“Pressure vs. Persuasion”

One of the joys of cross country road trips such as the one Mugsy, my English bulldog, and I completed last month is time for reflection.  It is also a great opportunity each night to catch up on reading.

Overnighting in Missoula, Montana near a visitor center for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation reminded me to read a white paper passed along to me by Ryke Longest, a friend who teaches and directs the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Duke Law School.

The paper, entitled Pressure vs. Persuasion was conceived and co-written by C.B. Pearson, a Senior VP for D.C-based M+R Strategic Services who graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula, which lost by the way on Saturday to North Carolina’s Appalachian State University.

Pearson heads one of the company’s offices nestled in the Northern Rocky Mountains where I grew up and worked before migrating to North Carolina nearly 25 years ago.

But he migrated the opposite direction, growing up in rural Fauquier County, Virginia about five hours up the Jefferson Davis Highway from where I live in Durham and an hour and a half north of Charlottesville in an area bordering the Blue Ridge Mountains along trails crisscrossed during the Civil War by famed Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and near the border with Maryland.

While always known as passionate during my now-concluded nearly-40-year career in community-destination marketing, I always tried to go about my business in a “ready-aim-fire” kind of way and with my decisions and strategy nearly always informed by research and data.

But Pearson’s white paper explains why I am often credited with success and also why I wasn’t very successful at other times, at least in my opinion.  The organizations I led during my career which spanned three different communities were in the “advocacy business” which involved not only promoting but sticking up for the communities I represented.

Especially on behalf of Durham, this meant using a mix of what Pearson calls persuasion tactics and “building power through pressure.”   Presenting factual, awareness-building arguments to overcome and reverse the condescension among residents in neighboring counties that was undermining and repressing Durham was only half the battle. 

The real change occurred when the persuasive information ignited the passion and community pride latent in Durham residents, empowering thousands to not only speak up in newsrooms, around water coolers and in co-owned regional venues such as the airport but then then to persist because these proactive Durham Image Watchers also had the facts on their side.

Pearson and his San Francisco-based co-author Aaron Eske suggest that it is the ratio that matters.  They recommend that for “every effort at persuasion, you build in three to four pressure tactics to compliment it.”

Often some pretty influential people in those surrounding counties would privately try to get me fired, or ridicule me and the organization I led in public meetings or even get some of my friends so worried for my safety that they would try to get me to back off, including a board member or two.

They mistakenly assumed that what cultural and moral psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and public policy researcher Robert Putnam term “bonding capital” or trust within a group such as a community has to be zero sum with “bridging capital” or the trust between groups in a region, for example.

Like persuasion and pressure, it is both/and, not either/or that works best.  They also failed to see that what economist Adam Smith noted and what many dismiss as parochialism, such as that between communities, is a good thing because as Haidt summarizes, it leads “people to exert themselves to improve.”

These critics failed to comprehend the points that Pearson makes in his white paper which indicate that creating change requires a mix of persuasion and pressure, and one or two didn’t even want me to use persuasion.  I wasn’t always sure where the line was either until we began to see results.

Where I failed though was when internal stakeholders such as local officials were involved.  Because the organization I led was an independent public authority formed by state legislation and inter-local agreement, our policy dictated that it was inappropriate to go beyond informing decisions with facts and to get involved with “lobbying” or in the “push and shove” of politics.

But politics is personal, not logical and pressure always trumps persuasion.

The negative externalities spawned by some of those decisions which dismissed the facts will not be felt for many years and by then it will be much too late to reverse them.  But I can already sense their impact and wish we had somehow found a way to do more without crossing that important line.

The 1980s - Durham’s Pivotal Sense-of-Place Decade

In 1984 then-Durham Chamber of Commerce exec Bob Booth was inspired to hire Jeff Downin, who had just earned a Master’s degree from Duke Divinity School, to head up a new Chamber division, then called government affairs.

The roster of those who went on to head public policy for this business-advocacy organization in Durham, NC, where I live, is stellar and none more so than John White, who currently holds that post.

Maybe it was divine influence or maybe it was the timely board leadership of the legendary Travis Porter, a friend whose image is shown in this blog and who passed away a few years before I retired after having served as an ex-officio on the Chamber’s board for nearly two decades.

Together in 1984, Porter, Booth and Downin, who would move on a couple of years later, can be credited with the Chamber’s wise assent to Durham’s decision nearly thirty years ago to ban and remove billboards along its roadsides in defense of the community’s scenic character and I believe, in an effort to preserve the sanctity of its signature trees.

Porter was a gravel-voiced lawyer, a tough former Marine and a practical, old-school North Carolina progressive who blended business community concerns with larger-community concerns.  He understood that a chamber’s role is as much to advocate on behalf of the community to businesses, many owned or managed by non-residents, as it is to advocate on behalf of those businesses to the community.

