Managing change

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.

How to See Community Problems in Context

August 16, 2011 By Otis White

If you’ve been involved in communities for long, you’ve probably run into something like this. A problem arises—say, a spike in crime—and officials do the things they’ve always done to tamp it down. Only this time it doesn’t work. Why?

Or maybe it happens like this. Your city has a big decision to make, but no one is worried. Your city has a long history of making difficult, even controversial decisions successfully. Yet nothing in the decision-making process works as it normally does. Instead of coming together, public opinion splinters, bloggers have a field day, and politicians who’ve been allies turn on each other. What happened?

The answer may be that the context of the problem has changed, turning what were once simple issues into complicated or complex ones. And according to a important article in the Harvard Business Review, as the context of problems changes, your decision-making process must change with it.

Actually, we’re seeing a lot of context shifting going on these days. The places where it’s most obvious are in the suburbs, which have changed dramatically in the past two decades. What were once white, middle-class residential havens have become major business locations with residents from an astonishing array of ethnic groups and income levels.

As a result, nearly everything about the suburbs is changing: economics, politics, housing patterns, transportation needs, human relations, lifestyles, social issues, public safety. And they’re changing not only in scale (greater traffic congestion, for instance, or more crime) but in kind (a different attitude about transit, a different relationship between police and residents). Suddenly, what worked 20 years ago doesn’t work anymore. Multiply that across all the things that communities care about—education, quality of life, community appearance and pride, and on and on—and you get a sense of how, yes, chaotic things seem in some suburban areas.

And chaotic is not always the wrong word, say the Harvard Business Review authors. Writing about business decisions (but with direct application to communities), they say that problems tend to fall within four contexts: simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. And the context of the problem, they continue, should determine the elements and sequence of decision making.

What distinguishes a simple problem from a complicated, complex or chaotic one is “the nature of the relationship between cause and effect,” David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone write. If one thing happens (let’s say, an increase in children in a community) and another thing happens as a direct result (a greater demand for public classroom space), that’s a simple problem. The cause and effect are direct, proportional and apparent. But as communities grow more complicated, the causes and effects become harder to trace. To understand why, it helps to know a little about the field of complexity science.

Complexity science is based on the idea that all systems (ecosystems, economic systems, organizations or human communities) are made up of elements that interact. Simple and relatively uniform systems behave in fairly predictable ways. But as you add more and different kinds of elements (plants and animals, commercial trade, specialized workers or ethnic groups), the interactions can become more and more erratic.

You can see it most clearly in our wildly gyrating economy today. What worked in one era to stimulate growth (public works projects or tax cuts, for example) doesn’t work nearly as well in another. The reason may have to do with our deepening global connections, which make it harder to know where the U.S. economy ends and the global one begins. So a debt crisis in Greece (Greece!) ricochets around the world and upends the U.S. bond market.

On a smaller scale, it’s what’s happening in America’s increasingly complicated communities. What look like small changes in one area set off big reactions in another, for reasons that aren’t apparent. And, not to state the obvious, it’s important to know the relationship between cause and effect because . . . well, it’s hard to solve a problem if you don’t know what’s causing it.

So what’s a local leader to do? Snowden and Boone offer two thoughts that may help. The first is that the causes of problems aren’t unknowable; they’re just unknown at this time. Later on, you may know exactly what caused the issue. In the meantime, all you know is that the traditional responses failed.

Their second thought is that, as you try to figure out what’s going on, there are things you as a leader can do—if you understand the problem’s context. I urge you to read the entire article (you can download it from Harvard Business Review for a price by going here), but here’s a thumbnail version of Snowden and Boone’s description of problem contexts—and how leaders should proceed in each.

Simple context: The cause of the problem is direct and apparent, and responsible officials know how to deal with these problems—or should. An example might be a water main break, something any competent water authority can handle. This sort of problem, Snowden and Boone says, is in “the domain of best practice.” In this context, the leader’s job is to sense the problem, categorize it correctly, and respond appropriately.

Complicated context: For problems in this area, the relationship between cause and effect are direct but . . . well, complicated, and not everyone can see it. For that reason, you’ll probably need to consult experts in order to proceed. Instead of a water-main break, imagine a water authority dealing with a sustained water shortage. Conservation measures might be the solution or new sources of water or even a system of recycling water—or all three. But before proceeding, leaders should consult people with deep and wide experience in water-availability issues. (Caution: Experts sometimes disagree, so consulting them doesn’t relieve leaders of making decisions. Also, most important decisions have costs and other consequences, and these must be managed, too.) Snowden and Boone characterize problems in the complicated context as the “domain of experts.” The leader’s job here is to sense the problem, analyze it (with the help of experts), and respond appropriately, usually choosing among alternatives that experts have suggested.

