The Dallas Police Department?s Youth Services Project (YSP) was a nationally acclaimed community-based treatment program that reduced juvenile recidivism from 62% to 12% for over 3,000 youthful offenders during its first three years of operation. Not only were families and community served by the YSP, so were the taxpayers. Project services including youth and parent skills training, counseling and social service agency referrals were delivered at half the established cost of a comparable "system" response i.e., juvenile court hearing and disposition. Perhaps the most confirming result of the YSP was that fact that it continued to deliver these needed services with similar results to the community for over 25 consecutive years.

It was during this project and others like it, that we began to develop our systems thinking, client-centered approach to organizational development and performance management that we use with our clients today.