Otis White – Page 13

What I’ve Learned about Leadership from Reading Obituaries

January 11, 2012 By Otis White

This may sound a little odd, but for several years I’ve been collecting newspaper obituaries from around the country. Not just any ones, but obits about highly regarded civic leaders, a group I call “super-civic leaders.” My aim is to find out what they did to be so highly respected, and how they did it. I’ve come to some conclusions.

I’ll tell you my conclusions in a moment, but let me tell you first how I choose these people and introduce you to a few from my collection. To begin, I’m not looking for elected officials—mayors, city council members, county commissioners—or for executives of major community nonprofits, such as chamber of commerce presidents or community foundation executives. I’m looking for people who, at least initially, started as volunteers and found something intoxicating about civic work.

I’m also looking for people who’ve made such a difference in their communities that their obits appeared on the newspaper’s front page or the first page of the metro section. The kind of people whose funerals attract mayors, governors, and other prominent folks. These super-civic leaders could have been successes in any field (and some, in fact, were highly successful in other ways), but at a point in their lives, they chose to devote themselves to the places they lived.

Why? Well, unfortunately, obituaries aren’t good at answering that question. And my own experience with super-civic leaders is that they aren’t good at explaining their motivations either. My theory is that they simply tried civic work, found it deeply satisfying, and, like most of us, stuck with something they did well.

What’s interesting about the 50 or so obituaries I’ve collected is that, in almost every other respect, these people have little or nothing in common. They were business executives and neighborhood activists. Lawyers, entrepreneurs, retirees, and activists. Republicans, Democrats, or completely nonpartisan. Male, female, black, white, Latino. Several were born in other countries. Some were Forbes 400 wealthy. Others seemed never to have had two nickels to rub together.

Let me introduce you to five from my collection. There’s Warren Hellman, the quirky investment banker from San Francisco who loved politics, bluegrass music, civic causes, and nearly everything about his city. (The things he didn’t like he worked hard to change.) On the other side of the country was Rob Stuart of Philadelphia whose occupation was unclear to most who met him. (The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as a communications consultant.) What is clear is that he was a passionate advocate for civic improvements and effective lobbyist at city hall. “He was like the 18th member of city council,” one council member said of him.

There was Noel Cunningham, a charismatic Irishman who turned his restaurant into Denver’s unofficial civic club, where mayors, governors, and do-gooders met and planned projects—always with Cunningham at the center of things. “Forget paying for the meal,” one nonprofit leader said. “You’d walk out of there with a checklist of things he wanted you to do.”

Seattle’s Kent Kammerer didn’t have a place for meetings, but he had a talent for creating serious discussions. He started a monthly forum called the Seattle Neighborhood Coalition at which political and civic leaders appeared for fair-minded but tough grillings. A retired teacher with gray hair and a bushy beard, Kammerer used these discussions to write about how to make Seattle better. He was so knowledgeable of the city and its neighborhoods that one journalist called him a “mossback Yoda,” after the wise and wizened Star Wars character.

Finally, there’s Eleanor Josaitis, a saintly Detroit woman about whom a book should be written. In 1968, as Detroit was experiencing a tidal wave of white flight, Josaitis, her husband, and five children went the opposite way, moving from the suburbs to the city so she could work with the poor. Over the next 43 years, Josaitis’ nonprofit became the place presidents visited to learn about Detroit’s needs. At her funeral, 900 people, from former mayors, governors, and business leaders to the people she served, sat shoulder to shoulder in Detroit’s downtown Catholic cathedral.

Again, I can’t tell you why these people gave so much of their lives to their communities. I do know they are so rare that, when they died, people mourned them as irreplaceable.

Given their vastly different backgrounds, what did these leaders have in common? Two things, I’ve noticed: First, they brought something valuable to civic work. Sometimes it was money, more commonly it was people, energy, or ideas. In a few cases, as with Josaitis, it was simply her moral force. Second, they gave astonishing amounts of time to their civic work.

Let me go a little deeper with both of these qualities. The old saying is that nonprofits need one of three things from board members: their time, talent, or treasure (that is, money). That’s true of super-civic leaders as well, but it understates their contributions because not everyone’s time, talents or treasure are the same. The truly great leaders bring something unexpected and sometimes unique.

Hellman, the investment banker, gave money, of course—his own and that of other wealthy San Franciscans he solicited for causes. But he also had a rare talent for solving civic problems, from government finance to bolstering Golden Gate Park. So when a civic problem needed a creative solution as well as cash, Hellman was there. And he didn’t just solve other people’s problems. He created things for the city, including a music festival called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass that brings hundreds of thousands of people each year to Golden Gate Park. Not your typical millionaire, Hellman would sometimes join musicians like Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle on the stage, plucking away on his banjo.

