Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

How to Listen Effectively

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On his 27th birthday, John Francis, an environmental activist who loved to argue, decided to be quiet for one day and listen to others. The result changed his life. What he learned on his day of silence was that he hadn’t really been listening at all. “I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I knew what they were going to say, and so I would stop listening,” he said in a speech not long ago. “And in my mind I just kind of raced ahead and thought about what I was going to say back while they were still finishing up. And then I would launch in. Well, that just ended communications.”

At the end of his birthday, he decided to be quiet for another day. And another. And then for an entire year. In all, John Francis remained voluntarily silent for 17 years, during which time he earned three college degrees (including a doctorate), taught classes using sign language, and walked across America. And he listened, really listened, to the people he met. (If you want to know more about Francis’ amazing story, you can hear it—yes, he speaks now—by viewing one of his presentations online.)

I doubt I could manage even a day of silence, nevertheless years. Perhaps you couldn’t either. But you don’t have to be silent to listen more effectively. And it’s a skill worth learning, maybe the single best thing you could do to make yourself a better leader.

Why? Start with the obvious: You can’t be a leader unless you have followers, and you can’t gain followers if you don’t understand them well enough to represent them. This involves listening. If you want to be effective as a leader, you’ll have to be more than a mouthpiece for a group: You’ll have to negotiate for your followers, and effective negotiating means knowing how leaders of other groups think about things. Finally, leadership means sometimes having to change your followers, as when circumstances shift dramatically and your group has to adapt. To do any of this involves listening deeply—truly taking in others’ fears, hopes, vision and motivations—before acting.

There are other reasons listening can make you a better leader: You’ll arrive at better solutions because you’ll have more complete information. Your ideas will gain greater support if you’ve developed them after consulting others. You’ll make fewer gaffes if you know others’ sensitivities. Finally, you’ll enjoy one of the greatest benefits of civic leadership, which is to learn about people who are different from you in background, temperament and world view.

And it all begins with listening. So how can you improve your listening skills? Here are some ways:

  • Start by concentrating. This sounds simple but isn’t. The greatest obstacle to listening is distraction. Instead of paying attention to others, we let our minds wander—to what else we need to do, whom we need to see, what we’ll say next, and a hundred other things. So begin your meetings with a reminder: Stay focused on the other person’s words.
  • Ask open-ended questions that require explanations rather than closed-ended questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” So you might ask, “How did you feel?” rather than “Were you angry?” because it offers a fuller understanding of the person. And keep your questions brief. The simpler the question, the more detailed and candid the responses tend to be.
  • Listen for insights into the person. People often say a lot more than they intend or we expect them to say; as a result, we don’t always take in what they’re telling us. Your meetings may be about a community issue, but if you ask good questions and listen carefully, you can learn a lot about the person who’s talking. You can not only get her opinions, you can get her life story and motivations, how she forms opinions and reads people. These things can be critically important later on as you work with this person. So listen for these deeper insights.
  • Take time. It takes a while to understand people, and the longer you spend, the more you learn. Don’t expect to learn someone’s life story, philosophy and motivations in 30 minutes’ time. Plan on an hour or more, which is why lunch can be a good time for such meetings.
  • Make it comfortable. Here’s another reason to consider lunch as a good setting for listening: It gets the person out of her office and away from her desk. Simply moving to neutral ground will sometimes open up conversations, particularly if the person has reason to see you as a potential adversary. But be careful: Chose quiet restaurants where you won’t be rushed, and think of places where the other person might feel comfortable.
  • Make eye contact. It seems like a small thing, but looking a person in the eye builds trust and comfort. And for you to listen deeply, you need people to trust you and feel comfortable sharing their hopes and fears.
  • If they attack you or your group, don’t be defensive. Ask the person why they feel that way. Keep in mind that every civic leader comes under attack from time to time, sometimes unfairly. If you meet anger with defensiveness, it deepens the antagonism. But if you seek to understand the anger, it diffuses it—and may win you grudging admiration. It’s something good salespeople know: When the customer attacks, don’t defend; probe.

