Luck

How Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities

October 18, 2017 By Otis White

On a Sunday morning a few weeks from now, the 47th running of the New York Marathon will begin on Staten Island as 50,000 runners and wheelchair athletes thunder over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. They’ll loop through Bay Ridge and into Williamsburg, then cross into Queens like an invading army. They’ll begin thinning out in Long Island City before heading into Manhattan across the high-arching Queensboro Bridge (the heartbreak hill of New York marathoners).

In Manhattan they’ll turn right and head north until they reach the Willis Avenue Bridge and cross into the Bronx, where they’ll basically make a U-turn back to Manhattan. The rest of the 26.2-mile run will be, comparatively speaking, a breeze, through Harlem, into the Upper East Side, with a triumphant finish in Central Park. The world’s best runners will finish in under two and a half hours. Mere mortals will take a while longer.

It’s an amazing spectacle. And if you’re lucky enough to see it (or better yet, participate in it), you may wonder: Where did the inspired idea of running a marathon through five boroughs and all these neighborhoods come from? And what does it tell us about how things like this happen in cities?

Answer: It came from a meeting in 1975, where two people found a way of connecting their entirely different needs in a way that created not just a common solution but a sensation. The central figures were Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, and Fred Lebow, head of the New York Road Runners.

The two could not have been more different. Sutton was a polished lawyer and politician. Lebow was a Romanian refugee who made money in New York’s garment district before falling in love with long-distance running. Sutton knew power; Lebow knew showmanship. In short, they were the odd couple.

Their needs, too, were completely different. During one of New York’s worst years ever, Sutton was looking to change the narrative about his city, to give it something hopeful in the Bicentennial year of 1976. (He also hoped to become New York’s first black mayor.) Lebow wanted something to distinguish New York’s marathon from the much older and better known Boston Marathon. At the time, New York’s race was run entirely inside Central Park, with runners dodging cyclists and families pushing strollers.

What brought them together was a misunderstanding. Lebow and others were talking about running the marathon in the streets (as Boston’s was). By the time the idea reached Sutton, it had somehow become a race through every one of New York’s boroughs. Sutton was intrigued by the idea; Lebow, once he heard what was on the table, was horrified. (The cost, the logistics, the likelihood that something would go wrong . . . this was a crazy idea.)

And here’s where the magic happened. Once they sat down and started talking, the two men found answers to every objection. And more: They found greatness in the idea. This wasn’t just a partial answer to New York’s image problems or a way to make the New York Marathon distinctive. This was a way of creating a spectacle that could rival 1945’s V-J celebrations in Times Square . . . and, if successful, could be held every year.

Their relationship held Sutton and Lebow together as they worked through the security, logistics, organizational, and cost issues. But the opportunity of a great civic spectacle became their driving force.

If anything, the New York Marathon has grown beyond anything Sutton and Lebow could have imagined: it’s a showcase of great runners (and tens of thousands of average ones) and great urban neighborhoods, an economic and tourism boost for the city, an irresistible draw for the news media, and a civic celebration. But it also is an illustration of how legendary civic projects come about: when odd-couple leaders find ways of connecting their needs and creating solutions that become greater than the problems they began with. You see it in the origins of Atlanta’s Beltline project and the reinvention of Denver’s Union Station.

There is no way to plan for these things. Having an open door and lots of relationships helps. So does having a creative mind that can connect needs in creating solutions. But luck plays a role. How else can you account for the fact that, had Percy Sutton not misunderstood Fred Lebow’s original idea, we would not today have one of the world’s greatest athletic events and urban celebrations?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Peter Miller licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

August 5, 2014 By Otis White

My aim in these postings is to help you, as a reporter or blogger, understand local government and avoid some of the problems I had as a city hall reporter. As I said in the introduction, I never truly “got” local government when I covered city hall. I kept looking for what I’d learned in college political science classes—that government decision making was about interests clashing over public policy. I was disappointed to find city councils focused instead on things that seemed smaller and less interesting: arbitrating zoning disputes, moving small amounts of money among city departments, listening to neighborhood complaints, voting on construction projects. Where were the interest groups, I wondered, the lobbyists, the committee hearings, the position papers, the public policies?

