Quick Tip #4: It’s Good to be Nosy

YES - IT”S GOOD TO BE NOSY!

Hiring a good consultant can be tricky.  Good credentials, a solid resume, and great recommendations help.  But when dollars for consulting help are so scarce and the stakes so high (as they usually are when an organization decides to get outside expertise), there’s one more question you should be asking prospective consultants.

 WHAT ELSE ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?

A really good, established consultant will tell you without your asking.  A good consultant will turn down work if it’s unlikely that s/he can devote the attention the project requires.  But some consultants keep adding on, taking project after project, until none of the projects, each one near and dear to the client, gets the time and skill needed to be successful.  For example, unless a consultant is commanding a large grant shop (and the client knows that someone else may be working on their proposal), it’s not a good idea for the same consultant to write two federal proposals at once.   You have no way of knowing unless you ask!

So be nosy.  Ask prospective consultants what else is on their plate. Maybe it’s “too much.”

Quick Tip #2: How to Get Traction on an Issue

A problem comes up.  A work group gets formed.  The work group meets and talks about the problem.  The work group adjourns and returns the next week and starts over. Again and again, the work group gathers, chats, adjourns, and returns until someone has the temerity to say, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. 

How many dozens of times have you been in a work group like this where a) you can’t afford not to attend because there is an off chance something important may happen; and b) the meetings are the ultimate Ground Hog Day experience with no progress and no product.

How to stop this complete waste of everyone’s time?

1.  Make a list of decisions that need to be made.  The quickest way to do this is with a traditional brainstorming/issue voting process:  Each person makes his/her own list of three major decisions.  Those are posted or written on large sheets of paper (sticky notes can be very helpful here). The list is discussed by the group.  Then each person gets three votes (not all three can be used on the same item) to select priorities.  The vote is tallied.  Voila!  Your list of decisions to be made magically appears!

2. Stick to the decision list.  Treat the decision list as if it is a holy document.  The list becomes your agenda for your next meeting. “At our next meeting, we will tackle decision items #3, 4, and 5 so be prepared to resolve those items at that time.”  Use the decision list as the organizing framework for the work group’s efforts, measure progress against the list, and organizing reports to the sponsoring entity using the list.

3.  Prohibit backward motion.  We’ve all seen it happen.  A work group labors for months to make progress and then someone new comes to a meeting and wants to start at Point A.  Very often, because people are basically nice and want to be inclusive, a work group will allow itself to be taken back to the train station.  To avoid that, practice saying, “We’ve discussed that.  This was our decision and we’re now working on decision items #3, 4, and 5.  In other words, there is no going backward, only going forward.  Of course, if there is something alarmingly wrong with the first decision, the group ought to revisit it but barring that, full steam ahead at all times.

 4.  Write everything down.  There is great power in the written document.  Having agreed-upon decisions written down and distributed at the next meeting reminds people that those discussion on those items is done and no longer open to debate.  I call this consolidation of gains.  This is how traction occurs:  by consolidating the gains (decisions made) at the last meeting and pulling people’s attention to the next set of decisions.

 This approach requires that someone in the group is able to take charge.  If there is an appointed chairperson who can’t seem to lead the group toward progress, then some of the members might have to gently offer to create a work group charge using the decision list model.  Often, the chairperson will be grateful for the assistance. 

This method has worked for me many times.  Let me know if it’s helpful for you.

Ask the Consultant: Evaluating a Program You Don’t Like

What do you do as an evaluator when you really don’t like or support the program approach you are evaluating; say, it’s something contrary to your principles or beliefs?

This was a question asked by an Alverno University student of me and several evaluation colleagues who were speaking to her class last week. One colleague recounted a major evaluation focused on a teen pregnancy prevention approach he couldn’t endorse.  I recalled instances where, in the course of an evaluation, I encounted agency practices with clients that made me uncomfortable, even angry.  We all agreed that this problem comes up a lot for evaluators since, being human beings, we have often have very strong personal beliefs.