Almost as quirky as Hellman, though not nearly as wealthy, was Rob Stuart of Philadelphia. Stuart combined a talent for research and enthusiasm for ideas (“he was like an idea merchant,” one neighborhood leader said) with almost superhuman persistence. Among his many initiatives, he battled the railroad company CSX for four years to create a public crossing of its land near a riverside park . . . and won. Said one civic leader of Stuart and his supporters, “They weren’t rabble-rousers. They weren’t suing. They just got a lot of people together, worked nights and weekends, and wore the railroad down, and we’re all going to benefit from it for the rest of our lives.”

Cunningham introduced people he met through his restaurant, connecting people with needs to those with resources. Kammerer did something similar in Seattle through his forums.

But having access to unusual resources was only part of it. These leaders also gave incredible amounts of their time. That was true even of Hellman, who had an investment firm to run. He spent hours negotiating with San Francisco politicians on city pension reform. And Josaitis, of course, gave 43 years of her life to rescuing a city that others had given up on.

There’s one other thing about these five super-civic leaders and most of the rest in my file: They come across in their obituaries as utterly sincere. Obituaries are almost always respectful of the dead, of course. But you can’t fake what people said of these leaders. “The world is a worse place without Noel,” one mourner said of Cunningham. His eulogist, a former governor, called him “the most persistent and selfless person I have ever met.” Said the cardinal of Detroit at Josaitis’ funeral mass: “She was one of those special people that comes along every 100 years. . . . She was able to do things most people weren’t able to do.”

And what do these rare people tell those of us who aren’t super-civic leaders? Three things: First, it pays to be strategic, to look around for things you—and only you—can bring to civic work. It could be a new set of ideas or contacts, or a new source of funding, such as grants or some kind of private funding. This is how you go from being a volunteer to a leader.

Second, to be effective in communities, you have to be willing to put in the time. Cities are complex environments that are devilishly difficult to change, and there’s no substitute for persistence and patience. (Think of Rob Stuart’s four-year crusade to convince CSX to let people cross its land to get to a park.)

Finally, authenticity is important. Because civic work is so long term, people will sort out the sincere from the insincere. So care about your causes. It’ll draw others to your work . . . and who knows? It might win you a wonderful obituary one day.

Decision Phase: Focused Persuasion

December 31, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

We’re on the final leg of our community change process. This is the “decision phase”—although, to be completely accurate, perhaps we should have called it the “decisions phase.” That’s because power is widely dispersed in American cities among levels of government (federal, state, local), types of government (city councils, school boards, authorities, agencies and courts), and individuals. And if you’re involved in major change, you’ll probably need a number of governments and agencies (and maybe a group of nonprofits and other funders) to say yes to your project.

Before getting to the decision phase, though, let’s review a few things you should have mastered in the previous stage, the planning phase. To begin, you should know precisely who has to approve your project and in what order their approvals should come. As you mapped these decision points, I hope you met with some of the decision makers to hear their advice and concerns. By now, you should also have a well-developed narrative, explaining the needs that your project is responding to, how possible solutions were considered, and why the solution being advanced is the right one.

There’s more: You should have lined up champions to talk about the project to different groups of citizens and decision makers. By this point, you should have mastered the details of your project so well that you and your champions can easily explain to decision makers how your initiative will unfold over time, what it will cost in each stage, and where the money will come from. And I hope you’ve built public support along the way, especially among groups most affected by the changes. With your champions, you should have met these groups, listened to their concerns, and answered them well enough that, if they’re not supporting your project, at least they’re not opposing it.

So what’s left to be done after all this? In a word, persuasion. Persuasion that’s focused on the handful of people who must say yes in order for your project to go forward.

In thinking about persuasion, it’s helpful to think first about decision making itself. How do people make up their minds about important decisions? Well, no two people are alike, but it’s safe to assume that most use a combination of two approaches: some sort of logical, cost-benefit analysis, and an emotional calculation involving intuition.

The funny thing is that it’s often hard to untangle analysis (appeals to the mind) and emotions (appeals to the heart). People who are good at persuasion move easily back and forth between them . . . and people who are being persuaded do, too. They get excited about the possibilities of a change, and a minute later think of a hundred reasons it won’t work. So as you’re persuading people, be ready to move back and forth between analysis and emotion, keeping in mind that some people want more of one, some want more of the other, but all need some of both.

But where do you begin in persuading public officials to say yes to major change? You start in the place where we began the map of community change, with the need—the problem or opportunity that your change process was intended to answer.

The need is a powerful motivating force because, if you are skillful in making it felt, it makes people uncomfortable with the status quo, creating a cost for standing pat. Put another way, it creates a “push” for change. But that’s not all you’ll need to motivate citizens and leaders to act. You need a “pull,” as well, and that is a vivid description of how things will be better once the solution is in place. In other words, a vision. Let’s be clear: A vision is not the same as the solution. It’s how the community will look and work once the solution is in place and the need answered.

