Group process – Page 3

The Montana Study and the Untapped Capacity of Communities

July 6, 2011 By Otis White

We need to remind ourselves from time to time that most of what we know about communities and leadership isn’t new; it’s relearned. Here’s an example: a project called the “Montana Study.” The name is misleading, since it wasn’t really a study. Rather, it was a civic experiment that took place in small, windblown towns in Montana during and just after World War II.

By the time it was finished, some of its sponsors consider it a flop —or, if not a flop, not of much interest. But on the contrary, the Montana Study showed us something inspiring and important: that average people living in unexciting places could do remarkable things in behalf of their communities. It was the first and one of the most important large-scale demonstrations of community citizenship ever mounted in the U.S. Only problem was, once it was demonstrated, it was almost entirely forgotten.

That may have been because of where it took place: in tiny towns scattered across a large and remote state. Or the timing: There was a lot on Americans’ minds in the mid-1940s. Or it could have been a result of its academic origins and the confusion caused by its name. Whatever the reason, it’s a shame the Montana Study faded in memory because there was nothing academic about its aim, approach or results, and the lessons learned apply just as well to communities large and small today.

The Montana Study was the brainchild of Ernest O. Melby, the energetic chancellor of the University of Montana system. (An admirer called him “the crusadin’ist educator this state had ever seen.”) Melby was worried about many problems facing Montana, but one of the most worrisome was what would happen to its small towns after World War II. The war was in its third year for Americans, and people like Melby were looking forward to the soldiers’ return. But would they come back to the cattle towns of Montana they had left in 1941 and 1942? And it wasn’t just the soldiers; others had left for work in urban war factories. Would these men and women come back to Saugus once they’d seen Chicago?

Melby thought the best way to bring back the young—and hold on to future generations—was for the towns to make themselves more interesting. So he approached the Rockefeller Foundation with an idea: Help us put together an experiment in engaging citizens in small Montana towns in improving their communities through study, discussion and action.

He must have been persuasive. The foundation approved a three-year grant, Melby put together a small team of professors to design the program and work with communities, and, in September 1944, the team started looking for towns willing to participate. The first place that asked for help was the west Montana farm town of Lonepine, a place so small, one professor wrote, that “the one-man cheese factory just back of Ted Van der Ende’s home makes up the industrial section.”

The approach was simple, unhurried and open-ended. The professors asked the community to organize a group of people who more or less matched the community’s demographics and were willing to devote 10 weeks to study and discussion. Then they offered a framework for the discussions: The first week was “Why Are We Here,” a look at town history. The second was “Our Town and Its People,” a discussion of demographics and origins. Another week was a look at the local economy called “Our Town and Its Work.” Another was “How to Make Life Better in Our Town.” And so on.

Each study group member was asked to research and write a paper to guide one of the discussions. At every session, a member took notes. The professors took the notes back to Missoula, where they typed them up and (using the technology of the day) mimeographed and returned the notes to the group as a record.

Looking back, you might call these discussions consciousness-raising exercises. They were a way of showing citizens how to see problems and opportunities with a fresh perspective and talk about them in new ways. But then what? At the end of the 10 weeks, the professors asked if the group wanted to do anything more than talk, if they wanted to take on some kind of improvement project.

Of the 15 communities that the Montana Study worked in, most did. And as they did, something wonderful happened: The academics stood aside and the citizens took charge. In Lonepine, members of the study group organized their fellow citizens to build a community library. In Conrad, they rallied neighbors to build a recreation center. In Lewistown, they started a folk festival. Some places even went on to create permanent citizens’ committees. The Greater Libby Association stayed together for years, lobbying for a new hospital, tourist attractions and two school bond referendums.

One town, Darby, created a pageant, “Darby Looks at Itself,” that was built around the things the study group had learned about the town. It had a cast of 125 people, plus members of the high school orchestra—in all, better than a fifth of the town’s entire population. A central figure in the drama was the Devil, who represented “outmoded thinking” about natural resources. At the end of the play, a group of woodsmen, worried about forest depletion, threw the Devil off the stage.

