Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Rules for Reformers

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I’m beginning a series of short postings about how cities decide things and how leaders can help their communities make smarter decisions. I’m calling these brief essays “Rules for Reformers.” Each will have an illustration, some scribbled key words, or a hand-drawn chart that, I hope, will make the ideas stick a little longer with you. (If the drawings seem a tad childish, feel free to blame the artist, who is . . . me.)

The rules come from conversations I’ve had over the years with civic leaders. The best leaders I’ve known—from mayors and county executives to chamber executives and CEOs—operate mostly from tacit knowledge, a set of understandings about power, change, and human nature that they accumulate over a lifetime and which becomes instinctual. As a result, they know how to get things done, they just can’t explain how they do it, and they certainly can’t teach it. This is fine with me because I’m in the explaining business.

My caution is that this is that these brief postings are meant to be simple, and maybe even overly simple. They’re general rules, not a guide to every circumstance. More than anything else, I hope you’ll turn to them when you’re stuck on a civic problem or obstacle. By reading a few of these rules, you may come across something that helps you figure a way through the problem or around the obstacle.

And about the name . . . Some of you have already figured out it’s a play on the name that the legendary Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky gave to his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” I’m not a fan of Alinsky’s or of his book. For one thing, I’m no radical. For another, his book isn’t actually helpful for people wanting to learn about community organizing. It’s more of a collection of war stories with a few philosophical musings (and even a sexist joke) thrown in. But it’s a great name.

So, with apologies to the late Mr. Alinsky, here are my “Rules for Reformers.” I’ll start with a few, add a few more, and we’ll see where things go from there. Please let me know what you think.

Here are the first Rules for Reformers: Three Ps of Public Policy, A Formula for Change and “What” Before “How.” Others will follow.

Revisiting the Core Skills of Community Leadership

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The best thing about writing a blog, I’ve come to learn, is that you sometimes surprise yourself. I’ve been writing one since February 2010, a little more than two years’ time, and I can already see small changes in my thinking about the things that interest me: how communities change, how people become leaders, how citizens figure into civic progress, and how local politics works. Don’t get me wrong; in re-reading my postings, I largely agree with the central ideas, but I see changes in how I’d put things today.

Here’s an example: the core skills of community leadership, which I wrote about in April 2010. I still believe that leaders who want to be effective in civic work have to master a set of skills, and the five I listed—empathy, facilitation, strategy, learning and motivation—are the right ones. But I’d call some of them by different names today and place them in a different order.

What has caused my thinking to evolve is the work I’ve done in how change happens. In a set of postings, beginning last August, I mapped out how deliberate change comes to communities. (Literally, I called it a map, with starting points and steps along the way, ending in adoption and implementation.) There’s a lot to the map—it took seven postings to explain it all—and one result of spending so much time studying the process was a new appreciation for what it takes to move things through it. That’s the role, of course, of leaders.

And that brought me back around to looking at those five core skill sets. Here’s briefly how I described them two years ago:

  • Empathy: These are the skills that allow leaders to understand others and work with them, “particularly those with whom you have the least in common.”
  • Facilitation: These are the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies. Think of this as putting empathy to work.”
  • Strategy: These skills “help you see the road—sometimes the only road—that will move good ideas forward.”
  • Learning: These are the skills that “help you search for, find, and recognize potential solutions, sometimes from unexpected sources.”
  • Motivation: These skills “help you engage others—and yourself—in your community’s work.”

As I said earlier, I agree that these are the key skills, but I’d put them in a different order, using different words to describe them. Here’s how:

The first skill set is still empathy, but I’d call it relationship building. And, yes, empathy is still important to relationships. But the aim of civic relationships, I’ve come to know, is not to understand people but to enlist them in civic work, and it now seems to me that “relationship building” is a more purposeful and action-oriented term. I’d still put it as the first skill to be mastered because relationship building is where community leadership begins. Without a group of people to call on for assistance and advice—and, ideally, a diverse group—it’s impossible to be a civic leader.

