Scott Hutcheson

I Love this Town

"These streets will make you feel brand new, Big lights will inspire you, Hear it from New York, New York, New York!" 

If you've not heard Alicia Keys' soaring tribute to New York City, you need to. It's beautiful. It's a love song, really, a love song to her hometown. Keys, of course, isn't the first to write a song about a city. Not even the first one to sing about New York. Frank Sinatra told us if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. He also had a soft spot for Chicago, crooning that it was his kinda town. 

It's not just big cities that can serve as a songwriter's muse. Rocker John Mellencamp's "Small Town" might be about a particular place in Indiana, but it has become a universal anthem for small towns everywhere. 

The month of February is a time when we think about love even more than usual, with the 14th marking Valentine's Day. Many of us will be both givers and receivers of tokens of love from people in our lives. As I considered a February column, I thought about how interesting it is that many of us have not only not people in our lives that we love but places as well - big cities and small towns. 

I discovered a book about this topic that came out a couple of years ago. Peter Kageyama's For the Love of Cities: The Love Affair Between People and Their Places says that certain attributes can make one place more lovable than another. He points to research conducted by Gallop looking at what community qualities influence residents' loyalty and passion for where they live. 

Aesthetics. The study indicated that a "pretty city" is a lovable city. Some of what makes a city beautiful is the natural setting - mountains and beaches, for instance - but also the built environment - parks, playgrounds and trails. Kageyama contends that lack of aesthetics does not ultimately disqualify a city from being lovable, but may mean the city needs to try harder in other areas. 

Social Offerings. Gallup also found that lovable cities are places where people have a lot of opportunities to meet up with others and make new friends. Kageyama suggests that although some of these social opportunities can be city- or town-sponsored, like a Forth of July parade, for instance, the most satisfying occasions are those led by "non-city agents." 

Openness. The No. 1 characteristic that makes a city lovable, according to the Gallup research, is openness or being a good place to live for a variety of people, which is defined as including, "senior citizens, racial and ethnic minorities, families with kids, gays and lesbians, college graduates, and immigrants from other counties." Kageyama has an interesting barometer for gauging openness. He says if a city seems like a place an outsider could move to, get engaged and in five or 10 years run for mayor, that's probably an "open" city, as opposed to a place where after living there for 20 years, you're still thought of as a "newcomer." 

He makes another point worth noting. When people "hate" something about a city or town, it is usually a big thing - crime, blight or traffic, but what they love about a city is often small things - a park in the middle of town or cafes with tables and chairs outside. He goes on to say that often just a few of the lovable little things can make up for some of the big challenges. 

So, as you set your mind on love this month, consider the place where you live. Do you love it? I hope that you do. If you think your city, town or neighborhood could stand to be a little more lovable, maybe some of Kageyama's ideas will help. 

Consider what you could do to help make the place you live more open, more social or more beautiful. You might not be able to do much about some of the big stuff that troubles many of our cities and towns, but we can all help with many of those lovable small things. Plan a block party or plant some flowers. Who knows, you might just be helping someone fall in love.

Originally published in quality newspapers in February 2015

Time for a Change of (Civic) Habit?

It’s January, the start of a new year, which means that many of us have made some sort of resolution. Researchers at the University of Scranton tell us that nearly half, 47 percent of adults in the U.S. make resolutions and that the most common are to lose weight, get organized, and spend less/save more. They also report that only about eight percent of those making resolutions will be successful in achieving them.

Part of what makes keeping resolutions difficult is that it demands a change in our habits, and that’s a hard thing to do. A recent story on National Public Radio included some reporting on what science tells us about translating our resolve into changed behavior. One of the insights noted that there are two sorts of behaviors: those that we perform infrequently and those that we perform very frequently.

