Otis White – Page 16

Citizens Are Not the Same as Customers

April 8, 2011 By Otis White

Analogies are a basic way we think and communicate. They help us see things in new ways and explain our experiences to people who haven’t . . . well, experienced them. Analogies, of course, draw similarities between things that aren’t really all that similar. So you could see life as a marathon, an election as a football game, a debate as a tennis match, and so on. (Needless to say, sports analogies are popular.)

We often use analogies to understand cities, too. But in doing so, we should be aware of the limits of analogies and the harm that faulty analogies can do. The ones that I think do the greatest harm are those comparing cities to businesses and citizens to customers.

Before beginning, let me say that I like business. I’ve owned several businesses in the last 20 years, and before that I was a business journalist. So mark me down as a fan and beneficiary of capitalism. Further, I think cities can learn a lot from the ways businesses approach things. In many cases, cities and their leaders suffer from a lack of focus. If there’s anything successful businesses do well, it’s retaining focus. Finally, there’s a great deal written about business that’s relevant to cities. So if you’re looking for new approaches to common civic leadership issues—like finding good ideas, developing young leaders, managing crises or dealing with difficult people—you’ll find much of what you’re looking for on the business shelves of bookstores or in the pages of Harvard Business Review.

And, in truth, there are times when citizens can be seen as similar to customers. In the early 1990s a popular book, “Reinventing Government,” urged government leaders to do just that—regard citizens not as constituents but as valued customers and use what corporations know about customer satisfaction to make it more pleasant dealing with government agencies. (If you’ve found it easier in the last 20 years to renew a driver’s license or apply for a permit, you can thank this book.)

So if it helps deliver services that are cheaper, better and faster, then I’ll all for using business analogies. But here’s where I grow wary: the relationship I have with where I live should be far deeper than my relationship with Apple Computer, Ford Motor Co. or Coca-Cola.

Let’s start with the basic analogy that citizens are like customers. Yes, in receiving city services like garbage collection, water and sewer, and even police and fire protection, we’re like business customers in the sense that we want the greatest value for the lowest price. And don’t underestimate the importance of these services in making citizens happy. If you’ve ever spent a long day at city hall trying to get a business license, or waited an hour for the police to show up for a traffic accident, then you know how poor service makes you feel about a place. And keep in mind that the majority of city governments’ payroll and budget is in the delivery of direct services to citizens, so money saved and satisfaction gained by doing these things right can have a huge impact.

But beyond this point, the business analogy breaks down. If we’re sometimes consumers of city services, then we’re also part-owners of the city, especially if we own a home or rental property. Does that make us like shareholders in a corporation? Well, in the sense that we want asset growth (that is, the value of our property to rise), yes. But, in truth, we really don’t own homes like we do stocks. Homes aren’t just financial investments; they’re comfort zones, objects of pride and self-expression, and centers of family and social life. Stocks are impersonal financial instruments; homes are full of meaning, much of it connected to the community around it. I’ve bought and sold plenty of shares, but I’ve never found a way to use a share of Ford Motor for hosting a family dinner or organizing a block party.

There are other roles that citizens play. If you want to use another business analogy, here’s one: the citizen as employee. In companies, employees create the goods or services that the company sells. In cities, much of the community’s value—what it “sells” to visitors, prospective businesses and future residents—is created by its citizens. Think about it: If you’ve been impressed by a city’s lovely neighborhoods, creative festivals and parades, or thriving economy, you’re looking at things the citizens themselves brought about. Yes, government often plays a supporting role, but it’s usually a portion of what the citizens are doing for themselves.

So even if you’re partial to business analogies, you quickly realize that the citizen-as-customer works only in some instances, and there are other times when you could see citizens as owners or employees. And there are yet other ways that citizens relate to cities that no business analogy can cover. Take identity. Yes, there are some companies that inspire great loyalty among customers and employees (think Apple Computer or the sporting-goods retailer REI), but these are rarities. Identifying with the place you live is the rule.

