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.

When something terrible happens, we want to do something to prevent a recurrence.  A baby dies while sleeping with his mother and local officials and the public at large want to see a strategy presented that will keep such an awful thing from happening again.  The rate of HIV/AIDS increases among young gay African American men and a new program targeted at this group emerges.  This effort to jump in quickly to try to prevent another accident, another death, and more community sorrow is laudable but flawed.  Here’s why.

We can spend a lot of time and money trying to solve the wrong problem.  The diagnostic process is very abbreviated when a group of people want to see action right away.  “I don’t care what we do,” I’ve heard more than once.  We just need to have some action on this. Send the community a message that we’re going to do something about it.  No one wants another study group or task force, they’ll say.  Let’s just get moving!

My experience is that people hardly ever really know what needs to be done.  Faced with a disturbing community event or trend, say an 11-year old waving a gun around on a local playground or the smoking rate among young adults suddenly jumping several percentage points, the leadership, including the content experts, will assume that they know a) the origins of the problem; and b) how to fix it.  More over, they will have a sense of certainty that will push all alternative explanations and ideas into a very small corner. This is a mistake. In order to solve a problem, we need to understand its origins. 

For example, if we respond the the 11-year old with the gun by implementing yet another violence prevention curriculum, will that prevent other kids from bringing weapons to school?  No, it won’t, unless we spend the time figuring out why kids think it’s a good idea to bring a gun to school.  First of all, why is there a gun at home where the child can reach it?  Second, what was this child’s and most children’s thoughts when they bring guns to school?  Are they wanting to impress, joke around, scare somebody?  Are they being bullied?  (This is our very favorite explanation now.)  Are they the bullier?  Is the point of intervention the child?  Or is it the parent?  If we up the violence prevention curriculum and there is still a gun lying on the dresser at home, have we changed this child’s mindset?  I don’t know.

It is very possible to have wonderful programs with great outcomes that have little or no effect on a community problem.  It happens all the time.  It happens because program designers, funders, and implementers are often too sure of themselves and their solutions.  Even an evidence-based approach is no insurance that a program will have an impact on the community even if the program’s participants have positive outcomes.  For example, taking our gun example, after a violence prevention curriculum, 80% of students thought it was a bad idea to bring a gun to school. Is this success?  Community change?  Not if the young person is having this positive thought while gunshots are being heard down the street.

The tricky thing about program design – deciding what to do – is that it requires time, patience, diligence, and courage.  New questions need to be asked of different types of people living in different neighborhoods and having different reasons for what they do and think.  By assuming we know what to do and how to do it, we sacrifice real impact for speed and the illusion of change.  Time to try a different approach.

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.

Today was about as much fun as planning can get – neighborhood survey to gather data for the Neighborhood Revitalization Strategy Area Plan that we are developing for the City of Sheboygan’s southside neighborhood. Great fall day.  A bunch of volunteers – including the mayor of Sheboygan, the police chief, and a couple of alderpersons.  Terrific and great looking survey instrument (thanks to the Urban Institute and Tessera Design).  Here – take a look:  SheboyganSurvey2010    Serious donuts – and I mean, high time donuts with icing, sprinkles and no apologies.  Volunteers hitting the pavement for 3 hours and coming back with data and STORIES.

• About the house with no foundation being held up by who knows what kind of wood framing;
• About the lady who answered the door in her nightgown smoking a cigarette whose husband just died but yes, she’d participate in the survey anyway;
• About the man roasting hot peppers over a grill so he could make salsa later;
• About the woman who invited the surveyors to come back for lunch;
• About the neighbors on one side of the street complaining bitterly about neighborhood teens; and those on the other side thinking they were no problem at all;
• About people being pretty unhappy with a lot of things in their lives but liking where they were living and intending to stay.

Best of all was the surveyors sitting around afterward yakking about what they’d heard from residents.  Swapping stories, comparing their findings.  It was easy to see they’d had fun.  They liked getting the straight scoop from people.  It got me jazzed for the next step – getting the data analyzed and ready for the Stakeholder Group to digest and use to develop the NRSA plan.  Real data – fresh from the street.  Damn.  What could possibly be better to launch a planning process.  Heaven.

Plus SHEBOYGAN BRATS.  We asked for the best place for brats and we were sent to Brachman’s and, oh my goodness, they were incredible. 

Good day, great people, terrific data.  And insanely good brats.   Not so bad for a Saturday in October.

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.

There’s a big risk I will start sounding like Lewis Black in this post.  I have had it up to here with ho-hum service providers who haven’t felt a sense of urgency since the last time they stood in a slow fast food lane.

It’s one thing when the waiting customers are adults.  Another matter altogether when we’re talking about children.  Because children – you see – live in a different time dimension, sort of like dogs.  Every hour is a day, every day is a month – waiting ticks away on a bigger clock for kids.  At the same time kids’ brains are developing at warp speed and their emotions are careening around street lights and space shuttles, adults are yawning their way through the 3 hour process necessary to schedule the next meeting in six months.

