Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Seven Ways Community Decisions Are Different

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I am sometimes asked if community decision making is different from other forms of decision making—say, the kinds used in companies or nonprofits. And my short answer is yes.

But I’d like to offer a longer answer, which is that community decision making is different not in one or two ways, but in a number. And because it’s different, it means we need different kinds of leadership in communities, leadership that is far more patient, collaborative and comfortable with ambiguity than we expect in CEOs or executive directors. I think you’ll see why as we move down the list of differences.

One: In most communities, legitimacy for big decisions comes from the bottom up (citizens), not the top down (CEO or board of directors). As a result, everyone expects a voice in community decisions.

In most ways, this is the sign of a healthy community, but it can lead to problems if citizens are asked to make decisions they’re not in a good position to judge. Take, for example, a proposal to start a streetcar system. To know if this is a good idea, you might want to visit Portland, Oregon or other places that have streetcars and see their impact, but not many citizens can do this. They depend, then, on others to visit, ask questions and report back to them—people like newspaper reporters and community leaders. And that would be fine, except for the next way community decision-making is different . . .

Two: There is little deference or ceding of expertise in communities. Many business employees and nonprofit workers are discouraged and cynical. But even corporate cynics will concede that, in some instances, top executives know more than they do and perhaps have good reasons for trying something new. But that’s not the case in many communities, where citizens do not presume that community leaders know better than they do —or even more than they do.

Three: It is much easier to slow or stop things in communities and much harder to get them started. That’s by design. In America, responsibility and power is dispersed among levels of government (local, state, federal) and types of governments (cities, counties, government authorities) and then fought over by independently elected officials (mayor, city council, and maybe a half-dozen others). And all of these parties are governed by legal requirements that serve to make the time line of decision making much longer in communities than in organizations. The result is that even the best decisions move slowly—and sometimes get stopped cold.

Four: It isn’t just the legal responsibility that’s dispersed. Resources are as well. Take almost any big community problem —from improving public safety and maintaining neighborhood parks to creating a more walkable downtown—and you quickly realize that these aren’t government problems alone; they involve multiple interests, from neighborhood associations and youth athletic associations to private property owners, businesses and special interests. All of these interests have resources they could contribute to the solution—if, that is, they agreed with it. As a result, the community decisions must be made collaboratively if they’re going to be effective.

Five: News media coverage of communities is far more extensive than of organizations. Again, this is a healthy thing—except that it exposes the “sloppiness” of decision making far more than in corporations and nonprofits. Don’t get me wrong: Decision making in big companies is sloppy too, with loud debates, false steps and corporate intrigue. But with few exceptions (think about BP’s repeated failed attempts to plug the 2010 Gulf oil spill and its clumsy public relations efforts), the sloppiness isn’t apparent to outsiders. Not so in communities. Fumble a big community decision—by going down one decision-making path and then abruptly changing course—and you’ll read about it in the newspaper and probably lose public support.

Six: Leadership is not as easily defined in communities as in organizations. That’s because community initiatives can come from many places—local governments, business organizations, neighborhood associations, nonprofits or individuals. (As an example, Kansas City is building a light-rail system because a single person got enough signatures on petitions to place the idea on the ballot and the voters passed it—over loud warnings by government and business leaders that light rail wasn’t feasible.) Companies may make poor decisions, but we know who makes them. That’s not always the case in communities.

Seven: In organizations, the measurements of success are clear: profits for corporations and results for nonprofits (the hungry are fed, trees are planted, museum attendance is up, etc.). There are no easy measurements of success in communities. This makes it harder to know whether past decisions succeeded and opens every new decision to long debates about outcomes and benefits.

I don’t mean to suggest that decision making is easy in corporations. I’ve spent enough time around large companies to know how gut-wrenching it is to deal with markets that suddenly collapse, competitors that emerge overnight or technologies that turn your industry upside down. Decision making in companies is fast because it has to be. CEOs would love to have the long time horizons of mayors and county commissions. But they would hate the ambiguity and loath the painstaking process of consensus building.

So when you hear someone say that your city should be run like a business, just say two words: Not possible.

The Purpose of a City

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For 30 years, I’ve read and reread Peter Drucker’s books. Drucker was a professor, writer and consultant who may have singlehandedly created the study of business management in 1945 with his magisterial book about General Motors, “Concept of the Corporation.” Drucker taught many things about how large organizations work, but his greatest skill was an ability to focus managers’ thinking without simplifying their tasks. And here’s an example: In 1954, Drucker defined, in 13 simple words, why companies exist. He wrote, “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”

Savor that for a moment: Companies don’t exist to make profits (profits are a means to an end, Drucker would say), or provide jobs for employees (again, means to an end), or benefit society (wonderful if it happens, but it’s a byproduct, not a purpose). No, the purpose of a business is to create customers because, without them, there would be no profits, jobs or social benefit. So every company’s focus must be, first and foremost, on creating customers.

