Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Dealing with the Cynics

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Maybe the most dispiriting things a reformer faces, when she’s trying to fix a major community problem—or maybe turn around an entire city—are the twin evils of cynicism and finger pointing. And if you prefer your evils in threes, add another: apathy.

In my experience, every city has some version of these problems: big cities and small towns, places in long decline and even those on the rise. And they come from people in low places and high. I’ve known mayors who were hard-bitten cynics, chamber of commerce executives who blamed everyone else for what went wrong, and newspaper editorialists who described every new idea as the Titanic weighing anchor.

So what do you do when you’re faced with such a wall of civic doubt and negativism? I’ll get to the things you should do shortly, but let’s begin with the things you shouldn’t:

  • Don’t become part of the problem. Specifically, don’t point fingers at others, don’t blame the community for things that go wrong, and don’t give up.
  • And don’t do the opposite, which is to overpromise. Leaders who promise too much (“we can turn this around in 90 days”) end up digging the cynicism hole even deeper when they fail. If you need a slogan, try this one: “Let’s do what we can.”

And what are the things you can do? Start with attitude. You can be positive without being a Pollyanna. The secret is to be quietly confident. Jack McColl, who worked for many years in rural development in the Midwest, wrote a wise little book 20 years ago called “The Small Town Survival Guide.” In it, he described a group that he called the “coffee-break cynicism society” whose delight, he said, was in describing every civic improvement as certain failure. His advice: “Cultivate your ability to smile and say, ‘Let’s try.’ “

But ultimately the only thing that overcomes widespread cynicism is success. Doing something. Succeeding. Then doing something else, and succeeding there too.

Which begs the question: Where do you start? I’ll give you the advice I’ve heard from two highly successful mayors. One was Bill Frederick, the three-term mayor of Orlando in the 1980s. 

Frederick’s advice was to pick the biggest, most visible thing that you knew with certainty you could accomplish, then bring every resource to bear on accomplishing it. It worked for Frederick, and it worked a decade later for Frank Martin, the late mayor of Columbus, Georgia, who worked mightily to change attitudes in his city. Martin used what he called his “man on the moon” strategy to complete a big civic project that had eluded one mayor after another, the building of a civic center in downtown Columbus. (Again: big, visible, doable, done.)

But here’s the key: One data point is not a trend, and a single success will not change a community’s cynicism. For that, you need repeated successes. Martin followed the civic center by building a stunning 22-mile river walk, a new set of recreational athletic fields downtown, and then, improbably enough, by staging in Columbus one of the events of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the women’s softball competition. (If you want the full story of what Martin did and how it laid the groundwork for Columbus’ eventual revival, you can read about it in my book, “The Great Project.“)

Most civic leaders aren’t mayors and aren’t called upon to turn around an entire city. But the same principles apply if you are trying to improve a neighborhood, change a lethargic government agency, resurrect a nonprofit, or deal with a crime problem. Be quietly confident and don’t overpromise. Focus on one big, visible project and move heaven and earth to get it done. (If it can be completed in ways that exceed expectations—on time, under budget, and with unexpected quality—all the better.) Then refocus and repeat. And then repeat again.

Keep in mind that you’ll always have rock-throwers, and some will always deny progress. But the more you accomplish, the less others will pay attention to them, and the quieter and quieter the coffee-break cynicism society will become.

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

The Coordinated Swarm

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What would you rather face in a life-or-death situation: a charging rhinoceros or a swarm of killer bees? Well, every man for himself, but I’d take my chances with the rhino. The reason: I might be able to think of one quick move to avoid a two-ton rhino, but there’s no outrunning the killer bees.

And that’s what I sometimes advise public leaders to consider as they’re moving from planning to action. The temptation is to be the rhino, to see action as one great masterstroke. But an unanticipated obstacle (a lawsuit, an unexpected environmental review) or a determined opponent can turn your masterstroke into a long slog to nowhere. To change analogies, it’s like marching an army up a single road. If there are problems at the front, soldiers in the rear can only sit and wait.

The alternative is to spread out, to attack problems from many directions, not willy-nilly but in a coordinated fashion. It is to be a swarm of killer bees.