When this happens, though, there is an enormous risk of one’s personal beliefs influencing the objectivity of the evaluation.  This can happen in such subtle ways that even the evaluator isn’t aware that his/her biases are shading everything – the construction/selection of evaluation instruments, the content of interviews, and the interpretation of observed activity. While it is far better and a lot more fun for an evaluator to evaluate an approach he/she fundamentally endorses, the opposite is often true.  When in this situation, a couple of possible strategies might be useful.

First, one of the evaluators on the panel reminded us all that every program deserves a decent evaluation, sort of on the order of everyone accused of a crime is entitled to legal counsel.  Good thing to keep in mind.  Every program approach benefits from a thorough, well-conceived and implemented process and outcome evaluation.

Second, when an evaluator is put in a position of having to fairly evaluate a program approach he/she doesn’t like, the bottom line is sticking with the process.  This means evaluating a program based on its program design/logic model.  Period.  This means not letting alternative or more philosophically attractive approaches enter into the analysis as implicit or explicit points of comparison.  This is tough, but essential.

Third, the evaluator simply must keep her/his biases in check and be extra vigilant about avoiding any opportunities to go looking for evidence to support those biases.  Because an evaluator often has a lot of control over how success is defined and measured, this can be extremely challenging.  Basically, to do right by the evaluation, the evaluator has to put on and keep wearing the mantle of objectivity even when it chafes.

 These are some ideas about handling this thorny situation.  In future blog posts, I’ll be tackling other questions that have been posed to me about planning, grantwriting, collaboration, and professional ethics.  If you have a question, let me know.  Be glad to take a crack at answering!

Quick Tip #1: Protect Your Meeting from Hijackers

Facilitating a group meeting, especially about a thorny subject, opens the door for hijacking if you’re not careful.  A meeting hijacking is when someone with a very strong point of view starts off the group discussion, setting a negative tone and direction for the meeting.  When this happens, other group members who are less willing to be vocal shrink before your very eyes.  They become spectators rather than participants.  It’s not pretty.

Here’s one way to avoid a hijacking. 

1.  Prepare for the meeting by developing THREE KEY QUESTIONS.  For example: “How did this report help you better understand this problem in Milwaukee.”  “What concerns raised by the report need to be addressed in the next revision?”  “What are three ways we could improve our system moving forward?”

2.  Start the meeting by asking each person – on their own/with no discussion – to provide written answers to the questions. 

3.  Open the discussion by going from person to person to get their responses.  As facilitator, use your ability to tie ideas together and to suggest other areas for consideration.

4. Continue to ask for elaboration, new ideas, while keeping the general framework of the questions as the agenda for the meeting.

Why this works:

• The action of writing one’s ideas down on paper empowers people.  If they write an idea down, they want to be sure to express it.  It becomes more valuable to them.
• If there is a potential hijacker in the room, his/her ideas become equal to everyone else’s.  The imperative of the ‘paper’ means that all ideas must be heard.  This makes it very awkward to monopolize the conversation.
• The strategy reduces the likelihood that the group will take off on an unproductive tangent.  The facilitator can always bring people back to the key questions.
• Participants’ written answers are ready-made notes of the meeting.  It’s not necessary but I ask people to identify themselves on these little surveys and it helps later when I want to seek clarification.

 This works for me and I’ve used it in some pretty touchy situations.  Let me know what you think.

Get The Money: Part 2: Ditch the Blue Smoke and Mirrors

I probably say it a dozen times in my workshops:  Writing funding proposals is a competitive sport.

And just like in sports, there’s no charity.  There’s no forgiveness of mistakes. There’s no dismissing poor performance as a fluke. There’s no fooling.  Blue smoke and mirrors just don’t work.  Sorry.

It’s serious competition and the result is winner take all.

Most proposals, especially high dollar federal proposals, are scored by independent panels of peer reviewers.  What this means is that experts in the field who have been trained to score proposals are in charge of your fate.  This refers to high level national competitions but much less so to state and local funding.  Foundations run the gamut. Depending on their size, interests, and investment plan, foundations may use a formal point process or put more store in relationships, reputation, and their program officers’ gut about certain projects.

