Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

The Loneliness of the Courageous Leader

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Of all the things required to be a good leader in a community, here’s the one that is least discussed: courage. One reason is that it sounds so wildly out of proportion. Courage is what soldiers and fire fighters have; it’s not something we normally expect of mayors, council members, city managers, business leaders, and concerned citizens.

But should we? Courage is the mastery of fear in the service of something worthy. Physical courage in facing enemy fire or entering a burning building fits the definition. But so does social courage, which involves facing the disapproval of those we care about. This is the kind of courage that is important to communities.

That’s because, on occasion, we need respected leaders, motivated not by anger or vanity but by love, to tell us things we don’t want to hear. When time proves these leaders right, we have a special place for them in our civic memories. These are the people for whom statues are erected and streets named.

There are times when courageous leaders come forward in groups. Here in Atlanta, it was the 1950s and 1960s, when the city confronted racial segregation and, with great difficulty, defeated it. Some of these leaders became national figures—Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy—while others are remembered mostly in Atlanta: William B. Hartsfield, Ralph McGill, Donald Hollowell, Jacob Rothschild, Eugene Patterson, Ivan Allen, Jr.

Most times, though, courageous leaders step up alone or in twos and threes, which makes their work especially lonely. Where do you see this courage?

One is in the lonely advocate, the person who sees the future more clearly than others and withstands ridicule or censure in pointing it out. The leaders of Atlanta in the 1950s and 1960s were examples. But so was Victor Steinbreuck, an architect who became in the 1960s a clarion voice for saving the buildings that made Seattle special. He became a writer and organizer, but he was also unafraid of leading protest marches. If you’ve enjoyed Pike Place Market, you can thank Victor Steinbreuck. He was instrumental in saving it from the wrecking ball.

Then there’s the opposite of the lonely advocate, the lonely opponent. This is the leader who asks us not to step forward but to step back from some action that is popular and emotionally satisfying but wrong. Take 15 minutes to read the extraordinary story of Greggor Ilagan, the young Hawaiian county council member who could not give into something his most vocal constituents wanted—and you’ll see what I mean.

Finally, there’s the lonely leader, a person who takes on a nightmare issue with no clear solutions because it’s important and no one else is stepping forward. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has done this several times in her remarkable career, including in 2013 in dealing with jail overcrowding in Chicago.

I can’t tell you where the courage of these leaders comes from. Probably from somewhere deep inside. But I can tell you what separates them from the obstinate, for which they are sometimes mistaken.

First, as I’ve already mentioned, courageous leaders act out of love, not egotism. They genuinely want to help their city with a problem that needs solving or help citizens avoid a terrible mistake. And they act reluctantly. Compare this to gadflies and political mavericks. They have no reluctance to stand against the majority; that’s their “brand.” And their actions aren’t expressions of love; they are part of their branding.

Second, the courageous ones are those who’ve studied the issue thoroughly and listened to people respectfully. That, too, is a sign of love. They are not going to put their community through the stress of controversy if it can be avoided.

Finally, time proves the courageous right. This may be a comfort to those who’ve lost their jobs because they stood for the right things, stood against the wrong, or shouldered the burdens the rest of us shirk.

Then again, perhaps these remarkable leaders don’t need comforting. After all, they have courage.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by jridgewayphotography licensed under Creative Commons.

A Better Way of Judging Candidates

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As I write this, America is in the middle of a fever dream over who should be the next president. Every four years, Americans endure an astonishing amount of foolishness from our politicians, and this election has already served up way more than its share. Sorry, I can’t fix America’s crazy electoral system. (Pray for us.) But I do have some experience in making thoughtful decisions about people running for mayor, city council, county commission, school board, and just about any other local elected position.

It involves pulling together a group that cares about local politics, thinking a bit about the offices up for election and what they demand, creating a fair process of evaluating the candidates for these offices, then creatively engaging voters in a conversation about what it takes to be a good officeholder. What the group creates, in effect, are job descriptions for elected officials. And that act alone is a big step forward—for the group and (depending on how effective it is at engaging the citizens) the voters as well. I know. I’ve seen this approach work in two different cities. It might work in your city, too.