A resolution to finally build shelves in the basement to help organize your totes and boxes is a very different sort of behavior than giving up cigarettes, when smoking is something you likely do several times each day. Those wanting to change the behavior of others have had pretty good success on these infrequent actions. Public awareness campaigns promoting annual preventative health screening, for instance, have worked well. They work less well for more frequent actions, like smoking.

The most effective way to change these more frequent behaviors is to change the environment in which the action occurs. If you eat your nightly pint of ice cream while sitting on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune at 7pm, then DVR the show and watch it in the bedroom, right before going to bed, ideally without the ice cream. You’ve changed the environment.

What, if anything, can this research on individual habits and behavior change tell us about our civic habits? By “civic habits” I mean the things we do to make the communities we live in a better place. Perhaps the most obvious civic habit is that of voting. But what about civic habits that go beyond casting a vote?

Another group of researchers provide a useful definition for this type of civic participation.” They describe civic habits that are “aimed at solving community problems.” In my experience, I’ve encountered very few communities that have developed the civic habit of coming together to address community issues.

The habit I have seen, however, is an enthusiastic willingness to complain about what’s going on in the community. We’ve even come up with some clever acronyms to describe these folks: NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and CAVE –(Citizens Against Virtually Everything).

Visit a local coffee shop or log into a local online discussion board and you will see this particular civic habit in full force, significant numbers of folks having daily discussions about what everybody else is doing wrong in their community.

Imagine trying to change that particular civic habit, changing the direction of these conversations from a negative downward spiral to a more positive, “what could we do together to make our community an even better place?”

A few communities have been successful in changing that conversation or starting appreciative conversation where no conversations had existed at all. They took a lesson from the research on habits and changed the environment by offering a regular forum to have such discussions.

Nearly fifteen years ago, Earnest Andrade decided to create a new civic habit in the City of Charleston. The city’s economy had been riding the wave of tourism for some time but they knew that was not sustainable in the long run. Earnest launched Fridays @ The Corridor a civic forum to talk about what might be next for Charleston and how to take action to make something happen. All these years later and Fridays @ The Corridor is still going strong, an ongoing civic habit. It has been the catalyst for diversifying the Charleston economy into a high tech hub as well as a terrific vacation destination.

So, how about a community resolution for 2015? Does your neighborhood or community need to develop a new civic habit? Does a civic forum, like the one in Charleston sound like a good way to change the environment? If you would like some guidelines on how to start this new civic habit, the folks at the Purdue Center for Regional Development can help. You can find them at www.pcrd.purdue.edu.

Originally published in quality newspapers in Janaury 2015

Storyworthy

Last week life took me somewhere I had never been before. This particular someplace happened to be located on the other side of the globe. When the possibility of a visit first came up, impressions arose in my mind, creating a sort of loose narrative about what sort of place this might be.

The first image was of Simon, the charming and handsome one-time significant other of a dear friend. I also thought of a couple of their exports that are particular favorites of mine - Syrah wine and merino wool. Images of this place's rugged mountains and vast plains came to mind, as well. I had seen them in 70mm beauty in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. I also remembered the devastating earthquakes from a few years ago and the remarkable tales of the people of Christchurch, New Zealand's resilience and resolve.

I have now come and gone on my trip, and New Zealand's story for me is even deeper and more nuanced. I met some of those resilient folks of Christchurch and left with several new friends. I shared a glass or two of that Syrah with a few of them. I saw those landscapes with my own eyes, even more vivid and breathtaking than on film.

More meaningful still were some of the things that people in Christchurch are doing: operating a "container mall," an area in the central part of the city where shops have been set up in large shipping containers while the retail district is being rebuilt; the public art created from earthquake rubble, empty lots now transformed into urban gardens; the Student Volunteer Army, an organization made up of thousands of college students who began volunteering in the earthquake clean-up and continue to serve their community.  

While there, I told my New Zealand story to family and friends as I posted photos and made status updates on my Facebook page. Now, I'm telling you, perhaps adding to any impressions you have of New Zealand.

