Creating a Wise Economy
How to keep your community from eating the ice cream | January 3, 2011
It’s that time of year when even the most laissez-faire of us get hit with the Set Goals bug. We all resolve (myself included) to lose more weight, eat better, spend more time with our family, yadda yadda. And we all swear that This Year Is Going To Be Different… although we know in the backs of our heads that chances are we will be on the couch eating out of the ice cream pint by February. Even though we know that setting those goals are the first step to success, we also know that setting those goals is only the first step, unlikely to catalyze any long-term changes unless we do a lot more.
Since our communities and governments are creations of people, it’s no surprise that they do the same thing. Every strategic plan and comprehensive plan has a laundry list of goals and objectives, and the really good ones might even give a game plan for getting there. But we all know the old saw about plans that sit on a shelf and collect dust.
Despite that cynicism, we know that there are communities out there that get it together, that enact positive change, and that maintain that positive momentum for multiple years — sometimes, decades. So what makes the difference between the communities that keep their New Years Resolutions and those that end up on the couch eating ice cream?
After working with communities for a couple of decades, and getting a front-row seat for both great successes and some pretty spectacular failures, I think it comes down to a pretty simple principle:
The long-term successful communities are the ones that not only set goals, but remain consistently conscious of and actively use their goals. That means that they:
- Maintain a clearly-articulated, shared public commitment to those goals.
- Refer and review those goals frequently (and tweak them if they have to).
- Use their goals as a primary criteria for selecting among the choices that they face.
- Use their goals as a yardstick to measure their progress over time.
Sounds pretty simple when you put it that way, right? So why are the success stories so rare?
Part of it stems from the same reasons why our New Years resolutions fall apart.: we don’t make it A Priority, we get distracted by other issues, we make short-term choices that satisfy immediate desires but go against long-term goals… Oversimplify a community and pretend that its political and economic decisions were made by one person, and it will sound like the first 15 minutes of every How I Lost Weight/Found My Dream Job/Became a Triathlete TV show you have ever seen.
But our communities aren’t one person — they are made up of many people, and even the most homogenous community will include many more differences of opinion than we tell in our February good-intentions-bad-follow-through self-improvement stories. We want our communities to move in a coordinated fashion toward common goals, like an ant colony, but most of our members, and almost all of our leadership, would make lousy ants. Our brains, our opinions, our traditions of independence and democracy, means that most analogies comparing communities to a person or an ant colony don’t hold up for long.
A lot of the time, Our Community’s Goals are not the community’s goals — they are a person’s goals, or a group’s goals. Because we fear conflict, because we don’t want to take the time or spend the money, because we shy away from disagreement, because we who were invested first don’t want to consider that others might have valid ideas, we often fail to have real, meaningful community discussions about what our goals should be. Then we act surprised when we discover that people, whether in leadership or in the community, will not support the actions we need to take to meet those goals. They were never the community’s goals to begin with.
Of course, if we _do_ deeply and meaningfully engage all the people for whom an issue matters (and believe it or not, there are ways to do that), we will discover that there are some issues where we cannot find agreement. Whether it’s political or philosophical differences or simple practical disagreements, we will not be able to agree on some issues. Because we fear that we will not agree on some issues, we do not attempt to agree on anything .
But here is the part we often overlook: if we did engage all the people for whom an issue matters, we would find a lot of agreement. We live in the same place, we see the same situations. we have, or can have with a little additional effort, the same base of information. Because of that, we will find areas of agreement — they may not be the Exciting Ones or the Big Ones, but we will find some. And if we focus on those points where we can agree, if we make those our goals, and they are truly shared goals, then we _will_ make progress. Goals that don’t solve everything but allow us to make progress are, at then end of the day, more effective than goals that cover everything but do nothing. An empty placeholder in the Goals for Everything structure simply means that that one needs more work.
As we make progress, two things will happen:
- We will build our community’s capacity for planning and working together. If we fear that distrust or disagreement will derail us, what better way to convince both sides that the other is not evil than to find and work on the things that they can agree about?
- That experience will allow us to learn and discuss and find consensus on those issues that we couldn’t deal with at first.
Making this work, of course, also requires leadership that understands this reality and is self-assured enough to lead this way – an issue I hope to talk about more in the future.
Sounds Pollyannaish, I know. And maybe it is. So here’s a challenge for you: look at communities you know that have been successful over the long term. They can be local governments, neighborhoods, business districts — whatever works. And let’s share your thoughts here.
In the meantime, if you are trying to choose the salad over the Lardburger on the lunch menu from now on, or setting the alarm for the 5 AM Boot Camp class at the gym, good luck…. and be glad there is only one of you!
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7 Comments »
I think another reasons goals don’t always work is because goals, whether implicitly, or explicitly, create winners and losers. Even something fairly benign as “improve property maintenance” as a community goal, puts more of a burden on real estate investors than someone else. And in communities, we work for politicians who are constantly balancing the conflict of promoting the winners over the protection of the losers. Needless to say, in that conflict, more often than not, we develop compromises than often fall short of the goal and usually make no one happy after a hard fought political battle. I am not trying to be pessimistic, just pointing out the joys of the American democratic system.
My second reason that I think goals fail is that they aren’t measured well. There is a tendency to bite off more than we can chew (especially when someone else has to make the sacrifice to make it happen). Of course, goals aren’t met and psychologically we become a bit damaged and hesitant to move forward.
I think here in Piqua, we do a decent job of meeting goals, only because we know that the goals we are going to acheive are going to be small pieces of a larger puzzle. It’s hard sometimes to see the over-arching, contextual changes we make, but they exist.
