Take a look at a few paragraphs from the Los Angeles Times of May 14, 2016.
“Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday threw his support behind an ambitious $2-billion plan to build housing for California’s mentally ill homeless population.
“The governor’s action comes as cities from Los Angeles to San Francisco, have seen homelessness increase in recent years, sparked in part by rising rents that have pushed poor people into shantytowns on city sidewalks and canyons. “Under the plan, the state would issue $2 billion in bonds, which would be repaid over 20 to 30 years with money provided under Proposition 63, the “millionaires’ tax” for mental health services that voters approved in 2004.
“Proponents said money from the bond, together with federal and local funding, would finance 10,000 to 14,000 new housing units for the state’s 116,000 homeless people, an estimated 30% of whom have mental illness.”
I’m sure you will agree that this is a thorny problem and solutions are not clear-cut. But, I read the last paragraph twice and thought, WHAT???? It is a start, but it doesn’t come close to solving the homeless problem we have here in Los Angeles, let alone the whole state. And, we are talking about taxpayer money – OUR money – so we all have a voice in how it is spent, which can slow this process to a crawl.
Businesses often do this same thing. We do not allocate enough resources to actually solve a problem in our organizations. Or, we do not fund a new initiative to make it successful. Further, we have different constituencies fighting for limited resources, and we can get stuck with no substantive progress on any initiatives. How often do we doom success because we don’t spend enough time planning and allocating resources? How often do we look at competing requests and put a little bit into each pot?
Government has to address all the issues, all the time. Luckily, we can pick just a few of the most promising ideas to invest in. Let’s put more time in up-front to see that initiatives get allocated the resources that weight the project towards success rather than failure.
Illustration courtesy of: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/avoiding-the-quicksand