Overcoming Statistics With Creative Governance

In this blog, I would like to share with you two Creative Governance practices that I sourced from Fastcompany business magazine Jan 2007 issue. One concerns health and the other on reforming criminals. Based on statistics, these two situations seem hopeless but they were overturned with Creative Governance

I believe it is time for us to explore such Creative Governance practices in resolving our outstanding social ailments. They are much more effective, with almost negligible cost and brought about lasting transformation. Isn’t it time for governments to set up teams to explore this Creative Governance approach?

Health-Care

According to Dr. Raphael "Ray" Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, "A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral." That is, they're sick because of how they choose to lead their lives, not because of factors beyond their control, such as the genes they were born with.
Dr. Edward Miller, of Johns Hopkins University said "If you look at people after coronary- artery bypass grafting two years later, 90 % of them have not changed their lifestyle."

Knowing these grim statistics, doctors tell their patients: If you want to keep the pain from coming back, and if you don't want to have to repeat the surgery, and if you want to stop the course of your heart disease before it kills you, then you have to switch to a healthier lifestyle. You have to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop overeating, start exercising, and relieve your stress.
But very few do.

In 1993, Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, convinced the Mutual of Omaha insurance company to pay for an unusual experiment. The researchers recruited 194 patients who suffered from severely clogged arteries and could have bypass grafts or angioplasties covered by their insurance plans. Instead they signed up for a trial. The staffers helped them quit smoking and switch to an extreme vegetarian diet that derived fewer than 10 percent of its calories from fat. In places like Omaha, they shifted from steaks and fries to brown rice and greens. The patients got together for group conversations twice a week, and they also took classes in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise, which became parts of their daily routines.

The program lasted for only a year. After that, they were on their own. But three years from the start, the study found, 77 percent of the patients had stuck with these lifestyle changes--and safely avoided the need for heart surgery. They had halted - or, in many cases, reversed - the progress of their disease.

I think, it is time to re-study medical health plans that focus on restoring health. It could save billions of dollars in health-care. There must be many doctors besides Dr. Ornish who achieved such successes. All we need is to look into them and adapt their proven strategies into our national health plan schemes. Do we have the political will to practice Creative Governance?

Rehabilitating Criminals

In the largest study of relapse back to crime of 272,111 inmates after they were released from state prisons ; the Justice Department published produced the following alarming statistics : 30 percent of former inmates were rearrested within six months, and 67.5 percent of them were rearrested within three years.

Psychologists and criminologists have come to share the belief that most criminals can't change their lives. These experts believe that many criminals can't change because they're "psychopaths"- they're unlike the rest of humanity because they aren't burdened by conscience. They don't have any empathy for others. They're concerned only for themselves.

An amazing initiative by the Delancey Street Foundation proved these experts wrong. This perceived luxury condominium complex in a choice water-front location is actually a residence where criminals live and work together. Most of them have been labeled as "psychopaths." They typically move to Delancey after committing felonies and having serious problems with addiction-to heroin or alcohol.

500 blacks and Latinos live together with only one professional staffer, Dr. Mimi Silbert who co-founded the program 35 years ago. Dr. Silbert, who's 63 and stands four feet, eleven without guards or supervisors of any kind allow these so-called hard-core criminals to run the place by themselves.

Dr.Silbert entrusts the residents to care for and take responsibility for one another. They kick out anyone who uses drugs, drinks alcohol, or resorts to threats or violence. Although most of them are illiterate when they first arrive, the ex-cons help one another earn their high school equivalency degrees, and they all learn at least three marketable skills.

Together they run the top- rated moving company in the Bay Area, a thriving upscale restaurant, a bookstore- café, and a print shop. In the winter they set up sites around the city where they sell Christmas trees. While taxpayers spend $40,000 a year to support a single prison inmate, Delancey supports itself with profits from its businesses. It never takes money from the government.

After staying at Delancey for four years, most of the residents "graduate" and go out on their own into the greater society. Nearly 60 percent of the people who enter the program make it through and sustain productive lives on the outside. This is indeed the reverse of the statistics compared to the Justice Department figures!

Don't you agree that this is yet another great example of Creative Governance?

Talk on Creative Governance

The above are just two of the many stories on Creative Governance that I have collated.

