Roles – Page 2

Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”

May 14, 2015 By Otis White

Twenty-five years ago, as I was growing interested in how cities produce leaders and leaders shape cities, I heard a state business association president define leadership. A leader, he said, “is someone who helps people get where they want to go.”

He was speaking to a community leadership class, and I could sense the audience deflate. That’s it? Help people go somewhere? Like a bus driver? What about organizing constituencies, offering a vision, and persuading the public? What about standing up for people—or standing up to the powerful? What about holding office?

And, yet, I had to admit he was on to something. Organization and persuasion are skills. Visions can be supplied by others. Standing up to the powerful and holding office are roles. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that helping people get where they want to go (and, one hopes, need to go) isn’t a bad definition of what leaders do. It’s just . . . incomplete.

So allow me to complete the definition. A leader is someone who helps people get where they want to go . . . by seeing the opportunity for getting there.

Seeing the opportunity—the narrow, sometimes temporary passage through which change can happen—is the genius of leadership. And herding people through that passage is the practice of leadership. What the genius and the practice require is a sense of how things fit together, a tactical vision, a willingness to learn from experience, and a saintly patience with people—but a patience that’s bounded by the resolve to do something meaningful.

If this sounds abstract, trust me; there are examples all around you. Here in Atlanta, I’ve seen these traits in people who nurtured projects great and small, from the creation of the Beltline, a circle of parks and trails that’s transforming entire neighborhoods, to the building of a roundabout that fixed an impossible intersection at the gates of Emory University and breathed life into a small retail district.

In both cases, the leader was someone who recognized the value of these projects, sized up the difficulties, figured out the path forward, and patiently guided others along it.

But how exactly did they do it? What are the steps in seeing and seizing opportunities? And how can you become one of these everyday geniuses?

You can find some of the answers in a book called “A Kind of Genius” by Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter. It’s about a man who took on some of New York’s toughest problems in the 1960s and 1970s, figured out practical, even elegant solutions, and got them implemented. His name was Herb Sturz.

Herb who? Roberts’ point exactly. Sturz was an “unsung hero, shrewd social engineer and social entrepreneur” who had an impressive but largely unnoticed impact on New York, first by reforming New York’s bail bond system (and inspiring similar reforms around the country), then pioneering ways of dealing with substance abuse. His final challenge was the one most apparent to residents and visitors today, the cleanup of Times Square.

You’ll be impressed by these stories. But the real reason for reading Roberts’ book is to learn how Sturz worked: by listening carefully, studying systems, proposing small-scale experiments, quantifying the results, answering objections, and winning over even the most skeptical officeholders. You won’t be surprised to learn that, as a child, Sturz spent a long illness learning to play chess and could see six moves ahead in his mind.

Here’s how Roberts explains the Sturz approach: “He spotted things other people hadn’t seen, even things that had been staring them in the face every day. 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.”

Herb Sturz was a remarkable leader, but I’ve seen similar traits in others who’ve accomplished big things in public life. They ask good questions. They listen intently. They experiment, observe, and quantify. They see how systems respond. They answer objections. They’re patient. But when an opportunity presents itself and the way forward opens, they are decisive and relentless.

At the end of the day, these leaders get people where they want to go, but often by a road no one else could have imagined. And that’s what makes them a kind of genius.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Steven Fettig licensed under Creative Commons.

Cultivating the Visionistas

July 18, 2013 By Otis White

I recently spent time with a man who had changed the course of a river—and not a small river, a big one. He’s John Turner, a businessman and environmentalist, and the river he changed was the Chattahoochee, which flows from well north of Atlanta to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Turner’s city of Columbus, Georgia.

Fifteen years ago, Turner took charge of an effort to turn the lazy, muddy Chattahoochee into whitewater in downtown Columbus. Or rather, back into whitewater, because, as it turns out, before factories in Columbus dammed the river in the 1830s, Columbus had extraordinary rapids.

I won’t go into detail about what Turner and his fellow citizens did to pull off this feat (year after year of making presentations, commissioning studies, sitting in permitting hearings, lobbying legislators and congressmen, raising money, and finally knocking down some century-old dams). But the results are spectacular. In May, Turner dedicated Whitewater Columbus, the largest urban rafting experience in America. It is two and a half miles of churning, stomach-dropping rapids that are already attracting world-class kayakers and families looking for adventure. It will, Turner is sure, create a boom in riverfront development in Columbus.

