Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

How Communities Can Thrive in a Post-Newspaper World

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I understand why most local-government officials and many other civic leaders don’t like reporters. Some journalists can be uninformed, easily distracted by the sensational, or strangely uninterested in the bigger and better stories that are happening around them. But, man, are you going to miss these folks when they are gone.

That’s because the void left by the loss of independent, professional reporters will be filled by far less reliable sources of news and other information: rumor, gossip and particularly social media, which so often are dominated by angry or frightened people with little interest in facts. And this will be much, much worse.

This isn’t a warning about the future. It’s happening now as newspapers reduce coverage or simply close up shop, so that local governments that were once covered daily are left in silence. The situation is so dire in New Jersey that the state legislature recently put up $5 million to encourage somebody, anybody, to start covering these “news deserts.”

But assuming no one starts a professional news organization in your community, what can a local government do to connect with its citizens in a post-newspaper world?

I put this question to a former mayor of a city known for its tight bond with citizens. Decatur is a close-in suburb of Atlanta that’s beloved by urbanists for its walkable, transit-oriented downtown and pleasant neighborhoods. It has a well-run local government and was recently named an All-America City by the National Civic League.

Call a meeting in Decatur and the citizens will turn out. I know this because I was involved in a planning effort there in 2010 that began with a large-scale citizen engagement effort. Hundreds of people participated in long meetings about what the city could be. Many of their ideas are being realized today.

Not that you would know any of this if you lived elsewhere in the Atlanta area. That’s because the daily newspapers stopped covering Decatur’s city commission meetings long ago. The only time reporters show up at Decatur City Hall today is when something bad happens, which is blessedly infrequent.

So how has Decatur maintained such a tight bond with its citizens in a post-newspaper era? That’s what I wanted to know from Bill Floyd, who was a city commissioner for 22 years and mayor for most of that time.

I started by asking about a colorful monthly newsletter called Decatur Focus that the city mails to every household. Was this the way Decatur kept citizens informed, basically by starting its own publication?

Well, Floyd said in his polite way, Decatur Focus was useful for communicating the city’s plans. “You have to stay in touch with people,” he said. And he was amazed by how many people read the newsletter and commented on it.

But, no, it wasn’t the newsletter alone. In fact, Floyd went on, there is no single way cities can communicate in a social media world. Nor would a single communicator be effective, even one at city hall. Rather, he said, you need an army of communicators in the social media, most of them residents. And Decatur has built just such an army through its endless citizen-engagement efforts.

The bedrocks are Decatur 101 and the Citizens Police Academy. Decatur 101 is what it sounds like, two-hour classes on how the city works, delivered over a seven-week period. Other cities have programs like this; this one is simply done better. Started in 2000, Decatur 101 became so popular that in 2006 the city began running two classes, with morning and evening sessions. There’s a waiting list of citizens who want a spot. Later, Decatur 101 inspired the Citizens Police Academy, a 10-week course on the local police and criminal-justice systems. (There’s even a Junior Police Academy for 11-to-14-year-olds.)

The result of these and other city programs, Floyd said, is that there are hundreds of citizens who know how to get information from the city. So, if a rumor starts on a neighborhood website about, say, car break-ins, or if someone spreads falsehoods about a rezoning case, a citizen who has been through Decatur 101 or the Police Academy is bound to see it, call a city official and have the facts in short order. “And when somebody says, ‘Here’s what the city says,’ it just stops the rumors cold,” Floyd added.

Decatur did not create its citizen-engagement programs in response to social media. There were no social media in 2000. It started them because it believed that informed, involved citizens made it a better place. That the city discovered a way to thrive in a post-newspaper world was a happy, unintended benefit. Wouldn’t accomplishing the same thing be good news for your community?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Felix63 licensed under Creative Commons.

Why Blame Is the Death of Reform

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If you want to see what can go wrong with government reform, look at this editorial cartoon.

