Listen to the People

Stress and strain, conflict and consternation are nothing new with important community projects that involve a lot of different interests, a ton of money, and little agreement about which problem to solve. This was highlighted by last week’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article looking at the city’s latest effort to reduce infant mortality. In an article entitled, “Program to reduce infant mortality slow to get going,” published as part of the newspaper’s Empty Cradles: Confronting Our Infant Mortality Crisis, reporter Crocker Stephenson tells us two stories. One story is about Tia Love, an African American mom who received intensive home visitation during her pregnancy and after her son was born and who could now well be the ambassador for the program throughout the country.

Contrast that to the tremendous frustration of the second story – the inability of local interests to form an effective and sustainable coalition to manage several million dollars in funding from the Wisconsin Partnership. Of the things we do well in Milwaukee, heaping blame may be at the top of the list. In this case, the blame goes to Patricia McManus, PhD., head of the Black Health Coalition, and an intense, uncompromising, very experienced leader in the African American community. Her complaint, as described in the article, is that the local coalition effort was not being run by the community but by outside interests. She is portrayed as the spoiler, the one responsible for the Wisconsin Partnership’s decision to pull back its substantial investment.

This kind of story is familiar to me – the faltering and weakening of coalition efforts. Usually, these are community initiatives that start with great fanfare and, often, the promise of significant  financial reward once a plan is developed. All the ‘right’ people are called to the table and they’re told to come up with a plan and a consensus. And it’s a bust. Maybe there’s a plan but there’s no consensus. Why is that?

It’s not about a person. It’s about the process. If the process is not genuine, it will fail. Either we can blame the person who keeps pointing out that it’s not a genuine process,who, in this case, I think is probably Dr. McManus, or we can figure out how to make community planning processes genuine.

It’s this simple: The technical expertise cannot lead the planning process; instead it must inform a process led by people with lived experience. In other words,  the consultant or the technical expert must essentially say to the group: How can I help you decide what to do? What information should I gather? Where should I look for answers? How do you want to make decisions?

When the technical experts lead a community planning process, everyone but them is disenfranchised. And this makes the non technical experts, aka the community, very, very angry. They feel patronized, minimized, and marginalized. They rightfully perceive that their lived experienced is viewed as less valuable than the experts’ technical knowledge. It’s conflict from the jump.

There’s an old adage in youth development work and it is, “Kids don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” In providing technical support to a community planning effort, the ‘expert’ needs to demonstrate that he/she cares by keeping his/her mouth shut and listening. Of all the things a consultant is asked to do, this may be the toughest. Sit down, listen, take a back seat, understand where people who have the lived experience you lack think the process should go, and help them get there.

Everything I talk about on this blog I’ve learned the hard way. That’s why I know whereof I speak. Signing off this fine February day,

Jan.

 Full link to article: http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/program-to-reduce-infant-mortality-slow-to-get-going-r68pjvo-191558341.html

Bridging the Gap in Group Facilitation

One of the toughest jobs as a group facilitator is to help connect people who have widely different perspectives on the same problem. In my work, it is very common to have the representatives of a major system in the same room with its consumers or other community representatives.  It’s the child welfare system administrator and a foster parent serving on the same committee or the head of a city’s economic development authority and the owner of the corner QuikStop. The systems person is thinking about budgets, outcomes, policies and procedures. The grassroots person is thinking about what happened in his/her situation yesterday, about his foster child’s problems in school or her grocery store’s inability to compete with the big box stores.

Ostensibly, the system person and the grassroots person are focused on the same topic but they rarely speak the same language. The distance between the ‘view at 30,000 feet’ and ‘boots on the ground’ is evident in how people identify problems and consider solutions. It’s even evident in the terminology they use and, most fundamentally, in the level of trust and respect they have for each other.

Good communication and problem-solving is impossible without a basic level of trust and respect. How does a group facilitator encourage this? Here are some ideas.

First and foremost, the group facilitator must be open and transparent about the process. This means saying the same things to the system representative as he/she says to the grassroots person. When one faction decides the facilitator is in the pocket of the other faction, credibility is lost.  This can be a fine line to walk.

Second, the group facilitator needs to establish a plan to proceed with the group’s work that is agreed upon by everyone. This will serve as the anchor for discussion and interaction. When things get confusing or stalled, the group can return to the plan. Work the plan and stick with the process are two of my favorite facilitation sayings.

Third, the group facilitator has to create an environment where conflict can make a productive contribution to the group’s work.  When people of differing views can openly express their opinions, talk through their concerns, and find areas of common cause, their group’s work will be 100 times better. Key point here is that the facilitator can’t be the intermediary in conflict; people have to learn to talk to each other.