I’m no Peter Drucker, but I’d like to try my hand at defining a purpose for cities: Cities exist to create citizens. Not to generate economic gains (they do, but as a byproduct), or provide a home to the arts, entertainment or learning (again, byproducts), and certainly not to support a government (it’s a means to an end). I would argue that the real purpose of cities is to create a group of people who will take responsibility for their community. And it’s this willingness to accept responsibility that is the difference between a resident and a citizen.

The good news is that cities are almost uniquely positioned to do this. States don’t easily create citizens, nor do nations; rural areas do it only with the greatest of difficulties. But cities have three unique assets for building responsibility-seeking citizens:

  • The people are already there. Cities are natural gathering places, so you don’t have to have a special meeting at the state capital or in Washington, D.C. to get the interested parties together. They’re around, seven days a week. And proximity is critical to building responsibility. If a person is concerned about an issue, there’s no need to read about it in the newspaper or watch it on CNN; she can go down to city hall, raise her hand and participate.
  • Cities are not abstractions like states or countries; they’re tangible places that you can see, touch, hear, smell and walk around in. As a result, the issues that concern cities—economic development, housing, public safety, downtown development, water and sewers, roads and schools—are far closer to the everyday concerns of people than those that preoccupy Congress and state capitals.
  • Maybe most important, cities can be molded by their citizens. They can determine the city’s physical form, the streets, buildings, sidewalks and connections. And that form, over time, will mold them. In that sense, it’s a feedback loop: the more you consciously shape the urban form, the more the form changes you and others around you.

When you put these things together—the accessibility of cities, their concreteness, and the opportunities for physical and social change—you can see why citizenship is much easier to create in cities than anywhere else.

And here’s maybe the best thing: 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.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. Daniel Kemmis, the former mayor of Missoula, Montana, wrote a wonderful book in 1995 called, “The Good City and the Good Life” in which he described how important it was for cities to create responsibility-seeking citizens, even if just a few at a time. Kemmis wrote:

If every meeting that dealt with a difficult public issue could, by its own dynamic, produce a half-dozen people who took upon themselves some measure of responsibility for the way people treated each other, we would solve problems at a much higher rate than most of us in most of our cities have ever experienced.

I’ll talk in the future about how cities can create more citizens and point to one city that’s actually doing it, but let me close with an important caveat: Citizen creation is not the work solely of city governments. Governments can do a lot to encourage and facilitate citizen involvement, but we need many community institutions to be involved, from schools and neighborhood associations to youth groups and foundations.

It’s only when people are surrounded by opportunities to get involved in their communities, opportunities that come at them from many directions, that we can move large numbers from being passive residents to active citizens.

Photo by Matt Malone licensed under Creative Commons.

From Provider to Partner

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There’s a vast change underway in how local governments relate to their citizens, as governments move from being providers to partners. Almost everywhere you turn, you see this shift. Here are three examples:

  • The rise of business improvement districts. I’ve heard former mayors who served in the 1960s and 1970s talk about how shocked they were to learn that businesses would voluntarily raise their taxes in order to improve their surroundings. And yet, by the 1990s the BIDs were everywhere. The original idea was to take over services that cities could no longer afford (like cleaning up graffiti and planting trees), but BIDs have grown into surprisingly effective planning organizations as well.
  • The vast expansion of public-private partnerships. Cities have been creating public-private partnerships for decades; it’s how stadiums and civic centers were built in the 1980s and economic development programs were funded. But we’re now into partnerships that couldn’t have been imagined even a decade ago, like building toll lanes on highways and privatizing downtown parking meters. Some of these ventures will prove to be bad ideas, but they demonstrate how far you can go in marrying profit motives with public purposes.
  • The arrival of philanthropy in government services. Again, this is the sort of thing that leaves former mayors shaking their heads, but cities everywhere are turning to non-profits and foundations to fund—and manage—public assets. Name a major municipal service area that touches the lives of citizens, and you’ll likely find philanthropy at work, from park conservancies and public land trusts to police and library foundations. I haven’t seen donors lining up to support solid waste, but surely it can’t be too far off.

I could go on and on—there are many examples—but the shift is undeniable and the implications are clear: Governments no longer “own” local problems; they “share” community problems with others. And as you move from owning to sharing, new skills are required of government leaders: that they be able to identify others to share the burden, and that they be able to work as partners and not directors. And for that, they must learn patience and restraint, and this is much, much harder than you might think.