Doubt it? Remember the old “Seinfeld” episode, where Elaine is assigned a new telephone area code, 646? She tries desperately to convince people that she still lives in Manhattan, home of the 212 area code, but can’t. Finally, she finagles her way back to a 212 area code because living in Manhattan is so important to her she can’t bear for people to think she lives anywhere else.

Why does all this matter? Because one of the greatest problems civic leaders have is understanding the potential and power of citizenship. When we compare citizens to customers, we are selling them way, way short. It’s like comparing life to a marathon. Only in the most superficial way is life like a marathon. And thank goodness for that. Otherwise, we’d be out of breath all the time.

Photo by Victoria Pickering licensed under Creative Commons.

The Secrets of Perspective

March 10, 2011 By Otis White

There are five essential ingredients for civic leadership: interest, knowledge, resources, position and skills. To explain briefly: To be leaders, people need to be interested in civic work, otherwise . . . well, they won’t do it. They need to know the community’s challenges and opportunities and how the community deals with change. They need to bring resources (connections to money and votes are the traditional ones, but access to ideas is fast becoming the third). They need a position that confers a legitimate place among community leaders; it can be mayor, chamber of commerce leader, neighborhood association chair, non-profit leader or interest-group representative. And they need the skills of leadership, which increasingly are about building consensus. Put these ingredients together, stir vigorously and, voila, you have a leader.

But while these ingredients will earn you a place among leaders, they won’t make you a great or even good leader. For that, you need a sixth ingredient: perspective. There are two parts to perspective. The first is learning to see problems as part of a thinking process and not just as issues. In doing so, you’ll sometimes find that you and your fellow leaders are thinking about things the wrong way. The second part is to identify which events in communities are replays of long-standing problems and opportunities, and which are truly new.

Why is this important? Because the job of civic leaders is to deal with their community’s most pressing problems. If you can’t answer this question—is this a new problem or have we dealt with it before?—then almost surely you will not find good solutions. Don’t get me wrong. Answering this question won’t give you the solutions, but knowing the answer will guide how you’ll search for them.

You can see how this works by looking at a common problem: downtown revitalization. If your city has a downtown, leaders have probably been trying to “save” it since the 1920s, when the automobile became popular and personal mobility expanded dramatically. As people moved farther out, retail followed, and many downtown stores shut their doors or joined the exodus. What followed was one failed attempt after another to compete with the new shopping centers and enclosed malls: free-parking schemes, pedestrian malls, skywalks and urban shopping centers.

Downtowns began turning around in the 1980s when leaders changed their perspective. Rather than asking how they could make central business districts more like suburban retail areas, they asked how they could take advantage of the things that made downtowns unique: historic buildings, sidewalks, mixed uses, access to transit and so on. They added some new ideas, like business improvement districts that improved safety and maintained streetscapes, and at long last downtowns began turning around.

You can see how the two parts of perspective worked here. First, leaders recognized that they had a long history with downtown revitalization and that most of their efforts had been disappointing. Second, they looked at the decision-making process itself and realized their greatest problem was how they were thinking about the problem.

For familiar issues, then, studying the record and examining the decision-making process will often yield new perspectives and better results. But what about problems that are truly new? The good news is that there aren’t many new of them. Most of the issues facing cities have been seen in some form or other before. But every once in a while, something comes along that has no antecedent.

The automobile presented that kind of challenge in the 1920s. Nothing before it—not horse-drawn carriages, steam-engine railroads or electric trolleys and subways—prepared cities for cheap personal automobiles. Previous generations of leaders did many things wrong in dealing with the car (running major highways through the heart of cities, for one), but in many ways it is amazing they coped as well as they did, considering the swiftness and magnitude of the challenge.

