Title: “Let’s collaborate”
Author: David Yaden
I don’t keep up with pop music, never have been to a Taylor Swift concert. However, among all her take-downs of her exes, she must have written at least one lyric along the lines of “let’s collaborate.” My evidence: Taylor is everywhere, and, coincidentally it’s hard these days to go to any confab about public policy without it ending with a resounding call to hold hands and cooperate. The call-out is to providers of public services, funders of services and projects, users and clients, business, advocacy groups, and, especially, all the governments and agencies with a finger in whatever pie.
As to what Portland needs to get out of its funk: “One clear theme that has emerged from these listening sessions is a desire for more human connections, as well as collaboration amongst government, private sector, non-profit, and education communities to reach our goals,” said Nolan Lienhart.,” chair of the vision committee of the Governor’s Task Force on Central City recovery. [emphasis added and in quotes below]
Portland State says in its soon-to-be updated strategic plan: “Portland State University pursues excellence through: Accessibility, innovation, collaboration, engagement, sustainability, transformation.
The Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) that submits university budgets to the state said in a review of university funding: “Collaboration is an increasingly important state priority for institutions of higher education.
Here’s a statement from Foundations for a Better Oregon’s “What we believe” page. “MOVE AS ONE FOR IMPACT: Oregon’s children are a shared responsibility. To solve complex problems with sustainable and systemic solutions, we need to build networks of trust that encourage shared learning, collaboration, risk-taking, and collective action.”
The newly adopted Portland City Charter includes the following responsibility of the new city administer: “Advance the City’s core values of anti-racism, equity, transparency, communication, collaboration and fiscal responsibility.
In my notes from the Oregon Leaders Summit in December, the annual who’s who of elected, business, and civic leaders, I wrote, “Word of the day: collaboration.”
From the website of a candidate for Portland City Council: “If I am so lucky to be elected to Portland City Council, you can expect me to be compassionate and [to] collaborate….”
Metro tells us: “There is no silver bullet solution to meeting our region’s housing affordability challenge. A range of innovative approaches and broad collaboration across public, private and nonprofit sectors are needed….”
OK, got it, Taylor.
Wicked problems
But what does all this clamor for “collaboration” tell us? If nothing else, the wide-spread yearning for it suggests that it is mostly missing in action if not in words.
One big thing it tells us is that the problems we want government to tackle have gotten a lot more complicated and convoluted, outpacing the capacity of existing governing structures to respond. Increasingly we’ve got too many big problems with too many facets and causes addressed by too many entities with too many different responsibilities and funding sources.
I’ll buy lunch for anybody who can map out for me a coherent strategy for improving the homeless situation that includes all the variety of homeless causes and situations as well as all of the entities working to provide and fund services.
American government has always been messy and multi-layered, by design and by happenstance. By giving both the national government and states substantial authority, classic federalism imposed on us a healthy appetite for messiness. For the most part, we have fudged and kludged our way forward as circumstances required.
Our regional government, Metro, is a classic example. Basically Metro came into existence for two reasons. Regional leaders schmoozed together enough to realize they could enlarge the transportation funding pie by cooperating rather than competing. Secondly, when the state swooned for land use planning to protect farm land and control sprawl, a regional authority simply made sense to avoid chaos and competition.
In both cases, transportation funding and land use, the cast of stakeholders and finders, was reasonably more manageable and the broad electorate could conclude, “I will benefit from more funding for transportation and from protecting farm and forest lands from those nasty California developers.” In a way, Metro was a solution to a welcome problem—chances for win-wins.
Now I am writing about so-called wicked problems, the more difficult circumstance in which stakeholders find themselves at odds over the definition of the problem, the effective solution, and over the different consequences among the stakeholders. This is almost always the case when “who pays” is on the table and when some stakeholders have a lot more at stake than others.
And that is exactly the normal case these days for issues such as homelessness, housing affordability, drug addiction, mental health, climate change, pandemic response. Problems and issues just won’t stay within the nice neat lines of governing jurisdictions, nor respond to short-term, unitary fixes. Much of what we expect government to do these days is an unruly sprawl of conditions, social and personal, resulting from both socio-economic change and from the unintended consequences of prior policy choices.
Ironically, Metro today finds itself inserted into housing affordability and homelessness, somewhat awkwardly, because it is a convenient avenue for distributing money but with very ambiguous and ambivalent real authority and accountability.
The polarization of society and politics has contributed to the confusion and contention around things that used to be settled. Education is a hot example. The defining issue for education used to be how much to pay for it. Now, pick your defining issue(s): what should be taught, who controls what is taught, is education a public or private good, who should provide it, are schools responsible for coping with other failings in society, how much Federal, state and local control and funding, where does accountability for learning performant reside….
I have made the case that the problems we face today are harder than in the past. I believe that is a hard truth. But the fact is that we have done lots of things over the years that, incrementally, have become problems rather than solutions. Times and circumstances change and sometimes we just get policy wrong.
