Otis White – Page 8

The Art of the Ask

February 3, 2014 By Otis White

There are probably many reasons to be fascinated by John F. Kennedy’s life and brief time in the White House. Here’s mine: I’ve long wondered how this one-time high-society party boy ever got to be such a good politician.

Chris Matthews, the TV commentator, may have finally answered my question. In his book, “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” Matthews said World War II changed Kennedy by placing him in charge of men not at all like him, mechanics and farmers, factory workers and truck drivers, Southerners and Midwesterners. That taught him empathy, which is a key to leadership. And somewhere along the line, Kennedy picked up a second skill: He learned how to ask people to do things.

This came in handy when Kennedy ran for office, and, Matthews writes, “realized that the key to forging loyalty within his (campaign) organization was the invitation itself. The mere act of asking someone to become a Kennedy person was the step that mattered.”

You may never run for public office, and if you do you may not need the political skills of John F. Kennedy. But asking people to do things—and getting them to do them—is a skill every civic leader and government manager needs to master, now more than ever.

Why? Because big urban problems can’t be solved by organizations acting alone; they can only be solved by collaborations. And collaborations—which are, after all, joint efforts by interests not compelled to work together—don’t come about on their own. They exist because someone brought the participants together. Simply stated, somebody made “the ask” and did so successfully.

So what’s an effective ask? It has three parts. First is finding the right person to ask. Second is asking the right way, so the person accepts the task. And third is asking again—the “second ask.”

If there’s an art to asking, it’s in that first part. That’s because finding the right person is a mixture of strategy, knowledge, and judgment. You have to know the objective (the task the collaboration will undertake), the organizations or interests that can best contribute to the objective, and the right person to work with inside those organizations and interests. (Hint: It may not be the person whose name is first on the letterhead.)

Then there’s the ask itself. Here again, it’s a mixture, usually including an appeal to altruism (imagine the good we can do) and self-interest (here’s what’s in it for you and your organization). But it has to go beyond artful phrasing because few will say yes to likely failure. So you have to show that you have a roadmap to success. That might mean facilitating meetings and offering other resources; at the very least it means deciding the number of meetings and what each will address.

And that brings us to the final part, the second ask, and back to JFK. Kennedy didn’t ask people to do things once. He asked them again and again. That’s how he built the intense loyalty that characterized his campaigns and his presidency.

There’s a bit of psychology here: When people say yes to an ask, no matter how little you’ve asked of them, they’ve investing in you. If the task is successful, your value rises in their eyes. By asking a second (or third or fourth) time, you are deepening your value . . . and building support. There’s also a bit of economics: You’ll spend much less time finding and asking people to join you a second or third time, so there is what economists might call a marginal efficiency in the second ask.

These benefits accumulate over time. But the first step, as JFK might remind us, is to ask—and ask well.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Andreas Klinke Johannsen licensed under Creative Commons.

The Opportunity: The Door to Civic Progress

January 13, 2014 By Otis White

For two years, I’ve been interviewing civic leaders for a podcast. I look for two kinds of people to interview. Most are leaders who’ve accomplished something strikingly successful in their communities; a smaller number are people who, through their experiences, have learned a leadership skill that’s valuable for others to know.

The format is simple. I introduce the leaders. We talk for about 15 minutes about their successes or skills, and I close by asking them for advice: If someone from another community asked how to take on a difficult project or master this skill, what would they say?

In the 23 interviews I’ve done to date, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about what civic leaders do and how they think. I’ve learned that most of their work isn’t heroic or visionary. It’s more like project management, as they move from one meeting, planning session, or presentation to another.

I’ve learned something about the motivations of these people. They seem driven to accomplish something meaningful, and communities offer an ideal stage for these achievements because civic projects often end with things you can reach out and touch—buildings, roads, and parks—things that will endure for decades. This concreteness and sense of permanence appeals to civic leaders.

And finally I’ve learned that despite the long hours of unpaid labor, the tedium of public meetings, and stress of occasional conflict, many of these people consider civic work an escape from their regular jobs. One civic leader told me away from the microphone that his project, which had occupied him for a decade and a half, was, outside of his family life, “the most fun I’ve ever had.”