I was launched into this sideline in 2001 when the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce asked my help with one of its affiliate organizations, the Committee for a Better Atlanta, whose sole purpose was to evaluate candidates for local elected office. Most of the time, the Committee slumbered. It awakened for a few months every election cycle, interviewed candidates, announced its findings, then went back to sleep. In that period, it worked like a newspaper editorial board or the endorsement committee of a political interest group: sitting down with the candidates, listening to their ideas, asking about things of interest to the group, then announcing who should get the job.

But two things were different in 2001. First, the Metro Atlanta Chamber did not want the Committee for a Better Atlanta to be seen any longer as just another interest group. After all, the chamber represented the region’s entire business community, not just one self-interested industry. And the Committee’s makeup was broader even than the chamber’s, pulling in a number of other business groups. The result was a diverse coalition of organizations concerned about Atlanta’s future, with a particular interest in its economic well-being.

The second difference was the election itself. In 2001, Atlanta was in a crisis. The mayor, Bill Campbell, had been indicted and would, in time, be convicted and sent to prison. The city faced huge financial and infrastructure challenges, much of which did not interest Campbell. The chamber and the Committee’s leaders felt the city could not afford another corrupt or indifferent mayor. They wanted this round of endorsements to make a difference.

So they asked me: Did I have any ideas that could help the Committee with its work? I’ll spare you the details, but the first thing I suggested was that the Committee meet and agree on its purpose and how it wanted to work. The results: It wanted to influence the election, it wanted to evaluate candidates in the fairest way possible, and its members were open to doing things differently.

This was helpful because I thought the three were connected. The best way to influence the election in a positive way, I felt, was to be transparently fair. And the best ways of being fair were to evaluate the candidates in a different way and present the results in a different way.

Wouldn’t it be better, I asked, if the Committee didn’t just announce to voters whom they should vote for but rather began a conversation about what makes good elected officials? One of the Committee’s co-chairs eventually came up with the right analogy: Maybe we could evaluate candidates the way Consumer Reports rates automobiles.

Consumer Reports doesn’t endorse cars. It defines the attributes of a good car (reliability, safety, performance, comfort, fuel economy, and so on), then tells you how each model performed in each category. If you valued reliability above all else, you could compare the models just for that. If performance and comfort were your things, you could look just at those scores. Want to put all the attributes together? Consumer Reports offers an overall score.

If we could bring this approach to judging candidates, we decided, the Committee could accomplish all we were seeking. It could engage voters in thinking about what makes good candidates for local office. It could point them toward the good ones by offering its assessments. But it could do so in a way that would seem fairer, because . . . well, it was fairer. This new approach began by judging everyone by a set of reasonable criteria. If two candidates were close in their qualifications and positions, that would be clear. If a third was woefully inadequate, that would be obvious as well.

This seemed like a breakthrough, but this was actually the easier part of our new approach. We had an innovative form, but what would be its contents? If Consumer Reports thought safety, reliability, comfort, and fuel economy were the elements of a good car, what were the elements of a good candidate? So we went back to the group with this question: What do you value in an office seeker? In other words, if you were writing a job description for mayor and city council members, what would you include?

The answer that emerged was that most members looked for two things: political positions and personal qualities. That is, they wanted elected officials who did the right things (and their positions would tell you what they wanted to do). But they also wanted officeholders who could accomplish what they set out to do and do so in the right ways, which has to do with ability and character.

The positions weren’t that hard to figure out. Given the city’s problems and Campbell’s shortcomings, this group of business people was focused on better city management, infrastructure investments, public safety, and stronger government ethics.

But the personal qualities were more difficult to define. After much discussion, Committee members came up with three attributes:

  • Does the candidate have a vision for the city and a personal vision of what she can accomplish in a four-year term?
  • Does the candidate have a set of experiences and qualifications that could make her effective as an elected official?
  • Could she actually accomplish the things she wants to do? In other words, once in office does she have the ability to implement the vision?

Once we knew the issues and qualities, what remained were mostly logistical questions. Among them:

  • How could we phrase questions so candidates would answer them thoughtfully and candidly? And, specifically, which questions should we ask in person and which could be answered on questionnaires?
  • How should we organize the in-person interviews? Should candidates be rated after each interview, or should the panel wait until all candidates were interviewed and then rate them as a group?
  • What should we do about candidates who couldn’t or wouldn’t appear before the panel?
  • Once the ratings were complete, how should we present the findings to the voters and explain our rating system?