My good friend Tim Nesbitt wrote recently in The Oregonian, “with record levels of state funding for K-12 spawning a teacher strikes and school district budget cuts, it’s time to recognize that the states approach to funding K – 12 is broken.….In the funding formula that exists today, there is no accounting for how similar districts with similar student populations in funding levels continue to show widely different results when it comes to measures like high school graduation rates.”
Tim’s statement is not about polarization but it does make the point that much of public policy is a patchwork that defies clear responsibility and accountability. Often yesterday’s fix is today’s problem.
That was driven home by the recent rancor over what to do with the unexpected windfall of revenue from Portland’s clean energy fund tax. In the squabble over whether it should be used for purposes only loosely tied to the ballot measure, one City Commissioner observed, “We are in a unique position regionally where specialized funds for specific programs are generating a lot more money than anticipated, while core city services are facing shrinking revenues and constrained budgets.…”
I haven’t done the research but I’m willing to bet that a big part of the problem I am outlining stems from too many programs with dedicated and restricted funding.
Collaboration, coordination, and control
So if the government I am describing looks like a Gordian knot of too many tangled threads or a crazy quilt of irregular patches rather than a nice neat organization chart, is it hopeless?
For the most part we have managed to keep different levels and parts of government in sync well enough to give government passing grades. Recently however, we are seeing more D’s and F’s—or incomplete— when we grade government performance. Some of this is due to general grumpiness in the face of unnerving social, political and economic change. but there is a lot of real governmental stumbling and bumping into each other.
Policy and programs always have involved sharing of authority, responsibility and funding among governments. That sharing is spelled out in legislation and intergovernmental agreements.
As I argued above, the problem is that problems no longer nicely fit into the policy and program frameworks we have evolved. Thus all the calls for collaboration. But putting a spotlight on collaboration shows that we do not do it very well.
Let me start by parsing “collaboration.” Sometimes what seems to be wanting is better coordinationamong responsible entities. And sometimes, more clear control by a higher level.
At one level collaboration is a well-tested process of different groups and agencies cooperating around a specified project or objective. I am mostly familiar with a variety of examples in which Portland State brings expertise and student engagement to bear upon an activity or project of a local government agency. Portland State has also served as a mediator in local conflicts. These are examples of working together because the issue or goal at stake is pretty clear and the parties can see mutual benefit. Clarity of situation, mutuality of interest in both means and ends, and capacity and willingness to cooperate.
We have a recent heartening example in the agreement over water use reached by stakeholders in the Klamath River Basin.
This really is mediation. It works when the battle lines are clear and the contestants recognize the futility of fighting. That is a different circumstance from the messier situation that is the subject of this commentary. A mediator is a neutral figure with no stake in the outcome; mediators work to help stakeholders get to an agreement they agree is necessary.
A close cousin of collaboration is coordination of entities that have clearly defined shared objectives. The fact that all the horses want to go on the same direction should make it easier to get them all in harness, but that isn’t always or even normally the case. Bureaucracies find lots of reasons, reasonable and not, to want to do things their way.
Generally, the route to better coordination is through a higher level of government exercising more control.
Oregon’s woeful record for helping the mentally ill has been in the news lately. Experts have pointed to the better record of Massachusetts. The head of the psychiatry department at OHSU explains:
[I]n Oregon, we have multiple governmental entities trying to create various systems without a lot of coordination. Here, the mental health system has always been described as a state-county partnership. The county is the mental health authority in Oregon. What happens is, counties decide what’s going to happen within their jurisdiction. That can be wildly different from one place to another.
Why does Massachusetts get better results?
Massachusetts has control over the delivery of care within the state.… As a result of the powers that they have, they are able to create coordinated systems of care that are very efficient and very effective.
Of course, things can get not only messy but contentious when problems of coordination get solved through Big Brother taking charge. It is easy to end up with assertions of control that are so ham-handed and mis-applied that they make effective collective action harder.
What really is of interest to me is the situation I described above, when stakeholders find themselves at odds over the definition of the problem, the objectives to pursue, the effective solution, and over the different consequences among stakeholders. It is the circumstance requiring hard discussions just to get to agreement on the ends to be pursued before worrying about the means to the end.
Are there examples of effective collaboration?
Yes, good examples. But I hesitate to say there are lessons we can easily apply here. Context matters.
Also it seems sophomoric to conclude that collaboration works where public, private and civic leaders want it to work. Nonetheless.…
A recent story in The New York Times was headlined, “How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own – The New York Times”:
The [lesson] was that in broken America it’s still possible for adversaries to share facts and come together around something contentious and difficult. Public and private, county and city, businesses and nonprofits, conservatives and liberals, the housed and unhoused: In Houston, enough of them have agreed on a goal that seems worth striving for. Working in concert, they have made genuine progress in housing previously unhoused people. And, so far, the benefits of collaboration have fended off the usual forces of entropy. That was an eye-opener and a sign of hope.
Whereas Portland once was lauded for creating Metro to institutionalize regional cooperation, more recently Denver has become a poster child for togetherness. When Atlanta civic leaders looked for examples they might follow, they pointed to Denver:
Greater Denver exhibits a degree of regional cooperation – in politics, business recruitment, transportation and downtown development — unusual across America. “There’s this sense that we are really a single large community in competition with other cities around the country, therefore, we have to stick together,” said Schroeppel, a professor of urban planning at the University of Colorado’s in-town campus.”