Forward-thinking chambers back then were already eschewing the antiquated notion that nothing noteworthy happened in their communities unless the chamber was a convener.  Instead they had begun to grasp that is far better to focus on being included at the table as equals with other strategic partners in the community.

These were also the days before so many chambers began to be neutralized by billboard representatives (or their surrogates) who began, as well documented by internal correspondence, to strategically infiltrate committees and even boards of directors banking on the hope that cronyism could protect them from revealing conflict of interest and serve to divide chambers from the best interests of their communities.

Also in 1984, the Durham Chamber nodded approval as community leaders germinated two other actions that have proven equally pivotal to fostering and promoting Durham’s sense-of-place.  One of these was the formation of a committee charged with shaping community consensus for a zoning overlay to protect I-40 along its path through this community which including prohibition of billboards as well as a wide range of actions to preserve and plant trees along that roadway.

Durham also laid the groundwork back then for the 1986 passage of state legislation including a provision for formation of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) as the community’s official destination marketing organization, envisioned, in part, as the “defender of Durham’s image and brand and guardian of its unique sense of place” and the start-up of which brought me to Durham in 1989.

Coupled with the 1981 and 1985 emergence of Durham’s first adaptive reuse of historic, brick factory buildings, this troika of 1980s initiatives signal the genesis of the bedrock of sense-of-place into the reinvention of a community which has evolved to its resurgence today as one of the most highly ranked communities in the nation across a wide and diverse number of benchmarks, earning the signature “where great things happen.”

Booth continued to make inspired choices to guide the Chamber’s public policy and government affairs efforts.  When Downin moved on he was replaced by Frank Smiley, a native returning to North Carolina after serving a career as a city manager in the Great Lakes region.

Smiley, who past away down east the year I retired, made certain with the leadership of Wayne Hays, then head of the Chamber board, that DCVB, the organization I was recruited to jump-start in 1989, would be formed as an independent organization and that its mission and resources would be safeguarded and not siphoned off as they often had been in prior decades by some chambers or local governments in other parts of the country.

As the 1990s emerged, Booth also tapped another inspired choice when Smiley moved on.  Nick Tennyson, another Duke grad and a former developer headed that Chamber division for a several years before moving on to head of the homebuilders association that represents three of the four counties that make up the Durham metro area and serving two terms to end the decade as the Mayor of Durham.

No one deserves more credit than Tennyson for paving the way for the massive American Tobacco Campus, one of many successful projects which ride on the shoulders of those 1980s adaptive use pioneers including West Village, Peabody Place, the campus of Measurement Inc., Golden Belt and now several adaptive reuse projects in the City Center such as 21C and a few more in the organic but unofficial NoCo district, each fostering the “built aspect of Durham’s sense of place.

But It is important to never forget that the path for these successes along with the preservation and promotion of far more temporal aspects of Durham’s sense of place was laid in that pivotal decade of the 1980s.

Exploring My Moral Matrix

Friends who know I haven’t been inclined toward organized religion since the early 1970s rib me about my religious zeal when it came to standing up for the communities I represented during my now-concluded career which is now evident in my defense of the sanctity of trees and the environment.

I descend from ancestors who immigrated to this country as Swiss Mennonites, Welsh Quakers, Palatine Lutherans, French Huguenots, Dutch Remonstrants, Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Mormons to escape severe persecution and I’ve always been curious about how I came to my own blend of values, ethics and morals.

Many more traits are to varying degrees more heritable than we once thought, especially when innate is viewed a “first draft, revised by experience” and that “morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply intuitions within a particular culture.)”

Dr. Jonathan Haidt is an expert in moral psychology now teaching and researching at the NYU Stern School of Business.  It is reassuring that he holds the Thomas Cooley Chair of Ethical Leadership and he is also a popular TED presenter.

He is also the author of a must-read book, published in March, entitled The Righteous Mind – Why Good People are Divided over Politics and Religion from which the earlier quotes were taken.

Haidt substantiates in the book that morals are more intuition than reason and that “we’re born righteous, but we have to learn what exactly, people like us should be righteous about.”

He describes six areas of moral beliefs including ethics and values that we each personalize much as we slide the channels on a music equalizer mixer such as the one we used to have on stereos and now have on smartphones.

Along with a friend, I took a brief quiz on yourmorals.org, a website developed by Haidt and others, and received my results (green bar) shown in the image in this blog.  The higher the bar the stronger that element is manifest.

My mix is compared to the averages of more than 132,000 others shown for proclaimed liberals in blue and conservatives in red.  The labels only show one of the words used to describe each moral foundation and the sixth is so recent it hasn’t been added to the assessment I guess.

