Scott Hutcheson

Picking Out a Frame

Woods or metals? Classic or contemporary? Statement-making thick or barely-there minimalist? There are lots of choices when picking out a frame, not to mention choosing a matte and whether you want glare-free or just regular glass. My wife and I face this decision now and again when we decide to frame something important - a new photo of our children or a piece of art we’ve found. Frames matter. There’s another lesson to be learned about framing. It’s a lesson about how conversations get framed, especially conversations about communities.

Perhaps a visit to fictitious Midville can illustrate the point. You can think of Midville as an average community. It could be a town or a neighborhood, and its residents are good folks, folks who care about where they live.

When they gather at the corner coffee shop, the beauty parlor, at their their kid’s soccer games, or even virtually in the online discussion board, midvillebabble.com, they talk about what’s going on in the community. Each of those discussions is framed in a specific way that sets the parameters and points toward a specific direction.

David Cooperrider, a professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve, noted that people and organization move in the direction of their conversations; and the way in which those conversations get framed, help to determine what that direction will be. Cooperrider developed something he called “appreciative inquiry” or AI. He defines AI as “the cooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them.“

I don’t know what conversations are like in your community but in Midville, they are not always focused on the best of the world around them. It’s not their fault really, most people are programmed to focus on the problems, to diagnose what’s wrong so that it can be fixed. Morning conversations around the corner table in the Midville Café are often about lazy kids, backdoor political deals, and good-paying factory jobs that no longer exist. Conversations about problems.

Cooperrider’s work isn’t based on some Pollyanna, head-in-the-sand notion of ignoring problems. It is based on the science of human and organizational behavior. The idea is that instead of focusing on negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, we can turn our attention toward discovery, dreaming, and designing together. This is especially powerful when it comes to communities. When we come together, whether as an informal group of residents, or at the invitation of some elected official or community group, the way in which the conversation gets framed makes a difference and framing a discussion to facilitate discovery, dreaming, and designing the future usually leads us to a good place.

Let’s take another peek at Midville. Some of the shopkeepers are concerned about teenagers loitering outside their stores, intimidating customers and being an overall nuisance. So, they call a meeting with the mayor and the police department to make sure someone does something about this problem. You can probably anticipate the direction that conversation is likely to take.

Advocates of AI say that a much more positive outcome could result from a conversation that was framed differently, perhaps like this:

Imagine Midville as place where shoppers consistently have a good shopping experience and our young people have a safe place to hang out and socialize. What would that look like?

According to AI when you frame a discussion like that and engage a lot of people in answering it – shopkeepers, customers, youth, along with the police and the mayor’s office, you will get a very different outcome, one that results in creative solutions and new ideas that no single person had before entering the room.

Powerful discussions begin with words like “what if,” “how,” “why” and my favorite, “imagine.” Less powerful discussions usually start with words like “who,” “when,” and “where.” One additional piece of advice when framing discussions for community conversations is to make sure the question being asked is one to which the answer is not already known. If it is, there is no need for any inquiry at all.

When we go to the trouble and expense of framing something for our home it’s usually because the object being frame is important to us, it has value. The same is true for our communities. Most of us value the places where we live. When we have conversations about our communities we should give some thought to picking out the right frame.

This column was originally published in quality newspapers the week of March 17, 2014 

Moneyball Economic Development

This is a longer version of an article written for "Ideas from IEDA" (Indiana Economic Development Association). It was originally published in March 12, 2014

If you know baseball you know this story. Or, if you know great books and good movies, you might know this story as well - how General Manager Billy Beane turned the 2002 Oakland A’s into a winning team despite the smallest total team salary in major league baseball. Conventional wisdom said hotshot pitchers and big hitters were the only ticket to a winning season. Instead, he built a team by finding the right collections of players, overlooked by conventional wisdom. While other GMs were concentrating on batting averages, Beane was looking for on-base percentages. He changed baseball, as a game and a business, and paved the way for stats geeks to become rock stars. Case in point, boy genius Nate Silver went from crunching baseball stats to successfully predicting electoral maps

As an economic developer, if you are not paying attention to data and statistics, being your community’s Billy Beane, you might not be doing your job as well as you could. This is the era of Moneyball Economic Development. There is a variety of great data available to you, many at your fingertips.  If you are not diving into them, you are likely missing opportunities to grow your economy - opportunities that may be right under your nose. 

Economic developers spend a lot of time and resources scouting for the home run hitters - the relocation or expansion that brings dozens, or even hundreds, of jobs with it, or that start up that's in someone's garage right now but has the potential to turn your region into a mini Silicon Valley.

But what about the singles or even the bunts? What about the parts of your economy that always seem to get on base? Do you even know what they are? How can you find those assets and help them move from first to second base and eventually to home plate? Just like Billy Beane, you can use data to find them and add them to your line up.

I sometimes get to teach advanced strategy to economic development professionals and one of the things we do in that course is look at some great data sources that are freely available on the web. These are tools that help us look under the hood of our economy (if you allow me to switch metaphors for a moment).