Finally, there was the rating scale, which touched off a lively debate. I thought it should be on a 1-to-10 scale or maybe 1-to-5, but Committee leaders felt strongly it should be a 1-to-100 scale, since that felt more like the grades people remembered from school. So that was that. And if a candidate didn’t show up? He got an N/A, which stands for “not available.”

Microsoft Word - 2001_05_31 Proposed candidate evaluation matrix

How did it look in practice? Before we started the evaluation process, I offered the Committee a mock-up, using my name and the names of three chamber employees. Here’s how it looked.

We held the interviews at a hotel in downtown Atlanta. We did a training session with Committee members before the candidates arrived, including a mock evaluation in which one volunteer answered questions evasively and another completely so members could see the difference. Everyone who was a Committee member (and my recollection is that it was a big group, perhaps 40 or more) sat in on the interviews for mayor and city council president. Then we divided them into panels for the city council races. They filled in their evaluations after all the candidates in a race had been interviewed. For such an unfamiliar approach, it went surprisingly smoothly.

One reason was that we had spent a lot of time thinking about the division of questions between the questionnaires, which candidates filled out in advance, and the interviews. Our criteria was this: If the question might reveal the candidate’s ability to reason logically, we asked it in person. Everything else was asked on the questionnaires.

You could see the difference in two questions we asked about infrastructure. The first was asked on the questionnaire:

In your opinion, what are the three greatest infrastructure problems facing Atlanta over the next four years? Please rank them in terms of expense and urgency. (There was space for three—but not more than three—answers.)

In the interviews, we asked a second infrastructure question:

In the questionnaire, you identified the three greatest infrastructure problems facing Atlanta in the next four years. Taking a look at the one you ranked as most important, please tell us how you would address this infrastructure need—and how you would pay for it.

We knew the Committee for a Better Atlanta was made up of business people who had long experience in looking at resumes and then drilling down in interviews for a job seeker’s problem-solving abilities. So that became our guide: Let background and big ideas be spelled out on the questionnaires and let the “how” parts be explored in person. (Actually, I think this approach would work for almost any group.)

When we were finished with the interviews, which took place over two days, we had the candidate scores and a good story to tell about our process. Then we had to figure out how to present these things to the voters.

Today, this wouldn’t be much of a mystery. You’d create a cool-looking website, with the ability to compare the candidates and explore the issues. You would have a page about the process and how it worked. You might include videos of the interviews, along with the questionnaires and candidates’ answers. You’d have short bios and links to the candidates’ websites. You might have interactive features (build your ideal candidate!) and places for comments and questions. And, of course, you’d have a marketing campaign to catch the voters’ attention.

But this was 2001. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. Netflix wouldn’t start streaming movies for another six years. Many people had access to a slow version of the internet but not everyone. We decided, then, that a booklet was the best way to present the information, something that could be inserted into a newspaper a week before the election. Then we called a press conference on the steps of Atlanta city hall to announce our new approach to rating candidates. (Hey, this was the way things were done in simpler times.)

In the end, did it work? Did the Committee for a Better Atlanta really influence Atlanta’s 2001 elections in a positive way? Oddly enough, the chamber wasn’t as interested in this question as I was. And, in truth, there are limitations to knowing how much impact a single group’s efforts can have on an election.

I tried my hand at answering the question in two ways: First, anecdotally; then by doing a little math. I started by looking at whether there were any surprises in the endorsements. That is, whether the new approach had caused Committee members to look at the candidates in a different way. And I thought it had, at least for the two most high-profile positions, mayor and city council president.

In both cases, the Committee rankings had surprised me. The two who scored highest for mayor and city council president were Shirley Franklin and Cathy Woolard. Both were less familiar to business leaders than their rivals and generally viewed as less business friendly. So something in the process had caused this group to consider the candidates in a more open-minded way. That, I thought, was significant.

Then I looked at who won the election and how the Committee had ranked them. The candidates with the highest rankings for mayor and council president (Franklin and Woolard) had won their races. But what about the council members? As I told the Committee in a post-election analysis: “Congratulations. You now have the city council you wanted.” Of the 15 council districts, nine had contested races. Of those, seven went to the candidates rated highest by the Committee. And the other two districts were won by candidates ranked exceptional (90 on a 1-100 scale) or acceptable (73).

