), pp.117-118.