This sounds like simple advice, but I recognize that it’s hard to follow for two reasons. First, it’s not the way our minds work. Conventional strategic thinking commands us to find the most direct route from where we are to where we want to be—to march up that single road. What coordinated swarms call for is not strategic thinking but systems thinking.

The second problem is that a charging rhino is heroic, in its own way. A swarm of bees? Not so much. So there’s a natural appeal for leaders in the masterstroke, the single great achievement that will form their legacy.

So what does a coordinated swarm look like and how is it different from a masterstroke? The swarm is a set of relatively modest actions that attack problems and opportunities from several sides. Let’s say you’re trying to turn around a troubled downtown. The swarm might involve dealing with public safety, cleanliness, appearance, retail and development problems in ways that reinforce one another. That way, nuisances are dealt with as the streets look cleaner, new stores are opened as banners are hung, trees planted and sidewalks widened, and zoning issues are fixed as new developments are sought.

None of this is heroic stuff and may not even be noticed for a while. But attacking problems from many directions recognizes the complexity and interconnectivity of urban issues, as well as the cumulative impact that small, reinforcing actions can have. It also brings something vital to the earliest stages of problem-solving, which is momentum—the sense that something, at last, is starting to go right.

Interestingly, what sometimes follows a successful coordinated swarm is a masterstroke, a major action that changes the environment. For a downtown, it could be a new performing arts center or sports arena, a light-rail system or a major new mixed-use development. Masterstrokes can work in these cases because the swarm has lowered many of the obstacles and built confidence that leaders know what they’re doing.

I’ve seen coordinated swarms work many times in many places. (The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street program is designed around attacking declining downtowns from four directions at once.) But I recognize that their greatest impediment is that they force us to think about, well, how we think. To embrace the swarm, we have to understand systems and accept their complexity, playing by their rules rather than our own. They force us to enter the world of unintended consequences and feedback loops that amplify our actions, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad.

Learning to think about systems asks a lot of overworked city managers, mayors or downtown executives who are simply trying to fix bad situations. But turning a coordinated swarm of killer bees loose on a problem can be the most effective way to clear the way for the rhino that can smash through those final barriers.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by dcJohn licensed under Creative Commons.

Selling Change by the Slice

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One of the hardest things to do in communities is to convince your fellow leaders or citizens to join you in a leap of faith. That is, to accept a major change that, while needed and logical, involves doing something most people are not used to. Look around cities today and you see leaders trying to talk people into taking these leaps: to build light-rail systems, accept greater density in their neighborhoods, turn over parts of busy streets to bike lanes, try new ways of recycling, change school attendance zones, and a hundred other things.

The problem isn’t just that the citizens and their leaders are personally unfamiliar with the change you’re advocating (that’s why it’s a leap of faith), but that often it’s “all or nothing” as well. That is, you can’t build part of a transit system or half of a high-rise condo, and then let people decide if they can live with it. Or can you?

Well, no, not literally. But an awful lot of bold community changes can be tried out before being fully implemented. And if you’re proposing a big change, that may be the smartest way you can offer it: as a test. Find a place in the city where you can demonstrate the change and its benefits so everyone can see it. If it’s as successful as you expect, you’ll dramatically lower the fear level, and by the time you ask citizens and their leaders to accept the rest (a built-out transit system, a mixed-use development in their neighborhood, a new kind of recycling), it’s less like a leap of faith and more like a hop.

You may know what I’m talking about as a “pilot” or “demonstration” project. But I like to think of it as selling change by the slice, because your job isn’t to prove a point but to get people to buy the entire change. You’re simply starting with a single slice.

How do you create successful pilot projects? There are two things to keep in mind. First, you have to find a place willing to accept the slice. Second, you have to make sure its success is so apparent that opponents are, grudgingly, won over.