Together with the incumbents who did not have opposition (and, interestingly, they wanted to be rated as well; all of them showed up for interviews), the average score of the city council incumbents who took office in January 2002 was 89 out of 100. So, yes, this was the council the Committee had hoped to elect.

None of this proves causation, of course. I couldn’t say the Committee’s ratings caused a candidate to win her race or her opponent to lose. But it was possible. (Among other things, we knew that the Committee judgments influenced how business groups contributed to candidates.) At the very least, I thought, it reassured one influential group that it would have a much, much better city government than it had endured under Bill Campbell.

So, what has happened to the Committee for a Better Atlanta since 2001? There’s good news and bad. The good: It retained the Consumer Reports-style approach of grading candidates along issues and qualities. So if two rivals are close in their issue positions and abilities, that’s obvious from the ratings. If they’re miles apart, that’s apparent as well.

The bad: It no longer gives much detail about the ratings so you can’t tell where the candidates succeeded and where they came up short. That’s a shame because the ability to drill down on issues and qualities was, I thought, the key to engaging the voters about what makes a good officeholder.

And this conversation, conducted over time, can be more important than any single election. The aim should be to help citizens make consistently good choices in the voting booth. And the way to do that is to apply something we’ve learned in the business world: that it helps if you focus on the job before you consider the candidates. The critical first step in doing that, of course, is to write out a job description. Everything that follows should be about how the candidates measured up to that description. If we leave out the detail, I fear, then we’ve lost the job description.

Footnote: I got a second opportunity to run this experiment in judging candidates a few years later, when a civic group in Memphis (again, made up mostly of business people) contacted me. A critical county commission election was ahead, and the group’s leaders wanted to know if a process similar to the one we used in Atlanta might work in a city even more divided by race, class, and geography.

We went through the same process with the Memphis group (define the issues and qualities, judge the candidates by those standards, then engage the voters). The leaders there even chose a similar name (the Coalition for a Better Memphis). The issues were different, of course, but most of the qualities carried over.

One difference: This was a startup group, so Coalition members began a bit more skeptically than the Atlanta group, which had long practice in working together. But when they saw how deliberate and fair the evaluation process was, they were won over. So were the candidates as they learned about it.

And the results? The scores of the winning candidates in Memphis were even higher than the city council scores had been in Atlanta. So I told the group, in my post-election analysis, repeating what I had told the Committee in Atlanta: Congratulations. You now have the county commission you had hoped for.

And what has happened to the Coalition? I’m happy to report it’s still around and still rating candidates using the system we pioneered. I can’t say how effective it has been in maintaining its conversation with the voters.


Photo by WFIU Public Radio licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities

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A little more than 10 years ago, I read one of the most wonderful—and deeply flawed—books about cities I’ve ever picked up. It was called, “City: Urbanism and Its End.” If you can get your hands on this book, I recommend it. My own copy is coffee-stained, dog-eared, highlighted across its 432-page expanse (not counting notes, bibliography, and index), and marked up with scribblings in the margins. Good luck doing that on your e-reader.

The backstory of the book is fascinating. The author, Douglas W. Rae, was a professor at Yale and chair of its political science department in 1990 when New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s hometown, elected its first African-American mayor. The new mayor asked Rae to be his chief administrative officer, and Rae accepted. This, then, is a Cinderella story in reverse: where the ivory tower professor descends to city hall and finds . . . a god-awful mess. Exactly how awful isn’t explained. (He says the city was in the grips of “its worst fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”) It couldn’t have been much fun because, in less than two years’ time, Rae resigned and went back to Yale to ponder his experience.

The result isn’t a memoir but a dissertation on New Haven’s troubles. And not just troubles in the 1990s but over the past century, beginning in 1910 when, as Rae explains, urbanism was at its peak in New Haven. What followed, in his telling, was a long and more or less steady decline in population, economic vitality, housing stock, civic involvement, political health, and neighborliness. Along the way, some tried to halt the decline (one mayor became a national leader in urban renewal). But in the end the city was overwhelmed.

