Ideas – Page 3

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

October 21, 2011 By Otis White

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.

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?

October 21, 2011 By Otis White

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.

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

August 22, 2011 By Otis White

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.

Dealing with Fear and Demagoguery

June 16, 2011 By Otis White

Bear with me as I tell you the story of a place far away, but one whose story will sound familiar. Maybe all too familiar. It’s Toowoomba, a city of 120,000 in Australia’s interior. The funniest thing about Toowoomba is its name (it’s an Aboriginal word that means, more or less, swamp). Toowoomba isn’t actually in a swamp; it sits atop a range of low mountains and is known as a pretty place where people take pride in their gardens, their local university and their schools.

But as Charles Fishman describes in his new book, “The Big Thirst,” Toowoomba has a terrible problem, which it shares with the rest of Australia. It is running out of water. Australia is 10 years into a drought that has become such a part of Australian life that it is called simply “the Big Dry.” Toowoomba’s particular problem is that, because of its location, it suffers a little more than other places, as water runs quickly off its slopes.

By 2005, with the drought in its fifth year, Toowoomba had done the usual things, forbidding outdoor watering, hiring officers to look for scofflaws, and holding community religious services for residents to pray for rain. No luck. The city’s reservoirs were down to 34 percent of capacity, and political leaders were desperately looking for solutions, any solutions.

You can imagine, then, the excitement that Mayor Dianne Thorley felt when, in May 2005, she addressed a local women’s club with news of a breakthrough: For six months, she told the members, she and city water engineers had been studying water systems around the world and had a plan to recycle waste water as crystal-clear drinking water—extending the city reservoirs’ capacity and, possibly, saving the city.

The reaction? “Dumbfounded,” one who was at the meeting, Rosemary Morley, said. The city wanted to run water from the toilet to the tap? “I came home from that meeting,” she told Fishman, “and my reaction was, “˜How can you go forward with a project like that without running it by people?’ I thought, “˜This is such a sneaky thing. There must be something about it that’s funny.’ “

Even so, it took a while for opposition to build. In the meantime, the city council approved the plan unanimously. The governor of Queensland, where Toowoomba is located, endorsed it. So did the member of parliament from the city. And the national government offered to pay two-thirds of the cost of the advanced treatment facility needed for recycling water.

By then, though, a citizens’ rebellion had begun in earnest. A former mayor weighed in, calling it the work of “sewer sippers.” If it came to pass, he thundered, Toowoomba would be known as “Poowoomba.” A group called CADS, Citizens Against Drinking Sewage, organized. And the federal government, seeing the furor, changed its mind, saying it would participate only if the voters of Toowoomba agreed to it in a referendum.

You can imagine how this unfolded. On the one side, the mayor and water officials offered reason, science, detailed technical information and the experiences of far-off places (in the U.S., Fairfax County, Virginia, and Orange County, California recycle water) to assure voters that it was safe to drink thoroughly treated waste water. On the other side, opponents used slogans, scare tactics and pseudo-science. (Opponents brought in an out-of-town plumber who said he had been studying recycled water and learned it contained tiny amounts of hormones from drugs flushed down toilets. Drinking the water, he said, would cause men to grow breasts and lose their testicles. Keep in mind, this was scientific analysis . . . from a plumber.)

Proponents produced a 40-page book, Fishman writes, “with graphics of molecules and filter barriers, pages of text explaining the technology, photos of water in every possible mood, and many pictures of children.” Opponents issued an eight-page newspaper whose front page had a photo of brown sewage. Underneath, it asked, “Is this our city’s future?”

Well. You won’t be surprised that on July 29, 2006, the voters of Toowoomba said no to the water recycling idea by a thumping 62 percent majority. The only surprise is that it wasn’t unanimous.