These are valuable things to know. It explains why cities are undergoing a renaissance these days. Somehow cities have learned to attract and harness the work of these leaders more effectively than in the past. And it assures me that this isn’t a phase. People will always seek meaning in their lives, and if cities continue offering a stage for these seekers, they’ll be successful.

Interesting as all this was to learn, though, it wasn’t why I started the podcast. I’ve actually been looking for something else: the structure of civic progress.

This is an old interest of mine. In fact, I started this blog four years ago so I could think out loud about civic progress, how it worked, and how we could make it work better. Along the way, I’ve made some stabs at a grand theory. A few years ago, I created a map of community change showing step by step how leaders moved from awareness of a need to a widely accepted solution.

Most of the map still seems right to me, but I’ve learned from the interviews that an important element was missing. You can’t, I’ve come to understand, view civic progress simply as a process. You have to see it as a system as well; one that, in the right circumstances, can be mobilized as a process. Leaders, then, have three responsibilities: Make sure the system is healthy, learn how the process of civic progress works, and know how to transform the system into a campaign for community improvement.

And what is the spark that mobilizes the system into a process? I call it “the opportunity.” It’s not the same as a need nor is it necessarily a solution. It’s more like a path to the solution. If civic progress were a sport, we’d call it an “opening” the hole in a line of scrimmage that a running back sees, the pass a point guard makes to set up a score, the moves a chess master sees that lead in five turns to checkmate.

If this sounds confusing, bear with me. It’s harder to understand the opportunity in theory than in practice, and the interviews offer plenty of examples. Maybe the best was in my interview with Cathy Woolard, the former Atlanta city council member (and, later, council president) who stumbled across a transformative project called the Beltline and saw, in an instant, how it could solve many of Atlanta’s transportation and land-use problems.

Here’s how she describes that moment of insight: “It was literally the right day, the perfect council member, the perfect district, for me to be able to look at (this idea) and know immediately what the benefit would be to the residents of my district in particular.” Because she saw the opportunity offered by the Beltline and figured a way through a maze of political and bureaucratic processes, Woolard was able to move this visionary project from grad-school planning thesis to urban reality. Today the Beltline, a circle of trails and parks around downtown Atlanta, is being built, and the sections that are open are wildly popular with cyclists, runners, and strollers.

You can see another opportunity in the interview with Scott Tigchelaar, a movie studio president who talked the small town of Senoia, Georgia into turning itself into a permanent film location. What triggered this, he said, was the sale of some land in downtown Senoia. Over the years Tigchelaar had used the town for movie locations (if you watched the 1991 movie “Fried Green Tomatoes,” you’ve seen Senoia). He feared a new owner would put up something that would ruin the town for movie shootings, so he approached the mayor and council with a deal: Create new design and zoning laws, allow us to buy the land and build some appropriate new buildings, and we’ll bring you a steady stream of movie productions, along with tourism opportunities. (It worked. Filming goes on year-round in Senoia, tourists flock there to see where their favorite TV shows are filmed, and the town has a host of new restaurants and shops.)

And then there’s John Turner, the businessman who helped restore a river through downtown Columbus, Georgia and, by doing so, turned a slow, muddy stream into roaring whitewater. Some had speculated as far back as the 1970s that Columbus might have world-class rapids beneath its downtown dams. But it wasn’t until Turner and others learned 20 years later that those dams were failing that he saw the opportunity to tear them down and create the longest urban whitewater attraction in America.

Opportunities arrive, then, when a long-felt need (to change land use and transportation in Atlanta, to preserve a small town’s unique economy, to do something about a neglected river) is connected with a sudden change in the environment (a visionary plan drops on a council member’s desk, tracts of land are offered for sale, old dams show signs of failing) and a way forward is seen (master the transportation planning process, get the city council to agree to design standards, gain government approval to remove the dams and alter the river).

And who connects these things and sees the way forward? Leaders do.