For those of you who write proposals that will be formally scored, here are three tips gleaned from many years in the federal grantwriting business:

 1.  Read the proposal guidelines very carefully.  You’re looking for two things here.  First,  how the points are distributed, e.g. how many for the problem statement, how many for the program design and so on, will tell you what’s important to the funding source.  You need to score high in all sections.  But the point distributions tells you where to focus your planning and preparation efforts. 

Second, what are the specific criteria on which the point allocation will be made?  Proposal guidelines can be tricky, providing information about the required elements in one place and the evaluation criteria in another.  And they don’t always match.  Your job as the proposal writer is to create an integrated list of criteria.  In other words, you are going to respond well to everything.

2. Understand that each proposal section is scored separately.  This means that the problem statement, program design, organizational description are scored independently of each other.  Sure, it’s possible to cross-reference information from one section to another (a good strategy to save space in a document), but you must make sure that each section pretty much stands alone and fully addresses the point criteria.

3.  Look under the rock.  Proposal reviewers, especially federal reviewers, hide their detailed review under a big rock.  What is the big rock?  It’s applicants’ fear of criticism.  Review comments are available upon request.  So, if a panel of three peer reviewers scored your proposal, you can receive all of their scores and comments.  This is the road map for the next proposal.  It will tell you where you were weak and why.  Your competition is combing through those review comments looking for ways to improve next time.  The fools – the ones with their programs’ pockets turned inside out, complaining about the unfairness of funding sources – will write the same failing proposal next time or, if they’re really special, find new ways to fail.

Think about proposal writing like a football team prepares for a game and then reviews a loss.  They watch film.  They play as hard as they possibly can. They watch more film. They analyze their strengths and weaknesses.  They win.  (Yes, sports fans, I know I’m oversimplifying here but you get my point.)

That’s what winning proposal writers do.  I learned this the hard way so I know it’s true.  Good luck!

Strictly from Hunger

Strictly from hunger.  Ever hear this phrase?  You have to be of a certain vintage to have heard it in everyday conversation.  What does it mean?  That something is busted. Nowhere. Just seriously lacking.  Unbeknownst to me, though, until I googled the term this morning, Strictly from Hunger was also the title of an apparently very famous “psychedelic” album made by the Portland, Oregon, group Hunger in 1969. That’s their picture. 

After my husband and I simultaneously used this term to describe something this morning, he dared me to blog about it.  “So what would the actual topic be?” I asked.  “I don’t know.  Just use it as the title and start.”

So here I go — hopefully, there will be enough examples of things that are strictly from hunger that you, too, can use this colorful term in your everyday discourse.

Things that are STRICTLY FROM HUNGER:

1. Using a ballpoint point on easel paper while leading a group discussion.

2. Related to #1 – having crummy, used up markers.

3. Not having coffee at meetings.

4. Running out of copies.

5. LCD projectors with no remote.

6. Occasions where you have to show a great PowerPoint on the equivalent of a white sheet hung up with tacks.

7. Conference luncheons with no dessert.

8. Office Depot pens.

9. Knock-off Play-Doh.  Seriously, if you’re a hotshot meeting facilitator, you know the value of real Play-Doh. Don’t be fooled into buying the cheap stuff at the Dollar Store because it’s…….STRICTLY FROM HUNGER!

10.Running out of food at a community event.  This is STRICTLY FROM HUNGER because it shows failure to plan, over-concern about cost, and unwillingness to deal with leftovers.  Plus, depending on the crowd, it can be very risky.

There. See? Now the next time you see something that’s strictly from hunger, you’ll know what to call it.

Play the Long Game

This morning, my local baseball expert explained to me the logic of Brewers manager Ron Roenicke sticking with the rotation in the 6th game of the National League Championship Series despite Shaun Marcum’s grim performance in Game 2.  “If he (Roenicke) picks somebody else to pitch, Marcum might never recover,” said my expert.  He went on to explain how the Brewers had sacrificed a lot to get Marcum and that passing him over in favor of someone else could essentially damage the goods long term, which in baseball parlance, means next year. 

