A Price to Obsolescence Denial – Part II

This is part II of an essay posted yesterday tracing the modern history of tourism along with that sector’s seeming inability to exercise what the late Peter Drucker called “systematic abandonment” as it relates to giving obsolete layers of organizations a proper burial.

I left off yesterday just before WWII created a lull in the widespread embrace of destination marketing organizations.  States had begun to advertise in the 1930s (the only element of marketing widely understood at the time.)

But first they had to purge their roadsides of billboard blight.  They also discovered another reason that they had the “cart before the horse” when it came to marketing.

States such as North Carolina had very little idea of what they could offer tourists.  The federal government came to the rescue again, as it had when it incentivized the building of roads.

A Depression-era program designed to put people to work rallied teams of authors and artists in each state to compile and illustrate comprehensive guide books that were then left to each respective state to publish.

In January 1937, my native Idaho’s was the first of the guides to be printed.  The remote mountain state had gone from having 5 of its 2,255 miles of roadway paved in 1922 to having 2,176 miles paved or oiled by 1936.

By the end of 1937, 400 autos a day were using the segment of the North & South Highway between Boise and Coeur d’Alene alone and officials were promoting improvements as a “means of attracting more tourists to Idaho.”

When first completed in 1927, the North & South’s terminus was at Weiser, about 74 miles short of Boise.

That segment had been completed by the time the state’s guide was published, making it possible for travelers to drive to and from Bonner’s Ferry, 30 miles shy of the Canadian border.

These state guides each catalogued detailed histories, inventories of flora, fauna, geology and archeology as well as point to point descriptions of things to see and do in each community.

Published in 1939, the guide book for North Carolina showed communities what was possible and planted the seeds for the post-World War II emergence of visitor promotion as we know it today.

That first visitors guide took nearly four years to research and produce with writers working out of eight different cities across the state.

But returning GIs across the country after World War II were impatient.

Tourism entrepreneurs, fearful states would not resume tourism marketing, began to instead organize another layer of associations, hoping to apply pressure.

Had they investigated more closely, they may have understood that the paradigm was shifting to community-based destination marketing organizations.

Key to strategic thinking is to look back in order to see forward.  A few did and jumped ahead of the shift to community-based tourism promotion.

Within five to ten years, the statewide tourism associations began to struggle for membership, as the idea of community destination marketing organizations rapidly spread and then exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The shift was hastened in North Carolina when one of those returning GIs, an aviator who had survived two plane crashes in the war, pioneered the local option occupancy tax as a means to self-fund community destination marketing.

By the early 1980s, even rural communities and counties were organizing DMOs.  The vast majority of travelers by the end of that decade were destined for a specific city, town or county.

That’s when meetings began to be held to determine what do with those middle-ring associations created in that span after the war.  People who were unaware of the paradigm shift that made them obsolete only a little more than a decade later were perplexed.

At a meeting in the early 1990s to decide what to do with that layer of associations created in the 1950s, a friend of mine who worked for Biltmore at the time gently explained why that layer should be laid to rest, what Nancy Lublin calls “death by success.”

He explained that tourism organizations were by then far more connected to their respective community destination marketing organization rather than statewide or even national tourism-related associations.

It was one of a half dozen such meetings I was asked to attend over the years.  But there were always a few on both sides of the paradigm shift who didn’t accept that “pulling the plug,” could be both celebratory and merciful, preferring life support instead.

It isn’t a phenomenon unique to tourism.  There are many such organizations on life support in every community, kept there by a few people who can never seem to say goodbye and forcing many times their number to pay the price of their reticence.

In my experience, those who are reticent to pull the plug are otherwise reasonable people who also often struggle with anything strategic in nature, giving them a general lack of understanding of patterns or distinctions.

I suspect that the productivity of society in general is loaded down much more than it needs to be, merely by the reluctance to shutter the obsolete.

For those who are near-sighted when it comes to recognizing paradigm shifts from either shore, they must seem so gradual as to barely even exist.

But in fact, those who do see patterns and distinctions long before they are apparent know that the tipping point can be blindingly fast when it comes.

It is why those who perpetuate roadside billboards fail to grasp that while that form of media began its march into obsolescence in the 1930s, it recently reached its rapid conclusion over just 48 months.

It explains why progressive tourism leaders pushed for them to be banned 76 years ago, while a handful today can’t bear to see them go.

But just as we kept an old typewriter stashed in the back rooms of offices as well as fax machines more than 20 years after either had been useful, we are forced to keep layers of organizations on life support for the few who can’t bear their demise.

It is the price we pay for those who are not strategic.

How Critical, Strategic and Historical Thinking are Linked

In 1892, twenty years before he would be elected President of the United States, Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson traveled by train from Princeton, where he was then a department chair, to a small conference in Madison, Wisconsin.

On his mind, in part, were the ongoing discussions that would soon lead to collapsing history, economics and political science or “politics,” as he preferred to call it, into one department.