Example: In the early 1990s, as organizers were trying to rally Atlantans behind a bid for the 1996 Summer Olympics, they often talked about how the games would change the city for the better. Yes, it would be good for the economy and for Atlanta’s image, they said, but those were short-term benefits. Long term, they said, it would make Atlanta a more international city, leave behind a collection of athletic and community venues, and inspire a generation of local children. Did it do all these things? I’ll leave it for others to decide, but the point is that these weren’t descriptions of the solution (that is, the Olympic games). They were descriptions of how the solution would make the community better, and they pulled people toward supporting the Olympics bid.

The third tool in your persuasion toolkit (after the need and the vision) is the plan itself—how the project will unfold, who will be involved, when it will take place, how the money will be raised, and all the other details. You worked all these things out during the planning phase. In the decision phase, you present them to decision makers.

Two cautions about the details: Different leaders will be interested in different details. Elected officials will be drawn to the political details—who is involved, who was consulted, how different parts of the community will benefit, and so on. Bureaucrats will be drawn to the operational details—how much money is needed and when, who will run things, how it will affect existing organizations, etc. If you talked with these officials during the planning phase, you’ll have a good idea of the sorts of details they’re interested in—and these are the ones you should focus on in making presentations to them.

And here’s the second caution: Don’t bring up details they’re not interested in. If you do, the results are likely to be bad . . . or worse. Bad: They’ll lose sight of your winning argument amid the blizzard of detail. Worse: You’ll leave them so distracted or confused that they’ll just say no. Gene Bedell, a former CEO who writes about persuasion, has a simple rule: In trying to persuade, “talk to people in terms of their interests and needs, not in terms of your interests and needs.” And the only way to do that is to let them talk first, listen carefully to their concerns, and focus your persuasion there.

There are three other rules of persuasion to keep in mind.

First, seeing is believing. If it’s possible to see the change you’re proposing, take decision makers there. I’ve written about New York’s amazing High Line project. One of the lessons that its advocates learned early on was that it was hard to describe what the High Line could be in a meeting at city hall, but it was easy to show it while standing on the old freight line. “It was the only way for others to understand it,” Robert Hammond, one of the High Line’s leaders, wrote. ” . . . You brought them up, you showed it to them, and they would do anything for the High Line after that.”

If you can’t get decision makers to travel, then bring the project to them, with maps, models, or anything else that’s visual. And bring those who would benefit from it. There’s a reason politicians in Washington and in state capitals stand shoulder to shoulder on podiums during press conferences: It’s a visual reminder that their proposals have support. If you can bring a hundred people to a city hall meeting room, all wearing t-shirts or stickers in support of your project, you’ve sent a powerful message.

Second, anticipate inertia—and deal with it. Bedell says a lifetime of selling has convinced him that most people have a basic need for security and predictability, which explains why they resist change even when the status quo is not good. The need for security and predictability is “life’s glue,” he writes. “It causes us to stand pat, go slow, to embrace the tried and true.” Even some who are enthusiastic about change will, on second thought, hesitate. “They may talk pioneer,” he cautions, “but they act settler.”

The best way of dealing with inertia is to make it as easy as possible to say yes. Chip and Dan Heath, who’ve written several books about corporate change, call this “shaping the path.” A good analogy is Amazon’s “1-Click” button. To help customers who were new to online shopping, Amazon made ordering from its website as easy as, well, clicking one button.

In approaching decision makers, think of as many ways as possible to make it easier to say yes. How about arranging for matching funds, bringing in officials from other cities who’ve made the same decision, holding public rallies, and so on? Or you might consider an easy, low-cost first step that, if successful, would draw leaders toward larger changes.

Third, amplify your luck. In my first posting on the change process, I said that “every big idea that succeeds in a community requires some amount of luck.” And what is luck? It’s something outside your control that suddenly makes your efforts easier. You can’t command luck; it is, after all, outside your control. But you can amplify it by calling attention to events that confirm or add momentum to your project.

If your project is about childhood obesity, then, any national report about the health consequences of obesity should be worked into your narrative. If your cause is downtown development and tax assessments show property values are rising faster downtown than elsewhere, you can use that to argue for greater investments. If you’re trying to convince your community to invest in light rail, any spike in gasoline prices should be in your next op-ed article.

This gets to the second part of decision making, the intuitive side. Faced with hard decisions, many people look around for some kind of confirmation. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who has written a book about how people change their minds, calls this “resonance.” Sometimes the resonance is personal. You go along with a change because you feel a connection with the person presenting it. (This is why champions are so important.) But it can be environmental as well. If leaders look around and see events pointing in your direction, it can convince them that your project is inevitable. Don’t miss the opportunity to connect these dots.

Final notes: The end game is about having your changes adopted and implemented. And in all likelihood, that will happen only if you can persuade three constituencies: the public, elected officials, and appointed officials. As I said above, politicians and bureaucrats have different concerns and will be interested in different details in your plan. But so will the citizens, who will be very interested in hearing about the benefits and sacrifices.

