Shift gears.  Last week I went with Joe Volk and Steve Falek to meet with members of the Milwaukee Journal Editorial Board to convince them to support the Continuum of Care’s 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness.  We went up the elevator, past a sprawling newsroom, and into a paneled conference room complete with a portrait of Solomon Juneau and there we made our pitch for their support.  It wasn’t hard — it’s not easy to be against ending homelessness.  The meeting, along with a terrific plan generated by a tireless group of CoC members, resulted in a great editorial two days later complete with a picture of a homeless man straight from central casting.  

So this is the high and low – the up and down – the good and the bad.  Certainly the exhileration I felt at the Editorial Board dissipated when I learned the details of the Thompson family murders. But standing back, I’m seeing circles – overlapping circles with the family in the middle, various systems, neighbors, teachers, and social workers touching their circle, but maybe the Editorial Board experience and what it represents in terms of Milwaukee’s opinion leadership and power structure just ever so faintly touching the Thompson’s world.

If I don’t get it, the Editorial Board probably doesn’t either.  And although they are closer to the ground, I bet the social workers and parole officers and the teachers know about the day to day, they are still at a loss as to what to do to prevent this in the future.

We don’t know why those young people would murder Rachel and her kids any more than we really know why people are homeless in a country with so much wealth.  It’s going to make my head ache extra hard to hear Charlie Sykes and his ilk jump up with the ’she should’ve known better’ or he should’ve worked harder’ insta-analysis.  And the inevitable, ‘this organization or this system failed.’

The fact of the matter – and I see this every day – is that the people who run homeless shelters, police officers, juvenile court workers, social workers – they’re all doing the best they can and trying to make things better.  They might not know the answers but they keep at it. And I guess that’s what we do at a time like this.  We just keep at it.

Because I had been in business before, I knew I could rev up the engine and get going again.  I likened myself to Rockford, the private detective living in a Malibu trailer who printed up business cards in his car on his way to con someone into giving up some valuable info.  I could do it all – planning, grantwriting, research, community involvement, all the things I loved doing.  Yep.  I could do it all and fry it up in a pan.   And that’s pretty much what I’ve done.

So because I’ve been around a while, I get a lot of calls from people who’ve decided to become consultants.  Usually, they’ve just been down-sized, are in a state of shock, and on the rebound, so to speak. They’re looking for a quick way to make it look like they chose to leave their job.  If I know them or know the person who told them to call me, we’ll have coffee so they can “pick my brain,” one of my least favorite terms but people always seem to think it’s a nice thing to say.  So I get asked lots of questions — usually the first is, “How much do you charge?”  Followed by “How do you get business?”  And, my favorite, “How hard do you have to work?”

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, ever likes my answers.  Sometimes they start telling me what they would do different.  And I think, ok, as if. Nine times out of ten, I never hear from or about these folks again.  Why?  They find a job.  Essentially they weren’t interested in the heavy lifting and unglamorous parts of running a business – the fact that while you might be master of your own ship, you’re likely to be the only person on the boat. They liked the idea of being on their own – the freedom, self-determination, and the huge fees they felt entitled to.

It’s kind of like getting married. There’s the idea of getting married and then there’s the day to day.  Having a successful business, like having a successful marriage, is about playing the long game.  It’s about being totally invested (not secretly considering options), optimistic, confident, and cheerful.  In marriage, as in business, it helps to have a short memory and start over every day.  In both marriage and business, you have to learn to quickly recover from failure and disappointment because the weight of those things can drown you.  Deciding this is IT – that you are totally committed to a course of action, whether it’s marriage or business, frees you up to do wonderful things.  For real.  I can prove it with 15 years of a great business and 26 years of a really great marriage.  Lucky to have both — but neither dropped from the sky.  As my father would say, “successful people make their own luck.”

My apology teacher was a former priest – my boss at the Social Development Commission.  Although sometimes overly responsible (apologizing for every bad thing that happened in the building), he knew how to apologize quickly and turn the discussion to making amends.  In other words, it was all about the product — not his ego. 

This is what I learned from that:  People will judge you on your overall competence – not on a single event.  If you’ve made a mistake — even if it’s a huge one — it’s how you handle the clean-up that is the critical factor.