Read more about Shaun Marcum in ESPN’s article, “Shaun Marcum will try to save season.”  (His or ours?)

http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7107384/marcum-season-hands

Like 99% of the human race, I tend to think about immediate strategy.  What makes sense this very minute – how to get out of the current pickle – how to win a grant or position a project.  All in the here and now.

Sometimes, I think I’ve changed the rotation because of my lack of faith in someone’s ability.  And it wasn’t always a fair assessment.   I may not have had Ron Roenicke’s wisdom to look at the long game, look at the repercussions of expressing lack of faith in someone, worry about the damage that would do to someone’s capabilities down the road, assess the cost long term to the whole enterprise.

They say baseball is a microcosm of life.  I’d say that in this instance, that’s really true.

You live and learn.

Advisory Committees: Don’t Say It if You Don’t Mean It

Let’s face it.  Most people could live without having an advisory committee for their new project.  But maybe the funding source has made it a requirement.  Or maybe the organization always sets up an advisory committee for a major project.  Either way, you’re stuck with putting an advisory committee together and making it work or, let’s be real, making sure it doesn’t bollux up the project or cause you endless grief.

It’s tricky.  I’ve set up advisory committees and been on them.  Here are five things I’ve learned that might help you.

1.  Create a job description for the Advisory Committee that clearly spells out its role as a group and the expectations for individual members.  This is harder than it sounds because people don’t generally want to be on committees that have no power and project administrators are usually reluctant to hand over much responsibility to outsiders.  Find the balance between making the group meaningful and protecting the integrity of your project.

2.  Invite people to serve on the Advisory Committee in a way that makes them feel special. That’s right, a mass email invite will not cut it.  The best strategy is a phone call to talk through the project and the Advisory Committee role, followed by a formal letter (remember letters?) from your executive director.  When I worked at the County, we made sure any Advisory Committee invitation would come from the County Executive.   This made the invitation seem more like an appointment by the CE, elevating its importance.

3.  Start off with a clear idea of what you want the Advisory Committee to do.  Develop a list of particulars.  There is nothing worse than a large group of people flailing around like 5th graders on a science project whining, “What are we supposed to do?”  Avoid that with a good, short work list.

4.  Designate the leadership in advance.  “Who wants to be chairperson?” is a dangerous (and nutty) question you want to avoid.  You know your project and what it needs by way of leadership.  Figure this out ahead of time.  Identify two people to serve as co-chairs, get their buy-in and start the Advisory Committee process with them already installed.  Don’t worry that people will ask you how they were chosen.  Everyone’s too polite to ask.  Thank goodness.

5.  Have robust, satisfying meetings.  Busy, important people are attracted to well-run, content-driven meetings that produce decisions that influence programs and systems.  Conversely, they disappear quickly if meetings are full of endless talking by staff and few opportunities to advise.  Unfortunately, not a lot of project directors pay much attention to the structure and content of meetings; as a result, attendance rapidly devolves in terms of numbers and the level of staff attending (you started with the CEO and now the girl who picks up her dry cleaning is attending).

A good Advisory Committee can be major value added to your project.  But not if you approach it as a throwaway feature of your project.  Your project will be stronger and more sustainable if you have a solid Advisory Committee behind it.  It’s worth the investment!

Long Distance

So much of stamina has to do with not thinking about what you’re afraid of and never looking up to see how far you have to go.  Letting fear in your head generates the kind of panic you can feel in your chest and arms.  Seeing the finish line far in the horizon – or worse not being able to see it at all – drains the confidence right out of you like a plug pulled on a very fast drain.  I say this like I’m a marathon runner or something.

I’m not. 

This picture is of me getting out of the water after a half-mile swim for the Danskin Triathlon in Pleasant Prairie about four years ago. Aside from childbirth, this is about as physical a feat I’ve ever attempted.  And I did it – swam across the lake in about 20 minutes, all the while fighting off my panic about being in deep water, in the weeds, with other women splashing and flailing about, people in kayaks telling me I was off course, and the other side looking like Tinker Bell’s light hovering several miles away.