If this sounds depressing, surprisingly it is not. The book reads like a mystery that opens with a murder. After examining the crime scene, Rae leads us through the victim’s promising early years, through a series of bad decisions mixed with circumstances beyond the poor fellow’s control, and then on to his demise—in search of a good mystery’s two most important questions: Who did this, and why?

Three things help carry the book along. First, as serious academics go, Rae is a good writer. When he drops you into different periods of New Haven’s history, you understand them.

Second, Rae tells his story with a clever structure. It consists of doing what I just said: Dropping you into several periods, starting with New Haven of a century ago, where he introduces you to the mayor, a well-meaning small-business man and civic booster named Frank Rice. Then he skips to the 1950s and 1960s, when New Haven was in steep economic and social decline and, hoping for a revival, elected the visionary Richard C. Lee as mayor. (More on him later.) The remaining chapters are about the succession of . . . OK, let’s be blunt . . . hacks who followed Lee.

Finally, the book is helped along by Rae’s interest in decision making and his sympathy for those making decisions. So while he doesn’t think much of Rice, whose tenure was untroubled in a way no mayor could imagine today, he explains in an evenhanded way why this mayor’s highest priorities were . . . building sidewalks.

Of Dick Lee, who directed a flood of federal money into reshaping New Haven—to disastrous ends—Rae is similarly sympathetic. Given the problems New Haven faced in the early 1960s, who wouldn’t have done the same? In fact, as I read the book, it occurred to me that Lee’s greatest problem might have been his own ambition, intelligence, and political talents. A lesser mayor (say, Frank Rice) might not have found all that federal money and figured out how use it in leveling entire neighborhoods.

As for those who followed, Rae offers a shrug. Urbanism is over. What could any mayor do?

Well.

As I read the “City: Urbanism and Its End” in 2004, its first flaw was as apparent as its subtitle. Urbanism’s end? Somebody forgot to tell the cities.

As Rae was writing, cities were in fact in the middle of a great revival—a reversal of fortunes no one could have foreseen in the brief period Rae was in city hall and apparently he missed on return to the ivory tower. (Well, not entirely. On page 421, he has a small section titled “Another Urbanism?” that hints something may be going on, though he never says what it is.)

But the deeper flaw is sometime I’ve noticed in the years since I first read it. It is Professor Rae’s analysis of how city governments steer their cities. And let me be as sympathetic to him as he was toward New Haven’s mayors. This may be an area where being a political scientist is a liability, not an asset. That’s because political scientists have trouble making sense of local government since they are naturally more attuned to state and federal government. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you try to understand city hall the way you do state capitols and the federal government, you’ll miss the mark. They are fundamentally different creatures.

That may explain Rae’s belief that city governments were always “weak players” in the realm of power who became steadily weaker as urbanism waned. “Focused on the city of 1990,” he wrote, ” . . . the end of urbanism meant the end of thinking about city government as a pivotal and more or less autonomous power system.” And it’s not just city governments that were weak and slow-moving, in Professor Rae’s eyes. So were cities themselves. “Most American cities,” he writes, “are sitting ducks, unable to move out of the way when change comes roaring at them.”

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Given their weakness and slow ways, how could city after city have staged amazing economic, social, and physical revivals in the past 20 or 30 years? How could New York have come from its “Bronx is burning” chaos in the late 1970s to the safe, vibrant, seriously overpriced city we know today? Or San Francisco? Or Minneapolis? Or Seattle? Or Houston? Or even my own city of Atlanta, where neighborhoods that were all but abandoned in the 1980s are filled today with loft apartments, brew pubs, boutique charcuteries, and tattooed hipsters on bikes and motor scooters? In fact, I’ll bet that not far from Professor Rae’s office, there might be signs of urbanism’s comeback even in New Haven.

That’s because urbanism never really ended in America. For a host of reasons, it receded for a while but eventually was revived because we needed it . . . for artistic and economic creativity and even (hello, Yale!) to produce a certain kind of education, one that teaches people to live and work amongst diversity.