Today, I can think of only two major issues that are similarly without precedent. The first is the internet and in particular its effect on politics and civic involvement. This may be more an opportunity than a challenge, but it will be an important force in the future. From reporting common problems (through innovations like New York’s 311 system) to organizing protesters and volunteers, the internet is changing how citizens and leaders interact—and maybe even who becomes leaders in the future.

The second is the problem of retrofitting suburbs for their more urban futures. Yes, we do have a record of successfully remaking some suburban-style areas around mixed use and transit, but the scale of change in the suburbs of the past 20 years has been so vast—unimaginable shifts in demographics, overwhelmed transportation infrastructure, aging households, and social and public safety problems that were once exclusive to inner cities—that it’s hard seeing how the rickety political and civic structures of the suburbs can cope.

What do you do when the problems or opportunities are truly unprecedented? How do you find the right perspective? Studying the past won’t help. Rather, you have to become a student of the present and keep up with what your peers in other cities are doing. (This is why access to ideas is becoming a key resource for leaders.)

But also be skeptical. In the breathless world of news and information today, first reports are often wrong. Breakthrough ideas are sometimes overstated or depend on factors that don’t apply to your situation. Think of unintended consequences and guard against the “confirmation bias” of seeing what you want to see. And above all, grant that complex problems rarely have simple solutions. If they did, then free parking really would have turned around downtowns.

The Mayor as Manager

February 23, 2011 By Otis White

Mayors have three jobs, but most enjoy only one or two of them. The ones they like are creating public policy or building political support for those policies. Almost universally, the one they don’t is managing the city government.

This should come as no surprise. Most people who run for elected office are drawn to public policy (How do we reduce homelessness? How do we keep our young people? How do we connect land use and transportation?) or politics (How do we create a coalition of interests? How do we persuade the city council? How do we get our friends elected?). They don’t run because they want to manage employees. If they wanted to do that, they’d probably be a city manager.

And yet, local governments are complex and challenging organizations and, as we were reminded in the 2008-09 recession, sometimes poorly managed ones. And despite how a mayor feels about the grind of organizational management, it’s a job that cannot be ignored. To do so is to risk every smart policy initiative a good mayor can create and every shrewd political move she can make.

So what does a mayor—or, for that matter, any civic leader—need to know about managing a local government? Here are four of the basics:

During good times, prepare for the worst. The problem with a good economy is that it creates a false sense of security. If a city depends on development-related fees (such as impact fees) or sales taxes (which tend to spike in good times), beware: They can make leaders complacent. The best things to do with boom-time revenues are pay down debt and make capital investments. The worst things to do are hire more employees and hand out generous pay raises and pension increases.

When you make capital investments, ask how they’ll increase productivity. Productivity, of course, is doing more work with the same or fewer people, and corporations have made great gains in productivity in recent decades. Governments? Not so much. This has to change, and the place to do that is with capital investments.

Think back to the Econ 101 class you took in college. Remember the three “factors of production,” the resources that create goods and services? As Adam Smith explained two centuries ago, the factors are land, labor and equipment (which Smith called “capital”). Labor and equipment have a special relationship in that you can substitute one for the other; that is, you can buy labor-saving equipment to . . . well, save labor. And that’s exactly what governments should do. Every time a local government wants to build a building, buy a new computer system or purchase a sanitation truck, elected officials should ask how many hours of labor it will save. If the answer is zero, don’t buy it. If the answer is that it’ll require more employees, run away as fast as possible.

Don’t just ask about productivity—measure it, set goals for it and hold managers responsible for achieving the goals. Let’s not beat around the bush here: The objective is to reduce the city’s workforce while delivering better services to the citizens. It’s simple math really: 70 to 90 percent of local governments’ operating budgets are salaries and benefits. If you can improve the productivity of workers through labor-saving equipment, good training, better work flow and smarter management, you can reduce your headcount, please the citizens, pay higher salaries and hold taxes in check. It is, as economists like to say, “the only free lunch in town.” It’s also the surest route to re-election.