As discouraging as Toowoomba’s experience was, it raises a good question: How can you deal with fear and demagoguery? This isn’t something that happens only in the Australian Outback or with proposals for recycling water. It happens every day in America, where complicated issues are put before voters promising an important benefit, but only if voters will pay a little more in taxes, change a familiar habit (such as commuting to work by train rather than car), or overcome their squeamishness. These ideas are sitting ducks for opponents whose only chore to come up with a slogan clever enough to play on citizens’ fears and doubts. When they do, the game is over.

What, then, can leaders do to lessen the inevitable resistance to new ideas and, maybe, win over skeptical citizens? The first thing is to do what Mayor Thorley (known in Toowoomba as Mayor Di) and her city hall allies never did: Recognize how much resistance there would be to such an unexpected and unconventional solution. Here’s how Fishman frames the mayor’s blindness:

What Mayor Di didn’t appreciate that day in May 2005 was that she was introducing a whole new way of thinking about water. She wasn’t being “sneaky”—to use Morley’s word—in the least. But Mayor Di didn’t seem to grasp that people might have different attitudes about water, and about what kind of water is wholesome.

What Mayor Thorley lacked was one of the essential ingredients of leadership: empathy, the ability to see the world from the others’ perspectives. She had been quickly converted to the idea of recycling water. She saw no reason others should take their time. When opposition mounted, she dug in her heels, insisting that the decision had been made, and critics should just get over it. “No consultation, no debate,” Rosemary Morley said. “That’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

But realistically, had she been more empathetic, what could Mayor Thorley have done? She could have taken six months to let the public work through the conversion process that she had made in days. When she spoke to the women’s club, her announcement should have been that she was forming a large task force (made up of friends, critics and respected leaders) to look at solutions to the water crisis and involve the community in learning about the options. Recycling water could have been one of the options, but only one.

Knowing how squeamish this option would make people, she could have suggested video conferences between task force members and people in Orange County and Fairfax County. She could have suggested a partial solution: Build an advanced treatment facility but use the water only for non-drinking uses, such as for industrial processes or in city fountains. Then she could have put goldfish in the fountains and invited everyone to watch the fish. (One resident of Toowoomba actually suggested this idea. It would have been persuasive.) After people saw the fish thrive (with no harm to the males), she could have suggested finishing the project.

The secret to defeating fear is a lengthy, open but certain decision-making process, one that allows not just those involved in the decision but everyone an opportunity to learn about controversial ideas without being hurried, to explore alternatives, and discuss and reconcile their feelings. In the end, of course, you have to make a decision. But in most cases, you don’t have to do it at the snap of your fingers. And you don’t persuade others by telling them just to get over it.

So what happened to Toowoomba after the referendum? An advanced treatment plant was built in Toowoomba but only to supply water to a coal mine operator. (The facility doesn’t bring the water up to drinking standards.) Eventually, Toowoomba signed an agreement with another water system to pump drinking water up the mountain. The pipeline and pumping stations will cost about twice what the recycled water system would have and have much higher operating costs that will grow as the price of energy increases. Fear, it turns out, has a price. Toowoomba’s water users will be paying for their fears for many years to come.

And now, the final irony: The water system that’s supplying the water to Toowoomba is building . . . you guessed it, recycled water facilities. So while the citizens of Toowoomba won’t be drinking water that has passed through their own toilets, they’ll be drinking the water from others’.

Photo of Toowoomba City Hall by Tim Swinson licensed under Creative Commons.

The Secrets of Perspective

March 10, 2011 By Otis White

There are five essential ingredients for civic leadership: interest, knowledge, resources, position and skills. To explain briefly: To be leaders, people need to be interested in civic work, otherwise . . . well, they won’t do it. They need to know the community’s challenges and opportunities and how the community deals with change. They need to bring resources (connections to money and votes are the traditional ones, but access to ideas is fast becoming the third). They need a position that confers a legitimate place among community leaders; it can be mayor, chamber of commerce leader, neighborhood association chair, non-profit leader or interest-group representative. And they need the skills of leadership, which increasingly are about building consensus. Put these ingredients together, stir vigorously and, voila, you have a leader.

