Otis White

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Why the Goals of Citizen Engagement Are Not What You Think

November 20, 2012 By Otis White

I know local government officials well enough to know some of their secrets. And here’s one: Many don’t really believe in citizen engagement. Or, if they do believe in it, they don’t think it actually works.

I understand why they feel this way. If I had to depend on what passes for citizen engagement in most places—public hearings and public-comment periods at city council meetings—I’d be skeptical, too. These clumsy attempts at citizen engagement are good at producing three things: apathy, antagonism, and cynicism. That is, either no one shows up or every sorehead in town does. And on those occasions when a citizen with a good idea approaches the lectern expecting some sort of reaction from the city council or the staff, what does she get? Stony silence. (This reaction is so common during public-comment periods that a public-radio show in Cleveland devoted an entire broadcast to it, entitled “Is This Microphone Working?”)

But there’s more to the doubts about citizen engagement than bad processes. Some elected officials genuinely don’t think it’s necessary. That’s because they believe they are how citizens engage with their government, through elections. “This is a republic, not a democracy,” I’ve been reminded by local officials over the years. “I didn’t get elected to run back to the voters all the time, asking them what to do.”

So, where to begin? I’d like to make two arguments to my friends in local government. The first is that citizen engagement can work a lot better than it does today, with much better results. The second is that citizen engagement is a critical part of making governments work better. I talked about the first part, the “how” of citizen engagement, in a past posting about visioning. But today I’d like to take on the “why” part—why talking with the citizens is worth the trouble.

To make my case, I need to convince you that the reason you believe the public should be heard from is, if not wrong, then woefully inadequate. You probably think it’s so elected officials can learn what citizens think about a decision they’re about to make. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I’m about to say. There is nothing wrong with hearing from citizens about controversial issues facing a local government. And even if you think it is wrong, you can’t stop them.

But this kind of public engagement has limited value. An opinion is only as good as the information, logic, perspective, and values behind it, and for reasons that are obvious, people who are most affected by a decision aren’t always its best judges. After all, there’s a reason we use impartial juries to decide guilt and don’t leave it to the victims or the accused.

And let me repeat: You can’t—and shouldn’t—stop people from expressing their opinions. They may bring information that others have overlooked or have a perspective that’s worth considering. But opinions shouldn’t be the goal of citizen engagement.

The goal should be something deeper: an understanding of the interests and desires of citizens. And you cannot get that from a public hearing or a public-comment period.

That’s because by the time citizens show up for a public hearing, a proposal is already on the table, and it’s often one they’ve had no voice in until then. At that point, they’re often angry or scared and in no mood to discuss deeper concerns. So pity the poor public officials sitting in the pose I call “duck and cover:” heads down, hands folded in their laps, silent as stones as speaker after speaker assails them.

The better way: Begin talking with citizens before plans are drafted, perhaps even before problems are identified. By doing so, you’ll get a calmer dialogue and a much better sense of interests and desires. And keep citizens involved at every step in the planning stage. Here is the key concept: Citizen engagement is not an event (a town-hall meeting, a public forum, or a “My City 101” class, and certainly not a public hearing or public-comment period); it is a process.

But a process to deliver what? This brings me to the second goal of citizen engagement. If the first goal is understanding, then the second is recruitment. Local governments need citizens, as individuals and in groups, to become partners in solving community problems and seizing opportunities.

That’s because the healthiest communities are those that share responsibility, where everyone does his part and all are held accountable. You see most clearly how shared responsibility works in downtown business improvement districts, where businesses pay for some things (streetscaping, cleanup crews, additional uniformed security) while governments pay for others. The additional resources are important, but so is the diligence. BIDs work so well because everyone is involved and, therefore, paying attention.

And isn’t that the perfect description of an engaged citizen—one who is involved and, therefore, paying attention? Done right, this is what citizen engagement can deliver to your community.