He was also aware of troubling signs in the economy such as the unsustainable level of mortgaged farms and the low values of railroads shares compared to the bonded indebtedness they racked up, which drove the economy since the end of the Civil War.

But it would be several months before the 1893 financial panic would set in and his mind was primarily focused on the future of secondary education in America.

During his lifetime, compulsory education had gradually been adopted state by state, beginning with Massachusetts prior to the Civil War about the time he was born.

His parents moved deep into the South in embrace of the Confederacy, cutting him off from his anti-slavery roots in Ohio and Pennsylvania.  He started his higher education at Davidson College in North Carolina and proposed to his wife in Asheville.

So he was disturbed that the Southern states were laggards in embracing secondary education for all of their residents.  It would be another 26 years before Mississippi would become the last of the states then in existence to do so.

Tennessee in 1905 and North Carolina in 1907 were the first to do so, twenty years after my native Idaho.

But as Wilson made his way to Madison, there was still no standardized curriculum for secondary education, especially in high schools where they existed.

A Committee of Ten, actually nine different committees of ten experts each were organized around nine different subject areas they were to assess.

Professor Wilson’s group was to tackle history, civil government and political economy (economics.)

On his mind may have been that it been 108 years since another future President and one of the nation’s most prominent founders had laid out the importance of students learning history.

Thomas Jefferson had penned, in the only book he ever published, that “History, by apprising them (students) of the past, will enable them to judge the future,” not only making the case for history’s importance to liberty but also strategic thinking.

Wilson and his nine colleagues would likewise stress in their report that “History and its allied branches are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable mental power we call judgment.”

Realizing that many students failed to see the value of memorizing dates and events, Wilson’s subcommittee recommended that history be not only taught as a subject several times a week for eight years but laced throughout other subjects such as English, Literature and Geography.

Their rationale was that the true value of learning history is learning “historical thinking,” such as the ability to decipher motives and see patterns important to “associational thinking,” or repurposing what is now understood to be the key to innovation.

Many people fail to move beyond dates and events to learn historical thinking because politicians have interfered and mandated a top-down approach out of concern that we won’t spend enough time learning national values.

But studies show this should be inverted.  More than two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of every ethnicity, view the importance of the past first through family background, a ratio of three to one over those that view U.S. history as most important.

Before there is any jump to conclusions, the percentage among non-Hispanic whites is nearly 70%.  Among African Americans and Native Americans, the area of next highest importance is their ethnic or racial group.

Then comes the history of the community in which we live.

In a twist of irony, the top down approach appears to disengage people, even the politicians who mandate it.

It would be interesting to know if the reason so many in my former field seem to lack any motivation or sensibility when it comes to guarding sense of place, let alone leveraging it as an appeal in favor of more superficial approaches, is due to a breakdown in historical thinking.

There are many studies, as well as examples through the years that have long ago confirmed that the inability to think historically is why so few are able to think strategically or make strategy.

A kindred spirit who is jumpstarting the Museum of Durham History first as an innovative pop-up pointed me recently to a book entitled, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts.

It was written by Dr. Sam Wineburg, a cognitive researcher at the University of Washington who then founded Stanford’s History Education Group.

He notes that “Situating ourselves in time is a basic human need.”

Those like many of my former peers who skip over history unless “useable” rather than as a way of thinking, give it, to paraphrase, the “fascination of the flea market.”

This, Wineburg explains, is because they think they more or less know what they are looking for when they skim through the past making it unlikely it will inform their outlook or cause them to do any rethink their strategy approach to a given community.

Instead, to continue to paraphrase Dr. Wineburg, the past becomes clay in their hands.  Instead of stretching their understanding and awareness, they merely contort it to fit the predetermined meanings they have already assigned to it.

But these observations among former peers in community destination marketing and many other officials and understanding how historical thinking works and how to reach it are very different things.

Fortunately, over the course of my now-concluded career, cognitive researchers have made huge strides in understanding the linkages between critical, strategic and historical thinking.

Using these findings, a collaboration with Ancestry.com has helped the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill near where I live create new tools and approaches to teaching historical thinking and they aim first at what the vast majority of all Americans consider most important about the past, their own.

Durham schools are not yet involved but twenty-four years ago this spring, a low-tech approach to this was first piloted in Durham.  It started when Ann Baker, the executive director of the newly formed Durham Service Corps, a national pilot. contracted with the City to clean up Geer Cemetery.

But rapidly that summer, the project evolved into much more than community service.  As at-risk 18 to 24 year olds, or what experts now refer to as “disengaged,” went to work on the historic site, they began to ask questions:

“Who owns this cemetery? Who let it get so run down. Why is the cemetery all Black?  What famous people, if any, are buried here?  Why isn’t it a Durham landmark?”

Out of the project came a collaboration with literacy and education which published A Model For Curriculum Development in History And Social Studies entitled, Reclaiming Yesterday.

But instead, the farsighted 1991 program was soon put on a shelf to gather dust, followed shortly thereafter by the demise of the promising Service Corps., doomed by decision-makers who didn’t know what to do with such a nugget.

