Recent experiences in Connecticut offer lessons for building back better.
When a crisis strikes, it’s amazing to see rational and creative responses sprout almost instantly.
Stamford Public Schools (SPS) closed. 15,000 children and their teachers were suddenly homebound. But SPS offered new online courses for home schooling within days. Teachers working from home communicated directly with students and parents at all hours. Teaching went beyond normal subjects to teaching students to use computers, to connect and to stay connected. Data systems adjusted from just taking attendance to finding students who couldn’t connect at all. These changes would be considered radical in normal times but were immediate, logical, and creative responses to the crisis.
Children’s Learning Centers. Stamford’s largest pre-school program had to assure safety and continued education of nearly a thousand children when schools closed. They secured emergency funding to hold teachers and staff intact. They began at-home learning by bolstering communications between teachers and families. They arranged back up food. They pivoted the annual fundraiser to virtual mode which produced more earnings than originally planned. All this and much more was done in five hectic weeks.
Stamford Cradle to Career, a Collective Impact program for education, kept its current projects moving, but mobilized volunteers for food and service distribution to senior citizens and helped build measurement for SPS at home learning at the same time.
Vita, a program promoting Collective Impact in education, health, and social services, ordered and began distribution of thousands of masks to social service and public housing agencies in days.
How can the same group of people, with the same organizations, facilities, and tools, suddenly shift gears to totally new performance levels? Three things changed.
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Focus – Shift from proliferating priorities, and broad missions, to intense focus on a few critical outcomes.
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Speed – Shift from lengthy studies, analyses, and debates to disciplined short-term action.
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Innovation – Shift from status quo to testing and adopting new practices.
Unwittingly, managers discovered the keys to great performance. Not more training, more research, reorganizations, or importation of yet another new program, managers discovered the hidden potential for high performance right in their own organizations, now. Results improved because three catalysts – Focus, Speed, and Innovation – acted together to enable managers and their teams to produce new results with the resources at hand.
This does not mean that more training, more research, reorganizations, or importation of new programs are wrong. They can be powerful. But they can become unconscious diversions from confrontation with the essential results to be achieved. The crisis, on the other hand focuses all attention and action on immediate urgent outcomes and gets results.
Use the lessons of the crisis to get back to better
While there have been some remarkable pivots out of the pandemic shutdown, no doubt there is still a long way to go. Resources are likely to be severely constrained. The winners will be those who can invent and implement higher impact and lower cost education and social services, quickly.
The key is to plan for re-opening not just to get back to normal but get back to better. We are already seeing signs of what better might mean – online and distance learning and social services which in some cases will be more effective than traditional school rooms and personal contact. Collective impact coalitions can aggregate fragmented services to better meet diverse needs, serve larger constituencies and tackle bigger goals. Special after-school and summer school programs can help overcome the learning delays of the Covid-19 shutdown. Instead of bringing kids to expensive school buildings on expensive buses to get perhaps mediocre learning, bring education and services to the kids and families at home, in small groups, in community settings, in collaborations with successful businesses. There is a thriving world of educational and social experimentation which has been going on for decades to be tapped and expanded.
The innovators need to remember the stern lessons of the crisis:
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Focus – Shift from proliferating priorities, and overly broad missions, to intense focus on a few critical outcomes.
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Speed – Shift from lengthy studies, analyses, and debates to disciplined short-term action.
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Innovation – Shift from status quo to testing and adopting new practices.
With some initial successes, organizations expand and sustain this rapid-cycle approach to performance improvement for larger scale strategic advances.
We are not starting from scratch. Here are some examples of such innovation in the past few years locally.
Seven Bridgeport schools increased 3rd grade reading scores in a focused effort in 90 days. Led by an Assistant Superintendent, the principals chose one goal, 3rd grade reading (FOCUS), carved out a limited time frame, 90 days (SPEED). Collaborated trying different instructional strategies (INNOVATION). They tracked scores assiduously month by month. On average they gained more than five points. One school gained 20. One principal grew math scores as well as holding high reading scores simultaneously.
Family Centers, P2P and Domus, collaborated to accelerate adult progress toward self-sufficiency with a target group of twenty people in economic distress, in 90 days. (FOCUS/SPEED) The key was agreement to use a new scale of seventeen key indicators of self-sufficiency to guide specific improvement action for each client. (INNOVATION) They produced 17% gain in 90 days which rolls out to cutting four months out of a typical two-year development cycle – a huge economic payoff for the participants and the community.
The WorkPlace, in Bridgeport CT, tackled a severe long-term unemployment problem. They enlisted 100 people who had been unemployed for three years. (FOCUS). They carved out a one-year time span (SPEED, alright at least a limited time frame). They engaged the target group and potential employers in a combined education, coaching and action process to get jobs (INNOVATION). 68% of participants were in fact employed in less than a year. The resultant total economic value exceeded 2X (benefit over cost). The program was expanded across Connecticut and then won federal funding to go to cities across the U.S.
Family Centers, VITA, Children’s Learning Centers (CLC), Be One Community (B1C), Stamford Public Schools (SPS) working together, closed a 24-point achievement gap with 25 children of immigrant families with lowest income and speaking little English (FOCUS). This was done over two years, not speedy, but not slow either for a complex program tackling a tough challenge. The program was called Parents as Teachers of Pre-school Immigrant children. Further iterations are being planned.
This is not the end of the story. We may be at the beginning of a new era in education and social services.
Robert A. Neiman is a management consultant who has applied this rapid cycle approach to performance improvement in many for profit industries, and in the non-profit arena for education, health care, and environmental protection. He is now a member of the Board of the Harvard Business School Club of Connecticut, Community Partners (HBSCT-CP) which provides pro-bono consulting to non-profit organizations in Connecticut. The cases cited here were all clients of his and teams of HBSCT-CP volunteers.