Building the wall

The Coordinated Swarm

April 24, 2013 By Otis White

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.

Consensus, Power, and the Art of Getting Things Done

June 3, 2011 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Skills of Small-P Politics

June 9, 2010 By Otis White

Not long ago, I wrote about Alan Ehrenhalt’s classic book about local politics, “The United States of Ambition.” In it, Alan, a longtime political journalist, documents the decline of deference, the rise of “freelance” politicians who come to office without deep community connections, and the erosion of traditional community leadership.

Alan is not the only one to notice this erosion. Writing from the other side of the desk, Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and one of the shrewdest political operators around, has also written about the sea change in how communities work. In his 2008 memoir, “Basic Brown,” Brown discussed the decline of what he called the “leadership class” of cities, “a brigade of people of wealth and interest who could be counted upon to support the city, its institutions, and its needs.”

These leaders, Brown said, would respond to almost any appeal that was couched in civic patriotism.

In an afternoon, you could reach a dozen or so people and help a worthy institution get its special fund-raising under way. You really didn’t have to explain very much. You just said, “The museum needs help. Everybody’s pitching in. Will you? And will you call people you know?” They did.

And today?

. . . (T)he people who feel this way are dying away with no one to replace them. It’s not that fortunes are disappearing—we have more billionaires than ever in San Francisco. It’s simply that this kind of local civic spirit is disappearing.

The problem, Brown wrote, was globalism, which has loosened the connections between the wealthy and the places they (or their forebears) made their fortunes. For example, he said,

I used to keep a Rolodex of real estate developers, builders of big apartment houses and office buildings, whom I could call upon for help with civic matters. These guys have almost all disappeared. Very few locals are directly involved in local real estate anymore. They don’t invest in buildings; they invest in global real estate trusts. They’re not San Francisco landlords; they’re market investors.

I, too, have written about the decline of long-term business leaders. In a 2006 op-ed article in the New York Times, I focused on the loss of bankers as local leaders, but I agree with Mayor Brown: It’s more than the banks, it’s most of our local businesses. Globalism may (or may not) be good for us as consumers and business people, but it has made communities much harder to lead.

So what do we do? Well, I don’t think we can reverse globalism. And I think Alan was right that the decline of traditional leadership has left many places with a set of “freelance” politicians whom nobody sent and, in a sense, no one is responsible for. So when you subtract traditional business leaders and deeply connected politicians, it leaves us . . . on our own. And that may be OK.

It means that if communities are going to be led in the future, the leaders will have to be us. You and me. Average people without corporate backing or generations of civic involvement. People who care about their communities and are willing to work to make them better, but can do so only part time because they have day jobs.

But if this is going to work, the part-time leaders will need to learn a few skills. First, they’re going to have to learn how power works and how to accumulate it to do important things. Second, they’re going to have to master the skills of “small-p politics,” how to introduce new ideas, build interest in them, remove obstacles, gain approval from permission givers and drive the ideas forward. This isn’t the “big-p politics” that we associate with campaigns and legislative chambers, the stuff you see on CNN or C-Span. Small-p politics is quieter, more patient, far less glamorous—in other words, it’s grunt work. (In an earlier posting, I called it “removing the boulders” and “building the wall.”)

So while I agree with Alan’s analysis and understand Mayor Brown’s frustration, I think the days of depending on the few to lead us are over, and we need to get on with teaching power and political skills to the many. And, oh, Mr. Mayor, it’s time to trade in that Rolodex for a database.

Photo by Wally Gobetz licensed under Creative Commons.

Never, Never, Never Give Up

May 31, 2010 By Otis White

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.

The Coordinated Swarm

Consensus, Power, and the Art of Getting Things Done

A Case Study in Small-P Politics

The Skills of Small-P Politics

Never, Never, Never Give Up

About Otis White

The Great Project

Follow Us on Mastodon