Let’s start with the second challenge. The important thing is to be sure that all the elements of the big change are at work in the pilot project. Let’s imagine that you’re trying to show that a bike-rental program would work in your city, and you’re going to start with a single location. What makes a bike-rental program successful? Marketing, management, maintenance, an information system to handle tracking and payments . . . and a dozen other things. All those elements have to be in place for the pilot to succeed and, therefore, convince citizens and leaders to expand it citywide. So approach the pilot with as much planning and design as you would a citywide program. Don’t think you can place a bunch of bikes around a neighborhood and expect it to convince skeptics.

Another thing about successful pilots is that they have to . . . well, succeed. That means testing in a place where success is most likely. In fact, that’s how most city bike-rental programs have proceeded. They’ve started in neighborhoods where the young and hip live and work, because these are the early adopters of urban cycling. Once people in other parts of the city see so many people on rental bikes (riding safely and with no loss in dignity), they’re open to trying it themselves. Think of it as the “iPhone strategy”: If the cool kids like it, others will come around.

And that brings me back to the first challenge: How do you convince a portion of the city to accept that first slice of change? Well, as I’ve indicated, it’s best to start among the persuadable, the neighborhoods that are most open to this particular change. It’s critical, too, that you go to the neighborhood early on and talk with its leaders. Make them your collaborators in designing the project.

Finally, if you can, you may want to present the pilot project as a competition. Have several neighborhoods in mind and let it be known that the one that does something concrete—raises money, finds land, creates a viable plan—will be the winner.

I know this sounds implausible. Change usually creates resistance. Why would neighborhoods compete to do things other places oppose? Because of a quirk of human nature. Present us with a situation that appears to require sacrifice, and we fight it. But present us with a situation that feels like a competition and ends with something that looks like a reward, and we fight for it.

Actually, you know how this works. Think back to that book you read as a child. The one that started out with a boy who got others to paint a fence and pay him for the privilege. Tom Sawyer did it by offering the work as an honor to be won. Surprisingly, change can sometimes be made like that as well.

Photo by Mag3737 licensed under Creative Commons.

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

The Realistic But Hopeful Place

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There are times when cities and organizations face a kind of abyss, when things they had counted on suddenly don’t work anymore. For a city, it might be when a major local industry shuts down. For an organization, it could be when its primary service is no longer valued. What usually follows (after a period of anger, recrimination, and denial) is an avalanche of ideas and advice about setting things right.

You can imagine how these ideas fly in from all directions: Let’s be a tourism city, or a high-tech center, or a retirement community—or all three. If it’s an organization, let’s try our old mission in a new way, let’s try an entirely new mission, or let’s try a bunch of missions and see which works out.

One thing seems clear in moments like these: You must focus your efforts. But on what? How do you decide which path to take when the past is no longer a reliable guide?

My advice is to search for a “realistic but hopeful place,” a place where ambition, success, and demand overlap. You find these places in the answers to three questions:

  • What do we want to do?
  • What are we good at?
  • What does the world want or need?

If answered honestly, these simple questions will take you into a deep analysis of your community or organization and a focused look at the world. Be careful, though, to ask them in the right order.

The first question, “what do we want to do?” requires that you talk to as many people as possible who know and care about the city or organization. You can do this in person or in groups. (I advise both; start with in-person interviews with a cross section of respected leaders, then convene groups. The interviews will give you some starting points for the group discussions.) What you’re searching for is not so much strategic advice (that is, exactly what we should do) as insight into what motivates people. A good way of getting to it is to ask: “Given that we’re going to make major changes, what is the best that that our organization (or city) can be?” Consider it a quick form of visioning.

The second question brings some specificity to the vision by forcing leaders to look for current successes, however modest they may seem. Some research will help. If you’re concerned about a city’s economy, look for local employment sectors that are growing, especially among businesses that export goods and services (that is, that sell things to people elsewhere). If you’re concerned about an organization, comb through the financial statements and talk with employees: Are there things your organization is doing, perhaps as a sideline, that people are demanding more of?

Just by answering these two questions, you can usually see some possibilities. Let’s say your city has traditionally been an auto manufacturing center. When you talk with people, their hearts are still in making things. (“We’re still a great manufacturing town, and we ought to be the best one in the state.”) As you look around, though, you don’t see many big companies that are growing, only a handful of small ones, a few of which make high-quality bicycles. Could that be a growth industry for your city?

