Otis White

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Selling Change by the Slice

October 23, 2012 By Otis White

One of the hardest things to do in communities is to convince your fellow leaders or citizens to join you in a leap of faith. That is, to accept a major change that, while needed and logical, involves doing something most people are not used to. Look around cities today and you see leaders trying to talk people into taking these leaps: to build light-rail systems, accept greater density in their neighborhoods, turn over parts of busy streets to bike lanes, try new ways of recycling, change school attendance zones, and a hundred other things.

The problem isn’t just that the citizens and their leaders are personally unfamiliar with the change you’re advocating (that’s why it’s a leap of faith), but that often it’s “all or nothing” as well. That is, you can’t build part of a transit system or half of a high-rise condo, and then let people decide if they can live with it. Or can you?

Well, no, not literally. But an awful lot of bold community changes can be tried out before being fully implemented. And if you’re proposing a big change, that may be the smartest way you can offer it: as a test. Find a place in the city where you can demonstrate the change and its benefits so everyone can see it. If it’s as successful as you expect, you’ll dramatically lower the fear level, and by the time you ask citizens and their leaders to accept the rest (a built-out transit system, a mixed-use development in their neighborhood, a new kind of recycling), it’s less like a leap of faith and more like a hop.

You may know what I’m talking about as a “pilot” or “demonstration” project. But I like to think of it as selling change by the slice, because your job isn’t to prove a point but to get people to buy the entire change. You’re simply starting with a single slice.

How do you create successful pilot projects? There are two things to keep in mind. First, you have to find a place willing to accept the slice. Second, you have to make sure its success is so apparent that opponents are, grudgingly, won over.

Let’s start with the second challenge. The important thing is to be sure that all the elements of the big change are at work in the pilot project. Let’s imagine that you’re trying to show that a bike-rental program would work in your city, and you’re going to start with a single location. What makes a bike-rental program successful? Marketing, management, maintenance, an information system to handle tracking and payments . . . and a dozen other things. All those elements have to be in place for the pilot to succeed and, therefore, convince citizens and leaders to expand it citywide. So approach the pilot with as much planning and design as you would a citywide program. Don’t think you can place a bunch of bikes around a neighborhood and expect it to convince skeptics.

Another thing about successful pilots is that they have to . . . well, succeed. That means testing in a place where success is most likely. In fact, that’s how most city bike-rental programs have proceeded. They’ve started in neighborhoods where the young and hip live and work, because these are the early adopters of urban cycling. Once people in other parts of the city see so many people on rental bikes (riding safely and with no loss in dignity), they’re open to trying it themselves. Think of it as the “iPhone strategy”: If the cool kids like it, others will come around.

And that brings me back to the first challenge: How do you convince a portion of the city to accept that first slice of change? Well, as I’ve indicated, it’s best to start among the persuadable, the neighborhoods that are most open to this particular change. It’s critical, too, that you go to the neighborhood early on and talk with its leaders. Make them your collaborators in designing the project.

Finally, if you can, you may want to present the pilot project as a competition. Have several neighborhoods in mind and let it be known that the one that does something concrete—raises money, finds land, creates a viable plan—will be the winner.

I know this sounds implausible. Change usually creates resistance. Why would neighborhoods compete to do things other places oppose? Because of a quirk of human nature. Present us with a situation that appears to require sacrifice, and we fight it. But present us with a situation that feels like a competition and ends with something that looks like a reward, and we fight for it.

Actually, you know how this works. Think back to that book you read as a child. The one that started out with a boy who got others to paint a fence and pay him for the privilege. Tom Sawyer did it by offering the work as an honor to be won. Surprisingly, change can sometimes be made like that as well.

Photo by Mag3737 licensed under Creative Commons.

Why Patience Is a Virtue in Civic Work

April 17, 2012 By Otis White

The Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington State is a marvel of engineering and one of the world’s most successful public projects. It is the single largest producer of electricity in the country and one of the largest concrete structures in the world. It was begun in the depths of the Great Depression as a New Deal project and began producing hydroelectric power—and lots of it—just months before Pearl Harbor. Because it produced so much power so cheaply (it cranks out enough today to electrify the Seattle area twice over), many give it some credit for winning World War II since Seattle needed a huge power source during the war years for airplane production. And get this: It was actually designed and built under budget. In 1933, when the project started, the estimated cost of the dam was $168 million. It was completed for $163 million.

