Guest blog by Danielle Bayer, Julia Lemesh, Othmane Ouhaddach, Konstantin Usov, Nanako Yamaguchi
The Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) is a federally funded community service and work-based job training program for low-income Americans who are 55+ years old. A program authorized by the Older Americans Act, SCSEP provides training for low-income, unemployed seniors, many of whom have experienced homelessness or are at risk of homelessness. The SCSEP federal budget is $400M per year to implement and deliver this program, including to qualifying MA residents.
Our team was invited to assist our authorizer, Olga Yulikova, Senior Community Employment Manager of the Executive Office of Elder Affairs, who oversees SCSEP implementation in the state, in a challenge faced by her department. Our work aimed to apply the PDIA framework to this specific challenge over the course of six weeks.
Applying the PDIA process
Initially, we were invited to tackle a misallocation problem. More specifically, we were tasked to help understand the existing demand for jobs among SCSEP participants despite the large number of job vacancies in MA. In our third week working on this problem, we needed to change focus after receiving notice that state HR department would be unable to collaborate on our work.
We agreed with our authorizer that our new problem would serve their direct objectives. We defined our new problem simply as: Not enough eligible people are enrolling in MA’s SCSEP program.
The change in problem was the most challenging period of our teamwork. With a new problem in week three of our seven-week course, we needed to re-focus on problem definition and deconstruction. We endeavored to fit three weeks of work into one week, while navigating other coursework and personal obligations. That being said, the shared struggles helped bring our team closer together. When one team member felt down, another provided motivation. We all resolved to recommit to the PDIA process and supported one another to put in substantially more time and catch up with our new problem in week three. We found revisiting our team constitution helpful at this time for reviewing the norms we’d set together about the supportive culture we wanted to create in our team.
As we dug into our new problem, we learned that the Executive Office of Elder Affairs wanted to increase enrollment in SCSEP from 72 to at least 100. The rationale for this increase is motivated by two factors:
- Ensuring more eligible people can benefit from the program
- Maintaining current levels of federal funding for MA’s SCSEP program
Further exploration highlighted the intricacies of the problem. Notably, we came to understand how the roots of the problem consist of a mix of issues inherent to the program implementation but also to causes that are external to the problem. For example, federal funding of SCSEP depends upon the number of people enrolled, so under-enrollment results in less funding available to our Authorizer’s department. Less funding means poorer service due to increased resource constraints for serving the 55+ low income, unemployed population as well as less funding available for advertisement to attract and recruit more participants. This creates a “chicken-and-egg” problem. In addition, through interactions with our authorizer and other stakeholders, it became clear to us that the attractivity of a job program is closely linked to the quality of the job offerings. Finally, SCSEP participants are in a constant trade-off between their social benefits and the financial rewards of working.
Doing so, we managed to deconstruct the problem around five areas of exploration (see diagram below): program service deficiencies, employers hiring, marketing challenges, quality of job offerings, and the benefits of not working. We then explored sub-causes underlying each area.
Using this disaggregated fishbone, we undertook our Authority, Acceptance, Ability (AAA) analysis for each of the five categories as well as for each sub-cause. In particular, our approach consisted of identifying the scope for change within each of the analyzed areas relying on the degree of Authority, Acceptance and Ability available. What became transparent is the little scope for change in most of the issues related to external factors (e.g. quality of jobs, benefits of not working). With few exceptions, most of the areas where our team could intervene were related to deficiencies within the program, highlighting the difficulty of the task at hand.
We decided to focus on two categories with the largest current change space: employers hiring and marketing. Our choice was motivated by the two-sided nature of the roots of the causes—i.e. demand- and supply-related. Within these categories, we identified two entry points which each had high degrees of authority, acceptance, and ability:
- Determining the best channels of communication to reach eligible SCSEP Program participants
- Employers do not understand why they need to be interested in employing 55+ people.
While we have put in a “holding space” a number of important, fundamental issues related to the SCSEP program implementation, we learned that these areas should not be ruled out, and small steps still might be possible to expand the change space. In the short term, however, given the length of our course, we decided to work on the entry points listed above as we felt we had a greater scope to make some progress on.
Next, we considered ideas to act on for these entry points. We considered existing practices, latent practices, positive deviance, and external best practices that could potentially contribute to our problem. Using this framework, we were able to brainstorm more ideas than we likely would have generated otherwise. We settled on three ideas to try:
- Assess current channels of marketing for the program and identify potential gaps (latent practice)
- Review existing marketing materials against behavioral science research regarding benefits uptake, and make recommendations for improvement and design a test (external best practice)
- Discuss with employers whether they would consider hiring through SCSEP as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programming (external best practice)
Defining the scope of our actions was no easy task. We understood the value of breaking these ideas into small steps to enable iteration, feedback and learning. For example, we initially wanted to run a full marketing test of behavioral science-adjusted marketing within the span of a week. However, as we learned more about the behavioral science testing process through our interactions with HKS-based experts, and evaluated SCSEP language vs. behavioral science research, we decided to slow down, allowing instead for more expert input and the design of a more valuable, slower testing procedure.
Words of Wisdom
Beyond the difficulties of dealing with complex problems, this experience helped us learn valuable lessons about working as a team. First, we realized that an effective, connected team can be built through “teaming” within a short period. Further, nudging helped keep the team members engaged and our work products on track. Our struggles showed us that building physiological safety (e.g. by encouraging feedback and open sharing of struggles) creates a great working environment. It was also easier to manage the workload by distributing roles based on skills, interests, and team members’ volunteered preferences. Finally, adopting fun accountability mechanisms to broken norms creates an enjoyable working environment for all! For example, we established the norm of having someone bring coffee and treats to our team meeting if they were late. This meant on-time team members lessened resentment of late team members, anticipating the yummy reward. We also used humor and assigned small additional work assignments to repeat norm-breakers, adding levity and decreasing tension.
As a final thought, we share with you some reflections based on our individual experiences:
“Don’t forget to have fun and connect with one another. Our acts of kindness created valuable opportunities for increased connectedness, and a focus on fun and playfulness made even the hardest weeks more tolerable.”—Danielle Bayer
“Use the framework of this course not only for the purpose of learning about a problem, but also to work on assignments. Deconstruct and divide the work between yourselves!”—Julia Lemesh
“PDIA is not only a frame, but also a journey of the mind; from a solution-oriented mindset to a problem-driven approach.”—Othmane Ouhaddach
“Use this PDIA journey not to master the universal all-solving toolbox but to master an art of unfading curiosity. You will undoubtedly need it in the face of every real conundrum in policymaking, politics, or government.”—Konstantin Usov
“It will be intense, but once you master PDIA, you can see all issues differently. It is eye-opening experience and can be used forever!! You will be able to say proudly that you are resilient and enjoy chaos!”—Nanako Yamaguchi
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.