It works the same way for organizations. Let’s say you’re on the board of a human-services nonprofit that, because of a change in reimbursements, is threatened. The first thing you want to know is, do others (board members, staff, and those the organization has worked with over the years) want it to continue in this field? Or is there something else they’d rather the organization do? Second: Are you already doing something, perhaps in a small way, for which demand is growing?

The third question then takes a hard look at the bright spots. Will the world want or need high-quality bicycles in the future? Will your organization’s sideline services be valued in the years ahead? Be careful not to focus too much on present demand. If people in your city spent generations making cars, bicycles will seem inconsequential. If the organization provided health-care services with reimbursements in the millions, then providing services for thousands of dollars will seem like small potatoes. The thing to focus on is growth, not current demand.

And let’s be realistic. If you are fighting for your city’s or your organization’s life, the choices are bound to be difficult. Whatever you do (including doing nothing) will involve wrenching changes. The question is, at the end of those changes, will you be in a realistic but hopeful place . . . or still in crisis?

Asking what you want to do, what you’re already good at, and what the world wants will help point out that place.

Footnote: Knowing the direction and reaching the destination are, obviously, different things. Discovering the hopeful place is an important first step, but that’s when the real work begins. How does a city help a small but promising industry to grow faster? How do you turn an organization’s sideline into its primary service? What do you do with all the infrastructure and processes that have grown up around the things that are ending? These are the hard choices of strategic planning. But it starts with hope and a dose of reality.

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

Like/Unlike

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Thinking is hard work, and if we had to think our way through every thing we did, we couldn’t keep up. That’s why we use mental shortcuts, which come in two forms: Framing for making sense of things and models that give us strategies for action.

Most of the time, these things work so well that we hardly notice them. We see something new (merchants complain about teenagers loitering near their stores), we frame it (public safety threat) and know what to do (send in the cops to warn the teens and, if that doesn’t work, write tickets). But what if the usual models don’t work or if the thing that pops up doesn’t appear to fit any previous frames? That’s when it’s time for something I call “Like/Unlike.”

To understand why this is helpful, you have to know how the shortcuts work together. The key step is the framing, which is a fancy way of saying we’ve put something into a category (teens loitering = public safety threat). The point of putting things into categories is to limit our options for response. There’s nothing wrong with that—it gives us a manageable list of actions to take—and as long as we put things in the right categories, these actions should work. Mind the caution: As long as we put things in the right categories.

If you look around, you can see this framing process at work in cities. One of my favorites is the dilemma posed by food trucks for city regulators and health inspectors. Are food trucks more like restaurants or hot dog carts? If you put them in the hot dog cart frame, then you should regulate where they operate but not worry too much about health inspections. If you put them in the restaurant frame, then you shouldn’t say much about where they operate but you should be diligent about health inspections. (My suggestion: Consider them a third category with their own set of regulations.)

The key is to pause before applying the frame. And Like/Unlike will help with that. It’s a simple way of checking your assumptions. You can do it through a quick mental checklist or you can pull together a group and do it more formally.

Either way, it involves listing attributes and categories, then asking whether the attributes fall into any of the categories. In the food truck example, food trucks are like hot dog carts in that they do business on public rights of way (which raises concerns about location) but like restaurants in that they prepare food in non-standard ways (which raises concerns about public health).

If you have enough attributes and categories, you can make a grid and do check marks. When you’ve finished, you should be able to stand back and see if the evidence points toward an obvious category (and resulting set of actions) or if you should approach the problem as something entirely new. (Don’t be too surprised if you find that you need more information. After all, why are those teenagers standing on that corner?)

Again, the key is the pause. The best leaders are those who are thoughtful, who don’t rush to judgment, who see dimensions to problems that others don’t. The thoughtfulness doesn’t paralyze good leaders. They understand full well the need for action, but they want to be sure the analysis that drives the actions is as accurate as possible.

And what makes it accurate is putting things in the right categories from the start. Like/Unlike will help.

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

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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You can find Otis White’s urban issues updates by searching on the Mastodon social media site for @otiswhite@urbanists.social.