The second skill set is the one I put as number four on the list two years ago, learning. It’s not a great name, but I’ll stick with it for the time being. These skills are about seeing community problems and finding their solutions. Why have I moved it up? Because this is the engine of community change. Change begins when people with strong community relationships meet problems they believe they can solve. So mix relationship building with learning and you have ignition. My caution is that learning is a process and not an event, and the process has two parts: seeing the problems and finding workable solutions. As I wrote in this posting, leaders sometimes get the order reversed. That is, they fall in love with a solution they’ve seen elsewhere—a river walk, say, or a streetcar line—without thinking much about the problem it’s meant to solve. If they did, they might realize that plunking a river walk or streetcar in their community may not improve things . . . and could make things worse.

The third skill set is strategy, and I think my description two years ago still works. It’s about seeing the “critical path” that the change process must follow—the necessary steps of citizen meetings, private consultations, fundraising, committee meetings, public hearings, and government approvals—and marshaling the people and resources to make the journey. If relationship building and learning starts the engine of change, then strategy gives it a map.

Facilitation is the fourth skill set. It’s not a great name, but I can’t think of a better one. I was right to say two years ago that it was the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies” but wrong to describe it as “putting empathy to work.” It’s more focused and strategic than that. At various points in a change process, leaders have to work with groups of people who are more or less peers, and facilitation teaches you how to do that with good results. Think of the best committee chair you’ve ever seen—the one who kept the group moving forward and pulled the best from its members—and you have the idea.

The final skill set I now call persuasion, which seems a bit more hard-edged than motivation. And that’s on purpose. Change, I’ve come to learn, does not come easily to communities, especially change that requires us to make conscious choices (unlike changes that are mostly beyond our control, such as economic change due to globalization) and meaningful sacrifices. Machiavelli described the problem with change rather well in 1513:

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.

Let me paraphrase: People who might benefit from a change have trouble valuing what they don’t yet have, but those who are asked to give something up know to the penny what it will cost them. Given this “order of things,” it takes something forceful to push change forward. And that force is persuasion, done in a hundred ways.

These, then, are my new core leadership skills, in the order in which they come to bear on community change: Begin with relationship building, followed by learning. When you have ignition, you bring in strategy, and facilitation. If all goes well, they will bring you to the 20-yard line. And to get over the goal line you need that final skill, which is persuasion.

Photo by Julie Faith licensed under Creative Commons.

Discussion Phase: How Need, Relationships, and Ideas Begin the Change Process

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

Let’s start at the top of the map, with the discussion phase. This is where change begins, with a leader recognizing a need and using her relationships, a set of ideas and a series of discussions to find a workable solution. But don’t let the casual-sounding name fool you. The discussion phase isn’t chit-chat; it’s a structured process involving different types of conversations with different groups, each a critical step in the change process. This phase ends with a decision about the solution to take forward.

Community change map

You begin with the need—the community problem or opportunity that’s the reason for the change process. This sounds so commonsensical that I’d hesitate to mention it were it not for the fact that most community change efforts (and virtually all failed ones) begin with something else: a solution.

Look at the ideas floating around your city. If it’s anything like mine, you’ll find proposals for streetcars, parks, bike trails, changes in taxes, water conservation, redevelopment finance, road improvements, zoning regulations, and on and on. What do most of these ideas have in common? They’re solutions without context. Their proponents serve them up without first establishing the problem they’re intended to solve. As a result, they create a ripple of interest . . . before sinking out of sight.

Business consultant William Bridges knows why this doesn’t work. As he warns corporate executives:

Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see, acknowledge, and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours, and then you won’t have to sell it—it will be theirs.

Right on both points: If people don’t believe a problem exists, they’re not going to buy its solution. And when they do accept the need, they’ll often come up with good solutions on their own—which ends not with your leading people but marching with them. And that’s exactly where you want to be.

