Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

The Blue-Ribbon Exception That Proves the Rule

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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.

Where Do Transformational Ideas Come From?

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When George Gascon became police chief of San Francisco last year, he brought with him an idea that, if successful, could change how his department operates. He wants to use civilians instead of officers to investigate most nonviolent crimes like break-ins, car thefts and vandalism. These civilian employees would photograph crime scenes, dust for fingerprints, write reports, testify in court and counsel victims on how to prevent future crimes. “This is really about re-engineering policing,” Gascon told the San Francisco Chronicle last summer. “It’s a program that I believe will increasingly become the model around the country.”

Perhaps, but in the meantime, it’ll certainly change how the police work in his city, how crime victims interact with his department—and possibly save millions in salaries and training.

And it raises an important question for all community leaders: Where do transformational ideas like this come from? Where do you find ideas and practices that could yield important community benefits but, by definition, aren’t in common use? And that question, in turn, begs two other questions:

  • When do you introduce transformational ideas? That is, how do you know when the time is right for transformation?
  • How do you introduce a transformational idea so it has a good chance of overcoming opposition and being accepted?

All important questions. Today I’ll take on the one about where transformation ideas come from. In future postings, I’ll look at the others. (See our series on mapping community change.) Caution, though: No leader should introduce a transformational idea until she can answer all three questions. (Where did this idea come from? When should we introduce it? How do we introduce it so it succeeds?). Leaders don’t just throw big, half-baked ideas on the table and expect others to react; that’s what gadflies do.

In Gascon’s case, he found his transformational idea in Great Britain, where civilian investigators are fairly common. After reworking it to fit American police practices, he tried it in his previous job as police chief of suburban Mesa, Arizona. (The verdict from top law enforcement officials and regular cops there: It works.) Now he’s trying it on a much larger stage in San Francisco.

In short, he found his idea the way most good leaders find ideas: He kept his eyes open, asked the right question (in Gascon’s case, how can we deliver police services better and cheaper?), and looked in places you might not expect (another country). This is part of a skill set you might not associate with community leaders but should: the leader as learner.

Two other examples of how leaders learn:

  • Bill Clinton and Renaissance Weekend. After Clinton was elected president in 1992, reporters were surprised to discover that he participated in an annual retreat called Renaissance Weekend. It sounded strange and even a little ominous at the time, but it was how Clinton formed relationships with people from many backgrounds and, more importantly, learned about ideas he couldn’t have found at the state capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas.
  • Rudy Giuliani and the Manhattan Institute. When Giuliani ran for mayor of New York in 1989 and lost, he didn’t have many good ideas outside of public safety for changing city government. (He was a longtime prosecutor.) But before he ran and won in 1993, Giuliani went to school by attending seminars at a conservative New York think tank called the Manhattan Institute. What he learned there formed many of his administration’s quality of life initiatives and government improvement efforts, ideas that were pioneered far from New York and brought to him by the Manhattan Institute.

Point is, as a leader you have to develop your own sources of ideas. You can find many good ones in your own community, but they will be mostly incremental ideas—improvements to things your city is already doing. If you want to find transformational ideas, ones that can take the city or its government in completely new directions, you’ll almost certainly have to look elsewhere.

There are several ways of doing this. You can read widely (books, magazines, blogs and national newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal). You can attend state or national conferences. (If you do so, attend the breakout sessions, talk with speakers—and get their business cards!) Or you can go on your own. I’m notorious for wandering away from family vacations to inspect downtowns, check in on neighborhood revitalization efforts and walk through new municipal projects. (And yes, I always talk to people and get their cards.)

Finally, there are intercity visits. These days nearly every city gathers a group of leaders and takes them on an overnight visit to study how another place does things. If you’re on the list, it can be a great way of learning about transformational ideas. 

Go with some questions in mind, though, and make them big ones, like how can cities get more citizens involved in civic work, how can they create more distinctive downtowns, how can they deliver services better and cheaper—and then look for answers in the host city. When you hear about a bold new initiative, ask where the idea came from, how it was introduced, why it was eventually adopted and how it changed things.

And don’t forget: Ask for business cards!

You Can’t Build a Community by Doing One Thing at a Time

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There are two things that separate most of us from great athletes. The first is a God-given talent for throwing a baseball at 90 miles an hour, running 40 yards in under 4.5 seconds or sinking putt after putt from 10 feet away. The second is the ability to block out all distractions and concentrate. Tennis great Serena Williams once explained it this way: “If you can keep playing tennis when somebody is shooting a gun down the street, that’s concentration.”