At some point, though, we must move from listening to acting, right? Of course, but as international mediator Mark Gerzon says in his book “Leading Through Conflict,” we don’t suffer in American life from too much listening (which Gerzon calls “inquiry leadership”). We suffer from too little listening and understanding. Here’s Gerzon’s advice about when to move from inquiry to advocacy:

The general rule is this: inquiry precedes advocacy. If you (1) are uncertain about having reliable, complete information; (2) have not yet engaged all the relevant stakeholders; and (3) doubt that you will have sufficient votes, power, or other support to put your plan in action, then it is time for inquiry, not advocacy. However, if you (1) have access to all the necessary information, (2) have obtained input from all the necessary people, and (3) have mapped a clear road to implementing a viable plan, then go ahead. Advocate your “solution” to the issue or conflict, and begin to rally everyone behind you.

In other words, until you understand an issue from all sides, have a clear plan, and enjoy broad support, listen up.

Cities and Disruptive Change

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In 1997, a book was published that made sense of the business world—and terrified corporate executives. It was “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, and it answered two questions that CEOs in the 1990s were asking frantically: Why were so many highly regarded corporations losing ground to startup companies? And how could they stop it from happening to their companies?

In his book, Christensen focused on technological change—change so great that it altered the business models in an industry. Sometimes, he wrote, this disruptive change came fast, as when the internet undermined the music industry in a few years’ time. Sometimes it came more slowly, like the decades-long decline of Sears and rise of discount retailers like Target and Wal-Mart.

One thing about disruptive change was clear, Christensen wrote. Big, established companies didn’t handle it well, and the companies that did were mostly smaller and newer.

In this posting, I want to talk about how disruptive change comes to cities—change that alters a city’s growth model. Unlike corporations in the 1990s, the key to how a place manages disruptive change isn’t size—some big cities handle big changes well and many small towns handle them poorly—but rather leadership. And that’s because in communities as in corporations, the way to manage major change is to do things that, to many people’s way of thinking, don’t make sense. For citizens to go along with these things, there must be a high level of trust in city leaders.

But before we talk about cities, let’s go back to “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” The part of the book that terrified executives was Christensen’s discovery that the victims of change were often among the best managed companies—“the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate,” he wrote, “the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute.” Even more frightening, he added, many of these companies had seen the disruptive changes coming, tried their best to accommodate them—and failed.

So what went wrong? In times of disruptive change, Christensen said, executives depended on practices that had served them well in normal times—things like listening attentively to their customers, offering customers a steady stream of new products, and investing in products with the greatest potential returns. In other words, the things they had learned at Harvard Business School.

Problem was, disruptive change wasn’t normal. It didn’t come from a company’s best customers, who were usually happy with the way things were. It began with marginal customers, people who wanted products that were simpler, smaller, cheaper—and far less profitable for manufacturers. These were the people who wanted desktop computers in the early 1980s: hobbyists, early adopters and small companies willing to learn DOS and be their own IT departments. These weren’t the corporate customers that IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. were used to dealing with. IBM tried serving these marginal customers but gave up; DEC never really tried. So the marginal customers (who, of course, became the vast majority of computer buyers in years to come) were handed over to startups like Microsoft, Apple and Dell.

For large corporations, Christensen wrote, the way to manage disruptive change was to do things that almost defied reason. First, they had to devote themselves to identifying and understanding fringe market segments that had the potential of growing fast. Second, they had to supply these marginal customers with cheaper, simpler products, tailored to their needs—even if the profit margins were slim or non-existent and threatened to undercut existing products. Third, they had to create special units to serve these marginal customers. Finally, they had to protect these units from being judged by corporate standards or run according to company rules.

In other words, they had to turn practically every corporate instinct and well-established practice on its head. No wonder so few companies made the transition.

