This is my 100th Wilberg Community Planning blog post.  So I figured it needed to be really good.  Deeply meaningful.  Something people will print out and carry in their wallets. 

But it’s not going to be because what I’m thinking about is ‘hair on fire.’  Hair on fire, to me, is about professional hysteria.  It’s about people who should know better going around the bend about a problem – usually before they have all the facts, before they’ve talked to anyone, and before they’ve taken 30 seconds to reason things out.  Hair on fire people (HOFP) can generate a lot of upsetness and take up a lot of time.

Here are 5 ways you can tell if you’re a HOFP:

1. You can’t wait to tell people about a problem and when you do, you make it just a titch bigger than it was when you first discovered it.  A big part of ‘hair on fire’ is thinking you have to be Paul Revere, that you have to get on your horse and start tearing through town spreading the news before anyone else.

2.  You want to make the problem so important and world-changing that it requires a whole group to solve it.  ‘Hair on fire’ is no fun all by your lonesome.  You really need a circle of nodding heads and at least one or two people whose reactions will be more extreme than yours so you look like a moderate.

3. You think that the distance between the situation and the end of the world is less than 5 yards.  When your hair’s on fire, you are convinced that the worst case scenario is staring you in the face.  And you kind of like that idea. 

 4.  You keep gathering evidence to stoke the fire. When you’ve got that ‘hair on fire’ thing going, everything  seems to be related to your problem.  You get gum on your shoe and you find a way to connect it to your calamity.

5.  The problem turns out to be nothing.  Eventually, even if you can’t because you’re a HOFP, someone will take a deep breath and figure out that the tornado actually isn’t headed this way and besides that, it’s petered out to a strong wind.  It’s sad not to have a crisis but 99% of the time, there’s no crisis.  No reason for hair on fire.  Demoralizing for the HOFP.

The whole ‘hair on fire’ thing would just be entertainment for a group if it didn’t take up so much time and often have repercussions way beyond the moment. When people buy into the panic, they do extreme and often dumb stuff they wouldn’t otherwise do. Sometimes, they end up paying for it for a long time.

Know any HOFP?  Give them my 100th blog post to carry in their wallet.

Nothing irks me more than a meeting where the agenda consists of one or two people giving reports while everyone else snaps their gum and fiddles with their Blackberries. These meetings remind me of the townfolk gathering outside the telegraph office to hear Old Ben in his suspenders read a message from the next town over.  Really — is this the purpose of bringing great minds together?  To sit and listen to someone ‘read the news’ that could have easily been disseminated via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a bunch of other new social media that I don’t even know the names of yet?

Me, personally?  I think it’s a bad use of time and talent.  Meetings without a problem-solving purpose are a waste of time. Those with such a purpose can be extraordinarily fun, collegial, and productive. 

An Alternative

A few months ago, the Milwaukee Continuum of Care established a special work group to develop a Coordinated Entry system for the homeless services system, including shelters, transitional housing, and homeless prevention services.  Recognizing that work groups can quickly devolve into three people with no better alternative than to show up, the chair (Tim Baack) and I patched together a strategy that has really worked.  Here are some of the elements:

1.  Homework.

Work group members were asked to interview people in other cities about their coordinated entry (central intake) systems.  Someone interviewed the central intake program in Dayton, someone else called Kalamazoo, and so on.  Results were shared with the group in oral and written form.  This dispersed the responsibility for information-gathering and synthesis to the whole group. 

2.  Visioning

A visioning process is really about having everyone say what’s on their mind.  We did this early to try to surface some of the misgivings and apprehensions that shelter operators and others might have about a coordinated entry process.  When their concerns were recognized as legitimate by others, they became problems to solve rather than little land mines that would blow us up later.

3.  Decision List

We came up with a list of questions that had to be answered in order to establish Coordinated Entry.  Every work group member was asked to submit his/her answers to the chair so they could be recorded on a decision spreadsheet.  At each meeting, we tackle 2 or 3 questions, not closing the discussion until there is genuine agreement on the answer.  When a question is answered, we go on to the next, with no circling back (well, so far).  Having the decision list puts the end in sight – essentially when we answer the last question we will have designed the Coordinated Entry system.

