Archives for July 2013

Cultivating the Visionistas

July 18, 2013 By Otis White

I recently spent time with a man who had changed the course of a river—and not a small river, a big one. He’s John Turner, a businessman and environmentalist, and the river he changed was the Chattahoochee, which flows from well north of Atlanta to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Turner’s city of Columbus, Georgia.

Fifteen years ago, Turner took charge of an effort to turn the lazy, muddy Chattahoochee into whitewater in downtown Columbus. Or rather, back into whitewater, because, as it turns out, before factories in Columbus dammed the river in the 1830s, Columbus had extraordinary rapids.

I won’t go into detail about what Turner and his fellow citizens did to pull off this feat (year after year of making presentations, commissioning studies, sitting in permitting hearings, lobbying legislators and congressmen, raising money, and finally knocking down some century-old dams). But the results are spectacular. In May, Turner dedicated Whitewater Columbus, the largest urban rafting experience in America. It is two and a half miles of churning, stomach-dropping rapids that are already attracting world-class kayakers and families looking for adventure. It will, Turner is sure, create a boom in riverfront development in Columbus.

If you’re thinking that your city needs someone like John Turner, you’re right. And here’s the good news: Your city may already have one, and maybe dozens of them. What you probably don’t have, though, is a process for cultivating them.

Some call these extraordinary citizens “civic entrepreneurs,” but I don’t think the name does them justice. Starting a company is easy by comparison to what they do. The term I’ve used for a while is “visionistas,” because their motivation is their ideas—the clear visions they have of things that others cannot see, at least in the beginning.

The first visionista I came to know was Billy Paine, the lawyer who in the late 1980s dreamed up the Atlanta Olympics, then patiently brought the games to life. But there have been many others: Fred Lebow, the man who reinvented the marathon in 1976 by running one through the five boroughs of New York; Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who in the late 1990s saw a long linear park in the sky when they looked at New York’s abandoned High Line train trestles; or, more recently, Elisa Beck, who is determined to create a center for sustainability inside an old grocery store on Pittsburgh’s South Side. As Beck illustrates, visionistas don’t always have ambitions as big as a city. Sometimes the vision can be for something in a single neighborhood.

The visionistas’ greatest strength is their drive. As a city council member said of Beck, these people can be tenacious. They are also persistent. Fifteen years is a long time to work on a single project. Most council members wouldn’t do it, and most mayors can’t. Visionistas also tend to be transparently authentic, which draws others toward them and their causes. Lebow was so obsessed with the New York Marathon that he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, but no one ever doubted his sincerity.

What should city officials do with such determined people? And how can you tell the difference between a crazy idea that’s a great leap forward and a crazy idea that’s just . . . a crazy idea? My suggestion: Encourage but don’t embrace visionistas, at least until they’ve make their ideas viable. And viability means two things: a significant group of supporters (including financial supporters) and a plan. And the plan has to answer three questions: How will this project be paid for? How will we get the necessary public and private approvals? And how will we explain it to the citizens?

Your job, then, is to explain the things that make projects viable, encourage the visionistas to give these things a try, and send them on their way. If they come back a year later with a group of supporters and a somewhat realistic plan, then you have not just a dreamer but a doer. And it’s time to consider investing your time and perhaps some public money in their project.

But even then, be careful not to take the project from them. The projects that succeed most spectacularly do so by living just outside government. If New York’s High Line, which is run by a nonprofit, had been handed over to the parks department in the early days of the Bloomberg administration, we wouldn’t be talking about it today as the creative, inspiring project it is. That’s because, alas, vision, creativity and bureaucracy rarely cohabitate.

If you value neatness and clear lines of authority, this will be uncomfortable. But if you can tolerate ambiguity and a certain amount of creative tension, working with visionistas can be exciting. Not as exciting as hurdling down a two-and-a-half-mile whitewater course. But thrilling in its own way. And along with the thrills, you might do your city some real good.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo courtesy of Whitewater Columbus.

Dealing with the Cynics

July 10, 2013 By Otis White

Maybe the most dispiriting things a reformer faces, when she’s trying to fix a major community problem—or maybe turn around an entire city—are the twin evils of cynicism and finger pointing. And if you prefer your evils in threes, add another: apathy.