But change never comes easily even when it promises great benefits. Employees don’t like being told to work differently—say, moving from paper forms to electronic—and neither do their managers. So offering better ways of doing things is just the start; you have to ensure the better ways are implemented. And here is where it is critical to have reliable measurements of productivity (number of potholes filled per worker, number of business licenses processed per hour, etc.). It’s the only way to be sure you’re actually doing more work with fewer people.

The good news is that there has been a revolution in measuring productivity in city governments in the last 15 years. For a glimpse of what’s possible, visit New York’s elaborate NYCStat performance-reporting system. You’ll be amazed at the detail with which New York’s services are tracked. They should be tracked just as diligently in your city too.

Stop feeding long-term liabilities. You know what I’m talking about here: pensions and other benefits. We didn’t create our country’s $1 trillion public pension problems overnight. Oakland, California’s city government hasn’t made a full payment on its pension obligations in a decade and a half, which explains why Oakland owes more in unfunded pension liabilities than its entire $400 million annual city budget.

Neither Oakland nor any other local government is going to solve its pension problems overnight, but we can make a start. This means, at a minimum, moving new public employees to defined-contribution retirement plans (like the 401(k) accounts private workers have), ending health insurance benefits for employees retiring early—and never, ever adding to these crippling liabilities again.

You’ve probably figured out by now that these are related. Productivity gains will help governments dig out of their financial holes. Budget discipline, particularly in good times, will keep us from digging future holes. Capital investments are a key strategy for boosting productivity—especially when married to measurements, goals and accountability. And all of it depends on mayors facing up to their least-favorite job: managing the city government as if it were a serious organization. Which, come to think of it, it is.

Photo by Indiana Public Media licensed under Creative Commons.

The Five Elements of Successful Visioning

February 1, 2011 By Otis White

I have been involved in large-scale community visioning projects for years and worked on them in all sorts of places, from metro areas to individual cities. I recommend visioning as a way of pointing communities forward. I’ve seen how it can engage citizens, give heart to political, business and civic leaders, and help set bold new directions for communities. But . . .

There are limits to what visioning can do by itself, and it can be done poorly, which is worse than not doing it at all. So, over the years, I’ve created a list of the five elements of successful visioning. Here it is.

Make it as representative as possible. The hardest part of visioning isn’t the meetings or analyzing what the citizens say. The hardest part is getting a cross-section of the community to the meetings. Believe it or not, there are people who think there are better things to do with their evenings than spend them in a public meeting.

But it’s worth the effort to be sure all parts of the community are heard. First, visioning’s power comes from its legitimacy; these are, after all, large-scale efforts to listen to and report accurately what the citizens want. If parts of the community aren’t heard, visioning loses its legitimacy. Second, it improves the visioning process to hear from a wide variety of citizens. That’s because people who are different sometimes think differently about community issues, and you need that diversity of thought, both in the meetings and in the final report. I’ve seen people change their minds during visioning meetings because another point of view caused them to think more deeply about an issue. We don’t have nearly enough opportunities for people with different ideas to talk with one another in communities; we should make sure it happens in visioning projects.

Ask appropriate questions. Once you have a cross-section of citizens in the room, make sure you involve them the right way. The best way is to ask them to talk about things that they—and only they—are experts in. My favorite is to ask participants to imagine that, in 20 years’ time, the community has become the place they want it to be. What does the community look like and work like? What is the same as today and what is different? What obstacles did the citizens and their government overcome to make it happen?

This asks citizens to define broadly what they want their community to be. You don’t spend a lot of time asking them how to make it happen—these are questions best asked of technical experts. The citizens are experts in what, the way they want things to turn out.