So what does this mean for cities? Well, to begin, there are changes that are every bit as disruptive to cities’ growth models as the technological changes that have swept through business. Here are five:

Natural or man-made calamity: This is easily grasped. New Orleans will never be the city it was before Aug. 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck, and most citizens accept that.

Economic change: This is much harder to see than a natural calamity—and some will deny it’s taking place. Michigan cities, for example, have known for 30 years that the state’s auto industry was in decline, but many have been unsuccessful at developing alternative economic bases.

Demographic change: Same difficulties as economic change: Demographic change is hard to see because it tends to take place slowly, and denial is a common reaction. There’s an additional problem, and that’s bias. Old-timers often don’t like the newcomers and some will oppose any efforts to help them.

Major political change: Cities are particularly vulnerable to political changes at other levels of government. For example, you can date the long decline of California’s local governments (and, for that matter, state government) to the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13, the tax-limitation law that changed the way government services were paid for.

Changes of taste, values or world view: This may be the single hardest disruptive change to recognize and manage because, unlike economic and demographic change, there are no reliable numbers to point to, and unlike calamities or political change there’s no event (tornado, hurricane, new laws, etc.) to mark its beginning. There’s simply a group of people who begin to think about things differently. Example: The Jane Jacobs-inspired movement toward mixed-use neighborhoods.

Surely, these are big changes. But what makes them disruptive? Because they have the potential of changing a city’s growth model—the elements that make a place grow and prosper and support the services that citizens want. The disruptions can be good ones—as in the turnaround that many big cities saw in the late 1990s when young people and empty-nesters returned to urban centers—or bad (see Proposition 13, above). Either way, the change has to be so great that the city grows or pays for public services in a fundamentally different way afterward.

How do places adapt to disruptive change? Christensen offers a good model:

  1. Begin by recognizing changes before they become obvious. Again, this is easy to do in a natural disaster, much harder to do with changes of taste or world view. But I would add that, except for calamities, disruptive change rarely comes suddenly to cities. If a city wanted to adapt to changes of attitude about transit and mixed-use development, for instance, it had a long, long lead time. Jane Jacob’s seminal book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”—the one that inspired New Urbanism in the 1980s—was written in1961.
  2. Don’t try to address disruptive changes using the same processes—or people—your city uses for other types of change. For instance, don’t ask the city’s department of transportation to make the city more walkable if its mission has long been devoted to making it more drivable. Create a new agency or organization to handle walkability issues. Much later, if the DOT has accepted walkability as central to its mission, you might bring it into the department—but be careful.
  3. Don’t measure progress using familiar yardsticks. That’s because you’re investing in the future, not the present. And the future, well, hasn’t happened yet. Transit critics, for example, often point to the millions being poured into light-rail projects and the relatively small numbers riding these new systems. Using that logic, which infrastructure would you have invested in 100 years ago, expensive paved roads used by a few automobiles or cheap dirt roads for the many horses? Again, the question isn’t which is the most efficient investment by today’s standards but which is the wisest investment for the future.
  4. The key terms, in talking to the citizens, are “future” and “investment.”  Citizens like leaders who are hard-nosed visionaries—people who can sketch an appealing future, point out the ways of getting there and deliver results. By and large, citizens aren’t blind; they will accept some sacrifice, as long as it leads to a place they want to go. They’ll even put aside some of their prejudices, if they see how it can benefit them in the long run.

But it starts by seeing the changes that are coming and knowing the right responses. And what if you’re not a particularly visionary person? Don’t worry, there are plenty of people in your city who think about the future. Just ask around. Take a few of them to lunch. Look at the city’s demographic and economic indicators. Ask legislators about major changes in politics and law. Read up on how cities elsewhere are changing.

Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to read a book about managing disruptive change. Here’s a good one to start with: “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Photo by Tom Blackwell licensed under Creative Commons.

