Planning – Page 2

Smart Citizen Engagement . . . and Dumb, Dumb, Dumb

March 29, 2012 By Otis White

I am a fan of governments reaching out to citizens for ideas and participation for two reasons. It’s good for government officials to work side by side with citizens, and it’s good for citizens to work side by side with governments. But there are smart ways of doing this, and there are dumb, dumb, dumb ways.

I’ll talk about the smart and the dumb in a moment, but first a few words about why citizen involvement is important. Start with the basics: Citizens know some things better than government officials, and government officials know some things better than citizens. Citizens know things that begin with the word “what”—what the problems are (particularly in their own neighborhoods), what they want their city or neighborhood to be, and what they are personally willing to contribute in time and taxes to make these things happen. In other words, citizens are good at vision and judgment. Government officials are good at the “how” parts—how to deliver the things the citizens want, how to pay for them, and how to be sure things work as planned when they’re in place.

When you put these competencies together, with the citizens taking the lead—but not having exclusive say—in the “what” parts, and government officials taking the lead—but not having exclusive say—in the “how” parts, you get a strong partnership . . . with a little creative tension. The tension comes from not totally ceding either part. On the contrary, it helps if the parties look over each other’s shoulder. Citizens sometimes have great ideas about getting things done. And public officials can often suggest things the citizens ought to be thinking about but, for some reason, aren’t. How do you let one side take the lead without ceding control? You act with respect for what the other party does best, the way you would toward any valued colleague or partner.

Here’s another principle of citizen engagement: The goal shouldn’t be a new set of ideas or goals but a long-term sharing of responsibilities. Alas, that’s not the political reflex. The reflex, upon hearing a complaint or an idea, is to take the problem away from the person who’s complaining. I understand why this happens—many elected officials believe the path to re-election is paved with credit for getting things done, and most appointed officials think it’s important to appear in control—but by taking problems away from people you diminish them and limit a government’s effectiveness. The best way to deal with community problems and opportunities is through partnerships, where everyone does his part: government, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens.

By taking the time to plan and act as partners, two wonderful things happen. First, resources multiply—not just financial resources but human labor and creativity. Second, solutions become virtuous cycles, where each partner’s contribution rewards the others’ efforts, increasing the rewards and making the effort easier with each turn of the cycle.

You see this most clearly in business improvement districts, where landowners tax themselves to make commercial areas safer and more attractive. The virtuous cycle for BIDs works in two ways. As they make improvements, property values rise and revenues to the BID increase, enabling it to do more, which makes property values rise even more . . . and on and on. But the real secret to BIDs isn’t the money they raise and spend on their own. It’s the partnerships they forge with governments. Over time, smart and focused BIDs learn how to ask intelligently for things, and governments like working with them. The money they raise, then, becomes not replacements for government services but enhancements, which helps everybody. The commercial district looks good, citizens are happy, businesses prosper, property owners see their investments rise in value, tax revenues grow for government and the BID, and the cycle goes round and round.

This, then, is the power of partnership, and it ought to be the aim of every government—not to coddle citizens or push them out of the way, but to plan and work with them as respected equals.

OK, then what’s a smart way of doing this? You start by asking citizens what they want, plan the “how” parts together—so citizens learn the cost of public goods and can decide if they truly want them—and then you ask those working alongside you to lend a hand in making them happen.

I have two examples of smart citizen engagement, both from older cities dealing with major crime problems. First is from Philadelphia where Mayor Michael Nutter has created a small agency called PhillyRising. It’s a handful of government workers who are good at talking with citizens and enlisting them as partners. Not long ago, a newspaper reporter sat in on a PhillyRising meeting in a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by crime. The meeting began with a top city official saying something you don’t hear enough from government leaders. “The city doesn’t have all the answers,” he said. “We know you guys,” referring to neighborhood residents, “know the problems in the community better than anybody else.”

And that was pretty much the end of the speeches. For the rest of the meeting, the PhillyRising staff facilitated the 35 or so who came in talking about the neighborhood’s issues—not just the crime problems, but things like neighborhood schools and adult literacy problems—as others took notes on large flip charts. At the end, staffers invited the residents to come back in two weeks to work on plans for changing the things they had identified—with the city playing a supporting role. As the PhillyRising director told the reporter who was there, “The idea behind it is, instead of doing things for people, we’re trying to do things with them and teach them.” Precisely.