Every place has a story and in my work - economic and community development - I've seen a lot of communities and regions spend a great deal of energy and money on telling their story or building a brand. This is an idea borrowed from industry, of course. The job of marketing and advertising professionals is to construct stories, stories about soft drinks, trucks, smartphones and the like.

Some in industry, however, are sensing that times are changing.

In a new book, True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business, author Ty Montage, says that "storytelling" is out, "storydoing" is what's making good businesses into great businesses. The difference between storytelling and storydoing is a subtle one. Storytelling companies do all the stuff companies have done for a long time, spend lots of money on establishing a brand. Storydoing companies, on the other hand, do things that are "storyworthy" and then let the stories emerge from their customers via social media and word-of-mouth.

This is a notion to which our communities should perhaps pay attention. Every community, be it a neighborhood, city or larger region, has a story or a narrative. In come cases, organizations like convention and visitors bureaus and economic development organizations have attempted to manufacture these stories; in other cases the stories have emerged more organically.

Some communities are happy with their story. Others, not so much. Communities that want to change their narrative may want to embrace this notion of storydoing or doing things that are storyworthy and then let the story emerge. It's really the way it happens anyway. I'm sure New Zealand has spent billions on advertising and branding. In the end, however, its current narrative is being spun from the storyworthy things they are doing in places like Christchurch.

What's your community's story? Do you know? If not, ask around. Better yet, do a little searching on social media like Twitter, YouTube, Yelp or Foursquare. What's going on that's storyworthy? If it's not much, or if you don't like what you see, here's your chance to change the narrative. Go out and do something storyworthy.

This column was originally published in quality newspapers in December 2014.

Big Wins with Small Goals

Lowell Catlett is an economist, futurist and professor at New Mexico State University. He often starts his talks about the future with a confession you might not expect. He can't really predict the future. Catlett points to research on the accuracy of economists' forecasts on stock prices, unemployment rates and the like. One study looked at 7,000 different economic predictions and found 47 percent of them were correct. In other words, flip a coin and you can beat the economists by 3 percent. Catlett's take-home message is that although you can't predict the future, you can prepare for it. The preparation is what helps us be adaptable when an uncertain future unfolds before us.

Our civic leaders do a great deal of thinking about the future, often setting ambitious, long-term, big goals. Perhaps your own community has a set of these big goals for the future. I know of a large metropolitan region that set a goal 20 years ago to build a light-rail, public transit system; several rural communities that set their sights on luring large auto manufacturing plants that promised hundreds of jobs; and urban neighborhoods that worked diligently to attract large foundation grants they were sure would reverse years of decline.

What about that metro region? Still no light rail. Those communities looking for the big employer? It never happened. The neighborhoods eyeing those big grants? Not a dime. The people in these communities looked ahead and set big goals. But a recession knocked the props out of the tax revenues expected to fund that light rail system. Some other communities landed those auto jobs. And as for that big grant for the neighborhood, the foundations changed their funding priorities. Big goals, like the future itself, are dependent on too many factors out of our control.

Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard, writes about the power of small wins. She notes that doubt and dwindling motivation comes on quickly when a big goal is missed. She advises that, on the other hand, small wins lead to what she calls the progress principle - more confidence, high performance and motivation to keep moving forward.

Another researcher, John Bryson from the University of Minnesota, says that this same principle holds true for communities. He defines small wins for a community as "concrete, completed, implemented outcomes of moderate importance." To get to the big payoff, Bryson says communities need to set a progressive series of small-win goals informed by a sense of strategic direction. Some recent research done at Purdue University seems to confirm this. Looking at over 300 community planning efforts, those that focused primarily on a progressive series of modest, near-time, easy-win goals were more likely to be successful that those focused primarily on bigger, more transformational and longer-term goals.