And perhaps because he’s wrong about urbanism’s death, Professor Rae is wrong as well about local government and how it works. It isn’t so much a forum for decision making as it is an important part of the assembly line of change in cities. Mayors may help plan great civic projects and city councils certainly have to contribute some of the parts. But they do so with the knowledge that, for anything of consequence to succeed, others in the community must add their parts—including the business community, nonprofits, volunteers, charitable foundations, and neighborhood groups. This collaborative approach isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a unique strength of cities. In fact, that may be why it was such a disaster in the 1960s to give Dick Lee all that federal urban renewal money. It allowed him to stop working with neighborhoods and start working on them. And as it turned out, he didn’t know better than they what they needed.

Having said all that, let me repeat. I like Douglas Rae’s book. In a way unlike any other, it takes you inside city hall at different periods and into the life of a city that has always struggled with great economic, political, and social forces. It helps you understand how different mayors saw the city and why they acted as they did. Finally, Professor Rae makes a convincing case for what cities have lost in the past century, although I would add that there’s much we’ve gained in those years in health, prosperity, and social justice.

But read it with the knowledge that political scientists, even those who’ve spent a while in city hall, have trouble understanding cities. And keep in mind, too, that there’s a missing chapter, the one where New Haven and other cities rediscover urbanism and find incredible new opportunities buried in old streets.

Oh, and please ignore that subtitle.

What Leaders Can Learn from Consumer Reports

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Apple, Inc. is the creator of elegant and ingenious products, and its reputation on Wall Street and with technology geeks and consumers could hardly be better. So when word circulated in blogs that Apple’s latest gadget, the iPhone 4, was dropping calls, the company’s first reaction was to dismiss the complaints as some people not knowing how to hold a cell phone properly. But a week or so later, when a 74-year-old publication called Consumer Reports said it wouldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 to its subscribers because of the signal-loss problem, Apple suddenly came around. It called a press conference to announce a software fix, a free case for iPhone users and a refund for anyone unhappy with the phone. CEO Steve Jobs said he was “stunned and embarrassed” by the Consumer Reports judgment.

There’s something delicious about a high-flying technology company running head first into an earnest, old-fashioned research outfit like Consumer Reports. But it’s also worth asking: How did Consumer Reports come to be so respected by the public and the news media? And can leaders borrow some of that magic for use in their communities?

First, about Consumer Reports: It’s the principal publication of a nonprofit organization called Consumers Union. Consumers Union was founded in 1936 on the belief that average people needed protection from shoddy merchandise and that the best way of determining a product’s quality was to test it using scientific methods. To ensure its credibility, Consumer Reports does not accept advertising and will not allow companies to use its ratings in their ads or commercials. Consumer Reports’ reputation, then, rests on promises to its subscribers: It promises to be on the side of consumers (establishing trust), makes it clear that it cannot be bought (giving it legitimacy) and spells out its testing methodology (showing that its judgments are fair and reliable).

Now, let’s think about communities. Is there anything like Consumer Reports in your city—an institution, individual, organization or process that citizens turn to in sorting out public disputes? Actually, in a few places there are. It might be a highly trusted politician or political body; a newspaper or longtime broadcaster; a respected nonprofit, such as a chamber of commerce or civic league; or maybe even a well regarded civic volunteer. But most communities don’t have any of these. In these places, politicians are just politicians, the chamber is seen as a mouthpiece of the business community, there is no civic league, and the newspaper is dying, irrelevant—or both. If there were any highly regarded civic volunteers, they’ve retired or moved away.

So what can community leaders do to build support for tough decisions in places where no one is trusted? You can follow the Consumer Reports’ formula in creating processes based on its promises of trust, legitimacy, fairness and reliability. One way is to convene a “blue ribbon committee.” You know how this works: A mayor or county commission asks a group of prominent citizens to listen to all sides, consult with experts and arrive at a set of findings and recommendations.

The federal government is particularly fond of blue ribbon committees (or commissions, as they’re sometimes called).  Think of the 9/11 Commission, which looked into the causes of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, and the Warren Commission on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. More recently, President Obama created a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to recommend ways of reducing the federal deficit.

You see blue ribbon committees at the local level, too. A good example is Tampa Bay’s ABC task force, a group of business and community leaders formed to figure out how to keep major league baseball in the region.

The best of these committees follow Consumer Reports’ promises. They start by announcing their purpose and whom they represent in their deliberations, establishing public trust. If they are chosen well, they will represent all sectors of the community, giving the committee legitimacy. (In other words, ensuring that no single faction will get its way.)