It wasn’t until much later that I understood local governments weren’t smaller versions of federal and state governments; they were focused on something different—not public policy but people and places, how these elements interact, and how they could be made to interact better. Land use, I learned, was the central concern of city and county governments, and it is local governments’ ability to place infrastructure and regulate land uses (not only on public streets and spaces but private property) that gives them power and importance.

A city council’s debate, then, about locating a civic center isn’t a boring discussion about another construction project—it’s a bet on where and how the city will grow. Guess right, and the area around it could be transformed. Guess wrong, and it could be a drain on government revenues and a huge missed opportunity.

And you can go down the list: Where transit stops are placed, sidewalks built, parks located, schools situated; whether to build a performing arts center, start a bike-sharing program, or help the local college expand; how to regulate food trucks and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft; whether to give economic development incentives to businesses or help a small-business incubator get off the ground. These decisions don’t look like much close up, but collectively they add up to a vision of the city, with each a step toward that vision.

One of your most important jobs as city hall reporter, then, should be to figure out the vision. If your city has been through a full-scale planning process recently, this may be easy. Many will know the city’s intended destination and how it aims to get there. Your task is to put these things into words and explain what they mean, why they are important, and what alternative visions were considered.

If the city hasn’t been through a visioning process or comprehensive planning effort, the vision could be known only to a few. So your first task is to piece together the vision by interviewing those with a say in city decisions and comparing it with the decisions they’ve made and the plans that guide them. (Hint: Talk to the city planning director and the local chamber of commerce president before interviewing the mayor and council members.)

It’s possible, of course, that there is no broadly shared vision, that the city council is feeling its way through important decisions. But trust me on this: Having no direction doesn’t mean the city isn’t going somewhere. It just isn’t going there by design. In these cases, your job is to see where the drift is taking the city, tell your readers what that place is likely to be, and ask leaders if they’re comfortable with the destination.

All of this brings up some questions: What does a vision look like? How would you know if your city is achieving it? And if the city is just drifting along, how can you see where it’s headed?

Actually, it’s pretty simple. Look at the demographics.

Go back to the central issue for cities: People and places, how they interact, and how they can be made to interact better. The tools that a city has are the “places” part of that statement—how it develops public places, regulates private ones, and serves all with infrastructure. The results are the people and what they do with those places. Remember the famous Watergate adage, “follow the money”? If you want to know where your city is headed, follow the demographics.

A vision, then, is an effort to picture who will live in, work in, and visit your city in the future, what they will do for entertainment, how they will relate to one another and the city’s physical assets, how they will move around, and what impressions newcomers will form. And behind the vision should be a plan: In order to make this ideal future become a reality, here are the things we must do.

Describing the vision is important, but you need to know more. Is the vision obtainable? Can the city truly attract those it wants and needs in order to be successful? To answer this, you’ll have to take a deep dive into demographics, starting with where the city is today and how it is changing.

Here are some questions to begin with: Who lives in your city by age, income, educational attainment, and ethnicity? How are these numbers changing over, say, the last 10 years? How do these changes compare with cities of similar size and type? How do they compare with nearby jurisdictions, such as suburbs? (You can find these things from U.S. Census data but call your regional planning agency. It may have additional data and even projections.)

Now drill down a bit: Where in your city are the greatest changes taking place today? If the city is investing in some areas or services (such as transit), how is that affecting the demographics in those neighborhoods? (Again, look not just at population numbers in those tracts but age, income, and education.)

All of this will give you some idea of how realistic your city’s vision is. If the city is aging rapidly and wants to attract more young people and you can’t find a single neighborhood where young people are replacing older families, it’ll be a tough slog—and you can say so. If, though, there are several neighborhoods that millennials are moving to, then there’s your lede. Interview the newcomers, explain the neighborhood’s attraction, and give readers a glimpse of the future.