4.  Cookies

The work group chair, Tim Baack of Pathfinders, sets the tone for the meeting with his preparation and his presence.  He is there to greet people as they arrive.  He has a fresh pot of coffee and a platter of cookies.  Agendas and meeting materials are at everyone’s place.  He is glad to see everyone and they feel welcome.  He guides the discussion but doesn’t rush it.  People are heard.  That’s huge.

When Coordinated Entry gets established, it will have a lot of fingerprints on it (and a few cookie crumbs). People will look back at the hard work they did and remember it as being challenging and energizing.  They’ll still go to the big meetings and listen to Old Ben read the latest telegram but they’ll be looking around the room for a problem to solve and some fun to have.

Twice this week, I was called into projects because the participants had let things get too complicated.  Their planning groups had started difficult projects, let the doors and windows open to any and every idea, and were now baffled and stuck. 

For a long time, I’ve been using the phrase, “Let’s make things simple first.   We can make them complicated later.”  Clients usually think that this is a planning device – something learned in graduate school or fancy seminars on one coast or the other.  Nope.

I need to make things simple so I can understand them.  Because I often get invited into projects after they’ve become knotted up like cheap necklaces in the jewelry box, my first worry is figuring out how to not sound like an idiot.  So I ask myself, “What’s the simple thing here?  What’s the most important thing? Where’s the easiest place to start?”

So I pull out the really sophisticated planning tools:  making an agenda, keeping minutes, developing a logic model.  These are all  things that I know and trust after years in this business but sometimes seem  too rudimentary for high-flying professionals.  The funny thing?  How often mention of these simple devices calms the worried and disorganized. 

Seriously, here are some things that I think really help people in a group get their heads on straight and work more productively:

• Go back to the original purpose of the group — what was it that the group was convened to accomplish.  Let’s get that on paper and make sure we all remember the starting purpose and agree that it’s still valid.
• Stress the importance of the same people staying involved over time.  Often a high-powered planning process will devolve to less influential staff.  This next generation process is good and one to be nurtured, but tough planning processes require decision-makers in the room.  And the same decision-makers over time.
• Have a designated facilitator, someone without a stake in anything other than the success of the group.  Let that facilitator manage the agenda, the discussion, and the work products.
• Establish a group norm of  discussion, consensus-building, agreement, and consolidation. Consolidate gains made at each meeting to avoid circling back at the next meeting.
• Create that logic model. It’s linear, spare, overly simplistic, and incredibly effective – the logic model gets everyone on the same page because there’s only one page to be on.  Distilling the group’s goals and outcomes into a simple logic model format of goals, objectives (activities), outputs, and outcomes sweeps away discussion debris and gets people focused fast.

I had a boss once who referred to endless planning sessions as “being lost in hedgerow country.”  We’ve all been there.  Maybe with some of these ideas, you can be the one to cut through the maze.

I’m a consultant.  So a lot of what I do and say comes from the comfort of the sidelines.  I watch things.  I analyze.  I suggest.  But I’m rarely in the line of fire.

The past several months I’ve watched a friend (and a client by the way) stand squarely in the line of fire.  I’m talking about John Chianelli, until yesterday, the administrator of Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health Division.  I’ve worked with John for many years - in the Continuum of Care (Milwaukee’s homeless coalition, on the reform of GAMP (General Assistance Medical Program – now known as BadgerCare Core), and in facilitating strategic planning sessions for the leadership team at BHD and assisting in the effort to integrate the AODA and mental health treatment systems into a more coherent, welcoming system for everyone.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done and proud of my association with John Chianelli.  He’s a gifted public administrator – talented, committed, energetic.  This recent situation is a tragedy all round.

Anyway, despite my great respect for John and the work BHD has done to reform itself, I am really troubled by how they’ve handled this crisis.  They stonewalled.  Something very bad happened on their watch and they battoned down the hatches and went mum. 