The second example is from Detroit, and it’s not about government doing smart things with citizens but citizens doing smart things with government. (Remember, it’s a partnership.) I don’t have to explain much about Detroit’s problems—they begin with a horrifying homicide rate and go from there. But not every part of Detroit suffers equally. There are a few neighborhoods that have kept crime at bay.

How did they do it? By organizing, watching things carefully, and working seamlessly with the police. These aren’t vigilantes. In one of the neighborhoods, North Rosedale, neighborhood volunteers don’t chase criminals; they photograph things that look suspicious and call the cops. They are so close to the police that, as neighborhood watch volunteers start their evening rounds, they check in with a nearby precinct to find out who’s on duty and what to keep an eye on.

As the Detroit Free Press reported, police and other city officials love these smart, organized, involved volunteers. “The cooperative effort that you have shown with the police department has just been super,” a police commander told one of the neighborhood groups at its regular monthly planning meeting with police and city officials last year. “The arrests that are being made are all with interaction with the community. A lot of other communities don’t offer that. It is a big tribute to you, and it’s very much appreciated.” The appreciation is mutual. One of the volunteers told the newspaper: “We believe it is important to work very closely with the police department.”

Let’s pause for a moment and review what’s right about these efforts. They create partnerships, not dependence. In each case, government knows its limitations. It appreciates what the citizens can do and stands ready to help but not direct. In one case, the government is reaching out to the citizens, in the other the citizens are reaching out to the government. The results of both will be smarter government (specifically, more effective policing) and smarter, more involved citizens.

So if these are examples of smart citizen engagement, what does dumb engagement look like? I have two examples of this, as well. The first involves the Pittsburgh police department, but instead of being partners of the citizens, the police have cast themselves as adversaries. The problem in Pittsburgh is a familiar one for urban police departments. Ethnically the police force doesn’t look much like the city today; it’s overwhelmingly white in a diverse city. The suspicion among African-American leaders is that the hiring process is rigged against black candidates, so they lobbied the mayor to open up the hiring process by allowing some community members to sit in on interviews.

Reluctantly, the police agreed. An organization called the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network offered the names of some volunteer interviewers to the police department, which forwarded them to other city departments for screening and training. In time, the interview panels including civilians were assembled . . . until someone noticed that one woman who was asking questions was wearing an electronic monitoring device on her ankle. Turns out, one of the police interviewers was a convicted felon who had pleaded guilty a year before to felony firearms charges.

The panels were abruptly cancelled. The police chief blamed city bureaucrats for fouling things up by not running background checks. Everyone was embarrassed and angry. But take away the embarrassing revelation—the woman with the ankle monitor—and you see this for what it was: a shallow and ineffective substitute for citizen engagement. It was shallow because it substituted a handful of people on city hall interview panels for genuine partnerships with citizens in their neighborhoods. And it was ineffective because it asked this handful of citizens to do something they weren’t equipped to do—judge what makes a good police officer. Actually, the citizen member who might know something about effective policing was the woman with the ankle monitor. At least she could claim experience with the criminal justice system.

What would have been better? It would have been much, much better if the department had taken the time to engage citizens in discussions about what they wanted from officers in their neighborhoods. If they had listened carefully and worked collaboratively to find better ways of recruiting, training, and retaining officers who fit the new profile. Afterwards, if some involved in the planning process wanted to serve on the interview teams, they should have been welcomed and would have come to the panels in a completely different way—with knowledge of what police officers do and an understanding of how the hiring process was changing. In short, they would have been seen as partners in making a better police department—and not as intruders or nuisances.

But it isn’t only local governments that make a mess of citizen engagement. Sometimes citizens do, too. This brings me to the worst citizen engagement process I’ve ever heard of, designed by a group in Pinellas County, Florida called FAST, which stands for Faith and Action for Standing Together. As the name suggests, it’s an interfaith group, and its heart seems to be in the right place. Founded in 2004, FAST wants to improve low-income parts of the county, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and has taken on important issues from crime and drugs to transportation and education.

But if its intentions are good, its methods are atrocious. After FAST members (who number in the low thousands) settle on an issue and decide—on their own, with no government officials involved—what the correct solutions are, they haul public officials before them, force them stand on a stage and say only “yes” or “no” to FAST’s agenda. As a final indignity, elected officials are not allowed to touch the microphone, for fear they might . . . you know, try to explain something. A FAST member stands with the microphone in hand, ready to snatch it away.