For example, one rural community was looking to bolster its agricultural economy, and leaders set their sights on repurposing an old outlet mall near the interstate as a distribution facility for agricultural products. They grew frustrated and discouraged after years of no progress. When they regrouped, they focused instead on setting a few more-modest goals based on what they could make happen in the short run.

Setting aside the outlet mall for the time, they settled on organizing a festival to promote one particular agricultural product produced in their area. They worked first on a recipe contest that would be a featured event at the festival. Within a year, they pulled off the festival with great success. It is now an annual attraction, drawing thousands of visitors (and their money) from around the U.S. and internationally. The big goal - the old outlet mall - was too big, too distant and too much out of their control, but a progressive series of small goals took them to a place they could never have anticipated.

So, the next time you and your fellow community leaders are dreaming of the future, try taking one small step. With each step you can see a little further on the horizon, and eventually you may see something that you couldn't have just a step back. That's when you start running.

This column was originally published in quality newspapers in August 2014.

Take Me to Your Leader

"Take me to your leader." This cartoon and movie catchphrase, or something close to it, has been uttered by fictional extraterrestrial visitors demanding to see the president or a general, to negotiate some terms before annihilating our planet.

Leadership is a concept we talk about a lot in the context of our communities. Our cities have mayors and other elected officials. Many of our towns and neighborhoods have formal and informal leaders to whom we look to help shepherd us forward.

With some of the kinds of issues we face in communities, it is pretty clear who the leader is in a particular issue. This summer in my community, a large infrastructure project has been going on to fix some stormwater drainage issues. The head of the street department is the city leader who is called upon to take care of this community issue.

Ron Heifetz of Harvard University, along with colleague Riley Sinder, has studied leadership as it relates to public problems; they classify problems into three types. They describe the street drainage problem as a "Type 1" public problem in which both the problem and solution are clear, and there is a clear leader "in charge" of addressing the problem.

Heifetz and Sinder also point out, however, most of the really big problems our communities face are of the Type 2 and 3 varieties in which either the problem is clear but the solution is unclear (Type 2), or both the problem and solution are unclear (Type 3). Leadership for these types of problems is a little less cut and dried.

If the issue in our community is related to economic growth, for instance, raising graduation rates or reducing neighborhood violent crime, what one individual do we go to? If instructed, "take me to your leader" in one of these contexts, where do we go? Heifetz and Sinder contend that there are no single leaders for Type of Type 2 and Type 3 public problems.

What makes these issues even more complex is the fact that we are trained to think of the world in hierarchies, looking up and down some real or imagined pyramid-like organizational chart for the fix to our problems.

There is not, however, anyone at the top of those organizational charts. Who is in charge of assuring all our kids graduate from high school; that everyone has the skills and opportunity to work in jobs that pay a living wage; or that each child has the support they need to maintain a healthy weight?

Heifetz and Sinder's answer to who is in charge of these issues is that we all are. There are no true experts with specialized know-how to fix these public problems. It takes, rather, the collective effort of all of us.

How does a community address these messes when nobody is in charge? The very first step is to move away from the hierarchy mentality of looking up and down, and, instead, adopt network thinking, requiring us to look out to our left and right, forward and backward.

These horizontal networks are how we best organize ourselves to address complex issues. A network is powerful because it optimizes the number of connections that can be made among the member of a network, many more connections than are made in a hierarchy.

Think about a hierarchy with 10 people. One at the top who directs the actions of three people, each of whom directs two people. That’s a total of nine connections. Now arrange those same 10 people in a horizontal circle where they can each connect to the other eight. You end up with 45 connections.

The only chance for our communities to address their most pressing problems is to adopt network thinking, harnessing the power of all the connections that can result. No single person or organization has the knowledge, resources or power to address these issues, but a network of people does.

So, if aliens shows up on your street insisting that you take them to your leader, don't head for city hall. Instead, shake their hand, tentacle, or whatever, and then have your neighbors form a receiving line right behind you.

This column was originally published in quality newspapers in July 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.