The full names the six moral foundations are:

1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation, and
6. Liberty/oppression.

It is well worth reading the book to understand how these were defined, what they mean and how they influence various groups and how misinterpretations can lead to divides.

Haidt provides compelling evidence that instead of demonizing each other, liberals and conservatives are “Yin and Yang,” “seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent. Night and day are not enemies, nor are hot and cold, summer and winter, male and female.  We need both, often in shifting or alternating balance.”

The book also provides scientific proof of why we are at our best as a nation when we have a strong, moderate center regardless of party affiliation or un-affiliation.  Lost on news coverage and partisan bickering is that nearly 40% of Americans are politically Independent (37%) and/or moderate (36%.)  Moderates may also be the moral center.

The book is an insightful and funny blend of a research, psychology, anthropology, neurology, public policy and mixed with excellent story telling.  It also reminds us that “morality binds and blinds.”

It is fast and entertaining to read but every sentence offers up a nugget so don’t plan on skimming.  Anyone trolling for cocktail nuggets will be surely busted.  Haidt takes the reader through the evolution of his own learning and thinking and just when you think you have it all figured out, a new dimension is introduced.

Easily one of the most interesting and useful books I’ve ever read.

The Hoof Beats Of Obsolescence

Last month, while I was traveling cross-country and back, I read one night, as I was catching up on news, that the proportion of Americans with smartphones zoomed past 44% and is projected to approach 60% in just a few months, up from 31% last year.

More remarkable, 74% are already using the hand helds to access location-based information in real time including a majority who use them for GPS navigation from a car or vehicle, further fueling the futile desperation by companies owning roadside billboards and their determined efforts to scrape and clear-cut more and more valuable roadside vegetation even though independent surveys now show that the ads place on these hulks now influence fewer than 1 in 10 consumers (8%) to purchase anything in a given year.

As much as we disagree on the sanctity or value of trees vs. the needlessness of roadside billboards, I can empathize with the fear these technologies create for those whose lives and careers have been centered around something that is fast becoming extinct.

Billboard companies are just the most visible form of media to hear the ominous technological hoof beats of obsolescence.  A new study shows that 21% of TV subscribers have moved to cord-cutting or cord-shaving in just the past year.  This also applies to local television for those who access it through subscription. 

More than 60% of consumers now use time-shifting such as video on-demand weekly and 60% use social media while watching television, up 18 points from just last year.

At the same time 58% of smartphone owners and 38% of all cell phone owners use the device to “keep themselves occupied during commercials,” prompting forecasts that online ad revenue will eclipse television within just four to five years.

Technology, as well as the decline in trust for advertising in traditional media (nearly 25% in three years) along with the over-exposure individuals feel at being bombarded with 10,000 advertising messages a day, is fueling the substitution of earned media such as news articles and much more trusted and curated content on organizational websites such as the one at this link for Durham NC, where I live.

It is also spawning formation of new media such as “digital placed-based advertising” (e.g. the video ads shown inside stores etc.) that are threatening to cannibalize more intrusive and destructive media by sucking as much as 64.2% of their revenue away from outdoor advertising such as billboards and 41% away from television. 

This is only the beginning of a massive and rapid sea-change and elected officials and other policy-makers need to be wary of desperate lobbyists and other economic rent-seekers, such as those who pushed through a bill in North Carolina to sacrifice 70,000 publically-owned roadside trees, worth more than $11 billion in just ecosystem services alone (over a 50-year lifetime had they been saved.)

This is a huge sacrifice of the “common good” just so the 8% of consumers shown to use messages posted on outdoor billboards over the course of a year can be even more sure to see them.

Remembering The Sand Creek Elk

A herd of elk and moose that wintered along the back of our ranch as I was the age of my grandsons now suddenly emerged from my memories as my daughter and I traveled a southbound-return stretch of my cross-country trip last month.

After ascending the narrow, green, tree-lined Beaverhead River Valley that morning as it contours around sage covered mountains, we had stopped for breakfast in one of those ma and pa diners for which we’ve always shared an affection, at a ranch town called Lima, Montana, population 220, one of several across the country to pronounce it “Leema.”

My elk reverie occurred to me as we continued up through a pass between two mountain ranges that form the Continental Divide along the border with my native state of Idaho because just after the crest, if one turns east through the mountains instead of dropping down into Spencer and follows the route along the southern edge of the Centennial Mountains for a total of 50 miles or so you reach a cutoff to the backside of the ranch homesteaded and assembled by my great-grandparents and grandparents.