The best blue ribbon committees go about their work in ways that are transparently fair and reliable. This is where these committees often stumble: They start out thinking their members’ reputations are so strong that they don’t need to open their meetings to observers, and, sadly, they aren’t. 

This became an issue in Atlanta in 2010 when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution questioned a blue ribbon committee that was looking into whether some public schools altered standardized test scores in order to look better. The newspaper raised concerns about the committee’s members, suggesting they were too close to the school system. But mostly it criticized the process: School system officials were too deeply involved in the committee’s work, the newspaper said. Others defended the panel’s work, accusing the newspaper of judging the committee’s work before it was finished, but the damage was done. If people didn’t like the committee’s report, the newspaper had given them the perfect excuse: It was influenced by the school system and its allies.

Even if you do everything perfectly, you’ll be criticized. After all, this is community work, and criticism comes with the territory. Consumer Reports has been criticized and occasionally sued over the years. It has even been wrong on rare occasions because of mistakes in testing. But the public’s confidence in Consumer Reports’ judgment has remained strong—strong enough to bring companies like Apple to heel—because it never forgets its promises: trust, legitimacy, fairness and reliability.

Never, Never, Never Give Up

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Sam Williams, the president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently in which he talked about Georgia’s remarkable new law allowing regions of the state to plan and tax themselves for transportation improvements. The law addresses a huge problem for the Atlanta area—it is losing its war with congestion, a war with which the rest of the state is unconcerned—and does so in a way that will have major implications as time goes by. 

In one fell swoop, the new law creates practical regionalism in Georgia. Not another planning agency, discussion forum or collaborative nonprofit, but a brand-new taxing authority that forces the Atlanta area’s 10 counties to work together (and other regions of the state, if they choose). If this succeeds, it’s not hard to imagine other regional decisions on taxing and spending being given to this new body, or to similar regional agencies.

To use a Jim Collins term, this was a BHAG for the Atlanta area and its largest chamber of commerce, a “big, hairy, audacious goal.” And it came with big, hairy, audacious obstacles.

Think about it. For this law to be enacted, the state and its political leaders had to cede a share of their authority to plan, tax and spend in one of the most powerful arenas of government, transportation infrastructure.

So how did the chamber, which led the fight, win over the state’s leaders? Well, the inside story is too long and complicated to summarize here, but let me tell you that it took four years to get the Georgia General Assembly and governor on board. And along the way, it had numerous near misses and near deaths. (In the second year that it was before the General Assembly, the regional transportation bill passed one house and came within a few votes of passing the other. The next year, the two houses were so divided over the bill and other things that it never came close to passing. By the beginning of the fourth session, few outside the Metro Atlanta Chamber thought it had a chance of success.)

Which brings us back to the Sam Williams interview. (Note: I’ve known Sam a long time and have done work for the Metro Atlanta Chamber.) Asked whether he had ever wondered during the four years if the General Assembly would pass the regional transportation bill, Williams said:

Well we certainly have been working on it a long, long time, and I was taught by a lot of my mentors in the past to never, never, never give up.

And there lies one of the truths of community leadership: Progress is made by the persistent, those who never, never, never give up. Public policy travels a long arc. We deliberately make change difficult in our communities by spreading power so widely, among elected bodies, appointed officials, authorities, citizen boards, private interests, non-profit groups and on and on. The only way to get things done is to patiently and persistently deal with objections, work around obstacles, tamp down opposition and sign up the permission-givers. (In future postings, I’ll write about this process, which I call “removing the boulders” and “building the wall.”)

What’s odd about this work—the countless meetings, the retelling of the proposal and its benefits over and over, the endless rumor-quashing and infinite adjustments—is that when a major proposal finally succeeds, it’s usually done quickly and sometimes unexpectedly. This is partly because, if you’re persistent, you’ll wear down the opposition and partly because your idea—told and retold so many times—has gradually become familiar to those who first thought it strange and threatening. It’s something I’ve written about before, the drip-drip-drip theory of change. 

Come to think of it, though, maybe there’s a better term, the “never, never, never give up” theory.

Photo by Seongbin Im licensed under Creative Commons.

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.