If you’re thinking that your city needs someone like John Turner, you’re right. And here’s the good news: Your city may already have one, and maybe dozens of them. What you probably don’t have, though, is a process for cultivating them.

Some call these extraordinary citizens “civic entrepreneurs,” but I don’t think the name does them justice. Starting a company is easy by comparison to what they do. The term I’ve used for a while is “visionistas,” because their motivation is their ideas—the clear visions they have of things that others cannot see, at least in the beginning.

The first visionista I came to know was Billy Paine, the lawyer who in the late 1980s dreamed up the Atlanta Olympics, then patiently brought the games to life. But there have been many others: Fred Lebow, the man who reinvented the marathon in 1976 by running one through the five boroughs of New York; Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who in the late 1990s saw a long linear park in the sky when they looked at New York’s abandoned High Line train trestles; or, more recently, Elisa Beck, who is determined to create a center for sustainability inside an old grocery store on Pittsburgh’s South Side. As Beck illustrates, visionistas don’t always have ambitions as big as a city. Sometimes the vision can be for something in a single neighborhood.

The visionistas’ greatest strength is their drive. As a city council member said of Beck, these people can be tenacious. They are also persistent. Fifteen years is a long time to work on a single project. Most council members wouldn’t do it, and most mayors can’t. Visionistas also tend to be transparently authentic, which draws others toward them and their causes. Lebow was so obsessed with the New York Marathon that he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, but no one ever doubted his sincerity.

What should city officials do with such determined people? And how can you tell the difference between a crazy idea that’s a great leap forward and a crazy idea that’s just . . . a crazy idea? My suggestion: Encourage but don’t embrace visionistas, at least until they’ve make their ideas viable. And viability means two things: a significant group of supporters (including financial supporters) and a plan. And the plan has to answer three questions: How will this project be paid for? How will we get the necessary public and private approvals? And how will we explain it to the citizens?

Your job, then, is to explain the things that make projects viable, encourage the visionistas to give these things a try, and send them on their way. If they come back a year later with a group of supporters and a somewhat realistic plan, then you have not just a dreamer but a doer. And it’s time to consider investing your time and perhaps some public money in their project.

But even then, be careful not to take the project from them. The projects that succeed most spectacularly do so by living just outside government. If New York’s High Line, which is run by a nonprofit, had been handed over to the parks department in the early days of the Bloomberg administration, we wouldn’t be talking about it today as the creative, inspiring project it is. That’s because, alas, vision, creativity and bureaucracy rarely cohabitate.

If you value neatness and clear lines of authority, this will be uncomfortable. But if you can tolerate ambiguity and a certain amount of creative tension, working with visionistas can be exciting. Not as exciting as hurdling down a two-and-a-half-mile whitewater course. But thrilling in its own way. And along with the thrills, you might do your city some real good.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo courtesy of Whitewater Columbus.

Smart Citizen Engagement . . . and Dumb, Dumb, Dumb

March 29, 2012 By Otis White

I am a fan of governments reaching out to citizens for ideas and participation for two reasons. It’s good for government officials to work side by side with citizens, and it’s good for citizens to work side by side with governments. But there are smart ways of doing this, and there are dumb, dumb, dumb ways.

I’ll talk about the smart and the dumb in a moment, but first a few words about why citizen involvement is important. Start with the basics: Citizens know some things better than government officials, and government officials know some things better than citizens. Citizens know things that begin with the word “what”—what the problems are (particularly in their own neighborhoods), what they want their city or neighborhood to be, and what they are personally willing to contribute in time and taxes to make these things happen. In other words, citizens are good at vision and judgment. Government officials are good at the “how” parts—how to deliver the things the citizens want, how to pay for them, and how to be sure things work as planned when they’re in place.

When you put these competencies together, with the citizens taking the lead—but not having exclusive say—in the “what” parts, and government officials taking the lead—but not having exclusive say—in the “how” parts, you get a strong partnership . . . with a little creative tension. The tension comes from not totally ceding either part. On the contrary, it helps if the parties look over each other’s shoulder. Citizens sometimes have great ideas about getting things done. And public officials can often suggest things the citizens ought to be thinking about but, for some reason, aren’t. How do you let one side take the lead without ceding control? You act with respect for what the other party does best, the way you would toward any valued colleague or partner.