Please email Dr.YKK at DrYKK@mindbloom.net if you want to invite him to present an illuminating one hour Talk on Creative Governance and thereafter to facilitate a session to help solve a prevailing public and social problem in the spirit of Creative Governance.

I would appreciate if you could share Creative Governance stories with me so that they could be featured here. Please forward your response and contributions to DrYKK@mindbloom.net

Happiness and Public Policy

A seminar on “Happiness and Public Policy” that was held in Bangkok, Thailand in July 2007 organised by Thailand’s Public Policy Development Office and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP).

This seminar was inspired by two people. Firstly, it was the Thai King’s suggestions and theories on a “sufficiency economy”, which aim to follow a “middle way” of development. The second inspiration came from Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck back in 1972 who conceived the term Gross National Happiness (GNH), which aims to define the quality of life in holistic terms .But it wasn't until 1998 that Bhutan decided to share this idea with the rest of the world.

GNH promotes a sustainable, simple way of life and a peaceful society. This approach has already been incorporated into Thailand's 10th national economic and social development plan, which was based on the King’s sufficiency economy concept. . Its development goal is to have a society where people lived together in peace, happiness and togetherness, including being in good health.

Amazingly, instead of being driven by religious or social leaders, this concept has now been championed by technology-based organizations spearheaded by the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec), Chulalongkorn University and the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) .

These organisations plan to use Web 2.0 technologies to identify what makes people happy, mapping who knows what in communities and in applying technology to teaching meditation or mindfulness.

This noble mission has attracted the support of multinational corporations such as Google, Nokia, Inte, IBM and as well as many of the country’s top universities and government agencies.

This GNH initiative to me is a fantastic illustration of the concept of Creative Governance, where happiness takes priority over economic growth.

For further reading, go to:
www.bangkokpost.com/080807_Database/08Aug2007_data22.php
www.SpiritualComputing.org

Talk on Creative Governance

The above are just one of the many stories on Creative Governance that I have collated.

Please email Dr.YKK at DrYKK@mindbloom.net if you want to invite him to present an illuminating one hour Talk on Creative Governance and thereafter to facilitate a session to help solve a prevailing public and social problem in the spirit of Creative Governance.

I would appreciate if you could share Creative Governance stories with me so that they could be featured here. Please forward your response and contributions to DrYKK@mindbloom.net

Creative Governance for Governments

by Dr.YKK, Chief Mind Unzipper

DrYKK@mindbloom.net

Imagine living in a community that is as close to your dream as you possibly can. There is a smile on everyone’s lips and a sense of joy is in the air. The lawns and gardens are well maintained giving you the visual pleasure that you desire. Public places bustled with brightly coloured and scented flowers and green vegetation. It is a real treat for your senses. The community is vibrant, prosperous and your neighbors are friendly. You feel absolutely safe as crime is almost non-existent. The council rates have been dropping steadily and they are now at the lowest levels in 20 years. Government officials are well-loved by the people and are held in high esteem.

Creative Governance can be applied to any sector of the public service, whereas it is at the municipal, state , national and even at the global level of the United Nations.

Creative Governance

Welcome to the world of Creative Governance! Of course there are problems in every community but the difference is that they were resolved in the spirit of Creative Governance. But what is Creative Governance?

First of all, let’s examine what is Governance. There are many definitions but I subscribe to the one given by Tim Plumptre, Founder, Institute On Governance (Ref: http://www.iog.ca/ ) . According to Plumptre, Governance is the process whereby societies or organizations make important decisions, determine whom they involve and how they render account.

My definition of Creative Governance is : Creative Governance is a process whereby societies or organizations embrace and introduce innovations that enhance the quality of life on a sustainable basis. It is about exploiting limitations to drive breakthrough thinking. Innovation demands exploiting limits not ignoring them.

Hammer and Nail

Sadly, nearly all the governments in the world adopt a Hammer and Nail approach to their public governance. They see every problem as a nail which they need to whack with a hammer. For instance, if crime escalates, the hammer and nail approach is to increase the number of the police force, build more jails, buy more weapons and enact more laws. As the stories below show, this may not bring about the desired impact in in resolving the problem. An Creative Governance approach provides a much more effective solution at a much lower cost.