In my experience, every city has some version of these problems: big cities and small towns, places in long decline and even those on the rise. And they come from people in low places and high. I’ve known mayors who were hard-bitten cynics, chamber of commerce executives who blamed everyone else for what went wrong, and newspaper editorialists who described every new idea as the Titanic weighing anchor.

So what do you do when you’re faced with such a wall of civic doubt and negativism? I’ll get to the things you should do shortly, but let’s begin with the things you shouldn’t:

Don’t become part of the problem. Specifically, don’t point fingers at others, don’t blame the community for things that go wrong, and don’t give up.
And don’t do the opposite, which is to overpromise. Leaders who promise too much (“we can turn this around in 90 days”) end up digging the cynicism hole even deeper when they fail. If you need a slogan, try this one: “Let’s do what we can.”

And what are the things you can do? Start with attitude. You can be positive without being a Pollyanna. The secret is to be quietly confident. Jack McColl, who worked for many years in rural development in the Midwest, wrote a wise little book 20 years ago called “The Small Town Survival Guide.” In it, he described a group that he called the “coffee-break cynicism society” whose delight, he said, was in describing every civic improvement as certain failure. His advice: “Cultivate your ability to smile and say, ‘Let’s try.’ “

But ultimately the only thing that overcomes widespread cynicism is success. Doing something. Succeeding. Then doing something else, and succeeding there too.

Which begs the question: Where do you start? I’ll give you the advice I’ve heard from two highly successful mayors. One was Bill Frederick, the three-term mayor of Orlando in the 1980s.

Frederick’s advice was to pick the biggest, most visible thing that you knew with certainty you could accomplish, then bring every resource to bear on accomplishing it. It worked for Frederick, and it worked a decade later for Frank Martin, the late mayor of Columbus, Georgia, who worked mightily to change attitudes in his city. Martin used what he called his “man on the moon” strategy to complete a big civic project that had eluded one mayor after another, the building of a civic center in downtown Columbus. (Again: big, visible, doable, done.)

But here’s the key: One data point is not a trend, and a single success will not change a community’s cynicism. For that, you need repeated successes. Martin followed the civic center by building a stunning 22-mile river walk, a new set of recreational athletic fields downtown, and then, improbably enough, by staging in Columbus one of the events of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the women’s softball competition. (If you want the full story of what Martin did and how it laid the groundwork for Columbus’ eventual revival, you can read about it in my book, “The Great Project.“)

Most civic leaders aren’t mayors and aren’t called upon to turn around an entire city. But the same principles apply if you are trying to improve a neighborhood, change a lethargic government agency, resurrect a nonprofit, or deal with a crime problem. Be quietly confident and don’t overpromise. Focus on one big, visible project and move heaven and earth to get it done. (If it can be completed in ways that exceed expectations—on time, under budget, and with unexpected quality—all the better.) Then refocus and repeat. And then repeat again.

Keep in mind that you’ll always have rock-throwers, and some will always deny progress. But the more you accomplish, the less others will pay attention to them, and the quieter and quieter the coffee-break cynicism society will become.

This is part of a series of brief postings called Rules for Reformers. For an introduction to the series, please click here.

How Collaboration Happens

July 3, 2013 By Otis White

I’m fond of saying that there are no silver bullets for cities but there are some bronze ones. Here’s a bronze bullet: a healthy cooperation among governments. City councils sitting down with school boards. County governments managing projects with cities. Cities contracting with one another for services. State legislators working with mayors, school superintendents, and county commissioners on legislative strategies. That sort of thing.

The benefits of healthy cooperation are so obvious—lower costs, greater effectiveness, public approval—that it makes you wonder why it’s so rare. My theory: It’s because many leaders do not know how to create the conditions needed for collaboration. And because the conditions don’t exist, neither does the collaboration.