Notice first the cartoonist’s point of view: that it is condescending and counterproductive for “drive-by” experts to criticize hard-working government employees (in this case, teachers) for their performance.

Then see the teacher’s point of view: She cannot be held responsible if she has to deal with children who are homeless, watching TV around the clock, provided no discipline, pregnant, living in single-family homes, and on and on. In other words, while drive-by experts blame her for education’s shortcomings, she blames the students.

When reform efforts get to this point—all sides dug in, minds shut tight, blame hurled in all directions—you can close up shop. Reform isn’t going to happen.

Is there another way? There is, but it has to be done right from the start. In fact, before the word “reform” is ever uttered. Here are three first steps.

First, you must promise never to blame employees for poor performance. This is critical because you cannot change an organization without the support of those who work in it. In this sense, the cartoonist was right: It is counterproductive to blame the employees.

Second, employees must stop blaming others. Just as it’s a mistake for education reformers to blame teachers, it is wrong for teachers to blame their students for poor performance—or government workers at any level to blame citizens when things don’t work right.

Third, once the blame game has ceased, everyone must work side by side to understand where the organization is falling short, why, and what can be done to turn things around.

This sounds so simple, there must be a catch, right? Yes, and it’s a big one. You have to work against political culture, which is to point the finger at others. Reporters, city councils, and legislative oversight committees will want to know who was responsible when mistakes were made or deadlines missed. If you genuinely want things to work better, there’s only one response: I am responsible. Blame me.

This takes courage in a political environment, but it’s the only way you can move to the second step, where you persuade employees to stop blaming others. If you have their backs, you can say, they must have the citizens’ backs. Always.

And once you reach that understanding and the blame wars have quieted, you can move to step three, where you work as partners. But even then, you must keep working on trust.

One of the earliest trust issues will be about measurements. If you’re going to fix a broken system, you have to agree on ways of measuring brokenness and gauging progress. But once you start measuring things, you’ll raise again the fear of blame. So you have to make another pact: The measurements will be used only for pinpointing problems and measuring progress, not for punishments or rewards.

This requires that you work against instinct, which is to reward your best performers and punish the slackers. But if you go down that road, it will encourage the slackers to resume the blame wars and, in no time, you’ll be back to . . . well, what you see in the cartoon.

In addition to courage, this approach requires faith that the vast majority of people want to do good work and only a small minority do not. If you can enlist the majority in changes that will bring them pride and accomplishment, the organization will make great strides. And, over time, you can weed out the minority.

But nothing will happen until you stop the blame.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Illustration by E Theroit licensed under Creative Commons.

How Collaboration Happens

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I’m fond of saying that there are no silver bullets for cities but there are some bronze ones. Here’s a bronze bullet: a healthy cooperation among governments. City councils sitting down with school boards. County governments managing projects with cities. Cities contracting with one another for services. State legislators working with mayors, school superintendents, and county commissioners on legislative strategies. That sort of thing.

The benefits of healthy cooperation are so obvious—lower costs, greater effectiveness, public approval—that it makes you wonder why it’s so rare. My theory: It’s because many leaders do not know how to create the conditions needed for collaboration. And because the conditions don’t exist, neither does the collaboration.

I’m going to set out four things that I think must precede collaboration, but first, a definition. Collaboration is cooperation by interests that don’t have to cooperate. That is, they could go it alone but choose to work together because they see clear benefits or because cooperation is, for some reason, expected. Often collaborators are organizations of equal or nearly equal size. To be a true collaboration, it can’t be an easy, one-off act, it has to be a sustained set of activities. (If I do something for you that’s unexpected and nice, I’m not collaborating. I’m doing you a favor.) And, again, it’s voluntary. If the cooperation is forced by an outside interest, it’s not collaboration; it’s compulsion.

The reason collaboration is so rare is that it requires us to think about things in different ways, and that’s hard. First, we’re not all that good at calculating the benefits of things that don’t exist, such as how things might be if we worked together. Second, we’re suspicious of interests that might be considered rivals. How can we be sure we won’t be taken advantage of? Finally, there’s inertia. If something seems to be working as it is, why change . . . especially if the change involves time or money?