A Case Study in Small-P Politics

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In 1961, more than 110,000 people spent time in New York City’s overcrowded jails, and the number was rising fast. Many weren’t convicted of a crime; they were awaiting trial and couldn’t afford bail. Bail is basically an insurance policy. You (or a professional bail bondsman) put up something of value to insure you’ll appear for trial. Problem was, poor people, including many who worked in low-wage jobs, had nothing of value and not enough cash to afford a bail bondsman. So they sat in jail, often for months, before trials.

There was another way: A judge at arraignment (that’s the court appearance immediately after arrest) could release a defendant on his own recognizance—basically because, in the magistrate’s judgment, the defendant was unlikely to flee. But most of the arraignment judges in New York or other big cities knew nothing about the defendants other than their names and charges. And since no one wanted to release a defendant who might take off—or, worse, commit another crime—it was far safer to send people charged with theft, disorderly conduct and assault to the Tombs, as New York’s jail was called, than to risk headlines.

Enter a young man named Herb Sturz, who wondered if there weren’t a better, more humane way to treat poor people who had made a wrong turn—a way that could also save the city millions in jail costs. Sturz is the subject of a remarkable biography by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts titled “A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems.” Briefly, Sturz figured out (by asking questions no one had thought to ask) how to create a better system of granting recognizance releases.

There isn’t space here to describe what Sturz learned along the way and how he learned it (but if you’d like to know, I recommend the book highly). It’s important to know, however, that Sturz worked with five objectives in mind:

  • Master the problem: Sturz had to know how the bail system worked and why it didn’t work better. Importantly, this wasn’t to point the finger but rather to know what had to be done to change it.
  • Build trust: As with most things in cities, authority to change the bail system was widely dispersed among judges, prosecutors, the police and politicians (who feared a scandal should criminals be released too easily). If anything was to change, all had to be convinced since any of them could have stopped reforms dead in their tracks.
  • Make an overwhelming case for change: Nothing important ever changes unless you can demonstrate why it should change, so Sturz had to show—from the standpoints of fairness, economy and public safety—that the reforms were better that the status quo.
  • Document the results: This was how he built trust. Sturz became a master of the “demonstration project,” which used controlled experiments to show that the reforms would do what he had promised. In the bail project, he and his team interviewed defendants and rated them for their suitability for recognizance release. Half who were judged to be suitable were recommended to a judge for release (and the judges overwhelmingly agreed); half were left in the old system (that is, some made bail but most stayed in jail). After a large number of these cases had gone to trial, Sturz could demonstrate that just as many released on recognizance showed up for their court appointments as those who made bail. More striking, far more of those who were released (on recognizance or bail) were exonerated or had their charges dismissed. (One theory: By being free, they had time to devote to their defenses.) The key was the rigor of the experiment, which made the results hard to deny even for those who could hardly believe them.
  • Respect authority: Even as he was asking judges and police officials to change how they worked, he did so in the most respectful way possible—by couching his ideas as something that would save money and make their lives easier. Sturz never sought the limelight. Over the years in a succession of reform projects, he always gave credit to people in authority and stepped forward only if someone had to accept blame. In doing so, he became one of New York’s most trusted authorities in the areas he cared about—criminal justice, substance abuse and improving the lives of the poor. (When Ed Koch became mayor in 1978, he made Sturz his deputy mayor for criminal justice.)

In summary, then, when Sturz arrived at a solution, it was holistic, systematic and efficient. It brought along those who might have stopped it. And it was delivered with the right reasons attached—not indictments of failure but opportunities for savings and public acclaim—and often with the promise that it would ease the jobs of those who had to implement the solutions.

As Roberts described Sturz’s quietly revolutionary reforms, they were so commonsensical in retrospect, they hardly seemed the work of a genius. But, he went on,

It took a kind of genius—someone wise and persevering enough to assess what was wrong, quantify the benefits of fixing it to all the stakeholders in the status quo and devising a simple, just, efficient solution.

