decline of deference

Seven Ways Community Decisions Are Different

September 1, 2010 By Otis White

I am sometimes asked if community decision making is different from other forms of decision making—say, the kinds used in companies or nonprofits. And my short answer is yes.

But I’d like to offer a longer answer, which is that community decision making is different not in one or two ways, but in a number. And because it’s different, it means we need different kinds of leadership in communities, leadership that is far more patient, collaborative and comfortable with ambiguity than we expect in CEOs or executive directors. I think you’ll see why as we move down the list of differences.

One: In most communities, legitimacy for big decisions comes from the bottom up (citizens), not the top down (CEO or board of directors). As a result, everyone expects a voice in community decisions.

In most ways, this is the sign of a healthy community, but it can lead to problems if citizens are asked to make decisions they’re not in a good position to judge. Take, for example, a proposal to start a streetcar system. To know if this is a good idea, you might want to visit Portland, Oregon or other places that have streetcars and see their impact, but not many citizens can do this. They depend, then, on others to visit, ask questions and report back to them—people like newspaper reporters and community leaders. And that would be fine, except for the next way community decision-making is different . . .

Two: There is little deference or ceding of expertise in communities. Many business employees and nonprofit workers are discouraged and cynical. But even corporate cynics will concede that, in some instances, top executives know more than they do and perhaps have good reasons for trying something new. But that’s not the case in many communities, where citizens do not presume that community leaders know better than they do —or even more than they do.

Three: It is much easier to slow or stop things in communities and much harder to get them started. That’s by design. In America, responsibility and power is dispersed among levels of government (local, state, federal) and types of governments (cities, counties, government authorities) and then fought over by independently elected officials (mayor, city council, and maybe a half-dozen others). And all of these parties are governed by legal requirements that serve to make the time line of decision making much longer in communities than in organizations. The result is that even the best decisions move slowly—and sometimes get stopped cold.

Four: It isn’t just the legal responsibility that’s dispersed. Resources are as well. Take almost any big community problem —from improving public safety and maintaining neighborhood parks to creating a more walkable downtown—and you quickly realize that these aren’t government problems alone; they involve multiple interests, from neighborhood associations and youth athletic associations to private property owners, businesses and special interests. All of these interests have resources they could contribute to the solution—if, that is, they agreed with it. As a result, the community decisions must be made collaboratively if they’re going to be effective.

Five: News media coverage of communities is far more extensive than of organizations. Again, this is a healthy thing—except that it exposes the “sloppiness” of decision making far more than in corporations and nonprofits. Don’t get me wrong: Decision making in big companies is sloppy too, with loud debates, false steps and corporate intrigue. But with few exceptions (think about BP’s repeated failed attempts to plug the 2010 Gulf oil spill and its clumsy public relations efforts), the sloppiness isn’t apparent to outsiders. Not so in communities. Fumble a big community decision—by going down one decision-making path and then abruptly changing course—and you’ll read about it in the newspaper and probably lose public support.

Six: Leadership is not as easily defined in communities as in organizations. That’s because community initiatives can come from many places—local governments, business organizations, neighborhood associations, nonprofits or individuals. (As an example, Kansas City is building a light-rail system because a single person got enough signatures on petitions to place the idea on the ballot and the voters passed it—over loud warnings by government and business leaders that light rail wasn’t feasible.) Companies may make poor decisions, but we know who makes them. That’s not always the case in communities.

Seven: In organizations, the measurements of success are clear: profits for corporations and results for nonprofits (the hungry are fed, trees are planted, museum attendance is up, etc.). There are no easy measurements of success in communities. This makes it harder to know whether past decisions succeeded and opens every new decision to long debates about outcomes and benefits.

I don’t mean to suggest that decision making is easy in corporations. I’ve spent enough time around large companies to know how gut-wrenching it is to deal with markets that suddenly collapse, competitors that emerge overnight or technologies that turn your industry upside down. Decision making in companies is fast because it has to be. CEOs would love to have the long time horizons of mayors and county commissions. But they would hate the ambiguity and loath the painstaking process of consensus building.

So when you hear someone say that your city should be run like a business, just say two words: Not possible.

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.

Rereading a Classic About Community Leadership

May 10, 2010 By Otis White

In 1991, I read Alan Ehrenhalt’s brilliant analysis of who runs for public office, “The United States of Ambition.” (Note: Alan is a friend and occasional colleague.) The book begins with a description of candidates of the 1990s and how they were different from candidates in the past, and continues with chapters profiling the changes at the local, state and federal levels, including who runs for president.

When I reread “The United States of Ambition” recently, I was surprised by how much I remembered of Alan’s book—and a critical part I had forgotten.

