Lessons from Scranton: How Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation Can Transform an Intractable Housing Crisis for Vulnerable Groups
Group blog by Michael Reschke, Velaphi Mamba, VK Vu, Nadyah Hilmi, Ussen Galym, Sam Pairavi
How do you address a minimally framed development challenge without data and an ominously opaque understanding of the real problem? Where do you begin to ‘sink in your teeth’ as you try to flesh out the challenge you are facing? These are the fundamental questions that our team, the Friends of Scranton, at the Harvard Kennedy School were faced with during the first week of our Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) class in late January 2023. We faced a minimally framed development challenge with no data or clear understanding of the problem. We were assigned to address the lack of transitional housing in Scranton, but discovered the problem was more complex. We worked with our authorizer, Eileen Cipriani, Director of Community Development, for seven weeks to better understand the issue and provide leads for tackling it through PDIA.
The PDIA framework and philosophy encouraged the team to approach the problem with great humility, curiosity, and a deep sense of inquiry with the view of trying to understand the problem without making any value judgments or offering predetermined solutions. This required us to adopt a robust problem definition and construction process that forced us to go beyond the initial problem statement, asking what exactly constitutes the problem. It might be true that there is a lack of transitional housing in Scranton, but why is that really an issue and for whom does the problem matter? After all, the problem is not the lack of transitional housing but rather the risk of homelessness that people are facing if they cannot find shelter. Through an initial rapid desk research process and interviews with key stakeholders in the field, we realized that there are some populations at greater risk of homelessness than others, that is mainly families who escaped domestic violence and individuals released from prison or discharged after treatment for substance abuse.
Therefore, we reframed the problem as a lack of adequate and safe housing for vulnerable groups. This problem statement not only centered the needs of our target populations, but it also allowed us to consider alternatives to transitional housing as a way to address the issue.
In the next step of the PDIA process, the problem deconstruction stage, we identified six root causes that we believed were the main drivers of the problem:
- Ease of evictions
- Lack of funding for housing support
- Lack of data
- Intergenerational poverty
- Low supply of low-income housing
- Low incomes in Scranton.
The challenge here was to separate and break down the underlying drivers to better understand how vulnerable groups were affected by the problem. This proved to be particularly difficult since for every ‘root’ cause there is another deeper cause that can be unearthed. It required some pragmatic decision-making based on the authority that Eileen and her team had: where can Eileen and team realistically have an impact? Where does their authority end? How do they begin and where best could they enter each problem? With these questions in mind, we were able to frame our problem and identify main drivers with root causes to construct the fishbone. Then we defined the boundaries of action while keeping in mind the required firm commitment and action by a multi-layered group of stakeholders through our Acceptance, Authority, Ability (AAA) analysis.
A key element of this process, and of PDIA more generally, were the over 30 stakeholder consultations and weekly interviews with a broad range of people from various professional backgrounds and lived experiences (part of a process called ‘teaming’). On the one hand, these discussions were highly informative, useful, and even enlightening. For instance, when we asked a representative from a local non-profit about the lack of data, they told us that a data dashboard already existed but was rarely used which proved to be an amazing entry point for this root cause. On the other hand, every interview that we held changed the overall picture at least a bit, if not substantially. We quickly learned that PDIA is less of a linear manual but more of an iterative approach. We often went back to previous steps, reflected, and adapted while moving forward and taking actions. You learn as you go by iterating, considering best, latent and positive deviance practices within the normative environment. This was a significant departure from the business-as-usual approaches mostly used in such work and required us to adapt.
Speaking of teaming, our group consisted of six members from five different countries. And sure enough, after week two or three a conflict arose. We were supposed to submit a group assignment but there were some remaining questions that needed further elaboration. The group member, who oversaw submitting the assignment for that week answered the open questions by himself. This, however, caused quite a bit of confusion among other team members who had not been asked or informed about the changes prior to the submission. After a heated WhatsApp conversation, we were able to resolve the issue and take away some learnings: avoid resolving conflicts over WhatsApp, establish decision-making processes when time is short, and document them in our team constitution. Most importantly, teaming with people from diverse backgrounds requires moving out of our comfort zones and establishing a middle ground through continuous discussion. The PDIA process allows for robust debates while maintaining psychological safety for all team members.
At the very beginning, a few of our team members voiced concerns as to whether we would be able to provide high quality guidance and recommendations to our authorizer within only seven weeks of work. This was especially trite since the emergent issues we are working on were entrenched issues of inequality with many moving targets. This became clear during our weekly meetings with Eileen where the topics discussed ranged from shortages of transportation systems, childcare and good job opportunities, low incomes compared to rising rents, intergenerational poverty and, of course, a lack of transitional housing. It seemed the subtopic of housing was so profoundly embedded in a whole cluster of problems that taking only one step forward would require years of research and consultations.
This was not the case. PDIA acknowledges and provides a framework to navigate uncertainty. We identified entry points for Eileen’s team to advance and explore: (1) We identified two key stakeholders within the City of Scranton that could provide training sessions for tenants on their rental rights to reduce the number of evictions, (2) we connected Eileen and team with individuals at the Continuum of Care and the Catherine McCauley Center to make increased use of the existing data management system, and (3) we found that the Rapid Re-Housing model that was already used by the United Neighborhood Coalition (UNC) could provide a more efficient use of available resources in the longer term and was a positive deviance for emulation.
Based on these concrete action items and entry points, both our team and our authorizer took away a good amount of learning. As an external group of students, we were able to provide new insights, ideas, and a different perspective to our authorizer. As an expert in the field, Eileen shared with us how bureaucratic and financial barriers sometimes paralyze non-profit organizations in the status quo despite working and striving toward the same goal. This is certainly a key learning for everyone involved: it is the fine-grained small-scale level of action that facilitates or hinders action on the systemic level. At the same time, we learned that our role as external consultants was not so much developing the one and only magical solution (since that does not exist) but rather helping our authorizer leverage available resources and deviate step by step from status quo to new practice.
So, what remains? What words of wisdom can we share? Well, since there is no magical solution, we cannot recommend a prescribed list of ‘10 things to do to make the project a success’. Maybe there are no fixed words of wisdom but are some advice that can guide you in your own PDIA journey:
- Be listening: Connect with as many stakeholders as possible across sectors to gain a deeper understanding of the problem.
- Be curious: Come with as many questions as possible to your authorizer.
- Be humble: Remember that your strategy and framework is working towards a solution that impacts real people and communities.
- Be bold: Don’t let lack of information scare you but view it as an opportunity for growth and learning.
- Be evidence-based: Develop data-driven, realistic, and relevant solutions.
This is a blog series written by students at the Harvard Kennedy School who completed “PDIA in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergence” (MLD 103) in March 2023. These are their learning journey stories.