Sturz, Roberts wrote, “spotted things other people hadn’t seen, even things that had been staring them in the face every day.” He continued,

He would pose questions that they hadn’t asked, even when those questions seemed mundane. And by peppering participants at every level with even more questions, by meticulously dissecting the responses, by crafting hypothetical fixes and subjecting them to challenging testing and experimentation, he tried his hand at transforming illusions into practical answers.

This is the heart of “small-p politics,” which I wrote about in an earlier posting. It’s small-p because it’s not the politics you normally think of, of campaigns and vote-trading. This is about listening, questioning, relationship building and, eventually solution building. It’s about dealing with obstacles and answering objections (“what if he flees?”) and signing up the permission-givers. It is the patient, unglamorous work of removing boulders and building walls. But this is what the workhorses of our communities do as the showhorses wring their hands.

So what happened to Herb Sturz’s efforts to reform bail? Not only were his solutions adopted in New York, but they were taken up in Washington and by 1966 had become part of a major reform of federal bail procedures. Afterward, state after state adopted the recognizance release approaches that Sturz had pioneered in New York. “In sheer volume,” one New York judge wrote in 1966, “probably never before in our legal history has so substantial a movement for reform in the law taken place in so short a time.”

Photo by Troy licensed under Creative Commons.

Never, Never, Never Give Up

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Sam Williams, the president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently in which he talked about Georgia’s remarkable new law allowing regions of the state to plan and tax themselves for transportation improvements. The law addresses a huge problem for the Atlanta area—it is losing its war with congestion, a war with which the rest of the state is unconcerned—and does so in a way that will have major implications as time goes by. 

In one fell swoop, the new law creates practical regionalism in Georgia. Not another planning agency, discussion forum or collaborative nonprofit, but a brand-new taxing authority that forces the Atlanta area’s 10 counties to work together (and other regions of the state, if they choose). If this succeeds, it’s not hard to imagine other regional decisions on taxing and spending being given to this new body, or to similar regional agencies.

To use a Jim Collins term, this was a BHAG for the Atlanta area and its largest chamber of commerce, a “big, hairy, audacious goal.” And it came with big, hairy, audacious obstacles.

Think about it. For this law to be enacted, the state and its political leaders had to cede a share of their authority to plan, tax and spend in one of the most powerful arenas of government, transportation infrastructure.

So how did the chamber, which led the fight, win over the state’s leaders? Well, the inside story is too long and complicated to summarize here, but let me tell you that it took four years to get the Georgia General Assembly and governor on board. And along the way, it had numerous near misses and near deaths. (In the second year that it was before the General Assembly, the regional transportation bill passed one house and came within a few votes of passing the other. The next year, the two houses were so divided over the bill and other things that it never came close to passing. By the beginning of the fourth session, few outside the Metro Atlanta Chamber thought it had a chance of success.)

Which brings us back to the Sam Williams interview. (Note: I’ve known Sam a long time and have done work for the Metro Atlanta Chamber.) Asked whether he had ever wondered during the four years if the General Assembly would pass the regional transportation bill, Williams said:

Well we certainly have been working on it a long, long time, and I was taught by a lot of my mentors in the past to never, never, never give up.

And there lies one of the truths of community leadership: Progress is made by the persistent, those who never, never, never give up. Public policy travels a long arc. We deliberately make change difficult in our communities by spreading power so widely, among elected bodies, appointed officials, authorities, citizen boards, private interests, non-profit groups and on and on. The only way to get things done is to patiently and persistently deal with objections, work around obstacles, tamp down opposition and sign up the permission-givers. (In future postings, I’ll write about this process, which I call “removing the boulders” and “building the wall.”)

What’s odd about this work—the countless meetings, the retelling of the proposal and its benefits over and over, the endless rumor-quashing and infinite adjustments—is that when a major proposal finally succeeds, it’s usually done quickly and sometimes unexpectedly. This is partly because, if you’re persistent, you’ll wear down the opposition and partly because your idea—told and retold so many times—has gradually become familiar to those who first thought it strange and threatening. It’s something I’ve written about before, the drip-drip-drip theory of change. 