I’m going to set out four things that I think must precede collaboration, but first, a definition. Collaboration is cooperation by interests that don’t have to cooperate. That is, they could go it alone but choose to work together because they see clear benefits or because cooperation is, for some reason, expected. Often collaborators are organizations of equal or nearly equal size. To be a true collaboration, it can’t be an easy, one-off act, it has to be a sustained set of activities. (If I do something for you that’s unexpected and nice, I’m not collaborating. I’m doing you a favor.) And, again, it’s voluntary. If the cooperation is forced by an outside interest, it’s not collaboration; it’s compulsion.

The reason collaboration is so rare is that it requires us to think about things in different ways, and that’s hard. First, we’re not all that good at calculating the benefits of things that don’t exist, such as how things might be if we worked together. Second, we’re suspicious of interests that might be considered rivals. How can we be sure we won’t be taken advantage of? Finally, there’s inertia. If something seems to be working as it is, why change . . . especially if the change involves time or money?

To collaborate, then, requires an act of will. In local government, it has to be initiated by someone who truly wants to collaborate and sees the value of community institutions and governments working together. It takes, in other words, a leader. But it need not be a top leader. It can as easily be a city council member as a mayor, a commissioner as well as a county administrator, a school board member as well as the superintendent. What it requires are diligence and a sense of how one thing leads to another.

And that involves seeing collaboration as a process that depends on three things happening in sequence and then connecting with a fourth element. The sequence is understanding, trust, and transparency. I’ll go through them in reverse order:

Transparency is the key ingredient. You can’t have healthy collaborations if one of the parties feels it may be taken advantage of. So how can you guard against this? By being as open as possible. If your city is supplying a service to others, you have to be open about your costs and revenues. If the city is working with the school system on a joint project, it has to open its books. If the legislative delegation is meeting with local governments, legislators have to be honest about what they can accomplish, and the localities have to be honest about what they need most and what they can contribute to the cause.
But no one wants to be the first to lay his cards on the table. So in order to have transparency, you must have trust, the feeling that you know the person or organization you’re dealing with and that your openness won’t be used against you. Trust, then, precedes transparency.
And what precedes trust is understanding. Understanding takes time. It doesn’t come from a single meeting, it comes from a number of encounters, often in different settings. There’s a reason so many business people play golf. It allows them to size up potential partners and vendors outside of the office. As much as a pastime, then, golf is a vetting process. Your vetting process might include golf, but it could just as easily involve lunches, cocktail parties, or baseball outings.

So think about this in sequence: First, you seek to know those who might be potential collaborators and become known by them. Those understandings allow you to build trust. And trust opens the door to transparency, which is needed for collaboration.

But these things only make collaboration possible. Collaborations don’t actually happen until there’s a fourth element, which is the recognition of mutual interest. This involves someone spotting an opportunity for collaboration, calculating its benefits to all, and persuading others to give it a try.

Here’s the best part of seeing collaboration as a process: Anyone with standing in an institution can start it. If we’re talking about governments collaborating, that means any elected official or relatively well-placed appointed official. All it takes to begin the process is seeing a potential partner and picking up the phone.

Once you do so, don’t be in a hurry; understanding, trust, and transparency take a while. Often there are bruised feelings caused by years of government officials pointing fingers at each other. Be patient, don’t take things personally (when you start talking with your counterparts in other governments, be prepared for an earful about transgressions past and present), and try to be a voice for understanding on both sides. That is, explain your government to potential partners as calmly and objectively as possible, and be quick to speak up for other governments among your own colleagues. Nothing builds trust as quickly as the feeling that somebody over there understands us.

But what about that fourth element, the recognition of mutual interest? How do you prepare for that? Basically, you just keep your eyes open. As you build understanding, trust, and the willingness to be open, the opportunities for cooperation will present themselves. Some may offer great potential benefits, others will have only modest benefits. A good strategy may be to start with some modest collaborations and build toward the big ones, deepening understanding, trust, and transparency along the way.

It can be a long journey, so it may help to keep in mind how some unlikely collaborations came together in the past. Look around. There may be some great examples in your city. If you can’t find one, you can always look back to 1787, when one of the world’s most unlikely collaborations began. It started in Philadelphia that summer, as a group representing 13 bickering governments produced a document beginning with these words: “We the people of the United States . . .”

Cultivating the Visionistas

Dealing with the Cynics

How Collaboration Happens

About Otis White

The Great Project

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