The 100,000 homes campaign A model for scaling up excellence

The 100,000 homes campaign A model for scaling up excellenceThe 100,000 homes campaign A model for scaling up excellenceThis is a true story that more people ought to hear. It contains numerous lessons for any leader, organization, or social movement about how to spread something good from the few to the many. It affirms my faith in humanity. And it just might do the same for you.In a nutshell, zu siche is what happened. In 2003, West Point graduate and former U.S. Army officerBecky Margiottabegan leading an effort to reduce the homelessness problem in New York Citys Time Square. Becky welches hired byRosanne Haggerty, who founded the dem gemeinwohl verpflichtet Common Ground in 1990 to create housing for people experiencing homelessness. Becky and her team spent five years working on the Street to Home Initiative in Times Square. By 2008, the mindset, skills, and methods the team developed enabled them to find homes for 49 of the 50 homeless people living in Times Square. In 2010, H aggerty and Margiotta launched The 100,000 Homes Campaigntheir plan welches to spread what they had learned in Times Square to other cities. The goal was to find homes for 100,000 Americans experiencing chronic homelessness. The Campaign announced that they reached this goal on June 10, 2014.Thanks to a wonderful team at the Stanford Business School, the twists and turns of this story are captured in a detailed multi-media case study that was completed about a year ago. The case was written and guided byDavina Drabkin. The video producer isJohn Jamieson. Stanford ProfessorsSarah Soule,Huggy Rao, and I instigated and (lightly) guided the development. Access was restricted to our students until now, as it is designed to spark class discussion. But thanks to the generosity of the Stanford Business School, it now available to everyone for free. You can findThe 100,000 Homes Campaign case here. Because this digital case was a prototype, the navigation can be counterintuitive and trying a t times. But it is worth it - there is so much to learn and so many examples of what happens when people with noble intentions are blessed with skill and persistence. It warms my heart.While I cant capture all the key lessons from this nuanced case in a single post or article, here are five of my favorites. I suspect that you will be drawn to different highlights and inferences.1) Where is Your Times Square?One of the hallmarks of bad scaling in start-ups, organizational change initiatives, and social movements is that leaders and funders want go big before they know what works. Note that Becky and her team spent five years working on how to house people who were chronically homeless in Times Square before they developed a playbook that (they hoped) would work in other cities. When Becky teaches leaders about how to develop programs or build organizations, she cautions about impatience and asks where is your Times Square? As we say to Stanford students and visiting executives, youv e got to NAIL IT before you SCALE IT.This doesnt mean that your model needs to be perfect or that it wont change as you learn more and it is customized for different settings. But when leaders and organizations try to spread something to others that has elend been proven to work in even one place, they increase the risk of ascaling clusterfug,as Huggy Rao and I call it.2) Mindset MattersBeckys team learned to embrace theHousing Firstphilosophy during the years that they spent in Times Square. The idea behind this philosophywhich clashes with beliefs and policies held by many politicians and activistsis that it is unwise and largely ineffective to require a person experiencing homelessness to deal with problems such as substance abuse or mental illness before they can be eligible for housing. As Becky put, The cure for homelessness is a house. Advocates of Housing First argue that one of the many benefits of their philosophy is that such problems are easier to deal with (for social s ervices agencies, nonprofits, and the people in question) when people are off the streets and have a predictable and stahlkammer place to live.Although this philosophy makes sense to me, there is also a broader lesson here about scaling that my colleague Huggy Rao observed over and over when we developed our bookScaling Up Excellence It is much easier to grow an organization or a program when there is agreement about what constitutes good versus bad behavior, or success versus failure. When people agree, they know where to direct their attention and when they are making progress or not.This doesnt mean that there is a one-size-fits all mindset. What works for one organization or movement might be a disaster for another. For example, Netflix has a strong commitment to hiring and keeping fully-formed adults who are star performers the company pays very well andakin to a professional sports teamfires employees who arent stars or whose skills become obsolete. That philosophy works for t hem, but I dont think it would be effective for McDonalds or the U.S. Army. The best leaders also devote close attention to when once useful mindsets start getting in the way. In the early days of Facebook, move fast and break things was a mantra that people lived by and it helped them grow the company. But by early 2015, CEO Mark Zuckerberg abandoned mantra and mindset. After all, breaking things had become too dangerous for its users and the firms reputation.3) The best strategies are formed by doers and