Footnote: When politicians say ours is a “republic and not a democracy,” they should consult a dictionary. A “republic” is any country that does not have a king or some other form of inherited or imposed rule. Therefore, in republics the people govern themselves by some means. (It doesn’t have to be through anything we would recognize as democratic government. After all, when it was under Communist rule, Russia was known as the USSR, which stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) And democracy, it seems, is also in the eye of the beholder. The formal name for Communist East Germany was . . . the German Democratic Republic. 

So what are we? America is a federal republic, whose national government, states and localities are governed through representative democracy. 

Photo by D. Clow – Maryland licensed under Creative Commons.

“What” Before “How”

September 11, 2012 By Otis White

Many communities fight the same old battles over and over. And even when there’s something new to consider—a solution that could improve the downtown, say, or a big economic development opportunity—the city can’t seize it because everyone is squabbling about the details. How do places get stuck in such unproductive debates?

There can be many reasons, some involving deep unresolved conflicts (dealing with race and class or other social and political divisions). But a surprising number of times, the reason is simpler: The community is talking about the issue in the wrong way. Leaders have jumped into a discussion of “how” before talking thoroughly about “what.”

Confused? Bear with me. Most leaders are problem solvers by nature. Show them a problem, and they’ll work through as quickly as possible to a solution, then pour their energies into selling that solution. On one level, it’s refreshing to be around such quick thinkers. And if the leaders are extremely powerful and can bulldoze opponents (think of Mayor Daley at his zenith in Chicago), it might work. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Here’s a better way: Spend at least as much time talking with other leaders and the public about the problem and why it’s worth solving as you do on actual solutions. Help everyone agree on “what” (the problem and the benefits of its solution) before moving to “how” (the solution itself).

Yes, this requires quick thinkers to show some patience, but it will pay off in two ways. First, it will dampen divisions. Most of the big battles in communities are over “hows,” not “whats.” (People generally agree on the need for better mobility, just not on that road in that place. They agree on the need for city services, just not on that tax at this time.) If you start with a thorough discussion of “what” (mobility and its benefits, city services and their benefits), you make it easier later on to accept the sacrifice of the “how.” Second, spending more time with “what”—and inviting many people into that discussion—may open the door to a better “how.” In complex environments like cities, thinking about problems from many perspectives usually improves solutions.

Let’s use an example: how to help your downtown. Let’s say that you’ve been thinking about this for a long time and have decided your downtown needs a business improvement district, which allows commercial property owners to tax themselves for special improvements such as streetscaping and security. If you do what many leaders do and simply announce your solution, you open a free-fire zone. Property owners may not like it (why should they pay for additional services the city ought to provide?), citizens may be suspicious (isn’t this just privatizing our downtown?), downtown residents may object (why don’t we get a seat at the table?), and on and on. Six months from now, you may still be bogged down in the debate . . . if the idea isn’t already dead.

Why not take those six months for a discussion of what downtown could be if its biggest problems could be solved? How it could look and feel. Which new businesses or attractions could be there. How young people or older citizens might use it.

After—but only after—a vision is in place, then move to the problems standing in the way (we need streetscaping and better security) and how they could be solved. The groups you’ve assembled might quickly take up the idea of a BID, or they might choose another solution. But they’ll come to it with a far better idea of what they’re trying to solve and why it’s important, and they’ll come to it collectively. You won’t have to argue with property owners, citizens, or downtown residents about why it’s important to take a first step. They’ll be among those demanding it.

And they’ll be demanding it for the best of all possible reasons: They own the problem. They believe in the benefits of solving it. They’ve thoughtfully explored the solutions.

And they’ve done it in the right order.

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

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.

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.

Consensus, Power, and the Art of Getting Things Done

June 3, 2011 By Otis White

If you’re the kind of person who likes intellectual exploration, abstract concepts and learning for the sheer joy of it, I have a suggestion: Spend a few weeks learning about systems thinking.

OK, I didn’t really think you’d go for it. Civic leaders are practical people who have little patience with theories. But a little theory can sometimes be helpful, and in this case might offer some guidance and encouragement for your work. So let me offer you a thumbnail guide to systems thinking (or at least, to my layperson’s understanding of it).