• Make sure you understand what mistake you actually made before you start apologizing.  And don’t do that stupid  “Gee, I’m sorry you’re upset” thing that they teach all the customer service people.
• Apologize in the same venue where the problem arose.  By this, I mean if you made a mistake involving one person in a large group setting — in my opinion, you have to apologize in the large group.
• Apologize, explain specifically what you think the offense/mistake was, and ask how to make amends.  “I’m sorry. I didn’t get this survey instrument approved before I started doing interviews.  How can I make this right?”
• Don’t blame colleagues, subordinates, your children, the weather, your failing health, or anything else for the mistake.  Practice this in the shower:  “I’m sorry.  There’s really no excuse for this. I take full responsibility.”
• Force yourself to make affirmative apologies.  By this I mean that once you realize that you did something – even if the event has passed – you should go back and correct it.  This can be really tough.  I’ve done it.  But you’ll feel better and your group will respect you.
• Remember there’s a difference between being accountable and being a doormat.  I’ll apologize when I’m wrong but I won’t tolerate piling up or my own colleagues running for the hills when they were part of the mess.

Life being what it is — complicated, messy, busy — there are always plenty of opportunities to practice apologizing.  Why, I was able to do a little practicing just this past week!  Did my apology fix everything?  I don’t know.  But life’s a long game – every mistake is about doing better next time – that’s what I think.

Let me back up.  I decided to do a series of group surveys/focus groups because I needed to include a consumer-prioritized list of service needs in a major grant I was putting together.  So it was time to get off my arse and go ask — it had been a couple of years -and I really felt like it was time to show the funding source that we were in touch with consumers. I’d already done a provider survey — a neat, tidy little online survey accomplished without moving from my office or talking to a single human being.

A big snow storm was predicted the day of our first group.  Looking at a 10-inch accumulation and blowing winds, I felt like an idiot going out to ask homeless people to rank their service needs.  But it’s what I do.  I put my survey instrument together,  packed my bag with chocolate bars, and headed out in my jeans and boots to do my job.  We needed consumer input.  My job was to get it.

At one shelter, we talked with a group of fourteen men.  My role as facilitator was to ask questions and listen.  See the guy who seems to want to talk and get him to talk.  Absorb it.  Move things along.  Maneuver the group around the interpersonal conflicts that seemed right below the surface.  And assure them that no repercussions would result from their complaints about various programs and, even, individual staff.

“Respect me.  Respect us.  Don’t treat us like crap.”  When I asked the group of homeless guys what message they wanted to send to providers, this was their answer.

I try to do this on a personal level.  When I meet a person who appears to be homeless on the street — or someone who asks me for money – I look them in the eye.  Sometimes I give them money.  Sometimes I ask if they’ve gone to XYZ agency or tried the ABC program.  I don’t ignore people when I meet them.  I look them in the eye.  I believe it’s the right thing to do.  I would want someone to acknowledge me if I was homeless and talking to them – to see that I am a person worth talking to.

But professionally, maybe it’s a different story.  I was so sure that I knew what homeless people wanted and needed that it seemed inconsiderate and redundant to go ask them.  After all, wouldn’t anyone know what homeless people would say they wanted on a snowy night with single digit wind chills?

No.

How many meetings have I sat through talking about homeless people, kids in the juvenile justice system, families in child welfare, without having any consumers in the room?  How many times have I helped decide what goals to pursue and where to allocate funding without the people affected being present?  How often have I assumed, and let others assume, that I know what people want and need.

It hit me last week.  My arrogance.  And so I’ll say here what I said in a Facebook post:  Slap me the next time I think I know what people want or need without asking them. 

People need to be asked and heard – not once every couple of years – but in an ongoing way.  A good lesson relearned.

Oh, I hear you.  Do I ever.  My whole life is about deadlines – so I’ve learned something about how to manage complex projects in a short time frame.  Some of this you’re not going to like hearing, but here goes…

My first tip is this:   Control your project.  The temptation to farm out pieces of a project to other people is huge.  Susie Q is a researcher – hey, she should be able to write the evaluation section.  So Susie Q tries, struggles, and then gives you a draft the day before the due date.  And it’s junk.  Then what?  You end up re-writing someone’s junk which, believe me, is far worse than writing it from scratch yourself.  My advice is meet with Susie Q early, get everything out of her brain you can, and write the section yourself.  In other words, control your project!

Second tip:  Keep the decision-makers in the loop. On a big project, you need to meet with the key people at the beginning of the project, when you have an initial draft/findings and then at the end.  In between, you want to keep good email/phone communication to make sure they are comfortable with the strategic decisions you are making.  Don’t go to them with the ticky stuff – then they will (rightly) think you are over your head.  Critical thing is to manage the people who will need to sign off/accept/endorse your product.  If you don’t, they’ll jam you at the end and you will have big deadline issues.

Third suggestion:  Manage yourself.  First thing to remember is that “panic is the enemy.”  Panic generates hysteria which generates junk.  Do what you need to do to keep your wits about you – deep breathing, a walk, commiseration with colleagues – but do it quickly.  Don’t spend hours calming yourself that you ought to be spending on your project!  Another thing to remember is to force yourself to focus on what’s most important.  Keep asking yourself — what really matters here?  What will make this product successful and useful?

