Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

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What Makes a Solution Workable?

October 21, 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.

At the end of the discussion phase, the guiding coalition settles on a workable solution. But what makes solution workable? And how will you know when the group finds one?

Actually, these are good questions for the guiding coalition. Ask members as they begin their work to say how they want to judge the solutions they’re about to consider. Write down the criteria they suggest, combine them into a small set of standards and hand them back to the group at your next meeting.

This may seem a little touchy-feely but it’s actually strategic. If you can get the group to set criteria early on, you’ll be able to steer it away from inadequate solutions (because they don’t meet the criteria) and free it from dead-end discussions (by reminding members of what they’re looking for). It will also help convince members when it comes time to dig deeper. If none of the alternatives they’re considering meets the criteria they’ve set, it’s time to expand the search for answers.

So, in every way, it’s better if the coalition sets its own standards. Still, you may want to think beforehand about what makes a solution . . . well, workable. Here are some starter ideas.

  • A workable solution answers the need. It’s surprising how often groups that are deep into the details forget why they started. As a leader, you can contribute to the coalition’s work simply by asking, “Does this really solve the problem?”
  • A workable solution can win the support of decision makers and the citizens—with hard work. Your “market test” discussions along the way will gauge this, but in the end it’s a judgment call: Do the members think they can gain enough support to win approval?
  • A workable solution is practical and sustainable. There are a number of tests here: Is the solution financially feasible? Will it attract the human resources (volunteers, staff, etc.) it will need? Can it maintain its political and popular support in years to come? If the problem grows or shrinks, is it scalable? You don’t need to think of every detail (that will come during the planning phase), but you do need a general idea of how the solution will sustain itself in the long haul.
Workable solution

When you put the criteria together, as in a Venn diagram, you’ll find the solution in the area where they overlap.

But how will you know that you’ve found the right answer? This is where the market tests will pay off. By talking with people outside the coalition about where the group is headed, you’ll learn quickly if the solution can generate the support it will need. And you can ask about the other criteria as well: Does it answer the need? Is it practical and sustainable?

When talking with others, don’t be put off by resistance. Resistance indicates that someone is taking your ideas seriously. In fact, if you don’t run into any, you should treat it as a warning that your coalition isn’t offering up much change. The question, then, isn’t whether there will be obstacles—there will be—but whether you can overcome them.

If you do all of this—define the criteria early on, search for new answers if the initial ones don’t meet your standards, judge alternatives rigorously, test your tentative ideas with decision makers and citizens, and know how you’ll deal with obstacles—you can rest easy. The guiding coalition’s chances of choosing the right solution are very high.

Photo by GotCredit.com 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.

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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.