By the end of its three-year life, the Montana Study had awakened citizens in more than a dozen towns to their communities’ possibilities, moved most of these places to take action and started attracting attention around the country. (In the years shortly afterward, educators in 12 other states and five foreign countries borrowed the Montana Study’s guidebooks to begin community study programs. Leaders in one Kansas town wrote, asking how they could “do a Darby” and organize their own community pageant.)

Unfortunately, the Montana Study no longer had Ernest Melby, who had moved from Missoula to, of all places, New York to be a dean at New York University. And for all the good it did in these communities, the Montana Study’s organizers neglected to build institutional or political support. After Melby left, academics at Montana’s colleges made it clear they weren’t interested in tromping around the state, helping people with community problems. The Rockefeller Foundation declined to fund the project any longer, and the Montana Legislature said no as well.

Because it didn’t endure, some associated with the Montana Study thought it really hadn’t accomplished much, but others saw it for what it was: an astonishingly successful experiment in citizen engagement—and a remarkable instrument for energizing communities. One who was involved in the project, Richard Waverly Poston, wrote a few years later:

. . . The Montana Study is of the greatest significance to America’s small communities themselves, no matter where they may be. For here is a technique through which ordinary men and women can coordinate for their own welfare the forces of education, religion, government, economics, culture, and democratic neighborliness, and by this simple means can lift the whole level of living in America. And, as the people of Conrad and Libby have shown, it can be done without the presence of outside experts. Any group of civic-minded men and women in any small community who desire to improve their own town, and are willing to take the trouble, can of their own initiative utilize the techniques of the Montana Study.

When I learned of the Montana Study a few years ago and got hold of the two books about it and the handful of academic papers, it was like finding my own community work—and the work of others I’ve admired—sealed in a time capsule from another era. All the elements of modern-day citizen engagement are there: Seek a cross-section of the community, offer them a structured approach to learning, put them in charge of their own research and discussions, don’t direct but seek only to facilitate. In the end, ask them if they want to go further—and accept if they don’t. But know this: Once most people have been awakened to new possibilities and new ways of thinking about their towns, cities or neighborhoods, they won’t be comfortable with the old ways. And most times they’ll want to turn that new understanding into action.

That’s what happened in Lonepine and a dozen other Montana towns in the 1940s. It could happen in your city too.

Consensus, Power, and the Art of Getting Things Done

June 3, 2011 By Otis White

If you’re the kind of person who likes intellectual exploration, abstract concepts and learning for the sheer joy of it, I have a suggestion: Spend a few weeks learning about systems thinking.

OK, I didn’t really think you’d go for it. Civic leaders are practical people who have little patience with theories. But a little theory can sometimes be helpful, and in this case might offer some guidance and encouragement for your work. So let me offer you a thumbnail guide to systems thinking (or at least, to my layperson’s understanding of it).

To begin, it’s a way of seeing major problems as . . . well, systems, rather than isolated issues. Systems thinkers usually begin with a thorough analysis that tries to untangle the system’s elements, interconnections and functions (they tend to make elaborate charts). They look at how the system changes over time (what systems thinkers call “flow” and “stocks”). Finally, they examine the causes or drivers of change, which they represent as “feedback loops” that work either to bring the system into balance or reinforce its direction. There’s much, much more to systems thinking, but trust me, a little goes a long way. This stuff gets complicated quickly and a bit mystical . . . like taking a seminar on quantum physics.

Here’s the point, though: The best urban leaders I’ve known were, consciously or not, systems thinkers. No, they don’t use the language or draw the charts, but as they looked at problems they too searched for context, change and causes. And they knew there were no simple, one-shot answers for complex problems.

And more: They discovered in many cases that the ultimate answer did not lie in addressing the problem they began with (say, crime in an urban neighborhood, the unkempt yards of foreclosed houses in the suburbs, or pedestrian fatalities along a busy highway), but in changing the system itself in some way—the elements and interactions that were causing crime, unsightliness or dangerous conditions.

