The best way to have collaboration is to get people with common interests and passions together, talking, and this includes clients. They do this in industry trainings, in breakout groups, so this is nothing new. What needs to happen is to have Interest groups (committee sounds so bureaucratic) composed of people who share the same interest. Your enemies might be wearing your uniform, and your friends might not be wearing your uniform, so to speak. I used to love the TV show Babylon 5, because it showed some extremely diverse people who had to cooperate to survive and get anything done. Good metaphor- they were aliens, from different planets, even. There is nothing more fun than being in a group with people who share the same interest. Right now we have the Silo walls keeping us apart. If you put people together, who share the same interest, magic happens, as David Bohm notes. A lot of new ideas start emerging. There is a name in biology for a process you will have to invoke, to succeed with your plan. It is Emergence. In a 5 person company, there is probably not a HR specialist. In a 100 person company, there probably is, at least part time. The HR position is "emergent", as the system grows and gets more complex, new order emerges. Getting people into groups, to talk, fosters "emergence". You don't know what will work, in the activities that will accomplish your goals. I don't care how smart you are, you simply don't know. Even if you did know, you couldn't put it all on paper. What you need is to have a way to support the emergence of the ideas that, when implemented, will do the job. An extremely important role for HUD will be the Web backup for these interest groups, where ideas can be sorted intelligently, where resources can be identified and shared, where people with a wealth of new information realize that a set of ideas makes something possible which has never before been realized. The Internet itself is emergent, and we haven't begun to use or realize all the possibilities in it. The same is true for using the Internet to foster the emergence of solutions to the problems we face. Shaun, Ron: if you do nothing else, you need to do this. Period. This is more important than any other feedback on this forum.

A major element of Departmental Risk Management is the HUD Hotline. THE HUD HOTLINE ISN'T WORKING! This is the messge you get when you email them:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:

Hotline
The recipient's e-mail address was not found in the recipient's e-mail system. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please check the e-mail address and try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.

The message this communicates is contempt for staff and Risk Management. Take care of the little things, and the big things take care of themselves. How do you know the big things aren't being taken care of? The little things are let go. And this is much more than a little thing. This is a communication to the entire country that HUD couldn't care less about fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

HQ has been addicted to numbers for a long time. They are like a driver who only studies the dashboard, and never looks out the windshield, or in the rear view mirror. What is rewarded is what improves. Right now, you have to make your numbers, or HQ will flay you. Why would anyone want to cooperate across cylinders, which costs time and effort, or indeed do anything creative that is outside the box, when there is no alignment, no interest from HQ in doing so? Public Housing, FHA, and CPD all work on the same kinds of issues in communities. How about you have some goals in communities, where at least those 3 divisions would need to work together to accomplish them? Pick a city per state, with problems, and set a goal. There is a military concept, called "Time on Target", developed during WW II. Basically, a time was picked, for an artillery bombardment of an enemy strongpoint. Every kind of artillery was to deliver rounds on an enemy strongpoint at that set time. So the long range artillery fired, then the howitzers, the the rocket trucks, then the 4.2" mortars, then the 80 mm mortars, then the 60 mm mortars, and so on. High level bombers could also take part. The result was that everything came together all at once, in a way that no individual could make happen. Isn't that what a laser is about? Coherence? Can you imagine how much more effective a coherent HUD would be? A coherent government? If the Army could do it 68 years ago, why can't HUD do it now? What is radical makeover doing to houses? The exact same thing. They set a goal, with a very limited parameter, and then they DEVOTE EVERYTHING they have to make that happen. Bob Proctor says if you don't gasp in delight when you set a goal, you aimed too low. HUD has been aiming too low for how many decades? What about a radical makeover for a troubled neighborhood? Work with the state government, the city government, neighborhood groups- heck, have an application process, let people sell us on which one to do, let them detail their capacity just as in grant applications. Do at least one of these every year, in every state, on the same day. Bring in Habitat for Humanity, and similar groups. Everybody in our field is frustrated at how things are now. Invite in volunteers. Invite in the churches. What would the elements of a radical makeover of a community include? They could include clearing a lot and planting a community decorative garden. They could include getting all the junk out. They could include securing an abandonded building, the city getting title to it, transferring it to Habitat, and getting it ready for rehab- prior to, with a ceremony on that day. They could include painting, and cosmetic upgrades - get a 501c3 to accept donations. Businesses would happily participate if it improved their neighborhood. I did a project like this myself, some years ago, and we got free food and drink from a nearby business that knew their business activity would go up based on what we were doing. I think homeowners would too, because done right, value would increase. I dare you to do it, Headquarters. I dare you to do whatever the heck you have to, to make these things happen, in every state and territory in the Union. Get Obama involved, he talks about stuff like this. Get the entire country focused on this, get the Public Affairs people out of their "just say no" mentality into a real sales mentality. Use a roto-rooter on OGC and all the other Doctor No's. Get into a World War II "everbody a hero" mindset, help people forget all the fear the TV news sells, help them step out and actually DO SOMETHING TO make their communities better. And Video it, put segments on YouTube, so we can get recursive reinforcement. You talk a good talk, Shaun and Ron, let's see you walk the walk. Your predecessors were full of BS, mostly, or at least they surrendered to the limitations. Doing this just once would forever alter people's ideas about what is possible. Heck, the people who do the Home Makeover show might even want to film it, and even contribute in at least one state. I have seen so many good ideas die due to bureaucratic barriers. I dare you, Ron and Shaun, to make this happen. I dare you. Show us what you got. Are you for real? Or not?