Tragic, but this is what invariably happens in a void of historical critical thinking, perpetually “reinventing the wheel” or worse, stagnation.

Fittingly to the former, Durham volunteers will turn out again on May 21st to clean up Geer Cemetery.  Many will be asking those same questions Corps. members asked in 1991.

Hopefully, it will energize historical thinking.

Another’s Inspirational Odyssey

A friend of mine still in her 20s living in Durham is a kindred spirit of sorts.

She has that blend of discoverer and deliverer that is the foundation for entrepreneurial spirits who are able to build and sustain innovative organizations.

She, too, sort of backed into her career and like I was at her age, curious about why she has so quickly been labeled an innovator.

Recently, I shared with her some of the kindred spirits who reached out to me when I arrived in Durham 26 years ago to build and grow what would be my fourth start-up in a long ago concluded career in a field different from hers.

I’ll share who they were in another essay some day, but like I am to her, they were old enough to be my grandparents.  I guess innovators can identify one another across generations.

But I wonder if one of my young friend’s early influences was her decision after college to bicycle with some friends on a route from coast to coast.

Let me explain why such a trip should also be a job requirement for anyone hoping to be involved in community destination marketing, as I was.

My friend and her companions biked east to west roughly following the old Bikecentennial route pioneered 40 years ago by a handful of other entrepreneurial innovators.

Back then, more than 4,000 cyclists to bike took part in portions of the route during the summer of 1976, 2,000 of whom completed the entire journey.

That was the year after I took the helm of my second startup, the first truly as the executive and a full-fledged community marketing organization.

By 1978, as I headed to Anchorage to complete another startup, the Bikecentennial had inspired AASHTO to recognize the existence of what is becoming a national system of bicycle routes.

It was an endeavor that would span the remainder of my career and beyond.  Today, 8,043 miles have been established involving 16 states with 40 states overall working on various routes.  Propelling it to its completion is still that original startup.

The transcontinental route my friend took is a slight variation of what is now U.S. Bicycle Route 76.

I was surprised to learn that the toughest mountainous segment was not the 68.6 mile, 3,341 ft. climb from Fort Collins over the 8,063.45 ft. pass on the southern route to Laramie.

Nor was it climbing over the Continental Divide in the Wind River Mountains or up along my native Tetons or then across the Bitterroots or up over the mile-high Lolo pass and through the canyons of the Clearwater.

It was just north of Durham in the southwestern Virginia portion of the Appalachians where, the Messersmiths, a line of my ancestors, had settled in the 1700s before heading west.

It was the hardest segment, not just because it was only a few days into their ride but, because the roads were so windy and the grades so much more difficult.

But the toughest portion of the whole journey was the relatively flat variation on the route they took down the Washington state side of the Columbia River Gorge before crossing over to Portland, due to riding against the wind blowing up the Gorge from the Pacific that makes it a haven for windsurfing.

When you discuss routes to the coast in Oregon, people usually refer to them in relationship to a series of colleges stretching down I-5.  Cannon is across from Portland State and Lewis & Clark College.

The beach at Lincoln City is across from Willamette University in Salem where I started law school.  Newport Beach is across from Oregon State in Corvallis.

UBR 76 ends at Florence Beach, across from the University of Oregon in Eugene but my friend’s more than 4,000 mile ride ended on Cannon Beach with its picturesque Haystack Rock.

These beaches are seared into my memory just as they were on 9/11 during a visit.  I first saw news about the initial plane crashing into the World Trade Center as I came in from watching the fog at Bandon.

It was eerie driving up the coast along each of these beaches on a bright, sunny day.  Each of these little towns almost seemed deserted including during an overnight at Cannon Beach.

Hearing about her journey across Kansas reminded me of the jestful lyrics to a song entitled Nickels Worth of Difference:

“There ain’t a nickels worth of difference in Kansas and Nebraska

A lot of wide open spaces, every now and then a tree

But I suppose if you were born and raised around there you might beg to differ

Yeah but I’m from Oklahoma, it looks pretty much the same to me”

While singer-songwriter Tom Skinner was playing off the ribbing that goes on between states, he puts his finger on how geographic stereotypes can predisposition some of us to miss distinctions.

They are clear as you drive cross country in a Jeep as my English Bulldog and I have along various routes at least eight different times since I retired.  I can only imagine how much more clear they are when viewed from a bicycle or walking.

Research shows that the vast majority of us are drawn to these distinctions when we travel while a much smaller share is drawn to places that look and feel indistinct or to replicas of where they live.

It is a bit like the difference that distinguishes the small number of executives who are “innovator-deliverers” from the vast majority who, as just “deliverers,” ultimately create stagnation.

In sense-of-place parlance, it is the difference that distinguishes “stayers” who safeguard the communities in which they live from “boomers,” otherwise reasonable people who lacking those sensibilities seem to trample or homogenize it instead.

I’m getting the itch for another cross-country trip with Mugs.