And kids?  They don’t really complain about it.  They don’t know too much about consumer hotlines and ombudsman programs.  They show up where the adults take them.  And use the only tools they have to make themselves heard including silence, ‘acting out’, and taking off, if they’re older.  They don’t know what they need and they don’t get it about taking a number.  They are told to rely on adults to figure it out but the adults have a lot of other pressing matters like referral forms and reports and collaborative team meetings.

The cynical part of me thinks that this dull, uninspired, limp culture is part and parcel of the for-profit helping industry whose interests are better served by kids staying a mess rather than getting healthy.  Maybe I’m wrong — everyone’s really super committed but it’s just hard to move quickly and affirmatively.  Sure.

Maybe it’ll all work out.  I just have to be patient.

This week someone thought they had to explain to me that ‘kickin’ it’ meant hanging out.  Thanks.  Gee, I thought people were actually going out back and kicking something.  Each other?  A ball?  Please.

One thing I know about — is ‘kickin’ it.’  Chillaxin’ – I’m pretty good at that, too. I’m also not bad at hangin’ loose (when I’m not hangin’ tight) and just plain chillin’. 

I got my start early.

In a real inner tube.

From a tractor.

So there.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with this post.  You see, the post was going to be about gardening – about how some people are good gardeners because they can commit to consistent effort and other people are, well, like me.  But I write about what I’m thinking about and what I’m thinking about is race.

So.  Cultural competence.  Does it go both ways?  If I am the only white person in a training program or a job or a school, do people worry about dealing with me in a culturally competent way?  And if they did (worry, that is), what would that mean?  What would be done differently?  In what ways would people take my white origins into account and how would they, or would they, modify their language or behavior? Can a white person wonder if something is culturally competent for him or herself?  Does the concept have validity for a white person in an African American world, say?

Of course, the issue of cultural competence is very difficult, made more complex by institutional racism and the pervasiveness and persistence of white privilege.  Thinking historically, it would be nonsensical to assume that the need for cultural competence runs both ways for that very reason — the embeddedness of racism in American society.  But what about in in a day to day sense, in the sense of a white teenager, who because of a variety of factors, is plucked from her family in a white environment and placed in an African American home, school, and neighborhood? 

Is it safe to assume that this kid will be well-received and that any feelings of fear or apartness or differentness will be quickly abated by people’s kindness?  That’s what I’m hoping.  And that years from now when she recounts the experience she had living in the African American community, it will be with pride and fond memories.  I want to believe that she won’t feel judged or marginalized and that her entire cultural identity won’t be comprised of stereotypes about white people.

I don’t have any answers and I’m not judging anybody.  I’m just wondering, that’s all – mostly because I know this kid and really care about her, but also because I think it’s an interesting and challenging set of questions to ponder.

And the picture?  It’s the product of one of the two days a year that I garden.  Day one is when I go to Stein’s and buy a bunch of plants.  Day two is when I find the machete and clear out the garden on the side of our house which looks spectacular at the moment…..although I have notoriously low standards in this field of endeavor.

A project is a thing of beauty in your mind’s eye.  It’s the implementation of it that’s the bear.  Yesterday’s project was repainting our sauna.   It looks like a little house – about 9′ by 15′ with a peak that you need an extension ladder to reach. 

The project started out hopeful and cheery like most projects do.  Using red paint helped.  Looks new.  Going fast.  Lots of jokes between me and my painting partner.  This is great – we’re going to be out of here in an hour. 

Dry wood sucking up paint like crazy.  Very hot sun and hotter wind that blows the paint off our brushes on to our arms.  Weeds in the way.  And so are the remnants of a Northwest Indian tribe totem pole which fell over in a Lake Superior storm about ten years ago. (Is this an odd story yet?)

Anyway, so we’re getting tired and very hot.  Painting partner sees a little hornet’s nest.  Good reason to skip the two slats right below.  First shortcut.  Last side has the weeds and the totem which of course we shouldn’t move out of respect to its what? imminent total deterioration? Second shortcut.

Now at least one of us is nearing heat stroke.  Spectator saunters over and suggests we just paint the bare spots.  “That’s crazy.  It’ll look like polka dots.”  The sauna was already red, so I actually considered that option. The two of us are now slapping paint on the last side wherever we can reach and starting a little chorus of “nobody’s going to see this side anyway.”  Which is perilously close to a really defeated “who gives a crap, haven’t we worked hard enough, the rest of it looks ok, let’s just bag it.”

And I realize that this surrender to good enough happens a lot when two people are working together.  It’s like cutting class — it’s contagious.  What the heck?  We could be drinking a beer and admiring the front of this damn sauna – where it actually looks pretty good.  If one person isn’t a high quality hardliner, two people will talk themselves into doing just enough to get by. 

Does it matter?  Sometimes.  Not everything needs to be perfect.  But some things do.

Still.  Sauna looks pretty good.  Don’t you think?

Jan Wilberg Janice Wilberg