By this point, most responsible elected or appointed officials will not participate what amounts to one of FAST’s public shaming sessions. Not long ago, though, several Pinellas County school board members came to one of the meetings, where they were told that the best way to instruct children was by using something called “direct instruction.” Would the school board members, on the spot, commit to changing the school system’s entire instructional approach? Yes or no? The answer, thankfully, was no. “I will not yield to pressure,” one board member told the group . . . presumably just before the microphone was snatched away.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be hectoring or patronizing. It doesn’t even have to be adversarial. In my experience, most government officials are perfectly willing to work alongside citizens; they just don’t know how to get started. And most citizens are far more interested in practical solutions than in venting their spleens and would welcome the opportunity to learn more about how government works.

There’s a marriage to be made here between governments and citizens, but like all good marriages it must come with some values. The two most important: respect for each other’s contributions and a belief in the power of partnerships.

Photo by Bytemarks licensed under Creative Commons.

Dealing with a Crisis

December 13, 2011 By Otis White

If there’s a gold standard for a mayor’s handling of a crisis, it is . . . well, you know what it is. It’s Rudolph Giuliani standing on a sidewalk on September 11, 2001 amid the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center, reassuring citizens. And if there’s a lead standard for a mayor’s handling of a crisis, it may be Jean Quan’s performance this fall when her Oakland, California police department cleared an Occupy protest site.

Mayor Quan’s public handwringing and contradictory actions were well documented. She ordered police to push protesters out of their camp near city hall, then allowed them to set up the camp again the next day, all the while agonizing over which was the right thing to do. The raid on the camp and the protests that followed resulted in serious injuries to several protesters and television footage that made Oakland look like a war zone. Later, Mayor Quan tried to apologize to protesters and was booed off the speakers’ platform. The police were furious with her equivocations, and so were the protesters. Not surprisingly, a petition drive to recall Quan was launched almost as soon as the tear gas cleared.

We could make a long list of the things Mayor Quan did wrong in this crisis: indecision, incoherence, lack of vision, lack of follow-through—combined with an astonishing inability to read situations or understand how others viewed her. But a better question than what went wrong with Jean Quan is to ask its opposite: What do good leaders do differently in a crisis, people like Rudy Giuliani?

To answer that, we have to look at crises as a special kind of problem. Most leaders, including Mayor Quan, have some notion about solving problems under normal circumstances. What makes crises so different that leaders feel abandoned by their instincts?

Three things: First, they are unexpected. Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans or a scandal at city hall, crises seem to come out of nowhere. Second, they appear to threaten the usual ways of doing things. This is why leaders sometimes lose their bearings; they don’t know what—or whom—to trust. Finally, crises are urgent. They fill the news and the conversations of citizens, events move quickly, and leaders must deal with them NOW. The pressure can be enormous.

When you put these things together—surprises that challenge the status quo and demand immediate action—you see how crises can paralyze leaders like Mayor Quan. But they don’t have to; they can just as easily make you a hero. Rudy Giuliani started the day on September 11 as a deeply unpopular mayor whose pettiness and bullying ways had worn out his welcome with New Yorkers. He ended it as “America’s mayor,” as many news articles called him, and the change in his image was solely the result of how he handled a major crisis while the whole world was watching.

Let’s take the elements of a crisis, then, and see if we can find a formula for success . . . or, at least, survival.

Crises are surprises. This means they aren’t on your agenda, and, therefore, can’t be planned for. Nobody runs for mayor to deal with a hurricane, a terrorist attack, or protesters camping out at city hall. (For that matter, nobody wants to be city manager so she can deal with a bridge collapse or a nonprofit executive so he can manage a financial scandal.) But if you can’t plan for crises, you can at least prepare for them.

What’s the difference? Planning is about steps (I’ll do this, then this, then that . . . over a known time period). Preparation is about contingencies (if this happens, I’ll do that . . . if I ever need to). There’s an element of planning in thinking about crises, but planning takes you only so far because these events are . . . well, unexpected, urgent happenings that appear to scramble the usual ways of doing things.

What you can do in preparing for a crisis is think through a few steps and then concentrate on roles and responsibilities. For instance, if a natural disaster were to strike, what would be the most important tasks the city government would have to undertake? What decisions would have to be made? Who would be needed to make these decisions and execute those tasks? How should these people work together, and where should they be? What resources would they need?