doing, not talkers and talkingBecky and her team focused on doing and learning, not on completing exhaustive strategy and planning sessions before they started experimenting and learning. They focused on light planning and heavy learning by doing in early days in Times Square and as their national campaign unfolded between 2010 and 2014. Their belief in this approach was reinforced byJoe McCannon, who had managed the100,000 Lives Campaignbetween 2004 and 2006. The Campaign spread evidence-based practices to some 3100 U.S. hospitals in order to reduce preventable deaths. It focused on spreading simple and proven practices from hospitals that used them to those that did not (yet). These practices included pressing health care providers to wash their hands to stop the spread of infections. Or reminding everyone who comes in contact with a patient on a respiratorfamilies and janitorial staff, for example, not just nursesthat the bed ought to be elevated at least 45 degrees (which reduces the risk of pneumonia). By the time the Campaign ended, researchers estimated that about 122,000 fewer deaths had occurred in U.S. hospitals.McCannon joined the 100,000 Homes Campaign as an advisor for about six months in 2009. One of the lessons that Joe emphasized was that THE WORST planning processes involve meetings where people talk and debate for months to develop the perfect planand to try to imagine responses to every contingency.In the case, you can watch several interv iew clips with Joe. He gets a bit emotional when he argues that there is usually little difference between a plan that takes three days of talking to develop versus one that takes three months. His view is that wasting time in all those long meetings undermines the development of a strategy that is based on reality rather than conjecture by the most talkative, pushy, and powerful people in the room.4) Beware of hollow Easter bunniesIn the early years of the campaign, Becky and her team noticed they were wasting a lot of time with communities where some enthusiastic person had signed up for the campaign. BUT despite a lot of talk and coaching from her team, nothing was actually getting done. Heres a screenshot from the caseThis is a syndrome that Huggy Rao and I have seen again and again in organizations where there is a lot of enthusiasm from people and they love the idea behind some program or effortbut the problem is their expertise is in TALKING about it rather than DOING it. In particular, at several organizations that we have worked with, senior executives were tapped to lead design thinking efforts, they ran hundreds of people through design thinking training courses, and gave speeches at conferences and universities about their marvelous accomplishments. BUT when we pressed them to name a single product or service, or anything else, that had been changed for the better via design thinking methods, they couldnt name oneor pointed to accomplishments that were trivial.5) Who is the chicken fer?There is a juncture inthe casewhere Becky (on film) describes her conversation with a team in a community that had found homes for only 10 people, far below their goal. They were complaining about getting little guidance from their leader and that it was unclear who was in charge. Becky was reminded of her days in the Army, and asked them a question that was a bit shocking and quite funny Who is the Chicken Fer? As Becky explained, when she was in the Army, if a grou p of soldiers were screwing around or messing things up, an officer would ask them who is Fing this chicken? In other words, who is in charge? When Becky told the leader of the group that story, she laughed and said you are right, I am the Chicken Fer. The leaders staff gave her a rubber chicken to make the point. Soon, Becky was giving The Chicken Fer talk to one community team after another.As the case reports, the Chicken Fer story evolved into the top secret Rooster Award. Each month, Beckys team would select 10 or 15 community members who had taken it upon themselves to move the campaign forward. Each Chicken Fer received a rooster figurine to celebrate their accomplishments (see picture). Messages like this - which emphasize about accountability and clarity about who is responsible for what - are hallmarks of successful scaling efforts. Excellence spreads when people hold themselves and others accountable for doing the right things - where they act as if I own the place and the place owns me.Again, these lessons just scratch the surface. I invite you to read, watch, and listen to The 100,000 Homes Campaigncase to learn more about the nuances of the story and to find your favorite lessons. And I want to give special thanks toDavina Drabkinand her colleagues for creating this case and to Becky Margiotta for spending so much time with us - and for the wonderful things that she and her team accomplished during the campaign.Bob Sutton is aStanford Professorwho studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Follow me on Twitterwork_matters, and visit mywebsiteand posts onLinkedIn. My latest book isThe Ahole Survival Guide How To verstndigung im strafverfahren With People Who Treat You Like Dirt.Before that, I publishedScaling Up Excellencewith Huggy Rao.My main focus these days is on working with Huggy Rao to develop strategies and tools that help leaders and teamschange their organizations for the better - with a particular focus onorganizational friction.Check out my Stanford FRICTION Podcastat iTunesorSticher.Thiscolumnfirst appeared onLinkedIn.