Archives for March 2010

Framing Your Change Efforts

March 8, 2010 By Otis White

In earlier postings, I talked about the roles of activists in introducing ideas and champions in moving ideas toward acceptance. But ideas don’t live in a vacuum. They are part of an infrastructure of thought that includes things that are bigger than ideas—they are ways of seeing the world and making sense of it. In 1922, Walter Lippmann called these things “pseudo-environments.” But to use more contemporary language, let’s call them “frames.”

Actually, you know frames quite well because we all use them. If they’re our frames, we might call them “values” and “beliefs.” In others, they could be considered “ideology.” Frames are, as Lippmann explained in his book “Public Opinion”, “the picture in (our) heads” that helps us understand our everyday environments.

. . . (T)he real environment is altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.

And that’s what frames offer us: a simpler model we can use to make sense of things and act on them.

Ever wonder how a friend or family member could read the same newspaper article as you—say, a story about a college student who was robbed while walking home at midnight—and come to the opposite conclusion about what it meant? While you were muttering, “Serves him right; he should have been studying,” your brother was fuming about the lack of police presence. Your frame: “In the end, it’s all about personal responsibility.” Your brother’s: “This is what happens when you cut city budgets.”

It’s important to think about frames as you consider how to make changes in your community. True, some changes are so narrowly focused or unexpected that they don’t fit into most people’s frames. You see this in natural disasters. When a tornado flattens a block in your city’s downtown, nobody questions the motives of weather fronts. But not many important changes escape the framing process. Let’s say your downtown organization wants to level a block and replace some shabby old buildings with new condos. You may find people framing your plans in unexpected ways, as some inveigh against greedy developers and business interests, while others think it would be nice to have more people living downtown.

Given this almost universal need for placing new ideas into old frames, people involved in change efforts should use this tendency to their advantage and connect their change efforts to the strongest, most widely accepted frames around. Want taxpayers to pay for more parks in your city? You could connect it to a tried-and-true frame, like “it’s good for quality of life” or go with something more current like “parks promote active recreation, which reduces childhood obesity.”

In a future posting, I’ll talk about how leaders can change community frames themselves. It isn’t easy, but sometimes it’s necessary to do more than win acceptance of ideas—you need to change the very ways large numbers of people make sense of their city and its issues.

Photo by marcmoss licensed under Creative Commons.

Enter the Champion

March 6, 2010 By Otis White

It won’t come as a surprise to many leaders, but change is hard. And the greater the change—the greater the shift in thinking or habits—the harder it is. The wonder is, given the difficulty, that people ever change their minds on important things.

But they do. My theory, which I call the drip-drip-drip theory, is that it begins with doubts—things that can’t be easily reconciled with a person’s present views. As the doubts mount (drip, drip, drip), the person struggles more and more to reconcile them, until suddenly she shifts, sometimes reversing long-held beliefs. This is how Democrats become Republicans and vice versa. The declaration (“I’ll never vote for another Democrat!”) comes overnight, but it’s usually preceded by a steady stream of doubts (drip, drip, drip).

But there are things that can help people take that final step in accepting a new idea. One of the most effective is the entry of a champion—a respected person who has accepted the new idea and can vouch that it is reasonable and worthy of support.

Two notes in thinking about champions: First, the champion need not be an individual; it can be a group of respected leaders. Example: In 2007, business leaders in Florida’s Tampa-St. Petersburg area announced it was time to develop a regional light-rail transit system. This wasn’t a new idea, but it wasn’t considered seriously until the business leaders weighed in. (In surprisingly short order, the Florida Legislature passed enabling legislation and planning began on the system.)

Second, timing is everything. Champions are second-stage leaders who enter when an idea is gaining viability. Their role is to move the idea from fringe to mainstream. Enter the discussion too soon, and they lose credibility; too late and they’re seen as irrelevant.

So who are the best champions? Really, there are only two criteria: That they be well known and credible. They could be elected officials, corporate CEOs or former leaders who remain known and respected.

Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about champions is to look at one we’re all familiar with, former Vice President Al Gore and his role in the climate change debate. Believe it or not, Gore didn’t discover that earth’s climate was changing; it just seems that way. By 2006 when his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, scientists had been talking about climate change for decades. (Gore said he learned about it in college in the 1960s.) But because of Gore’s familiarity and credibility, he was able almost overnight to shift the discussion from classrooms and laboratories to dinner tables and legislative chambers.

