In a networked, knowledge-driven economy, collaboration drives wealth creation. And collaboration can only thrive in a stable environment of trust. The corrosion of our civil society –– the alarming growth of incivility and pervasive lying –– undercuts our economy's productivity and our capacity to innovate.
Incivility -- fraudulent concealment ("hiding the ball"), lying, manipulation, and associated behaviors -- can work well to redistribute wealth. We see almost endless examples from MF Global to the subprime mess. Yet, these behaviors do not generate wealth. Indeed, they erode capitalism's capacity to generate wealth. That's
why corruption slows economic growth and why
trust is associated with higher rates of economic growth.
We have moved into a new economic era with new rules for prosperity. Increasingly, knowledge embedded in products and services creates the value leading to wealth. This knowledge is generated and managed through collaborative, loosely joined networks.
Our capacity to prosper depends on our capacity to collaborate and innovate in these open networks. To innovate, we must learn how to design and manage complex projects without relying on "command and control" dictates, which don't work. Trust becomes a key element in the effectiveness of these networks. Ethical habits are crucial to innovation and the generation of wealth in open networks. (For those interested in diving deeper into this topic, you might read Francis Fukuyama's
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.)
This all sounds abstract. Let's get practical.
We know this much: billions of dollars of federal money over the past four decades have not changed the dynamics within these neighborhoods. Each of these well intended federal programs has been designed to fix a specific problem. They do not change the underlying dynamics within the neighborhood. As a result, they fail. In the case of HUD, the agency's categorical programs have done little to change the dynamics of neighborhoods like Ledbetter and Allendale in Shreveport.
With the Choice Neighborhood grant, Kim and his team proposed to use the Ledbetter/Allendale neighborhoods as a testbed for new approaches to revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods by combining the insights of Community Renewal International and Strategic Doing.
This work is difficult, complex and exciting. Open innovation pushes us in new directions. At its base, however, it requires a commitment to civility among the members of the team. By “civility” I mean the capacity to treat each other with mutual respect and honesty. Civility means not withholding relevant information from one another, not lying to one another, and not personally attacking one another.
The Shreveport Choice Neighborhood innovation implodes
Unfortunately, the City of Shreveport and the local council of governments could not uphold their end of the bargain. A week ago, they issued a letter demanding that Kim and our team cease working on this project.
This letter came from an attorney after local government officials undercut the project with a pattern of unacceptable civic behavior. Rather than confront any disagreements with our team openly, the City and the council of governments elected to first attack our work behind the scenes and then run to a lawyer.
I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
Civic innovations like the ones we were designing in Shreveport disrupt bureaucratic organizations. These innovations propose a new way of doing business that can be threatening to the established order.
The incivility we encountered fits a pattern long established in Shreveport, where I have been working since 1984. When I first arrived in the city to work on an economic development strategy, I encountered a public debate touched off by a Methodist minister. He accused the city's leadership of being unable to collaborate to lift the city's sights. Rev. Hull called this civic pathology "Shreveportitis". Amplifying Rev. Hull's comments the same year, I wrote about the political challenges facing Shreveport in a strategy report that the American Economic Council awarded the first Arthur D. Little Award for Excellence in Economic Development.
I pointed out in that report that Shreveport's evolution politically would ultimately define its economic horizon.
Almost a decade later, on November 3, 1993, I gave a speech to the Shreveport Rotary, "The Politics of Personality: The Biggest Economic Challenge Facing Shreveport and What To Do About It." In the speech, I diagnosed Shreveport's problem bluntly: "The political dynamics of Shreveport...are mired in a ditch." I pointed out that as economies slow down, the focus of politics inevitably narrows. The game turns into zero sum, and local "leaders" focus too much on personalities and not enough on issues of common concern. They lose a sense of direction. Politics becomes a soap opera, an endless loop of shallow intrigue and innuendo.
In my 1993 remarks, I set out some simple rules to guide Shreveport toward a more healthy and productive civic process: Shreveport's leaders "must be willing to to exclude from the process those people who insist on promoting their own hidden agendas to the detriment of others. Those who insist on manipulating and withholding information to their own advantage. Those who refuse to respect others and the spirit of collaborative discussion."
Twenty-seven years after Rev. Hull and I pointed out the challenge of civic leadership in Shreveport, and 18 years after my speech to the Rotary, Shreveport's leadership has been unable to develop more healthy civic habits. Shreveportitis still infects the body politic.
The challenge for HUD: Move beyond project management
Sadly, the agency staff at HUD has proven itself not much help to get the Choice Neighborhood project underway. One of the challenges in moving HUD toward new models of sustainable development involves training staff new ways of thinking and behaving, new approaches that foster collaboration. The HUD staff is well-versed in project-based management. Yet, these approaches are too rigid, too linear, too bureaucratic to support the agile, integrated and open strategies that provide the foundation for sustainable development. Sustainable development invites us to cross boundaries, not defend them.
I am finding with my conversations with other development professionals across the country that the HUD staff has a very difficult time understanding how to manage promising new pathways to sustainable development. These approaches are inherently more agile and flexible. As HUD moves forward, they will need to examine how to retrain their field staff to promote more collaborative approaches to sustainable development. (The same is true for the staffs of the Employment and Training Administration, as well as the Economic Development Administration.)
Where do we go from here? We will continue to develop and deploy new approaches to agile strategy and sustainable neighborhood development. We will also explore how these models can be embedded, replicated and scaled across regions through our emerging university network.
In our last Strategic Doing Design Team meeting, we discussed the fact that not all communities or regions have the civic maturity to undertake these more sophisticated approaches to building wealth in a networked world. We will be writing up the case of Shreveport to gain some insight into the civic behaviors that must be in place to transform an economy through open innovation in loosely joined networks.
Shreveport's Choice Neighborhood initiative has provided us a valuable lesson in what to avoid.
Where does Shrevport go from here? My guidance to my friends and colleagues in Shreveport was passed on to me by one of my mentors, Dick Pogue, former managing director of the Jones Day law firm.
In guiding me, Dick told me he was passing on advice he received years earlier from his mentor, the legendary Erwin Griswold, former Solicitor General of the United States.
When I confronted opposition to deploying these new approaches in Cleveland, Dick told me, "Press on, regardless."
Sage advice.