To collaborate, then, requires an act of will. In local government, it has to be initiated by someone who truly wants to collaborate and sees the value of community institutions and governments working together. It takes, in other words, a leader. But it need not be a top leader. It can as easily be a city council member as a mayor, a commissioner as well as a county administrator, a school board member as well as the superintendent. What it requires are diligence and a sense of how one thing leads to another.

And that involves seeing collaboration as a process that depends on three things happening in sequence and then connecting with a fourth element. The sequence is understanding, trust, and transparency. I’ll go through them in reverse order:

  • Transparency is the key ingredient. You can’t have healthy collaborations if one of the parties feels it may be taken advantage of. So how can you guard against this? By being as open as possible. If your city is supplying a service to others, you have to be open about your costs and revenues. If the city is working with the school system on a joint project, it has to open its books. If the legislative delegation is meeting with local governments, legislators have to be honest about what they can accomplish, and the localities have to be honest about what they need most and what they can contribute to the cause.
  • But no one wants to be the first to lay his cards on the table. So in order to have transparency, you must have trust, the feeling that you know the person or organization you’re dealing with and that your openness won’t be used against you. Trust, then, precedes transparency.
  • And what precedes trust is understanding. Understanding takes time. It doesn’t come from a single meeting, it comes from a number of encounters, often in different settings. There’s a reason so many business people play golf. It allows them to size up potential partners and vendors outside of the office. As much as a pastime, then, golf is a vetting process. Your vetting process might include golf, but it could just as easily involve lunches, cocktail parties, or baseball outings.

So think about this in sequence: First, you seek to know those who might be potential collaborators and become known by them. Those understandings allow you to build trust. And trust opens the door to transparency, which is needed for collaboration.

But these things only make collaboration possible. Collaborations don’t actually happen until there’s a fourth element, which is the recognition of mutual interest. This involves someone spotting an opportunity for collaboration, calculating its benefits to all, and persuading others to give it a try.

Here’s the best part of seeing collaboration as a process: Anyone with standing in an institution can start it. If we’re talking about governments collaborating, that means any elected official or relatively well-placed appointed official. All it takes to begin the process is seeing a potential partner and picking up the phone.

Once you do so, don’t be in a hurry; understanding, trust, and transparency take a while. Often there are bruised feelings caused by years of government officials pointing fingers at each other. Be patient, don’t take things personally (when you start talking with your counterparts in other governments, be prepared for an earful about transgressions past and present), and try to be a voice for understanding on both sides. That is, explain your government to potential partners as calmly and objectively as possible, and be quick to speak up for other governments among your own colleagues. Nothing builds trust as quickly as the feeling that somebody over there understands us.

But what about that fourth element, the recognition of mutual interest? How do you prepare for that? Basically, you just keep your eyes open. As you build understanding, trust, and the willingness to be open, the opportunities for cooperation will present themselves. Some may offer great potential benefits, others will have only modest benefits. A good strategy may be to start with some modest collaborations and build toward the big ones, deepening understanding, trust, and transparency along the way.

It can be a long journey, so it may help to keep in mind how some unlikely collaborations came together in the past. Look around. There may be some great examples in your city. If you can’t find one, you can always look back to 1787, when one of the world’s most unlikely collaborations began. It started in Philadelphia that summer, as a group representing 13 bickering governments produced a document beginning with these words: “We the people of the United States . . .”

What Leaders Can Learn from Consumer Reports

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Apple, Inc. is the creator of elegant and ingenious products, and its reputation on Wall Street and with technology geeks and consumers could hardly be better. So when word circulated in blogs that Apple’s latest gadget, the iPhone 4, was dropping calls, the company’s first reaction was to dismiss the complaints as some people not knowing how to hold a cell phone properly. But a week or so later, when a 74-year-old publication called Consumer Reports said it wouldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 to its subscribers because of the signal-loss problem, Apple suddenly came around. It called a press conference to announce a software fix, a free case for iPhone users and a refund for anyone unhappy with the phone. CEO Steve Jobs said he was “stunned and embarrassed” by the Consumer Reports judgment.