To begin, it’s a way of seeing major problems as . . . well, systems, rather than isolated issues. Systems thinkers usually begin with a thorough analysis that tries to untangle the system’s elements, interconnections and functions (they tend to make elaborate charts). They look at how the system changes over time (what systems thinkers call “flow” and “stocks”). Finally, they examine the causes or drivers of change, which they represent as “feedback loops” that work either to bring the system into balance or reinforce its direction. There’s much, much more to systems thinking, but trust me, a little goes a long way. This stuff gets complicated quickly and a bit mystical . . . like taking a seminar on quantum physics.

Here’s the point, though: The best urban leaders I’ve known were, consciously or not, systems thinkers. No, they don’t use the language or draw the charts, but as they looked at problems they too searched for context, change and causes. And they knew there were no simple, one-shot answers for complex problems.

And more: They discovered in many cases that the ultimate answer did not lie in addressing the problem they began with (say, crime in an urban neighborhood, the unkempt yards of foreclosed houses in the suburbs, or pedestrian fatalities along a busy highway), but in changing the system itself in some way—the elements and interactions that were causing crime, unsightliness or dangerous conditions.

Some of these changes might be obvious (closing a neighborhood crack house), some might not (setting up after-school programs to keep children away from temptation). But these leaders learned two things through experience: First, you can’t change complex systems by doing one big thing. You change them by doing a number of smaller things in a coordinated way. Second, you can’t make these changes alone; it usually takes a team of outsiders plus the active participation of those in the system.

Let’s take a relatively simple case, the unkempt yards issue. Most suburban communities have ordinances requiring that lawns be mowed even if houses are unoccupied. But the foreclosure process creates a legal gray area as ownership moves from one party to another. During that time, it’s often impossible to tell who owns the house. Yes, the city can send out its own mowing crews and attach liens to cover the cost, but the paperwork is daunting, the process inefficient and reimbursement a long way off.  And, in truth, city governments have better things to do. It’s much, much better if the house doesn’t remain unoccupied for long, and that means speeding up the foreclosure process, making it easier to rent houses, or both. But what city controls foreclosure laws? (They’re the province of state governments.) And suburban homeowners are rarely happy about having renters next door.

To change the system so that houses don’t fall into disrepair, then, requires a lot of small solutions working together: Swifter legal processes, banks that are convinced to maintain their properties, incentives for placing renters in foreclosed houses, a neighborhood that accepts rental properties as preferable to abandoned ones, and neighborhood associations that are quick to report those who aren’t playing by the rules.

Looking over the list, you realize that no single individual or institution “owns” all these solutions. They are spread among several levels of government and independent agencies (judges, for example, have a big say in what gets priority in their courts), through the private sector (the banks must be willing to cooperate) and civil society (someone has to speak for the neighbors).

Another thought may come to you: This isn’t an exceptional problem; this is a standard-issue problem. In American communities, our problems are often complex and power is dispersed by design.

So how do you deal with systemic problems when no one’s in charge? This is the heart of modern civic leadership: It is about being the one who can create consensus among independent interests for solutions that benefit all—and then seeing that the solutions are carried out. It’s not glamorous work. It’s painstaking, “small-p” political work that involves chipping away at obstacles and bringing interests together. (Elsewhere, I’ve referred to it as “removing the boulders” and “building the wall”.)

There are rewards for this kind of work. First, it can result in actual solutions—or, at least, better bad situations—because you’ve dealt with root causes. Second, you manufacture a form of power along the way. The ability to solve problems is the most important power a civic leader can have. It’s not the province of elected officials alone; it can be done by philanthropists, business leaders, nonprofit executives, neighborhood leaders—or by institutions and organizations, like universities, foundations or chambers of commerce.

The keys are to see problems systemically, practice the art of consensus-building and focus on results. And if you like to draw charts, well, that’s a bonus.

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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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