Here’s another principle of citizen engagement: The goal shouldn’t be a new set of ideas or goals but a long-term sharing of responsibilities. Alas, that’s not the political reflex. The reflex, upon hearing a complaint or an idea, is to take the problem away from the person who’s complaining. I understand why this happens—many elected officials believe the path to re-election is paved with credit for getting things done, and most appointed officials think it’s important to appear in control—but by taking problems away from people you diminish them and limit a government’s effectiveness. The best way to deal with community problems and opportunities is through partnerships, where everyone does his part: government, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens.

By taking the time to plan and act as partners, two wonderful things happen. First, resources multiply—not just financial resources but human labor and creativity. Second, solutions become virtuous cycles, where each partner’s contribution rewards the others’ efforts, increasing the rewards and making the effort easier with each turn of the cycle.

You see this most clearly in business improvement districts, where landowners tax themselves to make commercial areas safer and more attractive. The virtuous cycle for BIDs works in two ways. As they make improvements, property values rise and revenues to the BID increase, enabling it to do more, which makes property values rise even more . . . and on and on. But the real secret to BIDs isn’t the money they raise and spend on their own. It’s the partnerships they forge with governments. Over time, smart and focused BIDs learn how to ask intelligently for things, and governments like working with them. The money they raise, then, becomes not replacements for government services but enhancements, which helps everybody. The commercial district looks good, citizens are happy, businesses prosper, property owners see their investments rise in value, tax revenues grow for government and the BID, and the cycle goes round and round.

This, then, is the power of partnership, and it ought to be the aim of every government—not to coddle citizens or push them out of the way, but to plan and work with them as respected equals.

OK, then what’s a smart way of doing this? You start by asking citizens what they want, plan the “how” parts together—so citizens learn the cost of public goods and can decide if they truly want them—and then you ask those working alongside you to lend a hand in making them happen.

I have two examples of smart citizen engagement, both from older cities dealing with major crime problems. First is from Philadelphia where Mayor Michael Nutter has created a small agency called PhillyRising. It’s a handful of government workers who are good at talking with citizens and enlisting them as partners. Not long ago, a newspaper reporter sat in on a PhillyRising meeting in a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by crime. The meeting began with a top city official saying something you don’t hear enough from government leaders. “The city doesn’t have all the answers,” he said. “We know you guys,” referring to neighborhood residents, “know the problems in the community better than anybody else.”

And that was pretty much the end of the speeches. For the rest of the meeting, the PhillyRising staff facilitated the 35 or so who came in talking about the neighborhood’s issues—not just the crime problems, but things like neighborhood schools and adult literacy problems—as others took notes on large flip charts. At the end, staffers invited the residents to come back in two weeks to work on plans for changing the things they had identified—with the city playing a supporting role. As the PhillyRising director told the reporter who was there, “The idea behind it is, instead of doing things for people, we’re trying to do things with them and teach them.” Precisely.

The second example is from Detroit, and it’s not about government doing smart things with citizens but citizens doing smart things with government. (Remember, it’s a partnership.) I don’t have to explain much about Detroit’s problems—they begin with a horrifying homicide rate and go from there. But not every part of Detroit suffers equally. There are a few neighborhoods that have kept crime at bay.

How did they do it? By organizing, watching things carefully, and working seamlessly with the police. These aren’t vigilantes. In one of the neighborhoods, North Rosedale, neighborhood volunteers don’t chase criminals; they photograph things that look suspicious and call the cops. They are so close to the police that, as neighborhood watch volunteers start their evening rounds, they check in with a nearby precinct to find out who’s on duty and what to keep an eye on.

As the Detroit Free Press reported, police and other city officials love these smart, organized, involved volunteers. “The cooperative effort that you have shown with the police department has just been super,” a police commander told one of the neighborhood groups at its regular monthly planning meeting with police and city officials last year. “The arrests that are being made are all with interaction with the community. A lot of other communities don’t offer that. It is a big tribute to you, and it’s very much appreciated.” The appreciation is mutual. One of the volunteers told the newspaper: “We believe it is important to work very closely with the police department.”

Let’s pause for a moment and review what’s right about these efforts. They create partnerships, not dependence. In each case, government knows its limitations. It appreciates what the citizens can do and stands ready to help but not direct. In one case, the government is reaching out to the citizens, in the other the citizens are reaching out to the government. The results of both will be smarter government (specifically, more effective policing) and smarter, more involved citizens.

