Drip-drip-drip theory

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.

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.

Enter the Champion

March 6, 2010 By Otis White

It won’t come as a surprise to many leaders, but change is hard. And the greater the change—the greater the shift in thinking or habits—the harder it is. The wonder is, given the difficulty, that people ever change their minds on important things.

But they do. My theory, which I call the drip-drip-drip theory, is that it begins with doubts—things that can’t be easily reconciled with a person’s present views. As the doubts mount (drip, drip, drip), the person struggles more and more to reconcile them, until suddenly she shifts, sometimes reversing long-held beliefs. This is how Democrats become Republicans and vice versa. The declaration (“I’ll never vote for another Democrat!”) comes overnight, but it’s usually preceded by a steady stream of doubts (drip, drip, drip).

But there are things that can help people take that final step in accepting a new idea. One of the most effective is the entry of a champion—a respected person who has accepted the new idea and can vouch that it is reasonable and worthy of support.

Two notes in thinking about champions: First, the champion need not be an individual; it can be a group of respected leaders. Example: In 2007, business leaders in Florida’s Tampa-St. Petersburg area announced it was time to develop a regional light-rail transit system. This wasn’t a new idea, but it wasn’t considered seriously until the business leaders weighed in. (In surprisingly short order, the Florida Legislature passed enabling legislation and planning began on the system.)

Second, timing is everything. Champions are second-stage leaders who enter when an idea is gaining viability. Their role is to move the idea from fringe to mainstream. Enter the discussion too soon, and they lose credibility; too late and they’re seen as irrelevant.

So who are the best champions? Really, there are only two criteria: That they be well known and credible. They could be elected officials, corporate CEOs or former leaders who remain known and respected.

Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about champions is to look at one we’re all familiar with, former Vice President Al Gore and his role in the climate change debate. Believe it or not, Gore didn’t discover that earth’s climate was changing; it just seems that way. By 2006 when his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, scientists had been talking about climate change for decades. (Gore said he learned about it in college in the 1960s.) But because of Gore’s familiarity and credibility, he was able almost overnight to shift the discussion from classrooms and laboratories to dinner tables and legislative chambers.

Gore gave the climate change debate a human face. That makes some in the environmental community uncomfortable; they think Gore is too identified with their cause. (How often do people say sarcastically during a cold snap, “Hey, Al Gore, is it cold enough for you?”) But that instant identification illustrates why champions are so important. Activists understand the complicated ideas they are advancing; most people don’t. They rely on people they respect to assure them that the ideas are sound, that the sacrifices are worthwhile. Few of us can explain the physics behind climate change, but we believe Al Gore understands it and that gives us greater faith—or higher blood pressure, depending on what you think of him.

There’s another role that champions can play, and that is defending the ideas when they come under attack. You can see Al Gore playing this role, too. When opponents attacked the credibility of climate change scientists not long ago, Gore weighed in with an op-ed article in the New York Times refocusing the discussion on the overwhelming scientific consensus behind climate change. In the long march of ideas in your community, there will be opportunities for champions to play both roles: vouching for new ways of thinking and new courses of action—and defending the ideas when they run into trouble.

Photo by Recylebank licensed under Creative Commons.

How Activists Change Minds

February 24, 2010 By Otis White

Community leaders come in many types. Let me focus on one type: the activist whose work is that of changing minds. I recently ran across a great example of one of these mind-changing activists, Fran Lee.

Who? Perhaps you know Lee’s legacy: New York City’s pooper-scooper law. The law, passed in 1978, requires dog owners to pick up their pet’s waste (at first, people did so with a long-handled contraption known as a “pooper-scooper”). Today, many cities have laws requiring owners to pick up their pets’ waste, but this was a radical—even laughable—notion in the 1970s. I know. I lived in New York in the early 1970s when the only instructions for pet owners were signs that said “curb your dog.” That meant steering them to the curb to relieve themselves, so the street sweepers could dispose of it. (Many missed those instructions, as I quickly learned.)

Enter Fran Lee, a white-haired consumer activist, one-time actress, occasional TV consumer reporter and longtime community scold, who died at age 99 on Feb. 13, 2010. As the New York Times said in its obituary, her passion was health and safety issues. Her son said she collected medical journals that doctors threw out, so she could read up on things like “spider bites, ticks, all sorts of diseases.”

And that’s what got her interested in dog waste, her obit says.

At the behest of a New York doctor, Ms. Lee took up the cause of dog waste. In the early ’70s she founded Children Before Dogs, a group whose aim was the elimination of all such waste from city streets. As she explained often in interviews, Toxocara canis, a tiny roundworm found in dog feces, poses health risks, especially to children. At its most severe, it can cause blindness.

Who could have imagined that, in five or six years’ time, Fran Lee could change so many minds about a problem so commonplace that most people just shrugged and watched their step? How did she do it? Let me suggest some ways: By doing her homework (all those medical journals), vividly portraying the problem (blindness! in children!), commanding attention (she knew the media and she knew how to perform in front of cameras). But most of Lee’s success, I would bet, was simple persistence.

And here’s where I’ll offer a theory of how minds are changed: the drip-drip-drip theory. People give up familiar ways of thinking reluctantly, and if you want people to change their minds, you need to be in their faces constantly, reminding them of the problem (drip), pointing to the facts (drip), demanding action (drip). If you’re good at it and a little lucky, at last the mental dam breaks, and people make the shift from one position (what can you do?) to another (dog owners ought to clean up after their pets!).

And that’s where people like Fran Lee come in. She didn’t mind being a pain, which all good activists must be (the Times described her as “a force of nature, simultaneously encapsulating Ralph Nader, a favorite Jewish grandmother and a foghorn”). And she had a passion for unlikely causes that, by sheer persistence, she could make others’ causes as well.

Photo by mag3737 licensed under Creative Commons.

The Coordinated Swarm

Never, Never, Never Give Up

Enter the Champion

How Activists Change Minds

About Otis White

The Great Project

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