As you’re getting used to demographics, don’t forget that cities serve more than residents. They’re also centers for work, entertainment, and tourism. Employee demographics aren’t as easily obtained as residential demographics, but governments do track the types of jobs being created as well as the number. I suggest starting with a federal database called County Business Patterns. Be patient: You’ll have to immerse yourself in things like NAICS codes and learn some basic spreadsheet techniques, but pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out how employment is changing in your city. And the same guidelines apply: If your city wants to be a center of technology and can’t show any growth in that area, then you can be properly skeptical.

Tourism and entertainment statistics will be harder still to come by; they’re kept locally and some are sketchy. But it’s worth the effort to learn who comes to your city and for what purposes. You may, for instance, be able to track restaurant sales figures over time, which will tell you whether city efforts to build an entertainment economy are working. If your city has invested in a convention center, the statistics on its use should be revealing.

Armed with a little curiosity and a few spreadsheet skills, then, you’ll quickly master the changing demographics of your city and turn out some great stories. But remember: You’re a city hall reporter, so your aim isn’t just to report what’s happening but to compare the government’s intentions and actions to the results. If there’s a vision, is it obtainable? If the city is drifting, where is it headed? If the city is making investments, are they working? Demographics will give you the answers.

Three cautions about fairness. First, be aware of the lag effect. Depending on economic conditions, a city can wait years after opening a transit station before developers start building transit-oriented buildings, and even more time before it’s reflected in the population changes. Ask independent experts, like academics and consultants, how long the lag should be.

Be aware too that government census reports are backward looking. They can tell you what happened but not what’s happening right now or what is yet to come. That was a big reason so many were surprised by the great urban turnaround of the 1990s. It had been underway for years before the 2000 Census awoke us to it. So if the demographics don’t reflect what you’re seeing in the neighborhoods, it may be because no one has collected the statistics or run the numbers yet.

Second, luck and circumstance play bigger roles in cities than we sometimes acknowledge. Local governments can do all the right things and yet see little return. Or they can do only a little and see huge changes. Williston, North Dakota, for example, was a sleepy little prairie town for most of its history. Then oil was discovered, its population doubled, and rents soared to levels approaching those in Manhattan. How much credit does the city government deserve for Williston’s growth? Probably not much. In the opposite way, we ought to give some credit to cities like Cleveland that have worked mightily to make themselves more appealing. Despite progress (it was named the site of the 2016 Republican National Convention and some of its neighborhoods are reviving) Cleveland hasn’t stemmed its population losses yet. Is it fair, then, to compare Cleveland to fast-growing cities like Miami or Houston—or would it be fairer to compare it to other cities trying to reverse a growth spiral? I think the latter is fairer.

Third, be smart as well as fair with demographics on ethnicity and income. These are politically sensitive subjects—for good reason. All cities that are successful over the long haul are diverse ones. So don’t let your reporting be an excuse for excluding some, as the city seeks others.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Corey Templeton licensed under Creative Commons.

Decision Phase: Focused Persuasion

December 31, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

We’re on the final leg of our community change process. This is the “decision phase”—although, to be completely accurate, perhaps we should have called it the “decisions phase.” That’s because power is widely dispersed in American cities among levels of government (federal, state, local), types of government (city councils, school boards, authorities, agencies and courts), and individuals. And if you’re involved in major change, you’ll probably need a number of governments and agencies (and maybe a group of nonprofits and other funders) to say yes to your project.

Before getting to the decision phase, though, let’s review a few things you should have mastered in the previous stage, the planning phase. To begin, you should know precisely who has to approve your project and in what order their approvals should come. As you mapped these decision points, I hope you met with some of the decision makers to hear their advice and concerns. By now, you should also have a well-developed narrative, explaining the needs that your project is responding to, how possible solutions were considered, and why the solution being advanced is the right one.