But while these ingredients will earn you a place among leaders, they won’t make you a great or even good leader. For that, you need a sixth ingredient: perspective. There are two parts to perspective. The first is learning to see problems as part of a thinking process and not just as issues. In doing so, you’ll sometimes find that you and your fellow leaders are thinking about things the wrong way. The second part is to identify which events in communities are replays of long-standing problems and opportunities, and which are truly new.

Why is this important? Because the job of civic leaders is to deal with their community’s most pressing problems. If you can’t answer this question—is this a new problem or have we dealt with it before?—then almost surely you will not find good solutions. Don’t get me wrong. Answering this question won’t give you the solutions, but knowing the answer will guide how you’ll search for them.

You can see how this works by looking at a common problem: downtown revitalization. If your city has a downtown, leaders have probably been trying to “save” it since the 1920s, when the automobile became popular and personal mobility expanded dramatically. As people moved farther out, retail followed, and many downtown stores shut their doors or joined the exodus. What followed was one failed attempt after another to compete with the new shopping centers and enclosed malls: free-parking schemes, pedestrian malls, skywalks and urban shopping centers.

Downtowns began turning around in the 1980s when leaders changed their perspective. Rather than asking how they could make central business districts more like suburban retail areas, they asked how they could take advantage of the things that made downtowns unique: historic buildings, sidewalks, mixed uses, access to transit and so on. They added some new ideas, like business improvement districts that improved safety and maintained streetscapes, and at long last downtowns began turning around.

You can see how the two parts of perspective worked here. First, leaders recognized that they had a long history with downtown revitalization and that most of their efforts had been disappointing. Second, they looked at the decision-making process itself and realized their greatest problem was how they were thinking about the problem.

For familiar issues, then, studying the record and examining the decision-making process will often yield new perspectives and better results. But what about problems that are truly new? The good news is that there aren’t many new of them. Most of the issues facing cities have been seen in some form or other before. But every once in a while, something comes along that has no antecedent.

The automobile presented that kind of challenge in the 1920s. Nothing before it—not horse-drawn carriages, steam-engine railroads or electric trolleys and subways—prepared cities for cheap personal automobiles. Previous generations of leaders did many things wrong in dealing with the car (running major highways through the heart of cities, for one), but in many ways it is amazing they coped as well as they did, considering the swiftness and magnitude of the challenge.

Today, I can think of only two major issues that are similarly without precedent. The first is the internet and in particular its effect on politics and civic involvement. This may be more an opportunity than a challenge, but it will be an important force in the future. From reporting common problems (through innovations like New York’s 311 system) to organizing protesters and volunteers, the internet is changing how citizens and leaders interact—and maybe even who becomes leaders in the future.

The second is the problem of retrofitting suburbs for their more urban futures. Yes, we do have a record of successfully remaking some suburban-style areas around mixed use and transit, but the scale of change in the suburbs of the past 20 years has been so vast—unimaginable shifts in demographics, overwhelmed transportation infrastructure, aging households, and social and public safety problems that were once exclusive to inner cities—that it’s hard seeing how the rickety political and civic structures of the suburbs can cope.

What do you do when the problems or opportunities are truly unprecedented? How do you find the right perspective? Studying the past won’t help. Rather, you have to become a student of the present and keep up with what your peers in other cities are doing. (This is why access to ideas is becoming a key resource for leaders.)

But also be skeptical. In the breathless world of news and information today, first reports are often wrong. Breakthrough ideas are sometimes overstated or depend on factors that don’t apply to your situation. Think of unintended consequences and guard against the “confirmation bias” of seeing what you want to see. And above all, grant that complex problems rarely have simple solutions. If they did, then free parking really would have turned around downtowns.

« Previous Page

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

What Makes a Solution Workable?

A Map of Community Change

Dealing with Fear and Demagoguery

The Secrets of Perspective

About Otis White

The Great Project

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