So if these are examples of smart citizen engagement, what does dumb engagement look like? I have two examples of this, as well. The first involves the Pittsburgh police department, but instead of being partners of the citizens, the police have cast themselves as adversaries. The problem in Pittsburgh is a familiar one for urban police departments. Ethnically the police force doesn’t look much like the city today; it’s overwhelmingly white in a diverse city. The suspicion among African-American leaders is that the hiring process is rigged against black candidates, so they lobbied the mayor to open up the hiring process by allowing some community members to sit in on interviews.

Reluctantly, the police agreed. An organization called the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network offered the names of some volunteer interviewers to the police department, which forwarded them to other city departments for screening and training. In time, the interview panels including civilians were assembled . . . until someone noticed that one woman who was asking questions was wearing an electronic monitoring device on her ankle. Turns out, one of the police interviewers was a convicted felon who had pleaded guilty a year before to felony firearms charges.

The panels were abruptly cancelled. The police chief blamed city bureaucrats for fouling things up by not running background checks. Everyone was embarrassed and angry. But take away the embarrassing revelation—the woman with the ankle monitor—and you see this for what it was: a shallow and ineffective substitute for citizen engagement. It was shallow because it substituted a handful of people on city hall interview panels for genuine partnerships with citizens in their neighborhoods. And it was ineffective because it asked this handful of citizens to do something they weren’t equipped to do—judge what makes a good police officer. Actually, the citizen member who might know something about effective policing was the woman with the ankle monitor. At least she could claim experience with the criminal justice system.

What would have been better? It would have been much, much better if the department had taken the time to engage citizens in discussions about what they wanted from officers in their neighborhoods. If they had listened carefully and worked collaboratively to find better ways of recruiting, training, and retaining officers who fit the new profile. Afterwards, if some involved in the planning process wanted to serve on the interview teams, they should have been welcomed and would have come to the panels in a completely different way—with knowledge of what police officers do and an understanding of how the hiring process was changing. In short, they would have been seen as partners in making a better police department—and not as intruders or nuisances.

But it isn’t only local governments that make a mess of citizen engagement. Sometimes citizens do, too. This brings me to the worst citizen engagement process I’ve ever heard of, designed by a group in Pinellas County, Florida called FAST, which stands for Faith and Action for Standing Together. As the name suggests, it’s an interfaith group, and its heart seems to be in the right place. Founded in 2004, FAST wants to improve low-income parts of the county, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and has taken on important issues from crime and drugs to transportation and education.

But if its intentions are good, its methods are atrocious. After FAST members (who number in the low thousands) settle on an issue and decide—on their own, with no government officials involved—what the correct solutions are, they haul public officials before them, force them stand on a stage and say only “yes” or “no” to FAST’s agenda. As a final indignity, elected officials are not allowed to touch the microphone, for fear they might . . . you know, try to explain something. A FAST member stands with the microphone in hand, ready to snatch it away.

By this point, most responsible elected or appointed officials will not participate what amounts to one of FAST’s public shaming sessions. Not long ago, though, several Pinellas County school board members came to one of the meetings, where they were told that the best way to instruct children was by using something called “direct instruction.” Would the school board members, on the spot, commit to changing the school system’s entire instructional approach? Yes or no? The answer, thankfully, was no. “I will not yield to pressure,” one board member told the group . . . presumably just before the microphone was snatched away.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be hectoring or patronizing. It doesn’t even have to be adversarial. In my experience, most government officials are perfectly willing to work alongside citizens; they just don’t know how to get started. And most citizens are far more interested in practical solutions than in venting their spleens and would welcome the opportunity to learn more about how government works.

There’s a marriage to be made here between governments and citizens, but like all good marriages it must come with some values. The two most important: respect for each other’s contributions and a belief in the power of partnerships.

Photo by Bytemarks licensed under Creative Commons.

Dealing with a Crisis

December 13, 2011 By Otis White

If there’s a gold standard for a mayor’s handling of a crisis, it is . . . well, you know what it is. It’s Rudolph Giuliani standing on a sidewalk on September 11, 2001 amid the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center, reassuring citizens. And if there’s a lead standard for a mayor’s handling of a crisis, it may be Jean Quan’s performance this fall when her Oakland, California police department cleared an Occupy protest site.