There’s more: You should have lined up champions to talk about the project to different groups of citizens and decision makers. By this point, you should have mastered the details of your project so well that you and your champions can easily explain to decision makers how your initiative will unfold over time, what it will cost in each stage, and where the money will come from. And I hope you’ve built public support along the way, especially among groups most affected by the changes. With your champions, you should have met these groups, listened to their concerns, and answered them well enough that, if they’re not supporting your project, at least they’re not opposing it.

So what’s left to be done after all this? In a word, persuasion. Persuasion that’s focused on the handful of people who must say yes in order for your project to go forward.

In thinking about persuasion, it’s helpful to think first about decision making itself. How do people make up their minds about important decisions? Well, no two people are alike, but it’s safe to assume that most use a combination of two approaches: some sort of logical, cost-benefit analysis, and an emotional calculation involving intuition.

The funny thing is that it’s often hard to untangle analysis (appeals to the mind) and emotions (appeals to the heart). People who are good at persuasion move easily back and forth between them . . . and people who are being persuaded do, too. They get excited about the possibilities of a change, and a minute later think of a hundred reasons it won’t work. So as you’re persuading people, be ready to move back and forth between analysis and emotion, keeping in mind that some people want more of one, some want more of the other, but all need some of both.

But where do you begin in persuading public officials to say yes to major change? You start in the place where we began the map of community change, with the need—the problem or opportunity that your change process was intended to answer.

The need is a powerful motivating force because, if you are skillful in making it felt, it makes people uncomfortable with the status quo, creating a cost for standing pat. Put another way, it creates a “push” for change. But that’s not all you’ll need to motivate citizens and leaders to act. You need a “pull,” as well, and that is a vivid description of how things will be better once the solution is in place. In other words, a vision. Let’s be clear: A vision is not the same as the solution. It’s how the community will look and work once the solution is in place and the need answered.

Example: In the early 1990s, as organizers were trying to rally Atlantans behind a bid for the 1996 Summer Olympics, they often talked about how the games would change the city for the better. Yes, it would be good for the economy and for Atlanta’s image, they said, but those were short-term benefits. Long term, they said, it would make Atlanta a more international city, leave behind a collection of athletic and community venues, and inspire a generation of local children. Did it do all these things? I’ll leave it for others to decide, but the point is that these weren’t descriptions of the solution (that is, the Olympic games). They were descriptions of how the solution would make the community better, and they pulled people toward supporting the Olympics bid.

The third tool in your persuasion toolkit (after the need and the vision) is the plan itself—how the project will unfold, who will be involved, when it will take place, how the money will be raised, and all the other details. You worked all these things out during the planning phase. In the decision phase, you present them to decision makers.

Two cautions about the details: Different leaders will be interested in different details. Elected officials will be drawn to the political details—who is involved, who was consulted, how different parts of the community will benefit, and so on. Bureaucrats will be drawn to the operational details—how much money is needed and when, who will run things, how it will affect existing organizations, etc. If you talked with these officials during the planning phase, you’ll have a good idea of the sorts of details they’re interested in—and these are the ones you should focus on in making presentations to them.

And here’s the second caution: Don’t bring up details they’re not interested in. If you do, the results are likely to be bad . . . or worse. Bad: They’ll lose sight of your winning argument amid the blizzard of detail. Worse: You’ll leave them so distracted or confused that they’ll just say no. Gene Bedell, a former CEO who writes about persuasion, has a simple rule: In trying to persuade, “talk to people in terms of their interests and needs, not in terms of your interests and needs.” And the only way to do that is to let them talk first, listen carefully to their concerns, and focus your persuasion there.

There are three other rules of persuasion to keep in mind.