Make no mistake, though. You can’t win by fudging the truth, by promising one group that no taxpayer money will be needed while telling another that you’ll need an appropriation. Someone will spot the lie, and you’ll read about it on Twitter and Facebook by day’s end. But while remaining consistent on the need, the vision, and the general plan, you can be sensitive to what people want to know and direct your communications appropriately.

This is a lot of work. Is it worth it? That depends on the change you have in mind . . . and on you. But as the great social psychologist Kurt Lewin once said, you can’t really understand something until you try to change it. By changing your community, you’ll understand the place you live as never before.

Flickr photo by Matt Picio licensed under Creative Commons

Dealing with a Crisis

December 13, 2011 By Otis White

If there’s a gold standard for a mayor’s handling of a crisis, it is . . . well, you know what it is. It’s Rudolph Giuliani standing on a sidewalk on September 11, 2001 amid the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center, reassuring citizens. And if there’s a lead standard for a mayor’s handling of a crisis, it may be Jean Quan’s performance this fall when her Oakland, California police department cleared an Occupy protest site.

Mayor Quan’s public handwringing and contradictory actions were well documented. She ordered police to push protesters out of their camp near city hall, then allowed them to set up the camp again the next day, all the while agonizing over which was the right thing to do. The raid on the camp and the protests that followed resulted in serious injuries to several protesters and television footage that made Oakland look like a war zone. Later, Mayor Quan tried to apologize to protesters and was booed off the speakers’ platform. The police were furious with her equivocations, and so were the protesters. Not surprisingly, a petition drive to recall Quan was launched almost as soon as the tear gas cleared.

We could make a long list of the things Mayor Quan did wrong in this crisis: indecision, incoherence, lack of vision, lack of follow-through—combined with an astonishing inability to read situations or understand how others viewed her. But a better question than what went wrong with Jean Quan is to ask its opposite: What do good leaders do differently in a crisis, people like Rudy Giuliani?

To answer that, we have to look at crises as a special kind of problem. Most leaders, including Mayor Quan, have some notion about solving problems under normal circumstances. What makes crises so different that leaders feel abandoned by their instincts?

Three things: First, they are unexpected. Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans or a scandal at city hall, crises seem to come out of nowhere. Second, they appear to threaten the usual ways of doing things. This is why leaders sometimes lose their bearings; they don’t know what—or whom—to trust. Finally, crises are urgent. They fill the news and the conversations of citizens, events move quickly, and leaders must deal with them NOW. The pressure can be enormous.

When you put these things together—surprises that challenge the status quo and demand immediate action—you see how crises can paralyze leaders like Mayor Quan. But they don’t have to; they can just as easily make you a hero. Rudy Giuliani started the day on September 11 as a deeply unpopular mayor whose pettiness and bullying ways had worn out his welcome with New Yorkers. He ended it as “America’s mayor,” as many news articles called him, and the change in his image was solely the result of how he handled a major crisis while the whole world was watching.

Let’s take the elements of a crisis, then, and see if we can find a formula for success . . . or, at least, survival.

Crises are surprises. This means they aren’t on your agenda, and, therefore, can’t be planned for. Nobody runs for mayor to deal with a hurricane, a terrorist attack, or protesters camping out at city hall. (For that matter, nobody wants to be city manager so she can deal with a bridge collapse or a nonprofit executive so he can manage a financial scandal.) But if you can’t plan for crises, you can at least prepare for them.

What’s the difference? Planning is about steps (I’ll do this, then this, then that . . . over a known time period). Preparation is about contingencies (if this happens, I’ll do that . . . if I ever need to). There’s an element of planning in thinking about crises, but planning takes you only so far because these events are . . . well, unexpected, urgent happenings that appear to scramble the usual ways of doing things.

What you can do in preparing for a crisis is think through a few steps and then concentrate on roles and responsibilities. For instance, if a natural disaster were to strike, what would be the most important tasks the city government would have to undertake? What decisions would have to be made? Who would be needed to make these decisions and execute those tasks? How should these people work together, and where should they be? What resources would they need?

You can construct scenarios for all kinds of crises—public safety emergencies, human disasters (say, a gas-main explosion or contaminated water supply), even political crises (a scandal, for instance). You can’t be very specific—not all hurricanes, gas-main explosions, or scandals are alike—but you can at least know where everyone in the decision team should meet and have a checklist of general things they should do (get the facts, assemble background information, brief other leaders, contact the news media, etc.). And you can prepare yourself and your emergency team for the what-ifs.

This was why Rudy Giuliani was so calm on September 11. He had already been there . . . in his mind. As he writes in his 2002 memoir, “Leadership”: “Throughout my time as mayor, we conducted tabletop exercises designed to rehearse our response to a wide variety of contingencies. We’d blueprint what each person in each agency would do if the city faced, say, a chemical attack or a biomedical attack.” This wasn’t just for the police and fire departments, he adds; it was for him and his staff as well. “The goal was to build a rational construct for myself, and for the people around me. I wanted them ready to make decisions when they couldn’t check with me. The more planning we did, the more we could be ready for surprises.”