Mayor Quan’s public handwringing and contradictory actions were well documented. She ordered police to push protesters out of their camp near city hall, then allowed them to set up the camp again the next day, all the while agonizing over which was the right thing to do. The raid on the camp and the protests that followed resulted in serious injuries to several protesters and television footage that made Oakland look like a war zone. Later, Mayor Quan tried to apologize to protesters and was booed off the speakers’ platform. The police were furious with her equivocations, and so were the protesters. Not surprisingly, a petition drive to recall Quan was launched almost as soon as the tear gas cleared.

We could make a long list of the things Mayor Quan did wrong in this crisis: indecision, incoherence, lack of vision, lack of follow-through—combined with an astonishing inability to read situations or understand how others viewed her. But a better question than what went wrong with Jean Quan is to ask its opposite: What do good leaders do differently in a crisis, people like Rudy Giuliani?

To answer that, we have to look at crises as a special kind of problem. Most leaders, including Mayor Quan, have some notion about solving problems under normal circumstances. What makes crises so different that leaders feel abandoned by their instincts?

Three things: First, they are unexpected. Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans or a scandal at city hall, crises seem to come out of nowhere. Second, they appear to threaten the usual ways of doing things. This is why leaders sometimes lose their bearings; they don’t know what—or whom—to trust. Finally, crises are urgent. They fill the news and the conversations of citizens, events move quickly, and leaders must deal with them NOW. The pressure can be enormous.

When you put these things together—surprises that challenge the status quo and demand immediate action—you see how crises can paralyze leaders like Mayor Quan. But they don’t have to; they can just as easily make you a hero. Rudy Giuliani started the day on September 11 as a deeply unpopular mayor whose pettiness and bullying ways had worn out his welcome with New Yorkers. He ended it as “America’s mayor,” as many news articles called him, and the change in his image was solely the result of how he handled a major crisis while the whole world was watching.

Let’s take the elements of a crisis, then, and see if we can find a formula for success . . . or, at least, survival.

Crises are surprises. This means they aren’t on your agenda, and, therefore, can’t be planned for. Nobody runs for mayor to deal with a hurricane, a terrorist attack, or protesters camping out at city hall. (For that matter, nobody wants to be city manager so she can deal with a bridge collapse or a nonprofit executive so he can manage a financial scandal.) But if you can’t plan for crises, you can at least prepare for them.

What’s the difference? Planning is about steps (I’ll do this, then this, then that . . . over a known time period). Preparation is about contingencies (if this happens, I’ll do that . . . if I ever need to). There’s an element of planning in thinking about crises, but planning takes you only so far because these events are . . . well, unexpected, urgent happenings that appear to scramble the usual ways of doing things.

What you can do in preparing for a crisis is think through a few steps and then concentrate on roles and responsibilities. For instance, if a natural disaster were to strike, what would be the most important tasks the city government would have to undertake? What decisions would have to be made? Who would be needed to make these decisions and execute those tasks? How should these people work together, and where should they be? What resources would they need?

You can construct scenarios for all kinds of crises—public safety emergencies, human disasters (say, a gas-main explosion or contaminated water supply), even political crises (a scandal, for instance). You can’t be very specific—not all hurricanes, gas-main explosions, or scandals are alike—but you can at least know where everyone in the decision team should meet and have a checklist of general things they should do (get the facts, assemble background information, brief other leaders, contact the news media, etc.). And you can prepare yourself and your emergency team for the what-ifs.

This was why Rudy Giuliani was so calm on September 11. He had already been there . . . in his mind. As he writes in his 2002 memoir, “Leadership”: “Throughout my time as mayor, we conducted tabletop exercises designed to rehearse our response to a wide variety of contingencies. We’d blueprint what each person in each agency would do if the city faced, say, a chemical attack or a biomedical attack.” This wasn’t just for the police and fire departments, he adds; it was for him and his staff as well. “The goal was to build a rational construct for myself, and for the people around me. I wanted them ready to make decisions when they couldn’t check with me. The more planning we did, the more we could be ready for surprises.”

Again, this isn’t planning in the conventional sense. It’s more like role playing, so everyone involved will know his role if the worst happens and, therefore, not be paralyzed.

Crises challenge the status quo. Take a deep breath. Crises rarely change things at a fundamental level, especially in environments as complex as cities. But they often appear to. A riot, for instance, can suggest to people that public order and the old ways of decision making have broken down and cannot be restored. And doubt can feed on itself. After Katrina, some believed New Orleans would never recover, which slowed the city’s recovery. The same thing with New York after September 11.