I’ll talk about restraint shortly, but first a bit more about the great role shift. I ran across a good description of the change in a report by a group called PACE, which stands for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. In it, the city manager of Ventura, Calif., Rick Cole, said the difference was between a vending machine and a barn raising:

“With a vending machine, you put your money in and get services out,” says Cole, a former alternative newspaper publisher and mayor in Pasadena. “When government doesn’t deliver, they do what people do when a vending machine doesn’t deliver,” says Cole. “They kick it.”

“The more useful metaphor,” he adds, “is the barn raising. It’s not a transaction, where I pay you to do work on my behalf, but a collaborative process where we are working together. Government works better and costs less when citizens do more than simply choose or ratify representative decision makers.”

Which are the next great barns to be raised? There are two areas where governments will make great partnership strides in the future. First is in neighborhood improvements; second is in bringing volunteers inside local governments.

With neighborhoods, this means letting residents take the lead in listing and prioritizing their needs, and insisting they take a major role in providing the solutions. I know, I know. We’ve tried for decades to find a workable model for neighborhood involvement without much success. But that’s because we’ve only done the first of these two things—we’ve asked people what they want and haven’t insisted they share the burden. To use Rick Cole’s metaphor, we’ve let people describe the soft drinks they want and the price they’d like to pay (essentially nothing), and when local governments failed to deliver, we’ve watched them kick the vending machines. We need them to grab a hammer and start raising the barn.

I’ll write in the future about the idea of volunteers in government. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I would point out that we already have volunteers in a range of government work, from volunteer firefighters and parents who help out in classrooms to volunteer librarians. (Next time you’re at your public library, ask the librarian to point out who works there for free.) Governments haven’t learned to ask for volunteers, but when they do, they’ll be surprised how many step forward. Here’s the key, though: They can’t manage volunteers like employees. So add to the list of skills governments must learn things like volunteer training, motivation and coordination.

Final thought: I first saw a local government acting as partner and not provider in 1994 when I wrote a magazine article about a South Florida city called Delray Beach. (You can read the entire article here.) The key to change in Delray Beach was a mayor, Tom Lynch, and a city council that had learned to be a dependable partner without becoming a dominating presence. Here’s a glimpse of how restraint works:

When a problem becomes apparent, civic leaders help the people most affected organize themselves to study it and come up with solutions. When the citizens arrive at some solutions, the city offers to be part—but only part—of the resolution. The group that’s most affected must accept the bulk of the responsibility.

It’s in this constant tension over responsibility—is everyone doing his part to solve this problem?—that Delray Beach generates both solutions and leadership. No one looks to city hall to figure out what to do or even to do it once it’s figured out. But they do keep close watch to be sure the city, the business community and non-profits live up to their ends of the bargain.

City hall is willing to “facilitate” the problem-solving process, help find resources and take some of the responsibility when the solution is arrived at. But it won’t tell people what to do or take on the work for them. As Mayor Lynch explains, “If someone comes to us with a problem, our role isn’t to solve the problem but to connect them with other people who can help them solve their problem.”

A decade and a half ago, I was amazed by this approach and even more by its results: not only a popular and well-managed local government in a city that had turned itself around—but a much happier citizenry as well. It turned out that, in Delray Beach, people preferred being partners to constituents. Come to think of it, they probably would have enjoyed barn raisings to vending machines, too.

Photo by Load Stone licensed under Creative Commons.

What Leaders Can Learn from Consumer Reports

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Apple, Inc. is the creator of elegant and ingenious products, and its reputation on Wall Street and with technology geeks and consumers could hardly be better. So when word circulated in blogs that Apple’s latest gadget, the iPhone 4, was dropping calls, the company’s first reaction was to dismiss the complaints as some people not knowing how to hold a cell phone properly. But a week or so later, when a 74-year-old publication called Consumer Reports said it wouldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 to its subscribers because of the signal-loss problem, Apple suddenly came around. It called a press conference to announce a software fix, a free case for iPhone users and a refund for anyone unhappy with the phone. CEO Steve Jobs said he was “stunned and embarrassed” by the Consumer Reports judgment.

There’s something delicious about a high-flying technology company running head first into an earnest, old-fashioned research outfit like Consumer Reports. But it’s also worth asking: How did Consumer Reports come to be so respected by the public and the news media? And can leaders borrow some of that magic for use in their communities?

