Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

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

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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

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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.

The Realistic But Hopeful Place

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There are times when cities and organizations face a kind of abyss, when things they had counted on suddenly don’t work anymore. For a city, it might be when a major local industry shuts down. For an organization, it could be when its primary service is no longer valued. What usually follows (after a period of anger, recrimination, and denial) is an avalanche of ideas and advice about setting things right.

You can imagine how these ideas fly in from all directions: Let’s be a tourism city, or a high-tech center, or a retirement community—or all three. If it’s an organization, let’s try our old mission in a new way, let’s try an entirely new mission, or let’s try a bunch of missions and see which works out.

One thing seems clear in moments like these: You must focus your efforts. But on what? How do you decide which path to take when the past is no longer a reliable guide?

My advice is to search for a “realistic but hopeful place,” a place where ambition, success, and demand overlap. You find these places in the answers to three questions:

  • What do we want to do?
  • What are we good at?
  • What does the world want or need?

If answered honestly, these simple questions will take you into a deep analysis of your community or organization and a focused look at the world. Be careful, though, to ask them in the right order.

The first question, “what do we want to do?” requires that you talk to as many people as possible who know and care about the city or organization. You can do this in person or in groups. (I advise both; start with in-person interviews with a cross section of respected leaders, then convene groups. The interviews will give you some starting points for the group discussions.) What you’re searching for is not so much strategic advice (that is, exactly what we should do) as insight into what motivates people. A good way of getting to it is to ask: “Given that we’re going to make major changes, what is the best that that our organization (or city) can be?” Consider it a quick form of visioning.

The second question brings some specificity to the vision by forcing leaders to look for current successes, however modest they may seem. Some research will help. If you’re concerned about a city’s economy, look for local employment sectors that are growing, especially among businesses that export goods and services (that is, that sell things to people elsewhere). If you’re concerned about an organization, comb through the financial statements and talk with employees: Are there things your organization is doing, perhaps as a sideline, that people are demanding more of?

Just by answering these two questions, you can usually see some possibilities. Let’s say your city has traditionally been an auto manufacturing center. When you talk with people, their hearts are still in making things. (“We’re still a great manufacturing town, and we ought to be the best one in the state.”) As you look around, though, you don’t see many big companies that are growing, only a handful of small ones, a few of which make high-quality bicycles. Could that be a growth industry for your city?

It works the same way for organizations. Let’s say you’re on the board of a human-services nonprofit that, because of a change in reimbursements, is threatened. The first thing you want to know is, do others (board members, staff, and those the organization has worked with over the years) want it to continue in this field? Or is there something else they’d rather the organization do? Second: Are you already doing something, perhaps in a small way, for which demand is growing?

The third question then takes a hard look at the bright spots. Will the world want or need high-quality bicycles in the future? Will your organization’s sideline services be valued in the years ahead? Be careful not to focus too much on present demand. If people in your city spent generations making cars, bicycles will seem inconsequential. If the organization provided health-care services with reimbursements in the millions, then providing services for thousands of dollars will seem like small potatoes. The thing to focus on is growth, not current demand.

And let’s be realistic. If you are fighting for your city’s or your organization’s life, the choices are bound to be difficult. Whatever you do (including doing nothing) will involve wrenching changes. The question is, at the end of those changes, will you be in a realistic but hopeful place . . . or still in crisis?

Asking what you want to do, what you’re already good at, and what the world wants will help point out that place.

Footnote: Knowing the direction and reaching the destination are, obviously, different things. Discovering the hopeful place is an important first step, but that’s when the real work begins. How does a city help a small but promising industry to grow faster? How do you turn an organization’s sideline into its primary service? What do you do with all the infrastructure and processes that have grown up around the things that are ending? These are the hard choices of strategic planning. But it starts with hope and a dose of reality.

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

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.

Why Patience Is a Virtue in Civic Work

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The Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington State is a marvel of engineering and one of the world’s most successful public projects. It is the single largest producer of electricity in the country and one of the largest concrete structures in the world. It was begun in the depths of the Great Depression as a New Deal project and began producing hydroelectric power—and lots of it—just months before Pearl Harbor. Because it produced so much power so cheaply (it cranks out enough today to electrify the Seattle area twice over), many give it some credit for winning World War II since Seattle needed a huge power source during the war years for airplane production. And get this: It was actually designed and built under budget. In 1933, when the project started, the estimated cost of the dam was $168 million. It was completed for $163 million.

So, if you are looking for a well-conceived, well-designed, well-managed government project, you need go no further than the Grand Coulee Dam. It’s a little surprising, then, to learn that the idea of the Grand Coulee Dam took shape in . . . 1918. It was then that a group of leaders in eastern Washington found the exact spot for a major hydroelectric dam and conceived its purpose and benefits (cheap power and irrigation for the parched countryside) 15 years before construction started and 22 years before it began producing power.