And it’s not just athletes who benefit from the ability to focus. Scientists, novelists, musicians, jewelers, mathematicians and pastry chefs all need to concentrate on one thing at a time if they want to be successful. But here’s one group that doesn’t: community leaders.

In fact, I would argue just the opposite: It is when mayors, chamber executives, non-profit leaders and philanthropists focus too much on a single problem (or, worse, a single answer) that things go wrong. They trade one of a community leader’s most critical skills—the ability to see things in the periphery—for tunnel vision. And it often ends in wasted energy—or outright disaster.

When I think of the single-minded leader—the one who’s convinced that all our problems would be solved if only our city had a major-league baseball team, a downtown shopping mall, a bigger airport or lower property taxes—I think of Sea Scouts. It comes from a wise little book written in 1993 by Jack McCall, who spent years as a community development official in the Midwest. In “The Small Town Survival Guide,” McCall writes about a man who grew up in coastal California, where he had joined a branch of the Boy Scouts called the Sea Scouts and found the discipline he lacked. McCall continues:

As an adult he moved to Kansas, a state with few lakes and little opportunity for people to experience boating. Nevertheless, he brought his love for Sea Scouting with him. Since joining the troop had been the solution to his problems, he was quick to suggest that any problem in landlocked Kansas could be solved by a good troop of Sea Scouts. Whatever the problem, whether it was juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy or reckless driving, the answer was: Sea Scouts.

Funny story, but McCall goes on to make a point that’s critical for community leaders:

There are very few simple problems in this world. Most of them are clusters of problems that have difficult-to-understand relationships, and consequently do not lend themselves to easy, single answers. Instead, they require a number of small answers, sometimes over a long period of time. Fifty 2 percent solutions are better than a single 100 percent solution.

I’ve found this to be true. Turning around a community requires making progress on a number of issues, not just one or two at a time. If leaders are too focused, they neglect things that will undermine their efforts at some point. It’s like a company that concentrates so intently on cutting costs and boosting profits that it loses its best customers, runs off employees and overlooks new markets. Profits might rise for a while, but they won’t last because you can’t have a sustainable company without the other elements.

So how can you develop your peripheral vision, the ability to see all the areas that cities must make progress in? The best way to start, I think, is by making a list of the things communities must do right in order to thrive. Ask this question: If a family had many choices in where to live, why would it choose one place over another?

When you make the list, you may find you have 20 or more items —they may range from very general, like the sense that the community has a promising future, to very specific, like a good parks and recreation program. But we have a hard time remembering 20 things, so you need to group these attributes. So think deeply: Why does someone want a to live in a community with a promising future or a lively downtown? The answer: Because it satisfies some basic human need.

If you think about it enough, you may come up with four to six basic needs that communities must meet in order to be successful —and remembering six things is a lot easier than 20. (Don’t worry. You haven’t thrown away the 20 things, you’ve just grouped them in ways that will help you see the connections among them.)

This should be your work, but I’ll offer a starting list: four basic needs I think successful communities satisfy. You may disagree with my groups or how I name them, and you will probably think of many more attributes than the ones I’ve listed. That’s great. This is a thinking exercise, and the more you think about it, the greater its benefit.

One important note: These are not things that should be done solely by government. As I’ve written elsewhere, governments don’t “own” community problems today, they “share” them. So feel free to think of things others should do, from nonprofits and businesses to schools, churches and neighborhood associations.

The value of the exercise is that it deepens your ability to see issues in context and sharpens your peripheral vision. You won’t be as likely to neglect one thing while doing another. And you won’t forget, as Jack McCall says, that far more progress is made by 50 small solutions than a single big one.

The need for security

  • Safe neighborhoods and the freedom to explore (“I can go anywhere in this city”)
  • Faith that crime will be punished and justice done
  • A safe and nurturing environment for children
  • Consideration for the elderly and their needs

The need for opportunity

  • Economic development and community progress
  • Schools that help children become their best
  • Opportunities for personal expression and growth (arts programs, adult education, etc.)
  • A sense of local control and responsibility (“We control our destiny as a community”)

The need for connection

  • A welcoming community
  • Community events that appeal to almost everyone
  • Pride of place (an attractive community)
  • Many opportunities for community involvement
  • Fun!