I have a bunch of other little tricks:

• Starting work at 4:00 a.m.  You can get more done by adding a 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift than working in the evening.
• Keeping information for a project in folders — a proposal might have 8-10 different folders.  This keeps me from shifting into an hysteria-producing top of my desk search mode.
• Not responding to tickiness.  I don’t like getting whipsawed by different people sending me comments.  So I figure out who’s a) the smartest reviewer; and b) the reviewer in charge and just listen to them.
• Physically laying out a project on a table top.  It is so easy to get lost in a document when you’re only reading it on the computer screen.  Print it, lay it out page by page on a big table, and walk around the table and read it.  Assess how it looks, how much attention you’ve paid to various topics, how it hangs together.  This exercise will tell you where to focus your limited time.
• Pretzels and Diet Coke.  Need I say more?

Amazing and often intimidating his audiences, The Great Rondini escapes from his chains and straitjacket night after night at the Key West Mallory Square Sunset Celebration.

If you go to Key West, you have to see The Great Rondini.  A magician, escape artist, and extremely caustic comic, Rondini specializes in zeroing in on people and making them squirm to the delight of the crowd….he remarked to my husband how nice it must be to get off the tractor for a while.  He told me if I didn’t move 3 steps closer, he would tell more race jokes.  I backed up 3 steps.

This year, though, we saw right through Rondini.  Listen, this guy’s prep is a thing of beauty.  Selected ‘audience members’ (all so authentic) buckle him up in his straitjacket, wrap him in chains, snap on locks, and mop his brow.  In past years, he would then be hoisted up by his ankles to start his escape hanging upside down.  Not so this year – maybe age has caught up with him.

So we watch – as intent as ever.  But because he’s not hanging upside down, it’s easier to figure out how he escapes.  He basically makes himself large when all the gear is strapped on, and shrinks to escape, going through all manner of gyrations to boost the crowd’s appreciation of his terrible predicament.

The writhing and cursing, struggling and bending, the exhortations to the crowd to be more enthusiastic and louder, and the studied pauses to tell more race/gay/Key West/tourist/hick jokes — it makes for a mesmerizing package.

First, he shrugs off the chains, then twists his arms inside the straitjacket until he can stand on his head and shrug it off as well.  He’s free!  The Great Rondini.    Even though I could see clearly how it was done, I still appreciated his showmanship, his wicked humor, and, maybe, his thumbing his nose at the world longevity.

Anyway, so what would this possibly have to do with planning or grantwriting?  Oh, you know I would have to find little lessons in this.  Well, here they are:

1. We give the Rondinis of the world too much credit because we get so caught up in their theater we don’t get the trick.
2. Almost everything about planning, research, grantwriting, group facilitation is about making the complex simple.
3. There is something to the notion of blue smoke and mirrors and it ain’t just for street performers.  It’s both a tool and a weapon.  But you have to be really good at it either way.

I really like The Great Rondini.  He’s a piece of work.  I admire that.

Second, whatever collaborative structure the relief organizations thought they had didn’t seem to work so well on the ground.  Silly me – I actually thought the world’s big relief groups would’ve done beaucoups disaster drills, as in “Haiti’s had an earthquake, who’s doing what, where and when?”  So that the minute the last tremor passed, food and medical aid was on the way.  No assessment, no planning, no discussion needed — just hit the road running.  The world community really deserves better collaboration among these big charity power players.  Same here — are we talking collaboration at the same time as we’re stepping over our competitors to get to donors?  Are we able to act quickly and effectively to deal with major problems in our community or are we all still assessing and planning and jockeying for position?

Third, the power of the media to define the issues and to shape public response to the situation was amazing.  So much depended on where CNN and other networks aimed their cameras and deployed their reporters.  What they thought was important became what I thought was important until I started to wonder why they weren’t covering the trickier and considerably drier issues related to coordination issues between countries and major relief groups.  Knowing the right problem to solve is an old community planning mantra.  To what extent does the media make this determination — not just in Haiti but here in Milwaukee.  Something to think about.

There’s still more to learn from this — we’ll make a big mistake if we look away now thinking that relief and rebuilding will take its course.  It’s during the reconstruction of Port au Prince that innovation and empowerment are really possible.  Let’s stay tuned…..and, if you haven’t already, open that wallet and donate!