Diana Nyad – long distance swimmer – talked about how she just focuses on the here and now, breaking a long distance into small chunks and keeping her head full of songs and ideas totally unrelated to the fact that she’s in an ocean with gigantic creatures and currents and chop, not to mention the Portuguese Man o’ Wars that eventually did her in on this last swim.

What I didn’t understand when I was swimming across the lake I have understood for a long time when it comes to work.

Almost since the beginning of my career, I’ve had enormous projects due in short amounts of time.  I have felt the physical panic that comes from looking up to see the finish line pages and pages away.  I’ve been defeated before I started thinking about all the dangers, the mistakes, and the risks.  I’ve frozen in place looking at a blank computer screen, cursor flashing, the outline of a federal proposal in the wee-est possible print on my desk, the points for each section stoking my fear and paralysis.  Sounds bad?  Yeah, I’ve had some bad ones.  But I learned from them.  One step at a time, that’s the trick.

When Diana Nyad described her strategy for swimming 103 miles from Cuba to Key West, it was actually kind of familiar.  But not in a sports way – in a work way.  On a big project, I always break the work into chunks, constantly work a list, keep focused on the task at hand, and don’t think about the sharks and other evils lurking – like bad data, lackadaisical colleagues, and indecipherable proposal requirements. I also make sure I’ve got the best equipment (no computer failures for me), solid connections to great resource people (a carefully tended Rolodex – metaphorically speaking), and a strong personal support system (husband who cooks).

Chunk, chunk, chunk.  Stroke, stroke, stroke.  Don’t look up until it’s time to walk on shore.

It works.  It really does.

Equal Opportunity Isn’t Always Equal

Or another title could be, “Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes.”  Although I resisted it for years, I have finally become convinced of the wisdom of women and minority-owned businesses seeking designation as DBE’s (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise).  My business, Wilberg Community Planning LLC, has been a DBE for several years.  Initially, I’ll be honest with you, I sought DBE status because a local government official said to me, “It would be a lot less hassle to hire you if you were a DBE.”

DBE Decision.  So I went after the designation really as part of a customer service strategy.  This particular government official was a good and steady client who had to negotiate and finagle my contracts through the bureaucracy every time.  Not in my interest to be a high maintenance consultant, so I filed the paperwork.  This isn’t a simple deal, either.  Obtaining DBE status means #1 – you actually have to have a business that’s real and #2 – you have to be able to prove it with things like profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and lists of clients. 

DBE certification also requires sending the certification agency your personal income tax returns.  And then there’s the signatures and the notary and all that stuff.  They don’t let just anyone be a DBE and they don’t make it particularly easy.  Primary reason is that it’s too tempting for majority companies to set up paper DBE firms and game the system.

The Ethics of It.  At first, I was really bothered by the ethics of seeking DBE.  The primary reason was that I didn’t think I was really disadvantaged.  I thought other people/companies were more disadvantaged and deserved the designation but me, being a white woman, not so much.  This was during a period when I really had come to believe that my education and experience erased sexism, bought me a membership in the Good Ol’ Boys Club, and leveled my little playing field.  Hence, no need for DBE.  Right.

Now my thinking has changed.  The playing field — the big playing field — the one where the pros play – won’t get leveled without a major structural adjustment. Here’s my view — male/majority companies have had decades of implicit preference.  If we wait for the normal course of progress to balance things out, it’ll be the next Ice Age.

So What?  So I understand the complaints of students at UW-Madison who are torqued about UW-Madison’s efforts to admit more minority students.  And maybe it isn’t fair that they have to pay the price for decades of majority preference.  But we just can’t wait patiently for things to get better.  We have to make them better.  Last spring, only 3.0% of UW-Madison’s students were African American, another 3.6% were Hispanic. Not good enough.

“Group says UW-Madison admissions favor minorities,” JSOnline, September 13, 2011.  http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/129773483.html