Again, this isn’t planning in the conventional sense. It’s more like role playing, so everyone involved will know his role if the worst happens and, therefore, not be paralyzed.

Crises challenge the status quo. Take a deep breath. Crises rarely change things at a fundamental level, especially in environments as complex as cities. But they often appear to. A riot, for instance, can suggest to people that public order and the old ways of decision making have broken down and cannot be restored. And doubt can feed on itself. After Katrina, some believed New Orleans would never recover, which slowed the city’s recovery. The same thing with New York after September 11.

Because crises often create periods of doubt and genuine uncertainty, leaders must do two things immediately. First, they must do everything in their power to restore public order. Second, they should promise an open-minded look at how the crisis came about and what it means for the future. This is important. Good leaders don’t promise that everything will return to the way it was. (There’s always at least a possibility that things really can’t be as they were.) But leaders can promise to examine carefully whether mistakes were made that caused or exacerbated the crisis and, if so, fix them.

Think of it as dealing with a car wreck. First you take the victims to the emergency room to stop the bleeding and set bones. Then you do the accident inquiry. Chances are, once the crisis has passed, you’ll find that major changes aren’t needed. But in the heat of the moment, people don’t want to hear that everything is fine because things don’t look fine. They want assurances that someone will take a long and fair look at why happened and why.

Consider how differently things would have turned out for Mayor Quan if she had followed this path in Oakland. First, she could have spelled out before the police action and after why the city had to clear the camp (for health, public safety, economic reasons, etc.). She could have been resolute about not allowing the conditions to be repeated (that is to say, no future camps). Then she could have promised an open-minded examination of how peaceful protests could be accommodated in the days ahead that would achieve what the Occupy activists wanted without repeating the problems the city was concerned about. Firmness in the short term . . . with an open mind for the long.

But what about those instances where a crisis exposes a situation where things can’t remain the same? A riot, for instance, like the one Detroit experienced in 1967 that came as the city was experiencing a major demographic transition (and which hastened the transition)? Or, say, the closing of a major economic institution at a time when the city’s entire economy is shaky? In these instances, it’s even more important to deal with the crisis on a short-term, long-term basis: short term to restore order, obtain temporary aid, and so on; long term to find lasting answers, which might include a whole new way of doing things.

Crises are urgent. In some crises, leaders don’t have a week to seek advice from others. They may not even have a day. On September 11, Rudy Giuliani had minutes to size up the situation and act. But the smartest leaders always ask first about the timeline. If they have a day, then they take the entire day to make decisions. If they have an hour, they take the full hour.

Why? Because decisions are almost always improved by more information and different viewpoints. This isn’t indecisiveness. It’s intelligent decision making. It’s based on the belief that better answers emerge as informed people debate the right course in constructive ways.

The best example and one of the most studied presidential decisions of all time was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The stakes could not have been higher. Almost everyone involved saw that the crisis might end in war, perhaps nuclear war. And yet the only options presented to President Kennedy at first were to do nothing or launch a secret, preemptive air strike that would have almost required the Soviet Union to retaliate in some way.

President Kennedy insisted that his advisors take the few days they had to look for other answers and debate the alternatives among themselves. And it was from this debate that a third alternative came about: a “quarantine” around Cuba (they didn’t want to call it a blockade for fear of provoking the Soviets). As you know, this unexpected third way worked, and the crisis ended better than anyone could have imagined (missiles were gone, war was averted, and relations with the Soviet Union even took a turn for the better). And it came about because Kennedy knew exactly how much time he had to decide and used that time wisely.

But know this: When the time expires, you must act. If you do so intelligently (like Kennedy) and calmly and decisively (like Giuliani), a crisis can be your finest hour. But wilt under pressure, equivocate, and blame others, and it will be your worst nightmare. Just ask Mayor Quan.

Connecting the Phases: The Guiding Coalition

December 6, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

As we walk through the community change process, let’s pause and see if we can connect more closely the first two parts, the discussion phase and planning phase. Briefly, the discussion phase awakens the community to a need and pulls together a group of people to search through a number of possible answers for a workable solution. The planning phase takes the workable solution and turns it into a set of specific plans that speak to the public, decision makers, and funders. It may also involve organizational work and fundraising.

What connects these phases? Aside from you, as the primary leader, it’s the guiding coalition. This is the group that helps you, in the discussion phase, sift through possible solutions and come up with the one to take forward. In the planning phase, you still need a group—if anything, the tasks multiply and grow harder, so you need others to help carry the load. And the obvious people to begin with are those who were with you in the discussion phase. After all, by this point, it’s their project, too.

But who else is needed? As I mentioned in an earlier posting, a good way of thinking about guiding coalitions is to consider people with expertise, power, credibility, and the ability to get things done. How does this change in the planning phase? It doesn’t. It’s just that, as you work into the details, the problems and opportunities grow narrower and deeper, so you’ll need people who can help you not just with the broad outlines of community change but the crevasses as well.