In the private sector, many companies occassionally take a break from the day to relax, destress, have fun, and engage in silo/cross-silo team building where supervisors and managers take off their management hat and everyone is an equal team member when they participate in team building activities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that U.S. companies lose approximately $3 billion per year because of the effects of employees' negative attitudes and behaviors at work. If we want to successfully work together as cross silo teams, it is important that we give the same respect and care to internal customers as external customers. Part of that is to take a day or half day and attend internal soft-skill, team building trainings without checking emails, phone calls etc. If employees truly feel like valued and appreciated team members, their morale and productivity is likely to increase. So, basically value internal customers' needs as much as external customers' because it makes financial sense.

We need better measures of effectiveness, and even of community health. Human services are a large part of the budget. A lot of that is Medicaid. OK. How do we know the services work? Where are the measures?

People claim that the needs of our citizens require an even bigger financial commitment. How do they know? Duplication, a lack of coordination and simply spending money on approaches with no proven effectiveness is rampant. We can't afford this.

We need accurate, human-services yardsticks, and measures of community health. Where is the agreed-upon way to measure the effectiveness of human services. When we build a bridge, we build it to engineering specifications to make sure it is adequate and no lives are lost by its failure. No such standards are consistently applied to services, yet even more lives may be at stake.

Programs funded could use long-term studies in peer-reviewed, scientific journals to help prove their effectiveness. We owe it to those being served to provide effective and proven care.

We need to pick one screening tool: Although effective treatment of persons with services needs begins with accurate screening, nobody really coordinates clinicians' or even social workers' assessment tools used to measure individual problems, leaving it up to the preference of each provider. This means agencies can use dozens of different measures that assess some problems while ignoring others. Misdiagnosing a mental illness or ignoring substance abuse can be the result, ill-serving the public and wasting taxpayer's money.

Washington state requires state agencies to use the same highly effective screening tool to measure mental health disorders and substance abuse dependency, including an assessment of suicide risk, for adolescents and adults. This forced clinicians who worked with widely varied populations in different agencies all to get on the same page. Washington has saved money, and lives, as a result.

We need to build communities to solve problems. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about "Million Dollar Murray," the nickname given to a homeless man in Denver who cost a million dollars a year in emergency and other services because the city managed his homelessness rather than solving it. There are tens of thousands of Murrays in our country, yet agencies and the federla government do little to exert the leadership to fix these problems.

Much good can be done when a strong, local human services department coordinates regional help for citizens. Some communities have gotten churches, the police department, local businesses, the hospital and even neighborhood pizzerias involved in providing help for the homeless on cold winter nights. Churches may take turns providing shelter while volunteers prepare the food. Each night, social workers interview individuals to help find the homeless permanent shelter, evaluate their problems and help them better their lives. The approach is practical, inexpensive and strengthens the entire community. Ignoring these problems, besides being shortsighted, is an expensive approach we cant afford.

We are not going to see a large influx of new dollars, which means we have to use what we have far more effectively. A Seal team of under 10, in certain situations, can do far more than a battalion of 600. We need to start thinking that way. This kind of thinking needs to infuse the Strat Plan and everything else we do.