You can construct scenarios for all kinds of crises—public safety emergencies, human disasters (say, a gas-main explosion or contaminated water supply), even political crises (a scandal, for instance). You can’t be very specific—not all hurricanes, gas-main explosions, or scandals are alike—but you can at least know where everyone in the decision team should meet and have a checklist of general things they should do (get the facts, assemble background information, brief other leaders, contact the news media, etc.). And you can prepare yourself and your emergency team for the what-ifs.

This was why Rudy Giuliani was so calm on September 11. He had already been there . . . in his mind. As he writes in his 2002 memoir, “Leadership”: “Throughout my time as mayor, we conducted tabletop exercises designed to rehearse our response to a wide variety of contingencies. We’d blueprint what each person in each agency would do if the city faced, say, a chemical attack or a biomedical attack.” This wasn’t just for the police and fire departments, he adds; it was for him and his staff as well. “The goal was to build a rational construct for myself, and for the people around me. I wanted them ready to make decisions when they couldn’t check with me. The more planning we did, the more we could be ready for surprises.”

Again, this isn’t planning in the conventional sense. It’s more like role playing, so everyone involved will know his role if the worst happens and, therefore, not be paralyzed.

Crises challenge the status quo. Take a deep breath. Crises rarely change things at a fundamental level, especially in environments as complex as cities. But they often appear to. A riot, for instance, can suggest to people that public order and the old ways of decision making have broken down and cannot be restored. And doubt can feed on itself. After Katrina, some believed New Orleans would never recover, which slowed the city’s recovery. The same thing with New York after September 11.

Because crises often create periods of doubt and genuine uncertainty, leaders must do two things immediately. First, they must do everything in their power to restore public order. Second, they should promise an open-minded look at how the crisis came about and what it means for the future. This is important. Good leaders don’t promise that everything will return to the way it was. (There’s always at least a possibility that things really can’t be as they were.) But leaders can promise to examine carefully whether mistakes were made that caused or exacerbated the crisis and, if so, fix them.

Think of it as dealing with a car wreck. First you take the victims to the emergency room to stop the bleeding and set bones. Then you do the accident inquiry. Chances are, once the crisis has passed, you’ll find that major changes aren’t needed. But in the heat of the moment, people don’t want to hear that everything is fine because things don’t look fine. They want assurances that someone will take a long and fair look at why happened and why.

Consider how differently things would have turned out for Mayor Quan if she had followed this path in Oakland. First, she could have spelled out before the police action and after why the city had to clear the camp (for health, public safety, economic reasons, etc.). She could have been resolute about not allowing the conditions to be repeated (that is to say, no future camps). Then she could have promised an open-minded examination of how peaceful protests could be accommodated in the days ahead that would achieve what the Occupy activists wanted without repeating the problems the city was concerned about. Firmness in the short term . . . with an open mind for the long.

But what about those instances where a crisis exposes a situation where things can’t remain the same? A riot, for instance, like the one Detroit experienced in 1967 that came as the city was experiencing a major demographic transition (and which hastened the transition)? Or, say, the closing of a major economic institution at a time when the city’s entire economy is shaky? In these instances, it’s even more important to deal with the crisis on a short-term, long-term basis: short term to restore order, obtain temporary aid, and so on; long term to find lasting answers, which might include a whole new way of doing things.

Crises are urgent. In some crises, leaders don’t have a week to seek advice from others. They may not even have a day. On September 11, Rudy Giuliani had minutes to size up the situation and act. But the smartest leaders always ask first about the timeline. If they have a day, then they take the entire day to make decisions. If they have an hour, they take the full hour.

Why? Because decisions are almost always improved by more information and different viewpoints. This isn’t indecisiveness. It’s intelligent decision making. It’s based on the belief that better answers emerge as informed people debate the right course in constructive ways.

The best example and one of the most studied presidential decisions of all time was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The stakes could not have been higher. Almost everyone involved saw that the crisis might end in war, perhaps nuclear war. And yet the only options presented to President Kennedy at first were to do nothing or launch a secret, preemptive air strike that would have almost required the Soviet Union to retaliate in some way.

President Kennedy insisted that his advisors take the few days they had to look for other answers and debate the alternatives among themselves. And it was from this debate that a third alternative came about: a “quarantine” around Cuba (they didn’t want to call it a blockade for fear of provoking the Soviets). As you know, this unexpected third way worked, and the crisis ended better than anyone could have imagined (missiles were gone, war was averted, and relations with the Soviet Union even took a turn for the better). And it came about because Kennedy knew exactly how much time he had to decide and used that time wisely.