There’s something delicious about a high-flying technology company running head first into an earnest, old-fashioned research outfit like Consumer Reports. But it’s also worth asking: How did Consumer Reports come to be so respected by the public and the news media? And can leaders borrow some of that magic for use in their communities?

First, about Consumer Reports: It’s the principal publication of a nonprofit organization called Consumers Union. Consumers Union was founded in 1936 on the belief that average people needed protection from shoddy merchandise and that the best way of determining a product’s quality was to test it using scientific methods. To ensure its credibility, Consumer Reports does not accept advertising and will not allow companies to use its ratings in their ads or commercials. Consumer Reports’ reputation, then, rests on promises to its subscribers: It promises to be on the side of consumers (establishing trust), makes it clear that it cannot be bought (giving it legitimacy) and spells out its testing methodology (showing that its judgments are fair and reliable).

Now, let’s think about communities. Is there anything like Consumer Reports in your city—an institution, individual, organization or process that citizens turn to in sorting out public disputes? Actually, in a few places there are. It might be a highly trusted politician or political body; a newspaper or longtime broadcaster; a respected nonprofit, such as a chamber of commerce or civic league; or maybe even a well regarded civic volunteer. But most communities don’t have any of these. In these places, politicians are just politicians, the chamber is seen as a mouthpiece of the business community, there is no civic league, and the newspaper is dying, irrelevant—or both. If there were any highly regarded civic volunteers, they’ve retired or moved away.

So what can community leaders do to build support for tough decisions in places where no one is trusted? You can follow the Consumer Reports’ formula in creating processes based on the its promises of trust, legitimacy, fairness and reliability. One way is to convene a “blue ribbon committee.” You know how this works: A mayor or county commission asks a group of prominent citizens to listen to all sides, consult with experts and arrive at a set of findings and recommendations.

The federal government is particularly fond of blue ribbon committees (or commissions, as they’re sometimes called).  Think of the 9/11 Commission, which looked into the causes of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, and the Warren Commission on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. More recently, President Obama created a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to recommend ways of reducing the federal deficit.

You see blue ribbon committees at the local level, too. A good example is Tampa Bay’s ABC task force, a group of business and community leaders formed to figure out how to keep major league baseball in the region.

The best of these committees follow Consumer Reports’ promises. They start by announcing their purpose and whom they represent in their deliberations, establishing public trust. If they are chosen well, they will represent all sectors of the community, giving the committee legitimacy. (In other words, ensuring that no single faction will get its way.)

The best blue ribbon committees go about their work in ways that are transparently fair and reliable. This is where these committees often stumble: They start out thinking their members’ reputations are so strong that they don’t need to open their meetings to observers, and, sadly, they aren’t. 

This became an issue in Atlanta in 2010 when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution questioned a blue ribbon committee that was looking into whether some public schools altered standardized test scores in order to look better. The newspaper raised concerns about the committee’s members, suggesting they were too close to the school system. But mostly it criticized the process: School system officials were too deeply involved in the committee’s work, the newspaper said. Others defended the panel’s work, accusing the newspaper of judging the committee’s work before it was finished, but the damage was done. If people didn’t like the committee’s report, the newspaper had given them the perfect excuse: It was influenced by the school system and its allies.

Even if you do everything perfectly, you’ll be criticized. After all, this is community work, and criticism comes with the territory. Consumer Reports has been criticized and occasionally sued over the years. It has even been wrong on rare occasions because of mistakes in testing. But the public’s confidence in Consumer Reports’ judgment has remained strong—strong enough to bring companies like Apple to heel—because it never forgets its promises: trust, legitimacy, fairness and reliability.

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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