Fourth, when there is white water (the going gets tough), the group facilitator finds the threads of agreement and weaves them together.  The facilitator encourages everyone to find the solution within the group and resist the urge to go outside the group to someone (do an end run) who can mandate a solution.

Fifth, the group facilitator helps people in the group establish friendships and connections that will live past the group.  This means the QuikStop owner will always feel a special connection to the economic development honcho in his/her town. It’s hard to attack a friend (not impossible, but hard) so this bodes well for their long-term working relationship.

It’s tough and tricky being the facilitator for a group of big picture/small picture folks.  Key words for success: careful, calm, neutral, and, most of all, forward-thinking.

Embrace Your Demons

Embrace your demons, everyone of them.  It’s because you have them that you have anything at all to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.

Professionally, progress and success are all about embracing your demons – organizing the project that seems way too big to manage, writing the giant proposal with so little time, shaping a work group with a bad history and no clear direction, making a speech you are afraid to make, doing something you haven’t done before.

Professional safety lives as a small, stuffed teddy bear along with the blankie you carried around when you were three years old.  Many of us keep the teddy bear and blankie at the bottom of the briefcase as constant reminders not to venture to far into the unknown and unsafe, to the land where the big demon, aka failure, lives, growling and scary under a bridge. If we never walk (or run) over the bridge, we never have to risk meeting up with the demon.

A richer, more productive professional life, I believe, comes from regularly doing something you are afraid to do.  By this I mean, something that you know in your gut is a bit ahead of your learning curve, an activity, job, or speech that is not ridiculous to undertake but clearly beyond the current boundaries of your comfort zone. 

Sometimes this means working with people that you can’t stand or worse, don’t like you!  It’s almost reflex to go the other way if such people will be involved in one of your efforts.  But that’s what those ‘demons’ expect – that you’ll be too afraid to walk across the bridge. 

Whether it’s people, projects, or presentations, surprise your demons this Thanksgiving by giving them a big hug and a wet sloppy kiss.  They live to make you better professionally but only if you embrace them. 

Buck Up, Buttercup: How to Handle Bad News

There are two kinds of people in the world:  those who want to know they have cancer and those who want to pretend that the stomach ache they’ve had for six months is about eating too many hot peppers. Which type are you?  More to the point, which type is your organization?

Some organizations will do anything to avoid hearing bad news.  They’ll eschew feedback on projects, proposals, and presentations for fear that someone will say something negative.  They’ll delay program reports and outcome analysis sensing that results won’t be good enough and funders will withdraw their support.  They’ll let staff or board conflict smolder, deciding it’s easier to paper over problems than put them on the table where they could be examined and solved.

This behavior engenders a type of organizational pretending that can drive good staff people and board members to distraction.  What they know to be real and what the leadership of the organization is recognizing as real become wildly divergent.  It can be crazy-making.

Of course, people and organizations can be so attuned to bad news that the downside ends up being all they see.  Everything is cancer in this scenario.

But assuming you’re in a relatively normal organization situation, how do you help your colleagues learn to handle bad news, to sit up straight like grown-ups and not dissolve to tears like the little man in the picture.  Here’s some ideas for working with your organization’s staff as a team:

Practice.  Start with honestly surfacing and solving little problems.  Use staff and board meetings to identify situations that may be interfering with the organization’s success and implement a process to solve them.  The NIATx process improvement methodology is a time-tested strategy to identify problems, test new approaches, and measure results.  Very valuable.

Escalate.  Increase the level of difficulty and complexity of the problems to be surfaced and addressed.

Depersonalize. Disconnect people from problems.  For many people, their entire identity is tied up in who they are on the job.  The demarcation between their own identity and that of the organization is lost; in essence, they are merged.  In this situation, surfacing a problem in an organization is immediately threatening personally to the person who thinks he/she is responsible. A problem that is not entangled in someone’s ego has a much greater chance of being solved.

Demystify. Hidden problems grow horns.  Exposed problems shrink in importance and impact.  Seriously, what you don’t know when you run an organization is going to hurt you as a staff person and your organization as a healthy entity a whole lot more than what you do know.  If you know you have cancer, you can go to an oncologist, get treatment, live through it, and go on charity walks to raise money for cancer research.  If you don’t know you have cancer but think you do, you can just stew and wring your hands while it gets worse.

Improve.  Every problem that is solved makes an organization stronger and healthier.  Not only does the practice of problem-solving exercise important team-building and technical skills, it drives improved quality – in everything from direct service to financial management to organizational behavior.

The nonprofit landscape is littered with organizations that refused to face their problems at a time when they could actually be solved.  They waited until Father Death was actually sitting with his sickle in the waiting room and then decided that it was time to problem-solve.  Too late, my friends.  The time is at the beginning when you still think the stomach ache that’s ruining your day could actually be the result of last night’s habanero peppers.