Listen to the citizens first. Many times, visioning is combined with a planning project, such as developing a comprehensive plan. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as two conditions are met:

It needs to be an authentic form of visioning with a sustained outreach effort to get a cross-section of people involved, hundreds of citizen participants, appropriate questions asked, and an honest report summarizing what they said and containing every single idea that was offered. To repeat: Bad visioning is worse than no visioning at all, so don’t cut corners.
It needs to end before the planners begin their work. I regularly get phone calls from planning firms that are looking for someone to help with “citizen outreach” or “citizen engagement” at a mid-point in their work. My answer is always no. If the citizens are worth hearing from, then hear from them first. Reaching out to the citizens after plans have been drafted isn’t visioning; it’s salesmanship.

Create accountability. Nothing breeds cynicism like being asked to speak your mind, being thanked for doing so—and then being forgotten. If you ask citizens to share their dreams with you, you should report back to them on what’s happening with their dreams. They don’t expect immediate success in all areas, but they want to know if there’s any success—or even backsliding.

If the visioning precedes planning, there are immediate opportunities for accountability. You could ask some of the citizens to serve on a steering committee to make sure the plans are true to the citizens’ desires. You could have a large community meeting and invite all who participated in visioning see the plans and comment on them. Better yet, you could do both.

However you do it, make sure that once citizens are “in the loop” of community progress, they stay in the loop.

Understand visioning’s limitations. Visioning is probably the best way ever devised of listening in an organized way to what citizens want. It helps build a sense of ownership and citizenship in communities. It can be an important way of moving a community forward. But it’s not sufficient by itself to create progress.

As I’ll write about in the future, breakthrough ideas for communities come from places where three judgments overlap: What the citizens want, what is politically possible, and what is best for the community at this point. Visioning can deliver the first judgment, and political leaders the second. The third can come from individual leaders and blue-ribbon committees or it can bubble up from the bureaucracy or from community groups like a chamber of commerce or civic league.

But even then, an idea is only an idea. What turns an idea into reality is someone committed to building support and removing obstacles. And we have a term for such people: We call them “leaders.”

How a City Creates Citizens

January 14, 2011 By Otis White

A while back, I tried my hand at defining a purpose for cities: Cities exist, I suggested, to create citizens. And who are citizens? They are people who take responsibility for their communities. If a city can do this, it’s as close to a silver bullet as you can find because:

Cities get much better as they create more citizens. Just about every problem in a city is easier to manage if citizens will step forward to help, from social ills and unresponsive government to a struggling local economy. So, just as businesses must focus first on creating customers in order to achieve their other goals, cities should focus first on creating citizens if they want to make progress in any other area.

But how do cities do this? How can they help passive residents become connected, committed citizens—people eager to run for office, volunteer for citizen boards, vote in elections, serve as neighborhood watch captains, tutor schoolchildren and report problems? To answer that, let’s look at a place that does a good job of creating just such citizens and try to figure out how it does it.

The city is Decatur, a close-in suburb of Atlanta. I’ve known Decatur for years and even had an office there once. But I really got to know it last year when I helped with a visioning project that was part of a larger strategic planning process called Where to Next? There are a number of ways of doing visioning, which involves convening groups of citizens to think about their community’s future. The one we used in Decatur asked citizens to attend three separate sessions lasting two hours each, with each session focused on a different set of topics.

A good rule of thumb for visioning projects is to aim for getting at least 1 percent of residents to participate, depending on population. (It’s easier to get a higher percentage in a small town than in a big city. In New York, for instance, 1 percent would be 90,000 people.) Decatur has fewer than 20,000 residents, so the goal should have been to get 200 participants. In fact, organizers got 740, three-quarters of whom attended all three sessions.

But it wasn’t the numbers that convinced me that Decatur had cracked the code on citizenship. It was what participants said in those sessions. One theme I heard repeatedly was the feeling of connectedness and community ownership people felt there. As one person put it, Decatur was the kind of place where residents expected “a hello on the street, pride in the community, (the) ability to be involved and contribute.” Another added, “There are 66 homes in my neighborhood; I know 55 of those families.”