The need for fairness

  • Fair decision making and social justice (“Even the quiet citizens are heard here”)
  • Faith in our government, leaders and institutions
  • Belief that others (government, nonprofits, businesses, citizens, etc.) are doing their part for the community

Seven Ways Community Decisions Are Different

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I am sometimes asked if community decision making is different from other forms of decision making—say, the kinds used in companies or nonprofits. And my short answer is yes.

But I’d like to offer a longer answer, which is that community decision making is different not in one or two ways, but in a number. And because it’s different, it means we need different kinds of leadership in communities, leadership that is far more patient, collaborative and comfortable with ambiguity than we expect in CEOs or executive directors. I think you’ll see why as we move down the list of differences.

One: In most communities, legitimacy for big decisions comes from the bottom up (citizens), not the top down (CEO or board of directors). As a result, everyone expects a voice in community decisions.

In most ways, this is the sign of a healthy community, but it can lead to problems if citizens are asked to make decisions they’re not in a good position to judge. Take, for example, a proposal to start a streetcar system. To know if this is a good idea, you might want to visit Portland, Oregon or other places that have streetcars and see their impact, but not many citizens can do this. They depend, then, on others to visit, ask questions and report back to them—people like newspaper reporters and community leaders. And that would be fine, except for the next way community decision-making is different . . .

Two: There is little deference or ceding of expertise in communities. Many business employees and nonprofit workers are discouraged and cynical. But even corporate cynics will concede that, in some instances, top executives know more than they do and perhaps have good reasons for trying something new. But that’s not the case in many communities, where citizens do not presume that community leaders know better than they do —or even more than they do.

Three: It is much easier to slow or stop things in communities and much harder to get them started. That’s by design. In America, responsibility and power is dispersed among levels of government (local, state, federal) and types of governments (cities, counties, government authorities) and then fought over by independently elected officials (mayor, city council, and maybe a half-dozen others). And all of these parties are governed by legal requirements that serve to make the time line of decision making much longer in communities than in organizations. The result is that even the best decisions move slowly—and sometimes get stopped cold.

Four: It isn’t just the legal responsibility that’s dispersed. Resources are as well. Take almost any big community problem —from improving public safety and maintaining neighborhood parks to creating a more walkable downtown—and you quickly realize that these aren’t government problems alone; they involve multiple interests, from neighborhood associations and youth athletic associations to private property owners, businesses and special interests. All of these interests have resources they could contribute to the solution—if, that is, they agreed with it. As a result, the community decisions must be made collaboratively if they’re going to be effective.

Five: News media coverage of communities is far more extensive than of organizations. Again, this is a healthy thing—except that it exposes the “sloppiness” of decision making far more than in corporations and nonprofits. Don’t get me wrong: Decision making in big companies is sloppy too, with loud debates, false steps and corporate intrigue. But with few exceptions (think about BP’s repeated failed attempts to plug the 2010 Gulf oil spill and its clumsy public relations efforts), the sloppiness isn’t apparent to outsiders. Not so in communities. Fumble a big community decision—by going down one decision-making path and then abruptly changing course—and you’ll read about it in the newspaper and probably lose public support.

Six: Leadership is not as easily defined in communities as in organizations. That’s because community initiatives can come from many places—local governments, business organizations, neighborhood associations, nonprofits or individuals. (As an example, Kansas City is building a light-rail system because a single person got enough signatures on petitions to place the idea on the ballot and the voters passed it—over loud warnings by government and business leaders that light rail wasn’t feasible.) Companies may make poor decisions, but we know who makes them. That’s not always the case in communities.

Seven: In organizations, the measurements of success are clear: profits for corporations and results for nonprofits (the hungry are fed, trees are planted, museum attendance is up, etc.). There are no easy measurements of success in communities. This makes it harder to know whether past decisions succeeded and opens every new decision to long debates about outcomes and benefits.

I don’t mean to suggest that decision making is easy in corporations. I’ve spent enough time around large companies to know how gut-wrenching it is to deal with markets that suddenly collapse, competitors that emerge overnight or technologies that turn your industry upside down. Decision making in companies is fast because it has to be. CEOs would love to have the long time horizons of mayors and county commissions. But they would hate the ambiguity and loath the painstaking process of consensus building.

So when you hear someone say that your city should be run like a business, just say two words: Not possible.

A Case Study in Small-P Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Troy licensed under Creative Commons.

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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