Gore gave the climate change debate a human face. That makes some in the environmental community uncomfortable; they think Gore is too identified with their cause. (How often do people say sarcastically during a cold snap, “Hey, Al Gore, is it cold enough for you?”) But that instant identification illustrates why champions are so important. Activists understand the complicated ideas they are advancing; most people don’t. They rely on people they respect to assure them that the ideas are sound, that the sacrifices are worthwhile. Few of us can explain the physics behind climate change, but we believe Al Gore understands it and that gives us greater faith—or higher blood pressure, depending on what you think of him.

There’s another role that champions can play, and that is defending the ideas when they come under attack. You can see Al Gore playing this role, too. When opponents attacked the credibility of climate change scientists not long ago, Gore weighed in with an op-ed article in the New York Times refocusing the discussion on the overwhelming scientific consensus behind climate change. In the long march of ideas in your community, there will be opportunities for champions to play both roles: vouching for new ways of thinking and new courses of action—and defending the ideas when they run into trouble.

Photo by Recylebank licensed under Creative Commons.

Building Relationships That Defy the Odds

March 2, 2010 By Otis White

Race and ethnicity are the great divides in America, yet nearly every community—and certainly every city—is diverse, some dizzyingly so. But if it’s so hard to reach across racial and ethnic lines, how can we ever make our communities better places? We couldn’t except for one thing: People do reach across those lines. Not as frequently as we’d like, but enough to help us move forward.

We have a profile of one of those remarkable boundary crossers in an article in the New York Times Magazine. Its title: “The Visible Man.” It’s the story of how James Fields, a 55-year-old black Methodist minister and former state employment agency worker, came to be a state representative from Cullman County, Ala., population 81,000, less than 1 percent of whom are African American.

It wasn’t just a demographic tide that Fields swam against. He’s a Democrat and supporter of President Obama’s in a state where 88 percent of whites voted for John McCain. Cullman County is staunchly Republican and deeply distrustful of Obama. And that’s not all: Cullman County has a history of being one of Alabama’s most racist places, which is obviously saying a lot. And judging by what the writer, Nicholas Dawidoff, learned in his reporting, racism (or, at least, racist language) is still part of everyday life there.

So how did James Fields, a black Democrat, get 59 percent of the vote in one of the unlikeliest—and, on the surface, inhospitable—places you could imagine? According to the article, Fields had three things that made most white voters pause, consider him seriously and mark his name on the ballot. First, he was local. He had been born and raised in Cullman County, and in such a place—out of step with the rest of America and proudly so—that meant a lot. Second, he was known by many white families because he had helped many of them find jobs in his days at the employment agency. From these experiences, white families knew him as hard working, thoughtful and far more like themselves than they could have expected

Finally, he emphasized the thing that bonded him mostly closely to his white neighbors: their shared religion. When he began his campaign for state representative against a white Republican candidate, Rev. Fields took out a newspaper ad urging that the candidates conduct a campaign that was “God-driven and Christ-centered.” This might cause eyes to roll elsewhere, but in small-town Alabama, where almost everyone is a Christian and many passionately so, it conveyed the message that James Fields is “one of us.”

And it’s not just in Cullman County that such cultural boundary crossings occur. Dawidoff interviewed other black political leaders from mostly white constituencies in Alabama and Mississippi and heard similar stories. Locy Baker, a former teacher and school administrator who is serving his fourth term as a state representative from Southeast Alabama, said it helped that he was local and known. “I (have) been living here all my days,” Baker told Dawidoff. “Grew up here. People know me.” And if you’ve spent time helping others—particularly those from different backgrounds—that’s a big help too. James Young, the mayor of Philadelphia, Miss., said, “It took me 30-plus years of working in this community to be where I am. It did not happen overnight. I tell younger people, live your life serving people, and it will come back to benefit you.” (Yes, Young is mayor of that Philadelphia, Miss., the place where three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 and the setting of the movie”Mississippi Burning”.)

So what are the lessons that James Field could teach other community leaders? First, establish your bona fides. If you weren’t born in the community, show how you’ve accepted it in the way you talk and what you say. Second, go beyond networking—networking is fine, but actually helping people is much, much better, especially if those you help are different from you. Third, look for opportunities that help others see what you have in common. For James Fields, it was a shared faith. In other places it might be a love of the local team, the neighborhood festivals, a respected charity or a beloved restaurant.

In the end, it’s about building relationships in spite of the forces that keep people apart. James Fields knows how to do it in Cullman County, Ala. You can do it in your city too.

Photo by Jeremy Wilburn licensed under Creative Commons.

Framing Your Change Efforts

Enter the Champion

Building Relationships That Defy the Odds

About Otis White

The Great Project

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