Because crises often create periods of doubt and genuine uncertainty, leaders must do two things immediately. First, they must do everything in their power to restore public order. Second, they should promise an open-minded look at how the crisis came about and what it means for the future. This is important. Good leaders don’t promise that everything will return to the way it was. (There’s always at least a possibility that things really can’t be as they were.) But leaders can promise to examine carefully whether mistakes were made that caused or exacerbated the crisis and, if so, fix them.

Think of it as dealing with a car wreck. First you take the victims to the emergency room to stop the bleeding and set bones. Then you do the accident inquiry. Chances are, once the crisis has passed, you’ll find that major changes aren’t needed. But in the heat of the moment, people don’t want to hear that everything is fine because things don’t look fine. They want assurances that someone will take a long and fair look at why happened and why.

Consider how differently things would have turned out for Mayor Quan if she had followed this path in Oakland. First, she could have spelled out before the police action and after why the city had to clear the camp (for health, public safety, economic reasons, etc.). She could have been resolute about not allowing the conditions to be repeated (that is to say, no future camps). Then she could have promised an open-minded examination of how peaceful protests could be accommodated in the days ahead that would achieve what the Occupy activists wanted without repeating the problems the city was concerned about. Firmness in the short term . . . with an open mind for the long.

But what about those instances where a crisis exposes a situation where things can’t remain the same? A riot, for instance, like the one Detroit experienced in 1967 that came as the city was experiencing a major demographic transition (and which hastened the transition)? Or, say, the closing of a major economic institution at a time when the city’s entire economy is shaky? In these instances, it’s even more important to deal with the crisis on a short-term, long-term basis: short term to restore order, obtain temporary aid, and so on; long term to find lasting answers, which might include a whole new way of doing things.

Crises are urgent. In some crises, leaders don’t have a week to seek advice from others. They may not even have a day. On September 11, Rudy Giuliani had minutes to size up the situation and act. But the smartest leaders always ask first about the timeline. If they have a day, then they take the entire day to make decisions. If they have an hour, they take the full hour.

Why? Because decisions are almost always improved by more information and different viewpoints. This isn’t indecisiveness. It’s intelligent decision making. It’s based on the belief that better answers emerge as informed people debate the right course in constructive ways.

The best example and one of the most studied presidential decisions of all time was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The stakes could not have been higher. Almost everyone involved saw that the crisis might end in war, perhaps nuclear war. And yet the only options presented to President Kennedy at first were to do nothing or launch a secret, preemptive air strike that would have almost required the Soviet Union to retaliate in some way.

President Kennedy insisted that his advisors take the few days they had to look for other answers and debate the alternatives among themselves. And it was from this debate that a third alternative came about: a “quarantine” around Cuba (they didn’t want to call it a blockade for fear of provoking the Soviets). As you know, this unexpected third way worked, and the crisis ended better than anyone could have imagined (missiles were gone, war was averted, and relations with the Soviet Union even took a turn for the better). And it came about because Kennedy knew exactly how much time he had to decide and used that time wisely.

But know this: When the time expires, you must act. If you do so intelligently (like Kennedy) and calmly and decisively (like Giuliani), a crisis can be your finest hour. But wilt under pressure, equivocate, and blame others, and it will be your worst nightmare. Just ask Mayor Quan.

From Provider to Partner

August 5, 2010 By Otis White

There’s a vast change underway in how local governments relate to their citizens, as governments move from being providers to partners. Almost everywhere you turn, you see this shift. Here are three examples:

The rise of business improvement districts. I’ve heard former mayors who served in the 1960s and 1970s talk about how shocked they were to learn that businesses would voluntarily raise their taxes in order to improve their surroundings. And yet, by the 1990s the BIDs were everywhere. The original idea was to take over services that cities could no longer afford (like cleaning up graffiti and planting trees), but BIDs have grown into surprisingly effective planning organizations as well.
The vast expansion of public-private partnerships. Cities have been creating public-private partnerships for decades; it’s how stadiums and civic centers were built in the 1980s and economic development programs were funded. But we’re now into partnerships that couldn’t have been imagined even a decade ago, like building toll lanes on highways and privatizing downtown parking meters. Some of these ventures will prove to be bad ideas, but they demonstrate how far you can go in marrying profit motives with public purposes.
The arrival of philanthropy in government services. Again, this is the sort of thing that leaves former mayors shaking their heads, but cities everywhere are turning to non-profits and foundations to fund—and manage—public assets. Name a major municipal service area that touches the lives of citizens, and you’ll likely find philanthropy at work, from park conservancies and public land trusts to police and library foundations. I haven’t seen donors lining up to support solid waste, but surely it can’t be too far off.