The route follows a stretch of Old Highway 22 past the Camas Meadows formed by a creek where less than thirty years before they homesteaded, Nez Perce Indians had defeated three companies of pursuing US Cavalry.

Here, a few miles before the path to the ranch cuts southeast toward Bishop Mountain is where my grandfather and I would occasionally search for arrowheads and other artifacts.

There the route arches around Big Bend Ridge, a thousand feet below where it cradles the lava of the Aspen-covered Yellowstone caldera, past where creeks named “Sand”, “Cold Spring” and “Snow” spill briefly out through the grassland and sagebrush steppes before the waters find their way down into the Henry’s Fork and then the Snake River Plain another thousand feet below.

Legend also marks this stretch as the site of a climatic battle between the encroaching bands of the Blackfoot confederation from across the mountains to the north and east and linguistically-related Shoshone and Bannock bands of Native Americans.

The far eastern part of our ranch embraced a bend in Snow Creek, a mile west of the Henry’s Fork and stretched west almost to where Sand Creek passes through Lemon Lake along a 17 mile stretch of public lands cobbled together for wildlife management after a small herd of elk was discovered to winter there the year between when my father returned from WWII and I was born.

There are now 3,000 elk, 1,500 mule deer and 400 high desert moose wintering there before migrating back nearly 30 miles east across ranchland - such as that of my youth, where we ranched as many as 500-head of cattle - circumventing tiny settlements such as Ashton, Marysville and Warm River, to summer in areas such as the Bechler Meadows in the southwest corner of Yellowstone Park and where a pack of grey wolves have since been reintroduced.

According to recent reports, the elk leave behind, in their winter home, animals such as beaver, mink, marten and muskrat along along with grouse and shorebirds such as loons, western grebes, trumpeter swans, snowy egrets, sandhill cranes, willets and long-billed curlews as well as the occasional osprey or bald eagle.

The wetlands where the elk summer form below the steep forested cliffs of a 70,000-year-old lava flow, Yellowstone’s most recent, known as the Pitchstone Plateau which stretches southeast from Old Faithful Geyser and Shoshone Lake.  The elk’s lush summer habitat is fed by spectacular 250-foot waterfalls that plunge, cascade or horsetail down into this relatively remote Idaho corner of Yellowstone.

My great grandparents, Hyrum and Margaret Bowman purchased 360 acres more than 105 years ago between Snow and Spring Creeks in that Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho so their six sons, including my grandfather, and three daughters could have an opportunity to surrounding homestead ranches.

One April their family caravan left their mid-Cache Valley spread along the Uinta Mountains near the Utah border with Idaho, taking horses, including three teams of four each to pull three iron-wheeled wagons and a buggy, along with saddle horses to guide the starter herd of 100 head of cattle.

It took them 15 days to make the 200 mile trip.  The first image shown in this blog shows the family, including my grandfather in the hay wagon, taken around my great-grandparents’ home.

Though three miles from the ranch house in which I spent my early years along Snow Creek, the house in the image, then deserted, was the site for days of solitary exploration that not only fueled my imagination but forever embedded a respect for my roots.

On a return visit while I was in law school, I snapped the second image shown in this blog from one of the window frames as a reminder of what that old house meant to me and what it still means to me nearly 60 years later, even though satellite images confirm it is long since gone.

After collectively “proving up” on or assembling approximately 2,000 acres of ranchland including spaces to grow crops of hay and grain to feed the livestock, everyone except my grandparents and great-grandparents eventually departed for other pursuits including jobs on the railroad or in the city or on farms further south.

My grandfather reassembled nearly all of the ranch after it was dissembled in the wake of my great-grandfather’s death without a will, complicated by his re-marriage after my great-grandmother died in the 1918 pandemic flu that killed tens of millions worldwide.

My Bowman great-grandparents are both buried in a very small county cemetery carved from the ranch on a hill above the Snow Creek house.

The homes on the various homestead parcels were recycled.  One was moved to Saint Anthony when my grandparents retired there after the war giving my father and mother the opportunity to run the ranch.

Several decades before my grandparents had moved into the sawed-log house on Snow Creek that my great-uncle George had built.  That is the house where my father was born and in which I lived my boyhood.  As singer-songwriter Neil Young writes, “all my changes were there,” or at least many of them.

For most of my adult life I’ve been a moderate Independent but possibly not that far from my the rock-ribbed, ultra-conservative Republican upbringing, evidence of how extremely far to the right that party has shifted.

As partisan as my parents and grandparents always seemed, they never dismissed the indispensible role that government played in my family’s emergence into the middle-class.

Things such as the elk preserve along the back of the ranch and the homestead act that enabled it and the incentivized dams and electrical cooperatives that brought it power, are all emblematic of many things made possible by a country that understood the “common good.”