Come to think of it, though, maybe there’s a better term, the “never, never, never give up” theory.

Photo by Seongbin Im licensed under Creative Commons.

Reframing Your Community’s Mind

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In an earlier posting, I wrote about frames—those familiar ways of thinking that help us make sense of a complicated world—and why it’s important in advancing new ideas to connect them to familiar and comforting frames. But what if the frame itself is the problem? Rather than helping people think about new ideas, what if the frame stops helpful discussions cold?

It happens all the time. But let’s be clear: The problem isn’t that people use frames, it’s that they’re using the wrong ones. That’s because even the most intellectually gifted among us need frames, which work like filters allowing some ideas in and keeping others out, to think about complex situations and focus on good solutions. But if we want to bring helpful ideas to our communities, it’s critical that we use the right frames to think about our problems and our communities. And if we’re using the wrong ones, we need to, well, reframe our thinking. As you’ll see, this is not easy but it is possible.

But, first, what exactly is a frame that might be used in communities? Usually, it’s a mental picture and a set of associations. Less commonly, it’s an analogy. Here are some examples: A community might think of itself as a “great small town,” with a set of associations that flow from that picture. (Not surprisingly, many people in such places think of the old Andy Griffith television show and its images of Mayberry.) A different frame, perhaps for an in-town neighborhood: young and hip, and the associations that flow from that. Less common are frames that are analogies, such as seeing a community as a business, a team, a family or a club.

So, how can good frames go wrong? They go wrong when reality changes and the frames don’t. I’ve worked recently in a suburban county that has seen massive demographic changes in the past 20 years. The ethnic composition has gone from 90 percent white to 50 percent in the last 20 years, its residents are aging rapidly, and the economic base has shifted dramatically as it has become a major center of employment. In short, it is more urban today than suburban. But the frame used by many leaders and citizens is that of 20 years ago: We’re a nice, affordable, low-tax, family-oriented suburb where people move to get away from urban problems, not deal with them.

You can see the problem here. By stopping people from thinking about urban issues—diversity, density, new styles of development, new modes of transportation, poverty and crime—the frame prevents leaders from dealing with the community’s most pressing problems and opportunities.

So, what do you do in this kind of situation? You help people change their frames. You do this in two ways: First, through a concerted effort to show why the old frame doesn’t work. Second, by suggesting a frame that fits the new reality.

Sound impossible? Well, it’s difficult and requires great patience, but this reframing process happens often enough that we know it’s not impossible. Here’s an example: smoking as a public health problem. If you can remember back that far, think about how smokers behaved around non-smokers 30 years ago. They lit up. Smoking was allowed in almost every public place in America, except elevators, buses and airplanes that were parked on the ground.

What drove the smokers out of doors wasn’t something they did, but a change in the frame used by non-smokers. Earlier, non-smokers may have been annoyed when an officemate started puffing away. They may even have complained. But they had no standing to ask smokers to leave; that required a great deal of well-publicized research on the dangers of second-hand smoke, and the reframing of smoking as a menace and not just an annoyance to non-smokers. (Or to put the frame in more positive language, non-smokers discovered they had a right to healthy air.)

That’s what it takes to change the frames used by communities as well. It takes a persistent but respectful campaign against the old frame (“we’re not the sleepy suburb we once were”), together with careful documentation of the changes (the demographic and economic shifts), matched with a new and positive frame (“we’re the suburb of the 21st century, diverse, dynamic and forward-looking”).

Don’t expect this to be a quick change in thinking. People accept new ideas reluctantly; they accept entire new ways of thinking about things even more reluctantly. But it’s critical work for leaders, because if you want better solutions, it’s necessary to think about problems and opportunities in new ways. And often that starts with a new frame. Albert Einstein saw the same thing in science:  “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.” Works pretty well in communities, too.

Photo by Chris Waits 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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