First, about Consumer Reports: It’s the principal publication of a nonprofit organization called Consumers Union. Consumers Union was founded in 1936 on the belief that average people needed protection from shoddy merchandise and that the best way of determining a product’s quality was to test it using scientific methods. To ensure its credibility, Consumer Reports does not accept advertising and will not allow companies to use its ratings in their ads or commercials. Consumer Reports’ reputation, then, rests on promises to its subscribers: It promises to be on the side of consumers (establishing trust), makes it clear that it cannot be bought (giving it legitimacy) and spells out its testing methodology (showing that its judgments are fair and reliable).

Now, let’s think about communities. Is there anything like Consumer Reports in your city—an institution, individual, organization or process that citizens turn to in sorting out public disputes? Actually, in a few places there are. It might be a highly trusted politician or political body; a newspaper or longtime broadcaster; a respected nonprofit, such as a chamber of commerce or civic league; or maybe even a well regarded civic volunteer. But most communities don’t have any of these. In these places, politicians are just politicians, the chamber is seen as a mouthpiece of the business community, there is no civic league, and the newspaper is dying, irrelevant—or both. If there were any highly regarded civic volunteers, they’ve retired or moved away.

So what can community leaders do to build support for tough decisions in places where no one is trusted? You can follow the Consumer Reports’ formula in creating processes based on its promises of trust, legitimacy, fairness and reliability. One way is to convene a “blue ribbon committee.” You know how this works: A mayor or county commission asks a group of prominent citizens to listen to all sides, consult with experts and arrive at a set of findings and recommendations.

The federal government is particularly fond of blue ribbon committees (or commissions, as they’re sometimes called).  Think of the 9/11 Commission, which looked into the causes of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, and the Warren Commission on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. More recently, President Obama created a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to recommend ways of reducing the federal deficit.

You see blue ribbon committees at the local level, too. A good example is Tampa Bay’s ABC task force, a group of business and community leaders formed to figure out how to keep major league baseball in the region.

The best of these committees follow Consumer Reports’ promises. They start by announcing their purpose and whom they represent in their deliberations, establishing public trust. If they are chosen well, they will represent all sectors of the community, giving the committee legitimacy. (In other words, ensuring that no single faction will get its way.)

The best blue ribbon committees go about their work in ways that are transparently fair and reliable. This is where these committees often stumble: They start out thinking their members’ reputations are so strong that they don’t need to open their meetings to observers, and, sadly, they aren’t. 

This became an issue in Atlanta in 2010 when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution questioned a blue ribbon committee that was looking into whether some public schools altered standardized test scores in order to look better. The newspaper raised concerns about the committee’s members, suggesting they were too close to the school system. But mostly it criticized the process: School system officials were too deeply involved in the committee’s work, the newspaper said. Others defended the panel’s work, accusing the newspaper of judging the committee’s work before it was finished, but the damage was done. If people didn’t like the committee’s report, the newspaper had given them the perfect excuse: It was influenced by the school system and its allies.

Even if you do everything perfectly, you’ll be criticized. After all, this is community work, and criticism comes with the territory. Consumer Reports has been criticized and occasionally sued over the years. It has even been wrong on rare occasions because of mistakes in testing. But the public’s confidence in Consumer Reports’ judgment has remained strong—strong enough to bring companies like Apple to heel—because it never forgets its promises: trust, legitimacy, fairness and reliability.

The Era of Cheap Community Organizing

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In 1982, I had a fellowship that allowed me to spend a year learning how computers were changing work in America. I spent the year talking with auto workers and car designers in Detroit, newspaper composers in Miami, bankers and technology officials in Boston. Here’s what I learned: It was too early to say how computers would change the lives of average workers. After all, it was only a year after the first IBM personal computer had been introduced. Cheap computer power was upon us and we knew that these bulky desktop computers would bring vast changes, but we didn’t know where or how the changes would come.

During that year, I heard a great phrase. The first thing computers would do, an engineer told me, was “pave the cowpaths.” That is, they would take what was routine and make it faster and cheaper. Computers would get rid of newspaper Linotype machines—loud, monstrous contraptions that composed newspapers in metal forms—replacing them with small, clean, quiet phototypesetting printers. They would gradually replace bank tellers with ATMs. They would replace paper drawings and clay models of car designs with computer renderings that you could rotate and even take on a virtual test drive. None of these tasks was new (setting type, dispensing cash, designing cars). In the first wave, then, computers would make established routines more efficient.

But what about the second wave, after the cowpaths were paved? What entirely new things would we be able to do with cheap computers? No one knew, but we assumed it would be revolutionary. And we were right.