So, if you are looking for a well-conceived, well-designed, well-managed government project, you need go no further than the Grand Coulee Dam. It’s a little surprising, then, to learn that the idea of the Grand Coulee Dam took shape in . . . 1918. It was then that a group of leaders in eastern Washington found the exact spot for a major hydroelectric dam and conceived its purpose and benefits (cheap power and irrigation for the parched countryside) 15 years before construction started and 22 years before it began producing power.

Why? For the reasons any experienced civic leader knows: Great ideas don’t sell themselves; the barriers to change—any change—are high; and sometimes it takes a crisis to motivate decision makers. And, yet, when the right moment comes along, bold ideas seem almost to leap off the shelf. Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933. Immediately, he and his advisers scoured the country for big public-works projects that could be started in a hurry. One of the first they found—and by far the largest—was the Grand Coulee Dam.

This time lag between concept and acceptance (often followed by frenetic action) is so common that economist Milton Friedman once offered some advice to those who despaired about change, especially his fellow conservatives:

There is enormous inertia—a tyranny of the status quo—in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

And it’s not just at the federal level that this lag occurs. Many people know that New York revolutionized police work in the mid-1990s by adopting the “broken windows” theory of social disorder. (Briefly, the theory holds that by strictly enforcing laws against small crimes such as littering, graffiti, turnstile jumping, public urination, and so on, you will head off major crimes. The name comes from the idea that, if a building has one window that’s not repaired, vandals will soon break all the windows.) Here’s the surprise: The theory was published in 1982 and thoroughly discussed at the time. It took 15 years for “broken windows” to get its high-profile test.

In Washington, D.C., there’s a mixed-use development going up on the site of the old Washington Convention Center at New York Avenue and 14th Street. It’s a big project: condos, apartments, offices, shops, and restaurants, packed into 10 acres. Sounds great until you learn that the city has been working on getting something at that site for almost two decades. Most of that time, officials knew they wanted a mixed-use facility—they even chose the developer in 2003—but one delay after another postponed it.

Given this sometimes long and frustrating delay between idea and execution, what should civic leaders do? Five things:

  • Don’t get frustrated. Ideas are often formed in a burst of energy and creativity and then . . . nothing. But simply knowing that the road ahead is likely to be long may help you keep spirits up. If an idea is a great one—if the benefits to the community are obvious—then it will find its moment. Be patient.
  • Keep talking about the idea and refining it. Use this fallow period to prepare your idea and prepare others for your idea by coming up with new ways of illustrating its benefits. If it’s a new museum or a streetcar, how many ways can you help people see the museum and its collection or experience the sensation of moving on rail?
  • Build a committed group of advocates. This is the other thing you can do during the fallow period. The social media allow nearly unlimited ways of keeping the converted in conversation – and converting new people. Use them.
  • Watch for changing circumstances that may allow the “politically impossible” to become the “politically inevitable,” to use Milton Friedman’s words. It could be a crisis, a change of leadership in a key agency or government—or both. And when it happens, bring your new idea and your growing list of supporters to the new leaders’ attention immediately. If FDR had learned about the Grand Coulee Dam idea in 1934 instead of 1933, chances are it would never have been built.
  • Search for a work-around.

The last point bears a little explanation. Sometimes bold new ideas can be presented as, well, not so bold. In fact, even the biggest changes in cities can be offered up as small and safe—if they are presented as experiments. This is how Mayor Michael Bloomberg has remade huge parts of New York, building bike lanes, closing Times Square to traffic, allowing “pop-up” restaurants on city sidewalks, and so on. If he had presented any of these as bold new city policies (which they eventually became), opponents would have killed them.

So how did he do it? He offered them as “pilot projects,” experiments in a small area for the purpose of observation. In part he did this because it allowed the city to do things without going through the cumbersome and delay-prone public review process. But Bloomberg is also an astute observer of human (and political) nature. Had he proposed narrowing hundreds of New York streets for bike lanes, the howls of protest would have drowned out the idea, all of them predicting economic and physical gridlock. But by doing just a few blocks at first, then a few more, then a few more, then a lot more, the mayor and his staff proved that even the busiest New York streets could accommodate cyclists, motorists, and truck drivers—and be more humane for it.

Bloomberg has done this repeatedly over his three terms in office, quietly making small changes that paved the way for big ones. Often, by the time the larger ones are made, controversial changes aren’t controversial any longer. One of his critics, looking at the mayor’s use of pilots to pave the way for change, told the New York Times, “It’s masterful.”

You may be able to offer your change as bite-size pieces, or maybe not. It’s hard, for instance, to build just part of the Grand Coulee Dam and use it as a demonstration project. But whether you offer your great idea as a series of small steps or one long stride, the same advice applies: Be patient.

Photo by Jeff Hanway 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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