BHD runs a public psychiatric hospital.  This is a challenging job with a lot of potential for error – especially when resources are scarce.  It’s not as if the public might not understand that a mistake happened.  Mistakes happen in this hard world.  But maybe on the advice of lawyers, maybe on their own counsel, BHD slammed the door shut.  No one called a press conference.  No one came out with the facts of the story.  No one said they were sorry.

This last element is the sticking point for me.  When little Christopher Thomas was killed at the hands of his kinship caretaker, the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare dummied up, looked at us (the public) stonefaced as if they had nothing to explain and nothing to apologize for.  I’m not afraid to admit it – Christopher Thomas’ death made me weep.  It also moved me to become a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) to stick up for a kid in foster care.  But back to BHD.

What I wanted to hear from Milwaukee County was an apology along with an acknowledgement that something went terribly wrong and needed to be fixed. 

BP figured this out too late — taking the advice of their lawyers until the entire world condemned their rotten behavior in the Gulf before and after the spill.  Same with Toyota.  Stonewall.  Denial.  Silence.  And then the avalanche of criticism and hatred.  The New York Times’ recent article, “In Case of Emergency:  What Not to Do,” lays it all out.  When there’s a catastrophe, disclose it immediately.  Come clean.  Be clear on what will be done to avoid a recurrence.  Own up.

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/in-case-of-emergency-what-not-to-do/

It’s not just strategy — gee, if BHD had done the Tylenol thing, it would all be ok — it’s also about public accountability and transparency.  And being and feeling sorry when something bad happens.  And meaning it.  I wish BHD administrators had done that — so they could enlist the public in their efforts to reform the mental health system instead of fueling the years’ old fires of suspicion and conflict.  Sad thing.  But bigger sad than just a couple of people — sad for all of us as a town.

There are things I’ve done to facilitate group discussions that, in retrospect, make me roll my eyes and yearn for witness protection.  Even more astonishing than the cockamamie things I asked people to do is the fact that 99.9% of the time, people would do them!

Without flinching,

• The head of UMOS agreed to write a ‘pressing community need’ on a balloon and tack it to the wall to be popped later by the expert facilitator as we established need priorities.
• Waukesha County’s budget director along with his key staff wrote their ‘most important outcomes’ on paper airplanes and sailed them at me and my co-facilitator in a flurry which had us scrambling around the floor trying to pick them up and read them.  (We planned pre-flight but not post-flight.)
• A police chief used crayons to draw his favorite summertime memory as a boy which had him on his bike in the hills overlooking his town and then label the picture “Lucky.”  (This was actually one that worked pretty well – helping a new Youth Collaborative harken back to the golden days of freedom and playfullness of their youth.  Unfortunately, they then went on to plan more structured activities for kids.  Oh well.)
• Emergency shelter directors constructed their ‘visions’ of how the Shelter Task Force should operate using (what else?) Tinkertoys.  (Didn’t work – they all looked like spaceships.)

In addition to this kind of stuff, I went through a period of taking little jars of Play-Doh to every meeting.  I probably have more Play-Doh in my office right this second that Milwaukee’s biggest day care — because, you know or maybe you don’t, that you really can’t use Play-Doh twice.  Has to be new.

Anyway, participants in a planning meeting will generally do whatever the facilitator asks them to do if the facilitator conveys a genuine commitment to the process and a real enthusiasm for the results.  If the facilitator equivocates, then people will hang back.  I witnessed someone at a large gathering not so long ago open the meeting by promising a great icebreaker and then, surprisingly, losing his nerve at the last minute.  If you’re going to do something different, you have to plunge in like you believe it. 

Now I pretty much stick with the simple and striking.  Like this ball.  This is possibly the most enticing ball on the planet.  So I use it to do introductions or I’ll just have it sitting on the table available for people to  pick up and fiddle with.  People like it that I thought to bring some toys; most people will get into it.  It helps them play while being serious.  Takes the edge off.  Gives them something to laugh about.  Makes the room warmer and happier. 

Sometimes, though, people gather to plan or discuss or strategize and they are just too up tight to pick up that ball.  The ball will sit there the entire session.  Like it was made of crystal.  Everyone is afraid of the ball, ignores it, looks at their hands.  When that happens, witness protection is looking better and better.