Some of these changes might be obvious (closing a neighborhood crack house), some might not (setting up after-school programs to keep children away from temptation). But these leaders learned two things through experience: First, you can’t change complex systems by doing one big thing. You change them by doing a number of smaller things in a coordinated way. Second, you can’t make these changes alone; it usually takes a team of outsiders plus the active participation of those in the system.

Let’s take a relatively simple case, the unkempt yards issue. Most suburban communities have ordinances requiring that lawns be mowed even if houses are unoccupied. But the foreclosure process creates a legal gray area as ownership moves from one party to another. During that time, it’s often impossible to tell who owns the house. Yes, the city can send out its own mowing crews and attach liens to cover the cost, but the paperwork is daunting, the process inefficient and reimbursement a long way off. And, in truth, city governments have better things to do. It’s much, much better if the house doesn’t remain unoccupied for long, and that means speeding up the foreclosure process, making it easier to rent houses, or both. But what city controls foreclosure laws? (They’re the province of state governments.) And suburban homeowners are rarely happy about having renters next door.

To change the system so that houses don’t fall into disrepair, then, requires a lot of small solutions working together: Swifter legal processes, banks that are convinced to maintain their properties, incentives for placing renters in foreclosed houses, a neighborhood that accepts rental properties as preferable to abandoned ones, and neighborhood associations that are quick to report those who aren’t playing by the rules.

Looking over the list, you realize that no single individual or institution “owns” all these solutions. They are spread among several levels of government and independent agencies (judges, for example, have a big say in what gets priority in their courts), through the private sector (the banks must be willing to cooperate) and civil society (someone has to speak for the neighbors).

Another thought may come to you: This isn’t an exceptional problem; this is a standard-issue problem. In American communities, our problems are often complex and power is dispersed by design.

So how do you deal with systemic problems when no one’s in charge? This is the heart of modern civic leadership: It is about being the one who can create consensus among independent interests for solutions that benefit all—and then seeing that the solutions are carried out. It’s not glamorous work. It’s painstaking, “small-p” political work that involves chipping away at obstacles and bringing interests together. (Elsewhere, I’ve referred to it as “removing the boulders” and “building the wall”.)

There are rewards for this kind of work. First, it can result in actual solutions—or, at least, better bad situations—because you’ve dealt with root causes. Second, you manufacture a form of power along the way. The ability to solve problems is the most important power a civic leader can have. It’s not the province of elected officials alone; it can be done by philanthropists, business leaders, nonprofit executives, neighborhood leaders—or by institutions and organizations, like universities, foundations or chambers of commerce.

The keys are to see problems systemically, practice the art of consensus-building and focus on results. And if you like to draw charts, well, that’s a bonus.

The Blue-Ribbon Exception That Proves the Rule

December 17, 2010 By Otis White

I was amazed to hear on Nov. 9 that the co-chairs of the bipartisan commission on reducing the national deficit had issued a detailed plan for doing just that. Former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, offered a plan that was a mix of spending cuts (to domestic and military budgets), policy changes (gradually raising the age for Social Security benefits), tax reforms (goodbye mortgage interest deductions) and revenue increases (hiking the federal gas tax by 15 cents a gallon). While the plan wouldn’t eliminate the deficit, Simpson and Bowles said, it would bring it under control—assuming American citizens and their lawmakers were willing to take strong medicine.

It wasn’t the details of the plan, though, that surprised me. It was Simpson and Bowles’ decision to release their plan before the 18-member commission had finished its work. The commission had been given until the first week of December to make its recommendations, and under the rules laid down by legislation, if 14 of the 18 members agreed to a plan, it would automatically go to the Senate and House for a vote. Why hadn’t the co-chairs waited for the other 16 members, I wondered.

Background: I’ve managed blue-ribbon committees over the years. And my advice to committee chairs has been consistent: Stay focused on managing the process and trust that the group will come to good decisions. Be positive. If members argue, give them room for debate and make sure it doesn’t get personal. If some members grow impatient or frustrated, talk to them privately and do your best to keep them on board. When you see the group moving to common ground, call it to everyone’s attention and push for consensus and agreement. Most important, keep your opinions to yourself.