Why? For the reasons any experienced civic leader knows: Great ideas don’t sell themselves; the barriers to change—any change—are high; and sometimes it takes a crisis to motivate decision makers. And, yet, when the right moment comes along, bold ideas seem almost to leap off the shelf. Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933. Immediately, he and his advisers scoured the country for big public-works projects that could be started in a hurry. One of the first they found—and by far the largest—was the Grand Coulee Dam.

This time lag between concept and acceptance (often followed by frenetic action) is so common that economist Milton Friedman once offered some advice to those who despaired about change, especially his fellow conservatives:

There is enormous inertia—a tyranny of the status quo—in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

And it’s not just at the federal level that this lag occurs. Many people know that New York revolutionized police work in the mid-1990s by adopting the “broken windows” theory of social disorder. (Briefly, the theory holds that by strictly enforcing laws against small crimes such as littering, graffiti, turnstile jumping, public urination, and so on, you will head off major crimes. The name comes from the idea that, if a building has one window that’s not repaired, vandals will soon break all the windows.) Here’s the surprise: The theory was published in 1982 and thoroughly discussed at the time. It took 15 years for “broken windows” to get its high-profile test.

In Washington, D.C., there’s a mixed-use development going up on the site of the old Washington Convention Center at New York Avenue and 14th Street. It’s a big project: condos, apartments, offices, shops, and restaurants, packed into 10 acres. Sounds great until you learn that the city has been working on getting something at that site for almost two decades. Most of that time, officials knew they wanted a mixed-use facility—they even chose the developer in 2003—but one delay after another postponed it.

Given this sometimes long and frustrating delay between idea and execution, what should civic leaders do? Five things:

  • Don’t get frustrated. Ideas are often formed in a burst of energy and creativity and then . . . nothing. But simply knowing that the road ahead is likely to be long may help you keep spirits up. If an idea is a great one—if the benefits to the community are obvious—then it will find its moment. Be patient.
  • Keep talking about the idea and refining it. Use this fallow period to prepare your idea and prepare others for your idea by coming up with new ways of illustrating its benefits. If it’s a new museum or a streetcar, how many ways can you help people see the museum and its collection or experience the sensation of moving on rail?
  • Build a committed group of advocates. This is the other thing you can do during the fallow period. The social media allow nearly unlimited ways of keeping the converted in conversation—and converting new people. Use them.
  • Watch for changing circumstances that may allow the “politically impossible” to become the “politically inevitable,” to use Milton Friedman’s words. It could be a crisis, a change of leadership in a key agency or government—or both. And when it happens, bring your new idea and your growing list of supporters to the new leaders’ attention immediately. If FDR had learned about the Grand Coulee Dam idea in 1934 instead of 1933, chances are it would never have been built.
  • Search for a work-around.

The last point bears a little explanation. Sometimes bold new ideas can be presented as, well, not so bold. In fact, even the biggest changes in cities can be offered up as small and safe—if they are presented as experiments. This is how Mayor Michael Bloomberg has remade huge parts of New York, building bike lanes, closing Times Square to traffic, allowing “pop-up” restaurants on city sidewalks, and so on. If he had presented any of these as bold new city policies (which they eventually became), opponents would have killed them.

So how did he do it? He offered them as “pilot projects,” experiments in a small area for the purpose of observation. In part he did this because it allowed the city to do things without going through the cumbersome and delay-prone public review process. But Bloomberg is also an astute observer of human (and political) nature. Had he proposed narrowing hundreds of New York streets for bike lanes, the howls of protest would have drowned out the idea, all of them predicting economic and physical gridlock. But by doing just a few blocks at first, then a few more, then a few more, then a lot more, the mayor and his staff proved that even the busiest New York streets could accommodate cyclists, motorists, and truck drivers—and be more humane for it.

Bloomberg has done this repeatedly over his three terms in office, quietly making small changes that paved the way for big ones. Often, by the time the larger ones are made, controversial changes aren’t controversial any longer. One of his critics, looking at the mayor’s use of pilots to pave the way for change, told the New York Times, “It’s masterful.”

You may be able to offer your change as bite-size pieces, or maybe not. It’s hard, for instance, to build just part of the Grand Coulee Dam and use it as a demonstration project. But whether you offer your great idea as a series of small steps or one long stride, the same advice applies: Be patient.

Photo by Jeff Hanway 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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You can find Otis White’s urban issues updates by searching on the Mastodon social media site for @otiswhite@urbanists.social.