Reflecting on why Clackamas county was reporting success in reducing homelessness, the deputy Director of the responsible agency said,: “I don’t think there is a silver bullet for homelessness….But there is a secret sauce and it is collaboration among community partnerships.”
Copenhagen, Denmark is often visited by urban planners eager to see a place denominated as a model for thriving urban livability. Here is how one of America’s foremost urban scholars reports on “Why Copenhagen Works”:
The Copenhagen story tells cities to focus on the fundamentals—the powers they have, the capacity of their workforces, and the extent to which leaders from the public, private, and civic sectors play well together
Coalitions built on shared goals
Is there a way to induce leaders from the public, private, and civic sectors to play well together?
A nudge from above—the Governor—can help. But powerful and self-sustaining collaboration is largely a boot-straps operation that appears to flare up when a variety of civic leaders can sense and are ready to grasp a moment of shared if inchoate public shared readiness. Here is how Don Clark, a monumental Multnomah County leader during Portland’s renaissance in the 1970s described it:
[The Mayor] was important but neither [he] nor I could have done anything without the network of people, just ordinary citizens, who were on the same wavelength. … group of progressive leaders on the same wavelength. Had a regional vision, to make things work together better.…A commonality of progressive spirit…. It was just all around us. Not just a few leaders but many, many people in the community.
It was not as though that shared and optimistic outlook was laying on the ground ready to be picked up. All kinds of community leaders and groups participated in conversations that coalesced into loose-knit coalitions that powered change.
Coalition-building is the traditional political means of forging a compact that supports action on a broad number of fronts. It can be transformational if broad and deep but unfortunately is increasingly rare.
I have been trumpeting for sometime that charter reform and civic engagement in Portland have become so focused on who sits at the table that we have neglected what happens at the table. While I am 100-percent behind a fully inclusive and equitable table, I do believe that we have drifted too far toward assertions of “hear my voice” and away from “let me hear your voice that we may find enough harmony to get something done.”
I am excited to watch the new Portland regime take shape and take office. In part that is because proponents promised a new era of collaboration. Let’s hope and expect that this means more than more talk.
Is (ugh) compromise part of collaboration?
Yes, often compromise is called for to get past contentious issues. But.
For the situations I am writing about, compromising does not work, nor should it, when people have to give up core principles. It does not work by splitting the baby. It does not work when it is seen as a zero-sum game.
There are two ways to avoid the zero-sum compromise trap that I know of.
First, and my favorite, is to make the problem bigger. This maxim, ascribed to General and President Dwight Eisenhower, is built on the wisdom that zero-sum, winner-loser situations can be transformed into win-win situations by changing how we characterize the problem itself.
Example: we have the divisive issues of public safety and police racial misbehavior. It should be obvious that they are sides of the same coin. I am willing to bet that, absent interest groups yelling loudly, this is how the public sees the issue.
Example: “recriminalization” of drug addiction. While there is ample evidence that a punitive drug policy is inhumane and fails, there is mixed but persuasive evidence and expert opinion that a timely nudge into treatment sometimes helps. Lost in the fight over “criminalization” was the opportunity to prioritize the missing necessity of solid and widely available treatment capacity as a condition for—even before – putting addiction even gently back into the justice system. Too often we have seen government fail to deliver on those sorts of promises.
The second, and related, route to get past zero-sum situations is to bring in a broader range of stakeholders. Without going further down that rabbit hole, we have lots of evidence that the broad but lightly engaged public often has opinions substantially different from the interest groups that dominate so much of politics that makes the news. (This is an opportunity for me to give a plug to the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to research that gives voice to Oregonians unfiltered by interest groups.)
This is drifting a bit off topic but is important if we want to encourage effective collaboration.
Leadership
In my normal stump speech about leadership, I valorize the bully pulpit. We look to leaders to show us they have a good grasp of the situation we are in and to mobilize us behind broadly understood courses of action. Leaders build coalitions. They use their charisma to inspire us. Good leaders are good storytellers.
More recently I have begun to consider what leadership looks like when collaboration becomes a more important aspect of governance. Perhaps a loud voice, a megaphone, a bully pulpit get in the way, no matter how articulate. In today’s world of unruly problems, the skill of the collaborator to morph zero-sum situations into something more amenable to solution may be what we need.
A few years back, the legendary advertising whiz, Dan Wieden, was reported to have observed:
“The leadership vacuum in our state is not only profound, it’s systemic.”
Old hierarchies have broken down and, no matter how much we might long for knights on white horses, fresh posses of can-do powerbrokers are not about to ride to our rescue.
“What we need,” Wieden said, “is a totally new approach to leadership. What we need is extreme cooperation.”
However, John Tapogna, former CEO of ECONorthwest and a respected participant in Portland’s civic life, observes that too often “collaboration” becomes a barrier to getting things done, a babble of voices—a “potato sack race” in his words.
So there’s the question: if we need effective collaboration, can we actually do it?