To make this clearer, let’s return to the example I used in my planning phase posting, the building of New York’s High Line Park. Remember that this project began in 1999 when two neighborhood residents, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, learned that an abandoned elevated freight line running through their West Side neighborhood was to be torn down. They both had the idea that something, some kind of public space, could be made of this industrial relic and provide a much needed amenity. Thus began one of the most astonishing urban improvement projects of the past half-century, culminating in 2009 with the opening of a park in the sky, one of the country’s most innovative public spaces.

Who joined David and Hammond’s guiding coalition, and when did they join? As they write in their book, “High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky,” David and Hammond started out with little knowledge of parks, planning, politics, or charitable fundraising. So they began with what they had: friends who knew people. And, here, they were lucky. Hammond had gone to college with a man who had become a well-connected New York lawyer. He introduced David and Hammond to the first member of their guiding coalition, a developer and former political insider named Phil Aarons. Aarons had three of the four qualities a guiding coalition needs: expertise, credibility, and the ability to get things done. He was immediately won over by the idea of the High Line and invested untold hours in making introductions, attending meetings, and advising David and Hammond about politics and public opinion.

Hammond had another college friend, Gifford Miller, who was by then a city council member (he would later be president of the council). Skeptical at first—Hammond says Miller called it a “stupid idea” when he first heard it—Miller changed his mind when Hammond took him atop the High Line and he saw its potential. Miller brought credibility and expertise to the group (he knew city government and especially the city council) and, of course, power.

Others joined the coalition soon after. There was a lawyer who understood transportation law and federal regulation, and helped guide them through the federal maze. Miller brought in the city council’s zoning and land use attorney. Aarons introduced David and Hammond to Amanda Burden, who was then a member of the city planning commission. In time, Burden would become the project’s most important champion and strategist. (In a stroke of luck, when Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor, he appointed Burden the city’s planning commission chair, which is a powerful position.)

Even more joined in time. One was a city government lobbyist who knew the nooks and crannies of city hall even better than Miller and Aarons. Another city council member, Christine Quinn, came aboard. An economic development expert, John Alschuler, was hired to study the project’s impact on property values and was so taken with the High Line, he stayed on as a volunteer and became part of the inner circle. There were others: One was a man who knew so much about the neighborhoods that the project crossed that he was known as the “mayor” of the lower West Side. He helped convince building owners and neighborhood groups to support the High Line. Finally, as the project moved into major fundraising, a partner at Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm, joined the group to help them connect with the wealthiest families and corporate interests.

These people came as needed. Alschuler was brought into the inner circle after the workable solution had been identified and when more detailed plans were needed. The lobbyist and neighborhood “mayor” joined as the approval process, at city hall and in the neighborhood planning boards, approached. The Goldman Sachs partner arrived after the project had won its most critical approvals and its heaviest fundraising began.

Others were influential, but more as allies than members of the guiding coalition. One was Dan Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development. Acting on Mayor Bloomberg’s behalf, he had major development plans for the northern end of the High Line, an area called the Far West Side. Doctroff’s support was crucial for the High Line but his own plans were controversial. So David, Hammond and the rest of the guiding coalition walked a fine line. They had to stay in Doctoroff’s good graces while not being too supportive—otherwise the neighborhoods would have turned against the High Line. Somehow they managed this well enough that when Doctoroff’s Far West Side plans fell apart, the High Line sailed ahead . . . with Doctoroff’s support.

There were other important supporters, including celebrities, business leaders, politicians, and society mavens, and they were frequently consulted. But they weren’t in the guiding coalition. Yes, they might be in the ribbon-cutting photographs or featured in videos and printed materials (that was a way of compensating them for helping out), but they didn’t map strategy or search for answers and allies. That was the work of the guiding coalition.

At a point, the High Line needed more than a loose coalition; it needed the structure of a full-blown nonprofit, which came to be called Friends of the High Line. Many of those who were in the informal guiding coalition became board members. Aarons was the first chair of the Friends of the High Line. The next was Alschuler, the economic development expert who started as a consultant and became an advocate.

The interesting dynamic about guiding coalitions is how members’ involvement waxes and wanes. That is, at a point, one person might be the key member because she has the critical expertise or credibility, but at a later point, she may not be as central to things. As long as it’s an informal coalition, these things are almost self-regulating. That is, as people feel they are needed, they step up. When they’re no longer needed as much, they drift away.

When a coalition becomes a nonprofit board, though, it takes greater management. Someone has to choose who stays on boards and who leaves. This is known as “board development,”and it is one of the most important strategic duties a nonprofit director and board chair make. And how do you choose good nonprofit board members? Well, expertise, power, credibility, and the ability to get things done are good places to start. But add one more: the ability—and willingness—to raise money.