First, seeing is believing. If it’s possible to see the change you’re proposing, take decision makers there. I’ve written about New York’s amazing High Line project. One of the lessons that its advocates learned early on was that it was hard to describe what the High Line could be in a meeting at city hall, but it was easy to show it while standing on the old freight line. “It was the only way for others to understand it,” Robert Hammond, one of the High Line’s leaders, wrote. ” . . . You brought them up, you showed it to them, and they would do anything for the High Line after that.”

If you can’t get decision makers to travel, then bring the project to them, with maps, models, or anything else that’s visual. And bring those who would benefit from it. There’s a reason politicians in Washington and in state capitals stand shoulder to shoulder on podiums during press conferences: It’s a visual reminder that their proposals have support. If you can bring a hundred people to a city hall meeting room, all wearing t-shirts or stickers in support of your project, you’ve sent a powerful message.

Second, anticipate inertia—and deal with it. Bedell says a lifetime of selling has convinced him that most people have a basic need for security and predictability, which explains why they resist change even when the status quo is not good. The need for security and predictability is “life’s glue,” he writes. “It causes us to stand pat, go slow, to embrace the tried and true.” Even some who are enthusiastic about change will, on second thought, hesitate. “They may talk pioneer,” he cautions, “but they act settler.”

The best way of dealing with inertia is to make it as easy as possible to say yes. Chip and Dan Heath, who’ve written several books about corporate change, call this “shaping the path.” A good analogy is Amazon’s “1-Click” button. To help customers who were new to online shopping, Amazon made ordering from its website as easy as, well, clicking one button.

In approaching decision makers, think of as many ways as possible to make it easier to say yes. How about arranging for matching funds, bringing in officials from other cities who’ve made the same decision, holding public rallies, and so on? Or you might consider an easy, low-cost first step that, if successful, would draw leaders toward larger changes.

Third, amplify your luck. In my first posting on the change process, I said that “every big idea that succeeds in a community requires some amount of luck.” And what is luck? It’s something outside your control that suddenly makes your efforts easier. You can’t command luck; it is, after all, outside your control. But you can amplify it by calling attention to events that confirm or add momentum to your project.

If your project is about childhood obesity, then, any national report about the health consequences of obesity should be worked into your narrative. If your cause is downtown development and tax assessments show property values are rising faster downtown than elsewhere, you can use that to argue for greater investments. If you’re trying to convince your community to invest in light rail, any spike in gasoline prices should be in your next op-ed article.

This gets to the second part of decision making, the intuitive side. Faced with hard decisions, many people look around for some kind of confirmation. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who has written a book about how people change their minds, calls this “resonance.” Sometimes the resonance is personal. You go along with a change because you feel a connection with the person presenting it. (This is why champions are so important.) But it can be environmental as well. If leaders look around and see events pointing in your direction, it can convince them that your project is inevitable. Don’t miss the opportunity to connect these dots.

Final notes: The end game is about having your changes adopted and implemented. And in all likelihood, that will happen only if you can persuade three constituencies: the public, elected officials, and appointed officials. As I said above, politicians and bureaucrats have different concerns and will be interested in different details in your plan. But so will the citizens, who will be very interested in hearing about the benefits and sacrifices.

Make no mistake, though. You can’t win by fudging the truth, by promising one group that no taxpayer money will be needed while telling another that you’ll need an appropriation. Someone will spot the lie, and you’ll read about it on Twitter and Facebook by day’s end. But while remaining consistent on the need, the vision, and the general plan, you can be sensitive to what people want to know and direct your communications appropriately.

This is a lot of work. Is it worth it? That depends on the change you have in mind . . . and on you. But as the great social psychologist Kurt Lewin once said, you can’t really understand something until you try to change it. By changing your community, you’ll understand the place you live as never before.

Flickr photo by Matt Picio licensed under Creative Commons

A Map of Community Change

August 22, 2011 By Otis White

I have been haunted by a question for the past four years. After my company worked on a visioning project in a community not far from Atlanta, a business leader turned to me and asked, “So what do we do now?”