But know this: When the time expires, you must act. If you do so intelligently (like Kennedy) and calmly and decisively (like Giuliani), a crisis can be your finest hour. But wilt under pressure, equivocate, and blame others, and it will be your worst nightmare. Just ask Mayor Quan.

The Five Elements of Successful Visioning

February 1, 2011 By Otis White

I have been involved in large-scale community visioning projects for years and worked on them in all sorts of places, from metro areas to individual cities. I recommend visioning as a way of pointing communities forward. I’ve seen how it can engage citizens, give heart to political, business and civic leaders, and help set bold new directions for communities. But . . .

There are limits to what visioning can do by itself, and it can be done poorly, which is worse than not doing it at all. So, over the years, I’ve created a list of the five elements of successful visioning. Here it is.

Make it as representative as possible. The hardest part of visioning isn’t the meetings or analyzing what the citizens say. The hardest part is getting a cross-section of the community to the meetings. Believe it or not, there are people who think there are better things to do with their evenings than spend them in a public meeting.

But it’s worth the effort to be sure all parts of the community are heard. First, visioning’s power comes from its legitimacy; these are, after all, large-scale efforts to listen to and report accurately what the citizens want. If parts of the community aren’t heard, visioning loses its legitimacy. Second, it improves the visioning process to hear from a wide variety of citizens. That’s because people who are different sometimes think differently about community issues, and you need that diversity of thought, both in the meetings and in the final report. I’ve seen people change their minds during visioning meetings because another point of view caused them to think more deeply about an issue. We don’t have nearly enough opportunities for people with different ideas to talk with one another in communities; we should make sure it happens in visioning projects.

Ask appropriate questions. Once you have a cross-section of citizens in the room, make sure you involve them the right way. The best way is to ask them to talk about things that they—and only they—are experts in. My favorite is to ask participants to imagine that, in 20 years’ time, the community has become the place they want it to be. What does the community look like and work like? What is the same as today and what is different? What obstacles did the citizens and their government overcome to make it happen?

This asks citizens to define broadly what they want their community to be. You don’t spend a lot of time asking them how to make it happen—these are questions best asked of technical experts. The citizens are experts in what, the way they want things to turn out.

Listen to the citizens first. Many times, visioning is combined with a planning project, such as developing a comprehensive plan. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as two conditions are met:

It needs to be an authentic form of visioning with a sustained outreach effort to get a cross-section of people involved, hundreds of citizen participants, appropriate questions asked, and an honest report summarizing what they said and containing every single idea that was offered. To repeat: Bad visioning is worse than no visioning at all, so don’t cut corners.
It needs to end before the planners begin their work. I regularly get phone calls from planning firms that are looking for someone to help with “citizen outreach” or “citizen engagement” at a mid-point in their work. My answer is always no. If the citizens are worth hearing from, then hear from them first. Reaching out to the citizens after plans have been drafted isn’t visioning; it’s salesmanship.

Create accountability. Nothing breeds cynicism like being asked to speak your mind, being thanked for doing so—and then being forgotten. If you ask citizens to share their dreams with you, you should report back to them on what’s happening with their dreams. They don’t expect immediate success in all areas, but they want to know if there’s any success—or even backsliding.

If the visioning precedes planning, there are immediate opportunities for accountability. You could ask some of the citizens to serve on a steering committee to make sure the plans are true to the citizens’ desires. You could have a large community meeting and invite all who participated in visioning see the plans and comment on them. Better yet, you could do both.

However you do it, make sure that once citizens are “in the loop” of community progress, they stay in the loop.

Understand visioning’s limitations. Visioning is probably the best way ever devised of listening in an organized way to what citizens want. It helps build a sense of ownership and citizenship in communities. It can be an important way of moving a community forward. But it’s not sufficient by itself to create progress.

As I’ll write about in the future, breakthrough ideas for communities come from places where three judgments overlap: What the citizens want, what is politically possible, and what is best for the community at this point. Visioning can deliver the first judgment, and political leaders the second. The third can come from individual leaders and blue-ribbon committees or it can bubble up from the bureaucracy or from community groups like a chamber of commerce or civic league.

But even then, an idea is only an idea. What turns an idea into reality is someone committed to building support and removing obstacles. And we have a term for such people: We call them “leaders.”

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