But what about you?  What happened the last time you lost?  When people in the nonprofit or government world talk about losing, they’re usually referring to not winning an important grant.  People have interesting reactions to not getting a big grant.  In my experience, the most common is that people never discuss the grant again.  It’s almost as if the grant committed suicide and the stigma is so great that no one feels it appropriate to mention its name.  Hardly ever do people sit down and do an honest and thorough debriefing about why they didn’t win.  I’m not criticizing anyone.  I don’t like to do this either.  It’s difficult, tiresome, and depressing – but, alas, necessary if you’re going to win in the future.

If you failed to win a big grant recently, sit down and think about these three possibilities. 

First of all, there is a likelihood that your grant simply was not good enough.  It may have been on the right track, had the right ingredients and partners, but just didn’t score high enough to be funded.  This means that in order to win next time you will have to pick apart the scoring, examing the point allocation and the comments.  You will have to see exactly where you lost points and figure out how to gain them back next time.  If you don’t do this you will absolutely repeat your mistake for this reason: when you wrote the grant the first time, you wrote to your strengths.  Unless you critically dissect the scoring, you will do the same thing again with the same results.

Second,  you may have made a serious strategic error.  This isn’t a problem of not writing a good enough grant proposal.  A mistake of this magnitude means that you went to Brazil when the funder told you to go the France.  Said another way, your lack of regard for the funder’s priorities put you out of the game from the jump.  The irony here is that you could write a suberb grant proposal in this situation and get tossed into the wastebasket at the first review.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with people (after the fact) who’ve made a serious strategic error on a grant proposal that was frighteningly obvious – picture a big scary clown face in the middle of the page – and they make the argument that the funder ‘just doesn’t understand what they are trying to do.’  Biggest reason this happens?  No one wants to take responsibility for the mistake.  Frankly, arrogance keeps some grantwriters from really listening to funders’ priorities and arrogance keeps them from accepting responsibility for the bad results.

Last, you can lose a big grant because of the luck of the draw.  A good friend of mine wrote the #1 scoring grant proposal in the country but it didn’t get funded because of political/geographical/who knows what else concerns that federal department had at the moment.  Granted this is a very rare occurrence but the takeaway is that you can write a really great proposal – maybe even one that is superior to hundreds of others – and still not get funded. Luck of the draw is a factor.  What if the Cardinals had won the coin toss?  (They would have won the game sooner.)

This is my point.  You lose a major grant.  Don’t bury it without a funeral.  Make yourself sit down with your colleagues and talk it through. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, quickly take all the responsibility and the blame.  Review, analyze, and discuss and figure out how to make those final 10 yards to score next time.

Just some suggestions – but here are 5 ways you can boost your accountability in 2010.  In other words, 5 ways to cut the BS and get serious and totally honest about your outcomes.

#1:  Measure the one or two things that are absolutely the most important to you.  What’s the bottom line for your program: no teen pregnancies, everyone finishing high school, no delinquency recividism?  Figure that out and measure it.

#2: Use numbers that don’t lie.  Either a teen finished high school or he didn’t.  Either a girl committed a 2nd juvenile offense or she didn’t.  These are powerful pieces of information.  Yes, it’s important that someone changed an attitude or learned a skill and yes, that should be measured but it shouldn’t be your only measurement!  Don’t be afraid to go for the true bottom line.

#3: Use decent measurement tools.  If you are measuring changes in knowledge, attitudes, or behavior, you might want to use a participant survey.  If you do, use one that’s been tested on your population, actually measures what you think is important, and can provide data that can be quickly analyzed.  Don’t – repeat DON’T – construct your own instrument unless you do so with the aid of a trained researcher/evaluator.

#4: Dump the “Baffle Them with BS” Strategy.  This little phrase was a basic tenet of my training in the old anti-poverty, community action world and we were really good at it.  Organizations that use the BTBS approach load up their year-end reports with endless lists of meaningless results; their outcome forests make it impossible to ever find a single tree.  And you know they’re hoping that the sheer volume of ’stuff’ will convince the evaluator or funder that amazing (and well-documented) results are occurring. I see a long list of ‘results’ and I smell obfuscation.  If you’re accomplishing something that really matters – then just say so.  Dump the BTBS.

#5: Run a good program.  Honestly, if programs put half the time into running a good program as they do trying to hose the funding source, we’d all be better off.  Do what you say you’re going to do.  If you are unable to do it right or well, tell the funding source and change your strategy.  Don’t stretch, bend, pretzelize your numbers and results into having the appearance of a decent program — actually have a decent program.  It makes that accountability thing oh so much easier!

Accountability in nonprofit programming has become a very sophisticated game.  It’s easy to get caught up in new ways to prove impact.  My thinking is this:  run a good, solid program and measure its bottom line results and leave the fancy weaving to others.