If I do say so, the year-long visioning project had gone well. More than 800 citizens participated in 12 visioning sessions, collectively generating more than 4,000 ideas and images of what they would like their community to be. Working with a planning group drawn from those who participated in the visioning sessions, we boiled down those ideas into 14 strategic objectives, 27 specific recommendations and 173 action steps. It was the greatest act of citizen engagement and planning the community had ever undertaken, and its sponsors were delighted with the results, which were ambitious, affirming and specific.

So I was happy to go back afterward to talk with one of the sponsors, a business executive with wide community and political experience who had immersed herself in the project. “So what do we do now,” she asked me. “How do we implement these ideas?”

I fumbled for an answer, saying something about creating groups to take charge of the most promising ideas, but I had two thoughts in the back of my mind. The first was that I was in the visioning business, not the implementing business. Thankfully, I didn’t say that. My second thought was one of surprise: You mean even smart and experienced community leaders don’t know how to get things done? Thankfully, I didn’t say that either.

It hit me as I drove back to Atlanta that I needed—and she needed—a theory of community change, one simple enough to fit on a sheet of paper but which fully describes the way complicated and diverse communities make up their minds to do something different—and get it done.

In the years since, I’ve sketched and resketched multiple versions of that theory. I tried first expressing it as a formula, kind of like E=MC². Then I tried doing it as a step-by-step process. (I had been influenced by John Kotter’s eight-step process for corporate change.) Then I tried various ways of drawing flow charts. The problem, I quickly realized, wasn’t in how I represented the process; the problem was that it was hard to capture all the elements of community change and still keep it simple enough to be useful.

At long last, though, I have a version of what I’m calling a “map of community change.” (Click below to see it.) It’s a simplified flow chart (no diamond-shaped boxes indicating decision points, no concurrency symbols). Its value, I hope, is that it will help leaders figure out where they are in their own change efforts and where they need to go next. Which, of course, is why I’m calling it a “map.”

In the next few postings, I’ll explain different parts of the map. For the time being, though, take a look at the three horizontal “phases”—discussion, planning and decision. Community leaders, I think, concentrate too much on the first and third phases (the blue and green areas) and not nearly enough on the gray area in the middle. And it was this area that the business leader was asking about: How do we use an engaged group of citizens to prepare challenging ideas for public acceptance and government action?

Again, I’ll talk about the phases in detail in the coming weeks, but let me offer three general thoughts about the map: First, the most successful mayors, chamber executives and community leaders I’ve ever known carried a map like this around in their heads. They knew how long it took to travel from realizing a need to making a decision (and even longer to implementing the decision), and they knew that most ideas didn’t survive that journey. But for those that did, this was the road they traveled.

Second, the area where ideas succeed or fail is usually in the gray zone, the planning phase. It’s here that advocates assemble the elements of success (which I call, simply, “the plan”) or they don’t. (Bear with me; I’ll explain the elements in future postings.)

Finally, there’s something very big that’s not represented on the map: luck. Communities are conservative places; they don’t accept change readily. Responsibility is diffuse, interests entrenched, and power hard to bring together. And, as Barney Frank, the U.S. representative from Massachusetts, once explained, opponents start with a great advantage over supporters: “It’s easier to get everybody together on ‘no,’ ” he said, “You all have to have the same reason for ‘yes.’ You don’t have to have the same reason for ‘no.’ ”

For that reason, every big idea that succeeds in a community requires some amount of luck: things happening at the right moments to confirm—to the public, elected leaders and bureaucrats—that this is the right decision. I can’t think of how to picture it, but as you look at this map imagine that, at various points, there’s an invisible force at work that helps advocates overcome obstacles. I could probably think up a fancier name, but for the moment let’s just call it “luck.”

This is the first of a series of postings about mapping community change.

Photo by Mark Deckers licensed under Creative Commons.

How Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

Decision Phase: Focused Persuasion

A Map of Community Change

About Otis White

The Great Project

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