It’s nearly 30 years later, and now we can see that computers—paired with the internet, an innovation as great as the personal computer itself—have come close to eliminating newspapers, not just the jobs of a few of their workers. They’ve allowed us to carry thousands of songs around in our pockets, killing record stores and decimating recording companies. Soon, we’ll all carry libraries of literature in a device the size of a single book and, in doing, may kill bookstores. Computers and the internet allow us to do nearly all our banking from home. (Goodbye paper checks. Will it also be goodbye branch banks?) They’ve given rise to new ways of buying things, from books and shoes to entertainment (Amazon, Zappos, Netflix) and new ways of selling them (eBay, Craig’s List).

None of this was obvious in 1982. And here’s my point: When we talk about how new technologies, particularly social media, will affect communities and their leadership, nothing is obvious today. We’re still paving the community cowpaths. But get ready, because the changes will be huge.

Let’s start with the cowpaths. If I were president of a Rotary Club or executive director of a non-profit, I’d put together an e-mail list and send out a newsletter every week or two. If I were angry about the city council, I’d post a snippish update on Facebook or, if I’m really steamed, write a blog post calling out every council member by name. If I wanted to hold an emergency neighborhood meeting, I might use e-mail, Facebook or Twitter to put out the word. And I wouldn’t sent out just one message—I’d send out a half-dozen reminders as well. After all, these messages are, except for labor, essentially free (no postage, no paper, no running to the printer for leaflets).

But none of these tasks is truly new. I’ve taken the familiar (paper newsletters, letters to the editor, griping about politicians, calling a meeting) and made them faster, cheaper and better through my computer and the Internet. I’ve paved some cowpaths.

So what will be new, even revolutionary, thanks to computers, the internet and social media? With the caveat that it’s still early in the social media era, let me offer a few thoughts.

To begin, as Clay Shirky points out in his book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” the most important contribution will be to dramatically reduce the “transaction costs” of coordinating groups. What are transaction costs? They’re all the things people have to do to manage organizations, events and projects.

To get a sense of what this means, Shirky asked us to imagine what it would have been like in, say, 1992 to be angry about a problem in your community and hear that a new organization was forming to address it. Your first impulse, certainly, would have been to join. But right away, Shirky wrote, you would have run into “a set of small hurdles.”

How would you locate the organization? How would you contact it? If you requested literature, how long would it take to arrive, and by the time it got there, would you still be in the mood (to join)? No one of these barriers to action is insurmountable, but together they subject the desire to act to the death of a thousand cuts.

The internet and social media have leveled those small hurdles. You know exactly what to do today: Go online and look at the group’s web site. If you’re convinced, you can register your name, phone number and e-mail address with the organization. You can take note of the date, time and place of the next meeting—and put it in your iPhone calendar. For good measure, you might go on Facebook and tell your friends about the organization and ask them to join you at the meeting.

And it doesn’t stop there. Since you’ve registered your contact information (on Facebook or Twitter, it can be as easy as clicking “follow”), you’ll start receiving regular updates from the group, including invitations to additional events. And the group’s organizers will know who’s coming to their events by the number who respond.

And here’s where we really get off the cowpaths: The greatest beneficiaries of cheap organizing won’t be conventional civic organizations—Rotary Clubs, chambers of commerce, city governments or even neighborhood associations. These groups are already organized, with established management processes.

No, the greatest beneficiaries will be those groups that couldn’t have organized in the past because they didn’t have the money, staff or connections. What we will see in the future, Shirky wrote, are a lot more groups, thinly financed (if financed at all), headed by volunteers and fueled by cheap technology.

What kinds of groups? Well, certainly protest groups. Wal-Mart take note: Your challenges in locating in big cities are about to get much greater. Ditto for city governments looking to locate a landfill or expand an airport.

But it won’t all be anger and protest. An era of cheap community organizing means almost any small-scale, focused effort can be managed at little cost, from a group of neighbors cleaning up a park to volunteers for an after-school tutoring program.

And here’s the payoff for community leaders: Cheap organizing offers much greater shared responsibility. In the past, citizens expected governments to do most things—clean up parks, tutor kids, and so on—because government was organized and they weren’t. But if citizens can be organized quickly and easily, they can do much more for themselves, with government acting as partner, not leader and provider.

This will be one of the greatest changes in cities in the years ahead: the replacing of professional government expertise and labor with that of grassroots volunteers. We’ll still need government but not in an exclusive role and, in some instances, not even in a central role. Rather than government taking charge and calling on citizens to help out, it will often be the reverse: citizens taking charge and asking government to lend a hand.

We are about to test the limits of what people, armed with the tools of cheap organization and communications, can do for themselves. My bet is, it’ll be a lot more than we can imagine.

Photo by Sarah Worthy licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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