I could go on and on—there are many examples—but the shift is undeniable and the implications are clear: Governments no longer “own” local problems; they “share” community problems with others. And as you move from owning to sharing, new skills are required of government leaders: that they be able to identify others to share the burden, and that they be able to work as partners and not directors. And for that, they must learn patience and restraint, and this is much, much harder than you might think.

I’ll talk about restraint shortly, but first a bit more about the great role shift. I ran across a good description of the change in a report by a group called PACE, which stands for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. In it, the city manager of Ventura, Calif., Rick Cole, said the difference was between a vending machine and a barn raising:

“With a vending machine, you put your money in and get services out,” says Cole, a former alternative newspaper publisher and mayor in Pasadena. “When government doesn’t deliver, they do what people do when a vending machine doesn’t deliver,” says Cole. “They kick it.”

“The more useful metaphor,” he adds, “is the barn raising. It’s not a transaction, where I pay you to do work on my behalf, but a collaborative process where we are working together. Government works better and costs less when citizens do more than simply choose or ratify representative decision makers.”

Which are the next great barns to be raised? There are two areas where governments will make great partnership strides in the future. First is in neighborhood improvements; second is in bringing volunteers inside local governments.

With neighborhoods, this means letting residents take the lead in listing and prioritizing their needs, and insisting they take a major role in providing the solutions. I know, I know. We’ve tried for decades to find a workable model for neighborhood involvement without much success. But that’s because we’ve only done the first of these two things—we’ve asked people what they want and haven’t insisted they share the burden. To use Rick Cole’s metaphor, we’ve let people describe the soft drinks they want and the price they’d like to pay (essentially nothing), and when local governments failed to deliver, we’ve watched them kick the vending machines. We need them to grab a hammer and start raising the barn.

I’ll write in the future about the idea of volunteers in government. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I would point out that we already have volunteers in a range of government work, from volunteer firefighters and parents who help out in classrooms to volunteer librarians. (Next time you’re at your public library, ask the librarian to point out who works there for free.) Governments haven’t learned to ask for volunteers, but when they do, they’ll be surprised how many step forward. Here’s the key, though: They can’t manage volunteers like employees. So add to the list of skills governments must learn things like volunteer training, motivation and coordination.

Final thought: I first saw a local government acting as partner and not provider in 1994 when I wrote a magazine article about a South Florida city called Delray Beach. (You can read the entire article here.) The key to change in Delray Beach was a mayor, Tom Lynch, and a city council that had learned to be a dependable partner without becoming a dominating presence. Here’s a glimpse of how restraint works:

When a problem becomes apparent, civic leaders help the people most affected organize themselves to study it and come up with solutions. When the citizens arrive at some solutions, the city offers to be part—but only part—of the resolution. The group that’s most affected must accept the bulk of the responsibility.

It’s in this constant tension over responsibility—is everyone doing his part to solve this problem?—that Delray Beach generates both solutions and leadership. No one looks to city hall to figure out what to do or even to do it once it’s figured out. But they do keep close watch to be sure the city, the business community and non-profits live up to their ends of the bargain.

City hall is willing to “facilitate” the problem-solving process, help find resources and take some of the responsibility when the solution is arrived at. But it won’t tell people what to do or take on the work for them. As Mayor Lynch explains, “If someone comes to us with a problem, our role isn’t to solve the problem but to connect them with other people who can help them solve their problem.”

A decade and a half ago, I was amazed by this approach and even more by its results: not only a popular and well-managed local government in a city that had turned itself around—but a much happier citizenry as well. It turned out that, in Delray Beach, people preferred being partners to constituents. Come to think of it, they probably would have enjoyed barn raisings to vending machines, too.

Photo by Load Stone licensed under Creative Commons.

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Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”

Cultivating the Visionistas

Smart Citizen Engagement . . . and Dumb, Dumb, Dumb

Dealing with a Crisis

From Provider to Partner

About Otis White

The Great Project

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