Planning Phase: The Slog of Civic Projects, and Why It’s Critical

November 18, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

In a time when many wonderful parks have been built, New York’s High Line may be the most wonderful of all. It’s a park that runs above the street and through buildings on Manhattan’s west side. If you climb the stairs and walk the portions that are completed (it will eventually be a mile and a half long), you’ll see something at once modest and spectacular. The modest part is the park itself, a narrow trail edged with plants and trees with resting areas along the way. The spectacular part is the setting: a park in the sky, wending its way through post-industrial New York. The reviews, as you can see in this video, have ranged from glowing to awestruck.

But my interest is not in the park itself. It’s in the project—the road the High Line traveled from a pair of neighbors looking up and seeing potential in an old elevated track until its opening in June 2009—and what that journey tells us about the second phase of our map of community change, the planning phase.

Background: In 1999 two men, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, attended a neighborhood planning meeting on the future of the abandoned rail line known as the High Line. Some landowners wanted it torn down to make way for new developments. David and Hammond, who did not know one another, came with another idea, that you could turn this elevated freight line into . . . something else, some kind of community asset.

Their ideas were vague. They thought about a park of some sort, but what kind of park could you build on a narrow set of elevated railroad tracks? And David and Hammond hardly seemed the type to turn vague civic ideas into reality. David was a writer who specialized in travel articles for glossy magazines. Hammond was a consultant to business startups. Neither had run a nonprofit, managed a park, or had any serious contact with government at any level. They came to the meeting with hopes of volunteering for a nonprofit—any nonprofit—that would make the High Line into a community asset. What they learned was there was no such nonprofit. So, pretty much on the spot, David and Hammond decided to do it themselves.

If you’re following this on the map of community change, we’re at the very start of the discussion phase, with the recognition of a need. Or, in this case, two needs. The first was David and Hammond’s belief that, in the crowded lower West Side of Manhattan, there wasn’t nearly enough open space. That part of New York takes in many old industrial areas (one neighborhood is still called the Meatpacking District). In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, New York didn’t build parks in places like that.

The other need was for quick action. If somebody didn’t act soon, they believed, the city would tear down the High Line and an opportunity for public space would be lost forever. (They were right. Less than two years later, the Giuliani Administration sided with the landowners and signed a demolition order for the High Line.)

A funny thing happened, though, once David and Hammond took up this project. It turned out—to their surprise and others’—that these two were uniquely equipped for a civic project of this magnitude and complexity. While they had no experience in leading an urban change effort, they had valuable and complementary skills. One could write well and knew some in New York’s social and philanthropic circles. The other was experienced in starting things, was at ease in asking people to do things (including giving money), and had a good sense of strategy. They were both quick learners, and each had an interest in art and design, which became important as the project moved forward.

It took three years of contacts, conversations, fundraising and strategic planning for David and Hammond to accomplish two things that ended the discussion phase and began the planning phase: First, they halted the demolition order with a lawsuit; second, they arrived at a workable solution for the High Line. You can view their workable solution online. It’s a 90-page document titled “Reclaiming the High Line,” researched by a nonprofit called the Design Trust for Public Space and written by David.

It’s an interesting document for three reasons. First, it’s beautifully designed. It had to be because it was aimed at multiple audiences: the political and planning communities that had such a big say in what would happen to the High Line; the community nearby, which at that time had barely any idea of the High Line’s potential; and possible donors who needed to understand the High Line’s vision.

Second, it’s modest in spelling out that vision. While it makes a strong case that the old freight line should not be torn down, used as a transit line, or turned into a commercial development (a long, skinny retail area, perhaps?), it doesn’t say it ought to be a park, either. It simply says its best use is as open space in a part of the city where there isn’t enough. In other words, the workable solution keeps its options open.

The third thing that’s interesting is who wrote the foreword: Michael Bloomberg, who by 2002 had succeeded Rudolph Giuliani as mayor. This gets to an important element in any change effort: luck. The High Line project was lucky in who got elected during its 10-year path from concept to ribbon-cutting, starting with the person in the mayor’s office.

Well, if a workable solution is at hand and a powerful new mayor wants it to succeed, that’s that, right? What else is there to do? The answer: The real work was just beginning. And this is my central message about the planning phase. Getting agreement on a workable solution is like getting everyone to agree on the design concept for a new house. Now comes the difficult, detailed work of hammering out costs and financing, drawing blueprints and mechanical plans, obtaining building permits, and bringing together a small army of independent contractors.

As David and Hammond explain in their book, “High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky,” even with the new mayor on their side, there was still a gauntlet of approvals to be run, from community planning boards (basically, neighborhood organizations that review developments) to the owners of the High Line (CSX, the railroad company) and the federal agency that approves transfers of railroad rights of way. And they had opposition: from landowners who had expected to build where the High Line stood, but also from residents who couldn’t see how the dark, peeling, scary elevated railroad could ever be anything but an eyesore. Finally, they realized a truth about government: that, even in a strong-mayor government such as New York has, the mayor doesn’t call all the shots. As Hammond writes:

(By late 2002) the Bloomberg Administration fully supported the High Line, but if they’d only endorsed it and done nothing else, the project would have died. Everything about the High Line was complex, and it had to pass through so many different agencies and departments. City government is like the human body: the head, which is the mayor’s office, may want to do something, but the body has a number of different parts that want to go their own way.