The model I’ve suggested to chairs was George Washington in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and others fought over the big issues. Washington rarely offered his own solutions, focusing instead on process and looking for areas of agreement. That has been my idea of a chair’s role. So why had two respected, experienced political leaders like Simpson and Bowles done things so differently with this commission? What was their goal? And would it work?

It took several weeks for the answers to reveal themselves. Some came in an hour-long interview with Simpson and Bowles on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show on Nov. 16. Rose never asked the question I most wanted answered—“Why not wait for the commissioners to act?”—but the co-chairs’ thinking became clearer as they talked. (Important to know: 12 of the commission’s members were current senators or representatives.) Said Simpson, “When you have 12 of these 18 of us who are members of Congress, it is so tough for them” to act decisively. He added later, speaking for himself and Bowles, “We’re not going to put out some whitewash (plan) that’s just a bunch of principles.” Bowles agreed. “I think we had to lay a predicate out there that would force action by this Congress and future Congresses.”

Let me translate: The commission’s goal, as Simpson and Bowles interpreted it, was to lay out an honest plan for reducing the deficit. But honest plans, especially those prescribing the level of pain that deficit reduction would require, rarely get much support from risk-averse politicians. Most of the commission members were, ahem, risk-averse politicians. So rather than offering “whitewash that’s just a bunch of principles,” which is what Simpson and Bowles believed the commission would have done on its own, the co-chairs decided to lay out a “predicate” (a bold plan) that would at least get people talking.

It certainly did that—and more. When the Simpson-Bowles plan finally came to a vote on Dec. 1, many were surprised that a majority of commissioners (11 of the 18) voted for it, including six of the 12 elected officials. It was enough to win the commission’s formal recommendation, though not enough to require a vote in Congress.

But Simpson and Bowles weren’t aiming for a mostly symbolic vote in Congress. They wanted to shift public opinion and political discussion away from hand-wringing and empty resolutions and toward actions that would make a real difference. They knew that others on the committee would be reluctant to champion such things because of the political costs, and they were willing to take the heat themselves.

Did it work? Well, their plan was adopted with few changes and was probably more realistic than the commission would have drafted on its own. It made an important point: Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans could agree on deficit reductions, as long as they included some of each party’s ideas.

And it shifted the political discussion, at least for a while. Within days of the commission’s vote, politicians were talking openly about ideas that were previously taboo, like reducing the mortgage interest deduction and raising the age for Social Security. President Obama got on board, announcing that he had asked his economic advisers for ways of simplifying the tax code along the lines that Simpson and Bowles had suggested.

So, is it always wrong for blue-ribbon committee chairs to advance their own ideas, to “pull” the committee rather than “push” it? No, not always. The deficit reduction commission shows an important exception to the George Washington model. And that is when:

The committee is charged with describing a course of action that will require serious sacrifices.
Public discussions of the issue have been sidetracked by unrealistic expectations.
For political reasons, members are reluctant to take the heat for recommending serious sacrifices.
The chair or co-chairs are willing to take the heat themselves.
The chair or co-chairs are reasonably sure that when the shock wears off, the committee will accept their core ideas.

In a way, what Simpson and Bowles did proves the larger point, that being chair is about putting the committee first. If you care more about a specific solution than you do about a successful process, you should be a member, not a chair. What Simpson and Bowles saw was a commission that wanted to do the right thing but feared the consequences. By stepping out front, they helped their blue-ribbon committee succeed, and that’s the highest calling of committee chairs.

Footnote: This is speculation, but my guess is that Simpson and Bowles told the other members what they were doing and, in the wink-and-nod environment of Washington, got their private blessings. The worst thing you can do in politics is surprise public officials. In reading the news articles after the plan was released, I saw no hint that other members were angry at the co-chairs’ actions. My bet: They weren’t because they knew it was coming.

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The Montana Study and the Untapped Capacity of Communities

Consensus, Power, and the Art of Getting Things Done

The Blue-Ribbon Exception That Proves the Rule

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