Comment by William Lutz — January 3, 2011 @ 11:29 am
Bill –
Man, you did it again… you have something very deep here, particularly in the winners/losers observation.
One of the things I have been struggling with since I wrote this blog post has been whether or not it is really possible to achieve that idealized approach to goal-setting in a real-world, local government political process. And that’s where the winners/losers issue becomes unavoidable.
I do think, at least theoretically, that it _would_ be possible to at least take the intensity of the winner/loser dynamic down several notches if we facilitated honest collaborative problem-solving that involved all of the participants.
But what if a participant refuses to participate, refuses to understand their enlightened self-interest in being part of the solution? Then you are stuck, and God knows that our present approach to politics and civic discourse doesn’t exactly set a constructive tone for that.
So maybe the real question is, how do you help the potential combatants discover that they can get farther along by cooperating? If you figure that out, Bill, I am sending you to Congress!
Comment by dellarucker — January 7, 2011 @ 3:28 pm
I am convinced that the balancing of the “winners/losers” dynamic is too much of an art and less of a science. My analytical mind makes me think that it’s hard to quanitify those metrics that make the “winners/losers” debate logical.
However, I do think we can tone down the intensity of the public debate, but it takes a multi-facteted approach.
First, we need to begin to celebrate successes. Every time both sides of an issue comes together to forge agreement and accomplish a goal needs to be celebrated. On a more national scale, very rarely do we hear about cross-partisan cooperation.
Second, we need politicans who are authentic leaders. I could name some of the stalwarts of the past few decades in the Senate for example. Moynihan, Goldwater, Stevenson, Dole. The list could go on. And guess what? These guys were partisan, but they were seen as cooperative and holding the nation’s interest above their own or their own views. With those four guys I mentioned, you could build a bronze statue of any of those guys and not get any debate. Think of a U. S. Senator now and think how many deserve a bronze statue. Yeah, I am stumped too.
Third, we need leaders to engage in real debate. I heard a television interview about how Barry Goldwater felt when Kennedy was shot. He was heartbroken because he lost a friend. Both men were planning on having weekly debates during the ’64 presidential contest. You think that would happen today?
Finally, we need to be more informed on our leaders. This is hard to do in our sound-byte culture. But if I was king, I would out-right ban politicans from referring to their opponents in any form in any commercial. Don’t tell me about your opponent, tell me about you. I know this is wishful thinking, but I can dream right?
I know most of the points use national politics as a basis, but I think it works in the local government realm as well. More successes, more civility.
Comment by William Lutz — January 10, 2011 @ 1:05 pm
One of the best implementation processes that I have observed recently was in Richmond Indiana. Their comprehensive plan had specific implementation strategies in it that included:
• a clear and accessible (and changeable) matrix of all the projects and initiatives;
• implementation teams (citizens and elected/appointed) were set up early and publicly;
• the implementation teams had budgets for publicizing their accomplishments and needs;
• the planning department scheduled annual reviews of the plan to update and tweak;
• I think there was also an interactive website where team members could update their progress, discuss issues and problems, read what the other teams were doing, etc.
In short – they really put a lot of thought into implementation during the planning process, rather than as an after-thought.
Comment by Susan Moriarty — January 4, 2011 @ 12:16 pm
Sounds excellent. Do you happen to know if there’s a URL for the site?
You summed up why this has the potential to work very well. I get incredibly frustrated with planners who think that a “plan” is drawing colored blobs on a map. My 8 year old can do that. What plans _should_ do is what you have outlined above: give the community a detailed road map for how to get there. That takes a certain level of wisdom and, well, bravery, not just on the part of the citizen committee and the elected officials, but the professionals as well. Plans get a reputation for being useless, and thus are _not_ done, or are just done to go through the motions, because we have too often permitted the colored map to suffice.
Comment by dellarucker — January 7, 2011 @ 3:47 pm
Della speaks the truth when she says that the communities that aren’t afraid of conflict are the ones where problems are resolved. When everything is just fine here in River City, not much progress is made.
In one suburban downtown where I used to work, moving ahead on the fairly apparent need for revitaliation took a mayor with the courage to sit in a large circle with business owners and tenants who disagreed with her–on a Sunday afternoon with an open agenda and no time limit. Simply the insistence that one person speak at a time and that everyone listen to everyone else allowed all the hurt feelings to be aired, all the hopes and dreams to come to the surface, the disappointments to be shared, and then at last the common goals to emerge.
The afternoon purge didn’t produce an action plan, of course, but it did pave the way for a better solution than either the pro-redevelopment folks or the leave-us-alone people had envisioned beforehand.
When the goals evolve from honest discussion, rather than those politically correct and pre-arranged meeetings, they are much more likely to be realized.
When we eat the ice cream, it’s a shortcut to feeling better fast, giving oneself a treat, or just having something to eat fast. When the community avoids shortcuts and gets down to business in the time-consuming but rewarding process of listening to one another, something of lasting value emerges.
Maybe it’s a little bit like choosing veggies over ice cream.
Comment by Nancy Thompson — January 6, 2011 @ 10:05 pm
Nancy, I don’t mean to sound ingratiating, but what you wrote is both profound and beautifully said. Just lovely. You made the old English teacher here quite happy!
The amazing thing about the story you shared is how very simple it is. No PR staff, no focus groups, just the humility and integrity to make herself available and find that common ground. I think that gets back to what Bill Lutz was saying in a different comment on this blog entry: it highlights how essential honest, open leadership is to creating communities and economic situations that actually work. Perhaps all of us who want to see sustainable communities should be learning how teach leadership instead.
Comment by dellarucker — January 12, 2011 @ 4:46 pm