The keys to introducing a successful change process, then, are to convince citizens and decision makers of the need for change and, in time, facilitate a group of people who’ll arrive at a solution. Let’s take these in turn.

Begin with the need. It can be a problem (vacant properties in a neighborhood, say, or a declining local economy) or an opportunity (a local university that could have closer ties to the community). It can be a short-term problem (say, a spike in crime) or a long-term problem (domestic violence). You might start out with a solution in mind. Let’s say you’re concerned about obesity, and it seems to you that more sidewalks and playgrounds could go a long way toward solving it. If so, put aside your solution and concentrate on the problem.

This is harder than it seems. We were all rewarded in school for having the right answers, but in leading a change process it’s better to be the quiet kid in the back of the room than the one in the front row with his hand up. Why? Because many people eye change suspiciously. You may think you’re offering helpful ideas when you volunteer solutions, but some will see a hidden agenda. It’s better to say you don’t know the answer yet—and politely ask people for their thoughts.

And then there’s what William Bridges said: If you’re successful at getting people to accept the problem and think about it, they may come up with better solutions than you had anyway. So for both reasons—it lessens resistance and opens the door to other, perhaps more creative, ideas—it’s far better to sell the problem at first than to push a solution.

But how do you sell a problem effectively? I’ll write more about this in the future, but in general leaders must do four things to move people from awareness to action. They have to convince them that:

  • The problem is a community problem; it’s not just a personal issue.
  • It’s an important need, one that affects the community’s future.
  • It is urgent; things will grow worse with delay.
  • It’s possible do something about it; the community has the ability to solve the problem or significantly reduce it. It’s not hopeless or beyond reach.

When you convince people—decision makers and citizens—of these four things, something wonderful happens: People and resources are drawn to you. If offering solutions builds resistance, convincing people of needs does the opposite: It smooths the path of acceptance. Again, the trick is to build confidence that a solution can be found while not offering up a specific one.

The next step is to gather a group of people to talk about the need, discuss a range of possible solutions and agree on one to take forward. Who should be in this group? If you’ve done a good job of talking about the need—in small meetings with decision makers, in larger forums with citizens, perhaps through the news media and social media—then you know some who should be included. These are people who’ve responded to your call for action with support and resources. If you’ve spent time building relationships in the community (see “What Glengarry Glen Ross Teaches Us about Change“), you’ll know others who should be involved.

But you should also be strategic. You are assembling what John Kotter, the Harvard business professor and expert on corporate change, calls the “guiding coalition” for the change process. The coalition will change somewhat as you move through the planning and decision phases, but basically it is the group that will be the brains and muscle behind your initiative, the strategists and doers.

And who makes up a strong guiding coalition? Kotter suggests four types (which I’ve modified slightly for community change projects):

  • People with expertise in the issue.
  • Those with power in this area.
  • People with credibility in the community.
  • Leaders who’ve shown they can get things done.

For a change effort about obesity, then, the experts might be public health officials and perhaps those who run youth sports programs. Those with power might include school system officials, city parks officials and public-works officials. The other two types are harder to suggest, but you almost certainly know those in your community with a track record of getting things done and those whose judgment is respected. For the latter type, you might want to consider leaders in your city’s ethnic communities: If there are special problems with obesity among African-American or Latino youths, who can speak credibly for, and to, these families?

When you bring the coalition together, the initial goal to arrive at a workable solution (see “What Makes a Solution Workable?“). How do you manage such a thing? Well, there’s a great deal to learn about group facilitation—far more than I can cover in this posting—but three guidelines will serve you well:

  • Be patient. You will almost certainly introduce people to one another, so allow time for members to talk and listen. Good decisions require trust and candor. You won’t get them in a single meeting or probably in several sessions . . . but you can in time.
  • Start with the need and return to it frequently. The best way to begin a group’s work is with the need: a thorough discussion of what makes the problem a community concern, why it’s important and urgent, and why members believe it can be solved. As the group gets bogged down debating solutions, bring it back to the need. It will remind members of the importance of their work and encourage them to stick with it.
  • Keep an eye on group dynamics. One dynamic to watch for is a rush to judgment by the experts or those with power. This shouldn’t be surprising. These are people who’ve been thinking about this problem for years. They may even have solutions they’ve promoted in the past that they’d like the group to endorse. You’ll need the others—those with credibility and leadership ability—to slow things down by asking questions, gently challenging assumptions and pushing for new answers. This is an important role but one that some are uncomfortable playing. So before the first meeting, you may want to ask one or two of the most confident leaders to be the questioners of assumptions.

One way to improve the group’s work is with some “market tests” along the way. With the group’s permission, take its tentative ideas and assumptions to decision makers and citizens, through private meetings, op-ed articles and forums. This has an obvious benefit: Before committing to a solution, the group needs to know what decision makers think, how citizens respond, and where the likely obstacles lay. Yes, it will slow the process, but that’s not necessarily bad. It will prevent a rush to judgment and allow members time to know each other better.

And, who knows? Someone you talk with might offer a better solution than the ones the group was considering.

Photo by Jason Diceman licensed under Creative Commons.

What Makes a Solution Workable?

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

At the end of the discussion phase, the guiding coalition settles on a workable solution. But what makes solution workable? And how will you know when the group finds one?

Actually, these are good questions for the guiding coalition. Ask members as they begin their work to say how they want to judge the solutions they’re about to consider. Write down the criteria they suggest, combine them into a small set of standards and hand them back to the group at your next meeting.

This may seem a little touchy-feely but it’s actually strategic. If you can get the group to set criteria early on, you’ll be able to steer it away from inadequate solutions (because they don’t meet the criteria) and free it from dead-end discussions (by reminding members of what they’re looking for). It will also help convince members when it comes time to dig deeper. If none of the alternatives they’re considering meets the criteria they’ve set, it’s time to expand the search for answers.

So, in every way, it’s better if the coalition sets its own standards. Still, you may want to think beforehand about what makes a solution . . . well, workable. Here are some starter ideas.

  • A workable solution answers the need. It’s surprising how often groups that are deep into the details forget why they started. As a leader, you can contribute to the coalition’s work simply by asking, “Does this really solve the problem?”
  • A workable solution can win the support of decision makers and the citizens—with hard work. Your “market test” discussions along the way will gauge this, but in the end it’s a judgment call: Do the members think they can gain enough support to win approval?
  • A workable solution is practical and sustainable. There are a number of tests here: Is the solution financially feasible? Will it attract the human resources (volunteers, staff, etc.) it will need? Can it maintain its political and popular support in years to come? If the problem grows or shrinks, is it scalable? You don’t need to think of every detail (that will come during the planning phase), but you do need a general idea of how the solution will sustain itself in the long haul.
Workable solution

When you put the criteria together, as in a Venn diagram, you’ll find the solution in the area where they overlap.

But how will you know that you’ve found the right answer? This is where the market tests will pay off. By talking with people outside the coalition about where the group is headed, you’ll learn quickly if the solution can generate the support it will need. And you can ask about the other criteria as well: Does it answer the need? Is it practical and sustainable?

When talking with others, don’t be put off by resistance. Resistance indicates that someone is taking your ideas seriously. In fact, if you don’t run into any, you should treat it as a warning that your coalition isn’t offering up much change. The question, then, isn’t whether there will be obstacles—there will be—but whether you can overcome them.

If you do all of this—define the criteria early on, search for new answers if the initial ones don’t meet your standards, judge alternatives rigorously, test your tentative ideas with decision makers and citizens, and know how you’ll deal with obstacles—you can rest easy. The guiding coalition’s chances of choosing the right solution are very high.

Photo by GotCredit.com licensed under Creative Commons.