The time is now ripe for Creative Governance for the public sector. Public Governance in essence is similar to Corporate Governance, a concept that is gaining worldwide acceptance for corporate operational transparency to shareholders, decision accountability to stakeholders and social responsibility for its actions to the public at large.

Public Governance

Public governance is concerned with the conduct of governments at all levels to bring the best possible benefits to their citizens and to fulfill their responsibilities as members of the global community.

Ultimately, I hope that the United Nations will come out with the Public Governance Framework to promote and encourage the practice of Good Public Governance to all countries of the world. Through this framework, our rights as global citizens will be safeguarded so that we will enjoy unprecedented peace, harmony, good health and a high standard of living befitting our human dignity.

Public Governance Forum

My objective in initiating this Public Governance Forum is to share ideas about best practices in government policies and operations at all levels from all over the world so that we could learn from each other. It is open to everyone including those in government, politicians, public officials and the public at large. Let's share ideas to bring about a better world. Below are some of the stories which I consider to be excellent examples of Creative Governance in the public service.

Curitiba

The city of Curitiba in Brazil offers one of the best examples of Creative Governance.
In 1972, the new mayor of the city Jaime Lerner, an architect and urban planner named, ordered a 48 hours transformation of six blocks of the street into a pedestrian zone. The municipal authorities were able to accomplish it in three days.

The creation of the pedestrian zone inaugurated a series of programs by Lerner that made Curitiba a famous model for urban planning. In promoting industrial development Lerner decided to admit only non-polluters. Curitiba constructed an industrial district that reserved so much land for green space that it was derided as a “golf course” until it succeeded in filling up with major businesses. Through the creation of over 20 recreational parks, many with lakes to catch runoff in low-lying areas that flood periodically, Curitiba managed, at a time of explosive population growth, to increase its green areas from 5 square feet per inhabitant to an astounding 560 square feet. The city promoted “green” policies before they were fashionable and called itself “the ecological capital of Brazil” in the 1980s.

Another of its famous innovations is the introduction of glass tubes that are boarding platforms for the rapid-transit buses. A light rail system would have required 20 times the financial investment and a subway would have cost 100 times as much.

Broken Windows in New York, USA

William Bratton, chief of New York City’s police reduced serious crime rate by 75 percent by putting the concept of Broken Windows into practice. This concept was first introduced by criminologist George Kelling and social scientist James Q. Wilson. It was build around the theory that people were likelier to vandalize a building with one broken window than a building with none. A broken window sends the message that nobody cares, encouraging vandals to act on their destructive impulses. Similarly, they suggested, if a community tolerates quality-of-life offences, such as drug use and prostitution, it signals to all potential lawbreakers that it doesn’t care what happens to it; more serious crime will soon result. In short, a successful crime prevention strategy n what they termed as Zero Tolerance is to fix the problems when they are small.

With Kelling as consultant, Bratton began to go after the fare evaders, pickpockets, and other petty criminals who terrorized the New York subway system. Bratton also had cops enforce anti-loitering laws to steer the homeless away from the subways and toward social services. The results were conclusive. Not only did minor crime plunge; serious crime did, too, and public confidence soared. Bratton also discovered that in arresting what he thought were minor offenders, many of them were actually wanted for much more serious crimes who evaded capture previously.

Bratton achieved similar success when he was appointed as police chief in Los Angeles, since 2002. The LAPD has reduced crime by 26 percent overall, and homicides by 25 percent in three years, using many strategies, but always emphasizing order-restoration. These achievements in Los Angeles, like those in New York and in other cities, prove that broken windows is, in fact, thriving.

As of 2005, New York City has the lowest crime rate among the ten largest cities in the US. In fact, it was so successful that the London ( UK) police had to send a delegation to learn from the New York program.

Peace in Basra, Iraq

The FastCompany magazine highlighted the Creative Governance achievements of British Army Captain Stephen Morte stationed in Basra, Iraq.

Captain Morte utilized the microfinance concept that won Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He worked to defuse tension between coalition forces and the Iraqi people by offering grants to help create jobs and ease poverty. By helping to build self-sustaining enterprises, thereby weaning Iraq from reliance on foreign aid and improving Iraqis' opinion of foreign forces, Morte believed that it would bring about more lasting peace than military enforcements.