Here are three most important things I remembered:

Few political analysts spend much time looking at who runs for office, Alan wrote, but a lot could be learned from looking at this “supply side” of politics.
The key change was in what Alan called “the decline of deference” and the rise of “freelance” politicians who represented no one but themselves.
This change in who runs for office, Alan said, resolved an old debate between sociologists and political scientists on who makes decisions for American communities. In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of sociologists studied cities and towns around the country and came to the conclusion that most important decisions were made by a handful of people, the “power structure.” Political scientists did similar studies and found that important decisions were made by shifting coalitions, not cohesive groups. Alan’s answer: The “structuralists” (sociologists) were describing the past, while the “pluralists” (political scientists) were describing the future.

It’s a smart book that’s brilliantly reported and well written. If you like local politics, you’ll be fascinated by Alan’s description of how places like Concord, Calif., Sioux Falls, S.D., Greenville, S.C. and Utica, N.Y. changed, sometimes overnight. At the center of the stories are the politicians. One year, elected officials are people with deep connections to a traditional group of community leaders. Then an election comes along and, bang, the voters put in a group of politicians no one had recruited and few had even heard of before they ran. (You’ll particularly enjoy the story of how in 1974 the voters of Sioux Falls tossed out a longtime mayor who sought and followed advice from a group of business leaders, replacing him with a “shaggy-haired, 27-year-old disc jockey who had run because a listener dared him to on a weekday morning call-in program.”)

The “mutiny of 1974” wasn’t peculiar to Sioux Falls, Alan wrote; it was part of a generational shift away from people who served on school boards, city councils and county commissions out of obligation to the community and toward candidates who ran for office because they loved the game of politics. These new-style politicians, self-motivated and self-sufficient, excel at campaigning.

The skills that work in American politics at this point in history are those of entrepreneurship. At all levels of the political system, from local boards and councils up to and including the presidency, it is unusual for parties to nominate people. People nominate themselves. That is, they offer themselves as candidates, raise money, organize campaigns, create their own publicity, and make decisions in their own behalf. If they are not willing to do that work for themselves, they are not (except in a very few parts of the country) going to find any political party structure to do it for them.

And this is a dramatic break from the past, Alan added:

. . . (T)he successful candidates a generation ago were those who bore the stamp of approval of the town’s informal leadership organization. “When we were kids growing up,” a Sioux Falls businessman in his forties recalls, “everybody knew who would win the elections. The person who had been in Rotary and had been endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce always won.”

These were the things I remembered from my first reading: the decline of deference and the sudden jolting changes as a new, “freelance” type of politician emerged in communities.

What I had forgotten was Alan’s caution that this new style of “unbossed and unbought” politician—which independent-minded Americans tend to like—carried a risk. The risk: That in overthrowing the “power structure” we would settle for no power at all. Here’s how Alan describes the downside of the truly independent political leader:

(P)ower can evaporate. When it breaks loose from those who have held it in concentrated form, as has happened in American politics over the last generation, it does not necessarily change hands. It may be dispersed so broadly that it might as well have disappeared into thin air. And leadership, which ultimately depends upon the existence of power, may disappear along with it.

The irony of pursuing office in the 1990s is that one may reach a position of influence, find no established elite or power structure blocking its exercise, yet discover that it is more difficult than ever to lead.

In the cities he profiled, that’s what he found: Newcomers with “no strings attached” also had no ability to pull strings to get things done. “Unbossed and unbought” sometimes meant unmoored and adrift. ” . . . (T)he mayor who doesn’t owe anybody a thing doesn’t have many tools to govern with either,” Alan wrote. “Candidates nobody sent can be very appealing; leaders nobody sent can be dangerous.”

The result, in city after city, were elected officials with too few connections and little in common to work together.

We have replaced governments that could say yes—and make it stick—with governments that offer a multitude of interests the right to say no. We have elected and empowered a generation of political professionals whose independence and refusal to defer makes concerted action, even when necessary, quite difficult.

I think this is exactly so, and it’s why I believe leadership has become the single most important factor in communities today—because it’s so easy to stop things and so hard to move things forward. We can’t depend on a power structure or elected officials to lead anymore. The first doesn’t exist in most places and the second often can’t deliver. It takes a broader group of people working together, using new skills to lead our cities and towns.

I’ve already talked a little about what those new skills are; we’ll talk more about them in the future. But the need for new leaders and new leadership skills is greater than at any time in my memory. Thanks to Alan Ehrenhalt for telling us why.

Photo of sign by Mark Sardella licensed under Creative Commons.

Seven Ways Community Decisions Are Different

The Skills of Small-P Politics

Rereading a Classic About Community Leadership

About Otis White

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