Everything hinged on three tasks that occupied much of the High Line’s planning phase: Coming up with a design for the park that would please politicians and neighbors and excite donors; dealing with the landowners’ objections; and figuring out how to pay for the construction and maintain this most unusual park in years to come.

If this doesn’t sound like exciting work, it wasn’t. This is the slog of civic projects, but it’s also why the planning phase is so important. Managing these details determines the success or failure of projects. And there were hundreds of details, from mapping the decision points and how to approach each of them to knitting together a coalition of supporters and funders. There were competing interests that had to be satisfied and intense politics. Oh, and they had to design a park unlike any in the world, and figure out how to pay for it.

What this phase requires from leaders are three things: the ability to plan (that’s why it’s called the planning phase), a mastery of detail (in an earlier posting, I called this the realm of “small-p politics”), and a willingness to ask for things. Throughout its development, David and Hammond asked people to do things for the High Line. Early on, they asked for information and advice (who owns the High Line, and how should we approach them?). Soon after, they asked for support and permission. In time, they asked for money. They started by asking for a small sums for printing costs and filing the lawsuit against the demolition. Eventually, they asked philanthropists and politicians for millions to pay for the park’s construction and maintenance. And they got it, in ways that surprised even them.

This brings us to the three elements of the planning phase that are in the map of community change: champions, narrative and strategy. I put them in the map as reminders. We’ve talked about one, strategy—that’s about mapping the decision points and making plans for each decision. This is the “inside game” of civic change, the political and bureaucrat checklist of approvals.

But there is always an “outside game” as well, and that’s where the narrative becomes critical because it speaks to citizens and potential supporters and donors. A narrative, of course, tells a story. It explains the need, why the need exists, the opportunity for addressing the need, how the solution was arrived at, and the future benefits of the change. Sometimes, the narrative has to change how people think about their community and its potential, something I call “reframing the community’s mind.”

And finally, there are the “champions.” Obviously, David and Hammond are the central figures of the High Line project. Without them, the freight line would be a memory and a remarkable asset squandered. But they aren’t the champions I have in mind; they’re the leaders and strategists. The champions are those whom David and Hammond asked for support who brought others along. Some were political champions who used their influence to win approval and gain government funding—people like Mayor Bloomberg, two successive city council presidents, New York’s senators and congressional representatives, and a host of people inside the bureaucracy.

There were also business and philanthropic champions, like media tycoon Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg who lent their names, made major financial gifts themselves, and hosted fundraisers for the High Line. Finally, there were celebrity champions who helped raise money and call attention to the High Line. An early celebrity endorser was actor Kevin Bacon, whose father had been an urban planner. Another actor, Edward Norton, also had a family interest (his grandfather was the pioneering urban developer James Rouse). When he read about the High Line project in a magazine article, he tracked down David and Hammond and offered to help out. As you can see from this video about the High Line, made before its opening, what Norton brought was public attention, which is what stars do.

The final box in the planning phase is “the plan,” but that’s a little too simple. In all likelihood, it’s not a single plan but a host of plans: one describing the project’s feasibility in great detail for decision makers, one speaking to the public about its benefits, one setting out the financing (for decision makers and funders), and one describing the design (if it’s a physical project). There will likely be internal documents that serve as a kind of project flow chart, laying out the approval process and decision points, and what each approval will require, so you can marshal the right supporters. Finally, your project may need interim funding, to print materials, commission studies and seek expert advice. You’ll need a plan for getting that funding along the way.

As I said earlier, this isn’t glamorous work; it’s a slog. The amount of detailed work and its complexity will test civic leaders’ commitment and attention spans. There will be victories along the way, and it’s important to broadcast them to keep your supporters’ spirits high. “One of the keys to the High Line’s success,” Hammond writes, “was in always showing progress, even if it was a really small step.” And sometimes there are big steps, like the day in late 2004 when Josh David opened an envelope and found a check for $1 million inside, from a donor he and Hammond had courted.

But make no mistake: This is the period when obstacles are met and overcome—or not. Do the planning phase right, and the next one, the decision phase, will be a triumph. Do it poorly and your chances of success are about as good as winning the lottery: theoretically possible . . . but practically impossible.

Photo of the High Line by Katy Silberger licensed under Creative Commons.

« Previous Page

What I’ve Learned about Leadership from Reading Obituaries

Decision Phase: Focused Persuasion

Dealing with a Crisis

Connecting the Phases: The Guiding Coalition

Planning Phase: The Slog of Civic Projects, and Why It’s Critical

About Otis White

The Great Project

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