Was It Worth It? How to Create Metrics for Events

Events are terrific.  If you’ve worked for a nonprofit organization, you have probably been involved in planning, staffing or cleaning up after an event.  It could be a neighborhood clean-up or back to school fair.  An event can be a promotion for a new program or a way to identify potential clients. 

When I managed Community Involvement at the Social Development Commission, we put on a slew of events, gave away thousands of hotdogs and neighborhood swag, like tote bags and refrigerator magnets with community service phone numbers on them. One communitywide planning event had an auditorium full of neighborhood residents doing a conga line through the aisles to the beat of an Indian drum. This made us all feel terrific.

But what did it really mean?  Most of the time, event organizers/sponsors use three metrics to decide if an event was worth the investment: 1) number of participants; 2) number of problems with the event; and 3) how happy we feel.  An event that fills the room, doesn’t have a catastrophe like running out of food, and leaves us humming while we clean up is an absolute success.

Is it possible to do a better, more substantive evaluation of an event?  Absolutely!

Here are some ideas to consider:

1.  Survey participants.  Yes, I know.  No one wants to interrupt the Kumbaya moment with a clipboard and a checklist.  A quick, post-card survey with 3 to 5 questions can provide actual data that can be used to determine what participants thought was valuable, what other information or resources they might like, and what potential impact the event will have on their lives.  The West Allis Health Department conducts an annual event called Two for the Show which is a developmental screening with various ‘stations’ to assess toddlers’ speech, large and small muscle development, and other developmental milestones.  This is one of the Health Department’s primary ways of identifying children in need of Birth to Three services so they are able to track identification of children with developmental challenges as they show up in the Birth to Three program.  Over and above that, however, the Health Department conducts a survey of each Two for the Show parent. Very smart strategy – makes funders happy and helps shape the next event.

2.  Service utilization. This is a variation of ‘tell them Fred sent you.’  Since many events, like the events we used to hold at SDC, are geared toward encouraging program participation in programs like Head Start or energy assistance, it is very helpful to connect participants’ attendance at the event with the eventual enrollment in a program.  This can be as simple as handing someone a card and asking them to mention the event when they call the program and offering some benefit for doing so.  This could be expedited enrollment or a small premium like a McDonald’s gift certificate.  Anything that helps you as the event organizer connect your event to later program participation is a big plus as you seek support for next year’s effort. 

3.  Tracking What Happens Next.  Events are often the vehicle for addressing a community need or problem.  Generally, the event creates several work groups with the hopes that when people leave they are willing to work on specific tasks in order to achieve an agree-upon goal.  Very often, big community organizing events are unable to translate to dynamic, robust work groups and so the energy and promise of the event just dissipates.  Vision Sherman Park, a tremendously inspirational community planning event that brought together observant Jews, African American, and White residents for a day of planning and dialogue, had a less vibrant transition to work groups.  That experience toward me that assessment of the follow-up is critical.  What happened afterward?  Who stayed involved?  Who didn’t?  What can be improved next time?

Ultimately, it’s all about a critical eye that looks beyond the momentary happiness of a ‘successful’ event to examine its true value and impact.  It’s not difficult, but it takes take planning and commitment.  When your next event rolls around, try to take a harder look at the issue of metrics.  I think it will pay off for you.

Working and Working Hard

When you’re in business a long time, you have to find ways to change.  Look what happened to Kodak.  The world evolves.  Clients need different services and new skills.  If a company doesn’t change in the right direction at the right time, it becomes yesterday’s news, last year’s hit.

Wilberg Community Planning has been around 17 years.  It was established two days after I left my dream job at an agency temporarily overrun with bad decision-making on the part of its board of directors.  I wept for a day and printed new business cards on the next.  It was a hard transition but I never looked back. 

This year, I made a similar decision and that was to leave a coalition for which I’d been the primary consultant for ten years.  A tough decision but one driven by the knowledge that my business needed to move on to new things, that to stay in the same position was making my business a Kodak.  That wasn’t good enough for me.  So I left without any quick replacements in terms of new business.

But, of course, just as happened when I first printed those business cards, business just started turning up.  A major, breathtakingly hard federal proposal that took months to put together, an opportunity to create an innovative evaluation system for a small, beautifully community-based organization, involvement in two major new redesign efforts in county government, and other new, different clients practically coming out of nowhere.  And then there has been a lot of training I’ve conducted over the past several months through the Nonprofit Center and my association with Planners and Grantwriters Roundtable.

In other words, I’m working and working hard but instead of that edge that I felt getting duller and duller, my new edge is sharp and focused.  Sometimes, you have to quit something to get other things going.  Or as I like to say, once in a while, you need to go out and come back in again.

Start over.  Be sharp.  Be keen.

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.