In his role as a civil-military cooperation officer for the Light Infantry Regiment - one of the most battle-hardened in the British Army, Morte liaised among Iraqi reconstruction agencies, the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, and Iraqi construction contractors.

With every payment Morte subsequently rendered, he sensed a change. He was well received and respected by the community. One plan set in motion was to revive an entire sector of the Basra economy with an $8 million program to plant 140,000 date palms. The program could provide long-term employment for 2,000 Baswari farmers and 8,000 laborers, two-thirds of whom were recently unemployed.

Sustainable peace in Iraq could be achieved not by military might but through non-military creative governance like the one practiced by Captain Morte.

Los Angeles Gang Violence, USA

The racial gang violence, Latino versus black proved largely immune to anti-criemefforts by the police. Violent gang crime jumped 14 percent in 2006. There were 40,000 gang members, spread between 720 gangs, who committed 269 murders last year.

According to Constance Rice, author of a study on LA crime and violence, the city has spent $50 billion on the problem over the past three decades and now has six times as many gangs and twice the number of gang members. Police see have come to realize that the gang epidemic here is largely immune to increased crime crackdown. .They realized that the police "cannot arrest their way out of the gang violence crisis," . A new innovative approach is required.

Rice’s research discovered a successful community model that had been tried in L.A., During the summer of 2003, local basketball courts stayed open past midnight for games. Community groups offered computer games and tutoring from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. – the hours when most violence occurs. Gang intervention workers negotiated with local gangs for no-violence agreements, while a local radio station provided coverage of progress.

At the end of 14 weeks there was a clear record ... not one shooting or killing or battery or assault. This is the power of Creative Governance.

Courtroom in School

Michael Martone is a district judge in Oakland County, Michigan, USA. He is a different kind of judicial activist -- a judge who thinks outside the box, gets off the bench, and tries to prevent problems involving drunk-driving accidents before they wind up in his courtroom.

He started a "Court in the Schools/Critical Life Choices." program with the goal to make an impression on students by bringing real-life sentencing hearings into their schools. His logic: If you want to encourage kids not to make bad decisions, then make them see the consequences of such decisions.

The second half of the program consists of a conversation with the kids, during which Martone screens news clips about drunk-driving accidents. For example he show a clip of a drunk driver who killed a mother and her three daughters. "He tore up two families," he tells the students, "his own and the one whose mother and children he killed. How is getting behind the wheel when you're drunk different from shooting someone?"

Martone put together a "startup kit" for his fellow judges. It has an organizational checklist, sample letters to send to school districts, advice on how to structure chats with students, and a sample press release to help spread the word. It also provides lots of evidence that the program works -- not hard statistics, which would be impossible to track, but handwritten thank-you letters that students have sent to Martone. The result is that it has attracted widespread attention throughout the US.

Baby Treatment, UK

A small town in the U.K had a problem with unruly young men after a drinking session at a local pub. In their drunk condition, they went on a rampage in the surrounding areas smashing cars and damaging public property. Many were hauled to jail to sober them up. However, the number of offences shot up instead of being reduced.

The police chief was in a fix. Through his discreet investigations, he discovered that the reason for the increase in drunk-related offences was the youth's perception of a 'macho image'. Those who went to jail actually boasted about achieving true manhood!

By understanding the problem, the police chief came out with an ingenious solution. He treated the jailed offenders like babies. They were fed baby food, given milk in baby milk bottles and spoken to by the wardens in the baby language. In a small community, news of this "baby treatment" spread like wildfire. Guess what? The offences disappeared as quickly as they had appeared! Perhaps this treatment could be meted out to the football hooligans as well.

Talk on Creative Governance

The above are just a few of the many stories on Creative Governance that I have collated.
Please email Dr.YKK at DrYKK@mindbloom.net if you want to invite him to present an illuminating one hour Talk on Creative Governance and thereafter to facilitate a session to help solve a prevailing public and social problem in the spirit of Creative Governance.

I would appreciate if you could share Creative Governance stories with me so that they could be featured here. Please forward your response and contributions to DrYKK@mindbloom.net .