Even more striking, these citizens wanted more opportunities for involvement. There were lots of ideas about how the city government could help with this, from “volunteer expo” fairs to booths at festivals and neighborhood block parties where people could sign up for community activities. One group suggested a “sister streets” program, somewhat like “sister cities,” so neighborhood leaders in one part of the city could get to know leaders in another part—and trade ideas and assistance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m accustomed to hearing participants in visioning projects say they want greater connectedness with their community. But I’m not used to them saying they already feel fully connected—and want even more involvement. So how did Decatur get to this enviable place?

Well, it has some advantages. Decatur is a small, densely developed city. It’s only 4.2 square miles in size and was built mostly before World War II, when houses were closer to one another. It’s easier to be neighborly when you are physically close to your neighbors. Decatur is also a well-educated place, a city where 62 percent of adults have four-year college degrees or higher (nationally, only 28 percent have bachelor’s degrees). As a rule, the higher the education, the greater the level of civic involvement.

But these things simply mean Decatur started with some advantages; they don’t explain how the city capitalized on them. And for that, the local government deserves a good deal of credit. Here are five things Decatur’s government has done to create citizens:

It has a great citizen-education program called Decatur 101. Classes are free, held in morning and evening sessions, and there’s usually a waiting list of people who’d like to participate. Offered since 2000, Decatur 101 has seeded the community with people who know how city government works, what the city’s history and most important goals are, and who holds elected and appointed office. Not surprisingly, graduates of this program are among those most likely to serve on citizen boards and run for office.
It has a surprising number of community events, two of which are its acclaimed annual book festival and beer festival. (Thankfully, these are separate events.) But they’re just the beginning. By my count, there are more than 40 festivals, concerts, events and parties sponsored by the city or non-profits, many of which are supported by businesses. There’s a serious side to this fun: Public events connect citizens to their community and each other—and open up numerous volunteer opportunities. These are keys to building citizenship.
It has a town square, where most of these events are held. I don’t think having a town square, main street, courthouse, central park or clearly defined downtown is essential to creating citizens, but it helps. That’s because community citizenship requires a larger sense of loyalty—to the city as well as a neighborhood, ethnic group, religious faith, political faction or workplace. And having a place where everyone in a city comes to celebrate—“neutral ground” that belongs to the entire community, not a neighborhood or private interest —helps build that larger loyalty.
Decatur has a full-time volunteer coordinator in city hall whose job is to match community volunteers with volunteer opportunities. Many of these jobs are helping with the city’s festivals and events, but others are ongoing responsibilities such as crisis-line volunteers, pre-school tutors and nursing home visitors. In the last 10 years, the city’s volunteer coordinator has built a database of 2,000 volunteers—10 percent of Decatur’s population—and helped move a generation of residents from wanting to serve to actually doing so.
It does a good job of communicating with citizens. Decatur doesn’t have its own daily or weekly newspaper. Its main news vehicle is a newsy, smartly designed newsletter published by the city and supported by local businesses. Called Decatur Focus, the newsletter is mailed 10 times a year to local households and keeps citizens aware of community events and what the government and their fellow citizens are doing.

Interestingly, though, communications was an area citizens thought could be improved. They wanted more frequent communications, delivered in new ways, mostly electronically. But they also wanted new types of information: about how to get involved, which problems to keep an eye on, what neighborhoods were doing to improve themselves, what could be recycled, how to take advantage of recreation opportunities and farmers’ markets to be more fit and healthy—and on and on. This is important because it shows that Decatur’s citizens viewed city government as more than a service provider; they saw it as a potential information resource —with innovative communications pushing out that information to citizens every day.

This may, in fact, be the highest level of citizenship a city can aspire to: where citizens tell the government, give us the information we need to make this a better place, help out where you can, and we’ll take it the rest of the way. Decatur is on the verge of reaching that level. Other cities should join it.

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Citizens Are Not the Same as Customers

The Secrets of Perspective

The Mayor as Manager

The Five Elements of Successful Visioning

How a City Creates Citizens

About Otis White

The Great Project

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