Strategy – Page 7

How to See Community Problems in Context

August 16, 2011 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do Transformational Ideas Come From?

November 4, 2010 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two other examples of how leaders learn:

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

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

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

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

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

And don’t forget: Ask for business cards!

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

September 30, 2010 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The need for security

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

The need for opportunity

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

The need for connection

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

The need for fairness

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

Cities and Disruptive Change

September 23, 2010 By Otis White

In 1997, a book was published that made sense of the business world—and terrified corporate executives. It was “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, and it answered two questions that CEOs in the 1990s were asking frantically: Why were so many highly regarded corporations losing ground to startup companies? And how could they stop it from happening to their companies?

In his book, Christensen focused on technological change—change so great that it altered the business models in an industry. Sometimes, he wrote, this disruptive change came fast, as when the internet undermined the music industry in a few years’ time. Sometimes it came more slowly, like the decades-long decline of Sears and rise of discount retailers like Target and Wal-Mart.

One thing about disruptive change was clear, Christensen wrote. Big, established companies didn’t handle it well, and the companies that did were mostly smaller and newer.

In this posting, I want to talk about how disruptive change comes to cities—change that alters a city’s growth model. Unlike corporations in the 1990s, the key to how a place manages disruptive change isn’t size—some big cities handle big changes well and many small towns handle them poorly—but rather leadership. And that’s because in communities as in corporations, the way to manage major change is to do things that, to many people’s way of thinking, don’t make sense. For citizens to go along with these things, there must be a high level of trust in city leaders.

But before we talk about cities, let’s go back to “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” The part of the book that terrified executives was Christensen’s discovery that the victims of change were often among the best managed companies—“the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate,” he wrote, “the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute.” Even more frightening, he added, many of these companies had seen the disruptive changes coming, tried their best to accommodate them—and failed.

So what went wrong? In times of disruptive change, Christensen said, executives depended on practices that had served them well in normal times—things like listening attentively to their customers, offering customers a steady stream of new products, and investing in products with the greatest potential returns. In other words, the things they had learned at Harvard Business School.

Problem was, disruptive change wasn’t normal. It didn’t come from a company’s best customers, who were usually happy with the way things were. It began with marginal customers, people who wanted products that were simpler, smaller, cheaper—and far less profitable for manufacturers. These were the people who wanted desktop computers in the early 1980s: hobbyists, early adopters and small companies willing to learn DOS and be their own IT departments. These weren’t the corporate customers that IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. were used to dealing with. IBM tried serving these marginal customers but gave up; DEC never really tried. So the marginal customers (who, of course, became the vast majority of computer buyers in years to come) were handed over to startups like Microsoft, Apple and Dell.

For large corporations, Christensen wrote, the way to manage disruptive change was to do things that almost defied reason. First, they had to devote themselves to identifying and understanding fringe market segments that had the potential of growing fast. Second, they had to supply these marginal customers with cheaper, simpler products, tailored to their needs—even if the profit margins were slim or non-existent and threatened to undercut existing products. Third, they had to create special units to serve these marginal customers. Finally, they had to protect these units from being judged by corporate standards or run according to company rules.

In other words, they had to turn practically every corporate instinct and well-established practice on its head. No wonder so few companies made the transition.

So what does this mean for cities? Well, to begin, there are changes that are every bit as disruptive to cities’ growth models as the technological changes that have swept through business. Here are five:

Natural or man-made calamity: This is easily grasped. New Orleans will never be the city it was before Aug. 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck, and most citizens accept that.

Economic change: This is much harder to see than a natural calamity—and some will deny it’s taking place. Michigan cities, for example, have known for 30 years that the state’s auto industry was in decline, but many have been unsuccessful at developing alternative economic bases.

Demographic change: Same difficulties as economic change: Demographic change is hard to see because it tends to take place slowly, and denial is a common reaction. There’s an additional problem, and that’s bias. Old-timers often don’t like the newcomers and some will oppose any efforts to help them.

Major political change: Cities are particularly vulnerable to political changes at other levels of government. For example, you can date the long decline of California’s local governments (and, for that matter, state government) to the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13, the tax-limitation law that changed the way government services were paid for.

Changes of taste, values or world view: This may be the single hardest disruptive change to recognize and manage because, unlike economic and demographic change, there are no reliable numbers to point to, and unlike calamities or political change there’s no event (tornado, hurricane, new laws, etc.) to mark its beginning. There’s simply a group of people who begin to think about things differently. Example: The Jane Jacobs-inspired movement toward mixed-use neighborhoods.

Surely, these are big changes. But what makes them disruptive? Because they have the potential of changing a city’s growth model—the elements that make a place grow and prosper and support the services that citizens want. The disruptions can be good ones—as in the turnaround that many big cities saw in the late 1990s when young people and empty-nesters returned to urban centers—or bad (see Proposition 13, above). Either way, the change has to be so great that the city grows or pays for public services in a fundamentally different way afterward.

How do places adapt to disruptive change? Christensen offers a good model:

Begin by recognizing changes before they become obvious. Again, this is easy to do in a natural disaster, much harder to do with changes of taste or world view. But I would add that, except for calamities, disruptive change rarely comes suddenly to cities. If a city wanted to adapt to changes of attitude about transit and mixed-use development, for instance, it had a long, long lead time. Jane Jacob’s seminal book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”—the one that inspired New Urbanism in the 1980s—was written in1961.
Don’t try to address disruptive changes using the same processes—or people—your city uses for other types of change. For instance, don’t ask the city’s department of transportation to make the city more walkable if its mission has long been devoted to making it more drivable. Create a new agency or organization to handle walkability issues. Much later, if the DOT has accepted walkability as central to its mission, you might bring it into the department—but be careful.
Don’t measure progress using familiar yardsticks. That’s because you’re investing in the future, not the present. And the future, well, hasn’t happened yet. Transit critics, for example, often point to the millions being poured into light-rail projects and the relatively small numbers riding these new systems. Using that logic, which infrastructure would you have invested in 100 years ago, expensive paved roads used by a few automobiles or cheap dirt roads for the many horses? Again, the question isn’t which is the most efficient investment by today’s standards but which is the wisest investment for the future.
The key terms, in talking to the citizens, are “future” and “investment.” Citizens like leaders who are hard-nosed visionaries—people who can sketch an appealing future, point out the ways of getting there and deliver results. By and large, citizens aren’t blind; they will accept some sacrifice, as long as it leads to a place they want to go. They’ll even put aside some of their prejudices, if they see how it can benefit them in the long run.

But it starts by seeing the changes that are coming and knowing the right responses. And what if you’re not a particularly visionary person? Don’t worry, there are plenty of people in your city who think about the future. Just ask around. Take a few of them to lunch. Look at the city’s demographic and economic indicators. Ask legislators about major changes in politics and law. Read up on how cities elsewhere are changing.

Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to read a book about managing disruptive change. Here’s a good one to start with: “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Photo by Tom Blackwell licensed under Creative Commons.

A Case Study in Small-P Politics

June 10, 2010 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Troy licensed under Creative Commons.

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How to See Community Problems in Context

Where Do Transformational Ideas Come From?

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

Cities and Disruptive Change

A Case Study in Small-P Politics

About Otis White

The Great Project

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