Complex context: Here the relationships between cause and effect are not clear at all—and may not be clear for a while. These problems are usually caused by a change in some fundamental condition (say, a major shift in the local economy or demographics), with the result that the usual solutions don’t work. Again, it’s not that the causes of these problems are unknowable but, as Snowden and Boone write, “we can understand why things happen only in retrospect.” This is what they call the “domain of emergence,” meaning that we can’t be sure what will work, so we must try things and see what emerges as a solution. Leaders in a complex context should probe for possible solutions, sense good and bad results from these solutions, and respond by investing in the good results.

Chaotic context: This is a leader’s worst nightmare: a riot, natural disaster or catastrophe similar to the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. There are multiple things going wrong at the same time, and it may be impossible ever to know their causes and effects. Besides that, you don’t have time to probe or analyze: the key is to restore order immediately. This context, then, is the “domain of rapid response.” The right decision-making process in these crises is to act to restore order, sense where stability emerges, and respond by supporting the stable areas. Your aim isn’t to solve problems but to move them from chaos toward a complex context, where they are manageable.

There are three big lessons that civic leaders can take from Snowden and Boone’s groundbreaking analysis:

When dealing with a problem, focus on cause and effect. How clear is the relationship between the problem you’re dealing with and its causes? If it’s clear, direct and proportionate, congratulations. You have a simple problem; look for the best practices and apply them. If the causes aren’t clear and proportionate, consider the problem’s context—and the decision-making process that best addresses what you’re facing.
Don’t apply the decision-making process that works in one context to another. Turning to the water authority during a water shortage and saying, “just fix it,” won’t work. Likewise, responding to every complex problem by acting like it’s in chaos won’t work either.
The greatest peril for leaders comes during a shift in context. Snowden and Boone use the example of Rudy Giuliani, who won great praise as mayor of New York for his cool-headed response to the Sept. 11 attacks. But he quickly lost favor when he tried to use the same command-and-control style to argue that his term in office (which ended the following January) should be extended. What followed the attacks were complex problems, the citizens knew, but they weren’t chaotic. And they didn’t need Giuliani—and only Giuliani—to solve them.

As Snowden and Boone write: “. . . A specific danger for leaders following a crisis is that some of them become less successful when the context shifts because they are not able to switch styles to match it.” I would argue that the same happens when problems that have been simple suddenly become complicated or complex. Very quickly, we learn that we can’t use simple decision-making processes to solve complex problems.

The Greatest Book About Cities Not Written by Jane Jacobs

July 13, 2011 By Otis White

This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that many urban thinkers consider the greatest ever written about cities. It’s Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and it is, indeed, an important work. Among other things, it showed us how to look at cities—particularly the interactions of street life—with greater appreciation.

“Death and Life,” then, is a great book. I recommend it highly. But I’d like to offer up another great book about cities, one published in 1993 with a bright green cover and cartoon illustrations. It was by a pair of Chicago academics and community organizers, John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, with a title only an academic or a community organizer could love, “Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”

In 376 pages, Kretzmann and McKnight introduce us to a set of ideas as challenging to the conventional wisdom of community development as Jacobs’ critique was to city planning. Their premise: that every neighborhood and every community—even the most impoverished—is filled with human, organizational and institutional assets that should be inventoried and harnessed before seeking outside help.

I’ll explain more about their ideas shortly, but first let me tell you how I was introduced to this book. In 1995, I wrote an article for Florida Trend, a business magazine, about a city in South Florida called Delray Beach. My assignment was to find the place in Florida with the most committed and effective group of local leaders. I found it in south Palm Beach County, which was a bit surprising because that part of the state wasn’t known as civic minded. But a much greater surprise came when I got to Delray Beach. Leadership worked in Delray, I learned, in ways differently than any place I’d ever visited.

You can read the entire article on the Civic Strategies web site, but here’s the five-second summary: Delray Beach city government insisted that, before it responded to citizen complaints, citizens closest to the problem had to organize themselves, study the problem and assume part of the responsibility for solutions. This bracing attitude—you do your part before we do ours—was so contrary to how local governments worked, I struggled to find ways of describing it. I finally hit on calling it Delray Beach’s “responsibility revolution.”

A year later, I got a second surprise when I was researching a study of leadership in Los Angeles and dropped by the offices of an organization called RLA. RLA had been created four years earlier as Rebuild L.A. and was the political and civic communities’ reaction to the 1992 Rodney King riots. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley asked Peter Ueberroth, the organizational mastermind behind the 1984 Summer Olympics, to head the group, giving it the vague mandate of raising a lot of money and improving the riot-torn areas of South-Central Los Angeles. In short order, Rebuild L.A. became a political disaster, a high-profile piggybank with a 30-member board that served the interests of everybody but the people in the neighborhoods. (To see of how bad things were, read Time magazine’s article about the early problems of Rebuild L.A.)