A Map of Community Change

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I have been haunted by a question for the past four years. After my company worked on a visioning project in a community not far from Atlanta, a business leader turned to me and asked, “So what do we do now?”

If I do say so, the year-long visioning project had gone well. More than 800 citizens participated in 12 visioning sessions, collectively generating more than 4,000 ideas and images of what they would like their community to be. Working with a planning group drawn from those who participated in the visioning sessions, we boiled down those ideas into 14 strategic objectives, 27 specific recommendations and 173 action steps. It was the greatest act of citizen engagement and planning the community had ever undertaken, and its sponsors were delighted with the results, which were ambitious, affirming and specific.

So I was happy to go back afterward to talk with one of the sponsors, a business executive with wide community and political experience who had immersed herself in the project. “So what do we do now,” she asked me. “How do we implement these ideas?”

I fumbled for an answer, saying something about creating groups to take charge of the most promising ideas, but I had two thoughts in the back of my mind. The first was that I was in the visioning business, not the implementing business. Thankfully, I didn’t say that. My second thought was one of surprise: You mean even smart and experienced community leaders don’t know how to get things done? Thankfully, I didn’t say that either.

It hit me as I drove back to Atlanta that I needed—and she needed—a theory of community change, one simple enough to fit on a sheet of paper but which fully describes the way complicated and diverse communities make up their minds to do something different—and get it done.

In the years since, I’ve sketched and resketched multiple versions of that theory. I tried first expressing it as a formula, kind of like E=MC².  Then I tried doing it as a step-by-step process. (I had been influenced by John Kotter’s eight-step process for corporate change.) Then I tried various ways of drawing flow charts. The problem, I quickly realized, wasn’t in how I represented the process; the problem was that it was hard to capture all the elements of community change and still keep it simple enough to be useful.

At long last, though, I have a version of what I’m calling a “map of community change.” (Click below to see it.) It’s a simplified flow chart (no diamond-shaped boxes indicating decision points, no concurrency symbols). Its value, I hope, is that it will help leaders figure out where they are in their own change efforts and where they need to go next. Which, of course, is why I’m calling it a “map.”

In the next few postings, I’ll explain different parts of the map. For the time being, though, take a look at the three horizontal “phases”—discussion, planning and decision. Community leaders, I think, concentrate too much on the first and third phases (the blue and green areas) and not nearly enough on the gray area in the middle. And it was this area that the business leader was asking about: How do we use an engaged group of citizens to prepare challenging ideas for public acceptance and government action?

Again, I’ll talk about the phases in detail in the coming weeks, but let me offer three general thoughts about the map: First, the most successful mayors, chamber executives and community leaders I’ve ever known carried a map like this around in their heads. They knew how long it took to travel from realizing a need to making a decision (and even longer to implementing the decision), and they knew that most ideas didn’t survive that journey. But for those that did, this was the road they traveled.

Second, the area where ideas succeed or fail is usually in the gray zone, the planning phase. It’s here that advocates assemble the elements of success (which I call, simply, “the plan”) or they don’t. (Bear with me; I’ll explain the elements in future postings.)

Finally, there’s something very big that’s not represented on the map: luck. Communities are conservative places; they don’t accept change readily. Responsibility is diffuse, interests entrenched, and power hard to bring together. And, as Barney Frank, the U.S. representative from Massachusetts, once explained, opponents start with a great advantage over supporters: “It’s easier to get everybody together on ‘no,’ ” he said, “You all have to have the same reason for ‘yes.’ You don’t have to have the same reason for ‘no.’ ”

For that reason, every big idea that succeeds in a community requires some amount of luck: things happening at the right moments to confirm—to the public, elected leaders and bureaucrats—that this is the right decision. I can’t think of how to picture it, but as you look at this map imagine that, at various points, there’s an invisible force at work that helps advocates overcome obstacles. I could probably think up a fancier name, but for the moment let’s just call it “luck.”

This is the first of a series of postings about mapping community change.

Photo by Mark Deckers 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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