In fact, this is probably the most creative thing that leaders do in cities. Like great business innovators (think Steve Jobs) or talented politicians (think FDR or LBJ), great civic leaders see paths that are hidden to most of us and connect things others hadn’t put together. Not all civic leaders can do this because it takes a special mind to see an opening to success and a strong will to push an entire community through the opening.

If you’re not that kind of leader, don’t despair. There are other things civic leaders do that are critically important, such as tending the system and managing the process of civic progress. I’ll talk about these leadership roles in future posts.

For the time being, though, keep this image in mind: Civic progress is neither a system nor a process; it’s both. And the door between the two is the opportunity. Trust me on this. I had 23 great teachers who showed it to me.

Photo by lau.svensson licensed under Creative Commons.

What’s New in Cities . . . and What’s Truly New

October 17, 2013 By Otis White

Cities have been around for thousands of years, and most of their biggest issues are nearly as old: safety, sanitation, transportation, education, commercial development, regulation, and so on. We think of new and better ways of doing things, but for the most part we are, as technology critics so often put it, “paving the cow paths.” That is, we are merely making the old more efficient.

Every now and then, though, something truly new comes along. And if we apply old ways of thinking to truly new issues, we are going to make a mess. For the past three years, I’ve been trying to see what’s truly new in cities, and I’ve done it with some 19th century technology: a filing system. Every time I run across a newspaper article, nonprofit report, or academic study that describes something that seems new, I place it in the file. (I do it on my computer, but you could do it with paper if you’re so inclined.)

I decided recently to take a look at the file, starting with its first year, March 2011 to March 2012. (A little distance helps in spotting the new.) There were 77 items in the first year’s file. The vast majority, 62, were the result of changes in technology, four were economic changes, and 11 reflected some new way of thinking or living.

It didn’t surprise me that technology took up more than 80 percent of the new. We’ve long known that technology is a major driver of change. And, sure enough, some were of the “paving the cow paths” variety—the rise of public-safety cameras, apps that help people report service problems, the growth of electronic tolling. If you’re not a toll-taker, these aren’t technologies that will radically change your life. They just make old systems work better.

But some of the technological changes in the file will have a much deeper impact. There are apps, for instance, that make it easy for small groups to map every public asset in a neighborhood, dramatically shifting accountability. There is a whole new category of “sharing” activities made possible by smartphones, from bike sharing and car sharing to apartment sharing and even parking-space sharing. And then there are e-books.

The biggest mistake governments make is when they think of these things as business as usual. E-books are not just paper books in a new form. They will dramatically change the nature of libraries. And the “sharing” technologies will demand that local governments think in new ways about transportation and regulation.

But maybe the most intriguing items in my file were changes in beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. One was the rapid rise in people living alone in cities (that is, with no spouse or roommate). Is this just a very small family, or will solo living cause new demands on cities? I’d bet on the latter. One prediction: It will fuel the demand for safe public spaces.

There were others: Philanthropy’s rise in urban leadership, as well as new understandings about childhood development that may take us far beyond pre-K programs, back to the first two years of life. And, of course, there were the food trucks.

Worth repeating: Some of these new technologies and changes in lifestyle and belief will require governments to think anew. If you try to regulate food trucks as bricks-and-mortar restaurants, you’ll soon be in tears. It won’t work. You have to treat food trucks as a whole new category.

You won’t do that, though, if you haven’t developed the habit of seeing what’s new. I recommend a file. Just toss in everything that seems new to you and, after some time has elapsed, go through it and ask: Is this truly new, or is it just more asphalt on the cow path? If it’s truly new, then ask: How do we think about this new thing?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Alan Stanton licensed under Creative Commons.

Cultivating the Visionistas

July 18, 2013 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo courtesy of Whitewater Columbus.

Dealing with the Cynics

July 10, 2013 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

« Previous Page

The Art of the Ask

The Opportunity: The Door to Civic Progress

What’s New in Cities . . . and What’s Truly New

Cultivating the Visionistas

Dealing with the Cynics

About Otis White

The Great Project

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