By the time I visited RLA, Ueberroth was gone and so was the 30-member board. In their place was a quiet, confident Latina named Linda Griego who had been asked to clean up the mess at Rebuild L.A. and do something to improve the area. Griego wasn’t interested in high-profile fund-raisers or big-ego politics. She renamed the organization and focused on the community’s strengths. What she discovered as her organization inventoried South-Central block by block was that there was a lot more to the area than outsiders thought. She found dozens of promising but underserved retail locations and hundreds of small employers. Maybe the greatest surprise: South-Central was a honeycomb of small manufacturers, from print shops to metal-working establishments.

Griego organized these small businesses so they could support one another and negotiate with big businesses and city hall. And she produced corporate-style market studies, pinpointing places that a drug store, supermarket or discount retailer could thrive. She took these studies to chain stores that had never given places like South-Central L.A. a second thought and already had successes to show for her work.

In the space of a couple of years, then, I had seen examples from opposite ends of the United States of how to look at neighborhoods, including very poor areas, in a totally new way: not as hopeless victims but as places with assets—communities with the leadership and some of the resources needed to turn themselves around . . . if outsiders let locals take the lead. And once again, words failed me. I couldn’t come up with the right term to describe what Linda Griego was doing. I called it “grassroots networking.”

It wasn’t until the following year, when I was visiting the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, that I found the words I’d been looking for in a homely guidebook in the foundation’s library. It was Kretzmann and McKnight’s book, and the term they used was “asset-based community development.”

In an 11-page introduction to the book, Kretzmann and McKnight explained that the traditional approach to low-income neighborhoods was understandable but wrong. As outsiders, we view these places as the sum of their problems: “crime and violence, of joblessness and welfare dependency, of gangs and drugs and homelessness, of vacant and abandoned land and buildings.” This causes us to conclude they are essentially hopeless: “needy and problematic and deficient neighborhoods populated by needy and problematic and deficient people.”

One result, they continued, is that we throw the residents a lifeline in the form of welfare and a mixture of social programs. These programs don’t solve the residents’ or their neighborhood’s problems; they “guarantee only survival and can never led to serious change or community development.”

What’s needed for change—for altering the fate of neighborhoods and the lives of people and not just easing their pain—is a new way of thinking about these communities, not as a collection of needs but as a wealth of assets that haven’t yet been identified, organized and made productive. What assets? They are “the capacities, skills and assets” of the residents and the neighborhood itself. And you find these assets in three forms, Kretzmann and McKnight say: in individuals, associations (formal and informal groups of various kinds) and institutions (from churches, businesses and schools to police stations and neighborhood parks). Most of the book is given over to showing how to find these assets and what to do with them once they’re found.

I knew instantly what Kretzmann and McKnight were talking about. Their notion of asset-based community development was the same as Linda Griego’s belief that South-Central L.A. teemed with productive businesses and potential markets, and what was needed were ways of harnessing this productivity and unleashing the potential. But there was also in the asset-based approach the wisdom of Delray Beach: that real change can’t happen until the community is a full-fledged partner in its own development—and not a supplicant. As Kretzmann and McKnight write:

. . . All the historic evidence indicates that significant community development takes place only when local community people are committed to investing themselves and their resources in the effort. This observation explains why communities are never built from the top down or from the outside in.

Yes, Kretzmann and McKnight are careful to add, outside resources are almost always needed, but these resources are effective only when requested by local leaders and matched by local efforts:

. . . Outside resources will be much more effectively used if the local community is itself fully mobilized and invested, and if it can define the agendas for which additional resources must be obtained.

OK, this isn’t great writing. In fact, at one point Kretzmann and McKnight caution that their book “is not a novel.” It’s meant to be read as a handbook, skipping from section to section as needed. But for community developers or others who care about cities, there’s as much wisdom here about the human assets of cities as you’ll find in Jane Jacobs’ descriptions of the physical assets.

There’s one more thing: The greatest obstacle to effective action in cities is the complexity of communities. People are frozen because they don’t know where to start. “Building Communities from the Inside Out” tells us not only how to make sense of places but where to begin our efforts to improve them. Literally. One of its final chapters outlines a five-step process: Map the assets, build relationships, mobilize for economic development and information sharing, convene the community to develop a vision and plan, and (only then) seek outside help.

If you want inspiring prose and a dead-on analysis of the physical assets and street life of cities, turn to Jane Jacobs, who probably did write the greatest book ever about cities. But if your tasks involve changing attitudes, peeling back layers of cynicism and apathy, and rallying groups to improve the places they live, then Kretzmann and McKnight have written the book for you. And by anyone’s measure, it’s a great one.

Photo of Jane Jacobs book ad by Pdxcityscape licensed under Creative Commons.

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

What Makes a Solution Workable?

A Map of Community Change

How to See Community Problems in Context

The Greatest Book About Cities Not Written by Jane Jacobs

About Otis White

The Great Project

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