A regional industry cluster analysis, for instance, which often relied on a consultant to complete at a cost in the range from $10,000 - $100,000 in years past, can now be done in about three mouse clicks at virtually no cost. Another tool lets you do the same thing with occupational clusters, learning what skills the people of your region or community specialize in. Yet another tool helps you do a shift-share analysis to identify which sectors in your economy are more resistant to national economic changes than others, recession resistant, in other words.

Here's an example of how moneyball economic development could play out.

Midville had seen brighter days. Its largest employer, ABC Manufacturing, had closed its doors a decade ago and the cascading effects are what you might expect – economic decline, an eroding quality of life. Civic leaders and economic development professionals, in their efforts to develop a new set of strategies for growth, discovered something interesting in the data they were reviewing. Despite having no information technology (IT) FIRMS in Midville, they had about 30 IT WORKERS, embedded in other non-IT firms – like hospitals, the schools, a few small manufacturers that still existed.

Recognizing these workers as potential economic assets, the chamber of commerce launching Tech Tuesdays, inviting these IT pros for a series of brown-bag event. It was not long before new relationships were developed among the attendees and some new business ideas emerged.  The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) was asked to provide some start-up assistance, the community bank got involved, and two of these folks had an idea for a new smart phone app. At first they worked on the new enterprise evenings and weekends, but when their app launch was successful, they quite their day jobs, leasing space on the town square and hiring three locals to assist with programming and marketing. Midville had its first IT firm!

These are the kinds of singles and bunts and even walks that can get an economy moving again; and data, the sorts that exist beyond the demographics and household income stats, can help uncover them, fueling the imaginations of civic leaders and economic developers with ideas for how they could leverage these assets. For many communities, a home run is a long shot and it may never come at all; but a line up that includes these kinds of solid performers, and the policies and resources to support them, can be a winning strategy. 

It's Complicated

Originally published in quality newspapers in March 2014 

A former colleague of mine was attending a faculty function when he struck up a conversation with another professor. My friend had spent his 35-year career doing research and outreach in economic and community development, helping communities, big and small, grow their economy and improve the quality of life. The other professor was an aeronautical engineer. As they shook hands and introduced themselves and their work, the engineer said with a broad smile, “What you do isn’t rocket science, is it?” Just as my friend was about to take offense, the engineer added, “It’s harder than rocket science.”

As strange is it may sound, the engineer was right. The things we try to do as a community – keep our streets safe, make sure our kids have the education they need to be successful, assure that everyone has a clear pathway to the middle class and beyond – are harder than sending a rocket to the moon.

An economist from the 1950s, Kenneth Boulding, came up with something called general systems theory and identified nine different “systems” within which everything happens. Boulding would have classified rocket science as being part of what he calls the “clockwork” system that includes machines, small simple ones as well as complicated ones. In this nine-level hierarchy, this is only number two. Things in this level are relatively predictable, like clockworks.

The sort of things that we try to do as a community fall into Boulding’s level eight – “social organizations.” This is the system in which we humans interact with one another, like the economy, like in community. This is the second most complex system of Boulding’s nine. The ninth is “transcendental” systems, which gets too abstract for me to fully understand. The point is that what when we, as a community, set out to accomplish something together like grow our economy, reduce crime, raise our educational attainment levels, or tackle childhood obesity we face a set of challenges more daunting than building a rocket and sending it to Mars.

Just because its complex and complicated does not, however, mean it is impossible. Many of us have seen or been actively involved in, neighborhood or community-wide efforts to accomplish something, to make a change. Doing so seems to be part of our DNA as human beings and we Americans have a heritage of working together to accomplish social change. French historian Alexis de Tocqueville made this observation when he visited the U.S. in the mid-1800s and many others have noted it as well. We like to ban together to get things done.

Sometimes our efforts are successful. We make that change - we see a struggling school make a turnaround. We see a community become more welcoming to newcomers who are “different” from long-time residents. We see a regional economy thrive again after a devastating blow. We’ve also, unfortunately, experienced times when, despite our best efforts, the challenges remain and worsen.

The good news is that success is possible. The bad news is that there is no secret recipe. It’s complicated. Blame is easy to cast. “If those elected officials had voted this way or that.” “If we had only gotten that big grant.” “If more people had been involved.” It’s also easy to give up or never get involved to begin with, to put our nose to the ground, just take care of our family and ourselves and ignore what’s going on around us.

My hope for this column is that it will bring you some new ideas. Ideas, hopefully, that will resonate with those of you who are passionate about making your community a better place and maybe with those of you whose passion may currently be at a low simmer, challenging you to get involved again.

This column, won’t, however, bring you cookie-cutter approaches. What works in one community might not work in another. That’s a big reason this stuff is so complex. What I hope these stories will do is ignite your own imagination as you take a little of what you learn from here, add it to what you’ve learned elsewhere, stir in a heaping spoonful of your own experiences and intuition, and hopefully you might create your own recipe that will be just right for the street where you live.