Future Here Now: Why I do this

Hey there. I have a fair number of new readers / listeners / watchers on here and other platforms, and this week I’ll be putting out content that introduces or re-introduces what I’m about and why I do this stuff.

This selection is from the 2021 version of The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived. I think it’s a good introduction to what has formed my approach and what drives my work. If you haven’t read it, you can get your own copy here or here.

Lots more news and analysis coming this week at the Future Here Now newsletter. Subscribers get two to four downloads each week of analysis, tools and insights that help you position to succeed in a future that will be very different from our past. Learn more, get a seven-day trial and sign up here. You’ll be better for it.

If I’m going to hit you with the challenges and opportunities facing our communities in this new era, maybe I’d better give you some idea where I’m coming from. As I’ll say later on, making wise decisions depends on understanding the limits of the information you’re working with. Might as well start by applying that to me.

I’m as much a product of the U.S. Rust Belt as anyone you’ll meet. I grew up in a small town outside of Cleveland, Ohio, where my father and grandfather ran a small paint factory. The factory was a sort of jack-of-all-trades type establishment, making everything from primers to spray paints for wholesalers and retailers. In the pre-rusting Rust Belt, there was a lot of metal to protect, so the paint-making business kept about eight people, including my dad and grandfather, pretty busy.

Until about 1981. As a result of being where I was when I was, I had a front row seat for the first convulsions of the collapse of the traditional manufacturing economy. The collapse that’s still playing out today.

By the time I was in middle school, several of the company’s customers had gone out of business, and the market for a jack-of-all-trades paint manufacturer had collapsed. The company was sold for its assets (the only value left). My father was out of work for most of three years.

Thankfully, I had encouragement in high school, and I was able to go to a very good college. I ended up with an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in Chicago and, about 10 years later, a Masters in Community Planning from the University of Cincinnati. So for the most part, I came out OK.

But I don’t think my father ever got over those years. Unemployment isn’t just a statistic in some government report — it’s a life profoundly dislocated. You can’t always control that, but do try not to forget that. OK? Thanks.

___

I have had four or five careers, depending on how you want to count. I sometimes joke that my career path looks like cooked spaghetti. I started out as a small town journalist, and then became an English teacher, which gave me a skill set for managing and guiding groups of people to find answers and meaning for themselves. It did not, however, give me much in the way of job prospects, since I came out of college in a place and time where there were five times more teachers than anyone needed.

As I tried to figure out my next act, I ended up with a consulting business that focused on historic preservation and downtown revitalization. Through a typically convoluted process, that work morphed into community planning, which morphed into economic development planning and swung back around to include community revitalization, public engagement and a little journalism. And then I started a couple more businesses and worked on higher education experiential learning and doing things that I had never heard of in Cleveland. Whoever said God has a sense of humor apparently had a hand in my resume.

And in the process I have had the great gift of working and caring and striving with many, many people who are not like me — people whose cultural and racial and socio-economic and personal experiences taught me far more than I would have ever learned anywhere else. I have had hundreds of teachers, and still do today. I will never be able to thank them enough for how they change and expand me.

At some point in the book, I will end up touching on all of those — and also on parenthood, a constant source of delight, frustration and total chaos. My personal narrative will also bounce geographically — Cleveland, yes, but also Cincinnati, where I live today, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I spent most of the 1990s. And assorted client locations, an occupational hazard when you’ve spent much of your adult life consulting with local governments.

Enough. Let’s get on with it.

What’s happened since 2013

I published the first version of this book in 2013, incorporating essays I had written as early as 2010. Not all that long ago, but…hey, it’s been a long decade. And as I returned to the old version on occasion, I saw a lot of the content that still worked, but I felt like some important things were missing. That resulted in this update.

So, what’s changed?

First, some of the simple things. Obviously, I’m older. My kids are older (both in college in 2021). Dave is older. And the people who wrote early versions of some of the chapters in this book have moved on to different careers. But that doesn’t change the truth of what they wrote before.

The biggest changes are probably inside my head.

Like a lot of people, I find myself more cynical about the potential for national solutions to these challenges in a post — 2016 world. At the same time, I have a fragile, guarded optimism that important new solutions are developing that will lead us in a better direction.

A lot of what I hoped was around the corner in 2013 didn’t happen as quickly as I thought it would. And the 2016- 2020 period made a lot of us realize that many of the core social elements that we had taken for granted, and that were necessary underpinnings for the progress this book is about, were a whole lot less certain than we thought. If I had been able to imagine the events of 2020 and early 2021, I don’t know if I would have written this book back then.

I’ve learned that, on the individual level, the kind of change I’ve been talking about is even harder than I thought it would be. That’s not just because of money or politics, but because of how our brains lock into our paradigms — our assumptions and expectations about How Things Work. Especially among those of us who have worked on a particular issue for a few years. As soon as you think you’ve got it figured out, Surprise! You’ve locked yourself into a box that makes it almost impossible to see what your assumptions about How Things Work are missing or got wrong.

I spent four years between 2013 and now working on a business where I had to throw out most of my previous assumptions about the right way to do something, anything, something as basic as talking to a client. That throwing out and rebuilding is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Worth it, but viciously hard in the process.

That experience gives me a bit more soberness about some of the hard things that this book may challenge you to do. And much more admiration for the people who take on those challenges.

What else? I’ve also written a few more books since then. Crowdsourcing Wisdom in 2015 was intended to give a how-to on doing the kind of hands-on, directly meaningful public involvement that I was advocating. It’s used to teach classes for future planners in California. Everyone Innovates Here came out in 2018, and presents a new inclusion-powered model for designing innovation ecosystems — a strategy that was heavily formed by my experience with Econogy in the late 2010s. And another book, tentatively titled Public Engagement Done Right, was written but withdrawn from the publisher when I realized that it would probably get lost in their system. So that will see the light at some point.

But I think this is the most important change since the first version of this book came out: In 2013, I understood that racism and inequity existed, but like a lot of us who have enjoyed privilege, I didn’t really understand. I didn’t recognize the structures underlying the damage that was being done to my Black friends. I didn’t see the implicit biases, I didn’t get how past barriers continue to live on and hamstring lives today.

I hope I’ve become a little more attuned, a little better ally, a little more understanding of the ways in which too many people have been left behind in a whole host of ways. And the more I learn, the more I understand how much I don’t understand. I still screw up. A lot.

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve come to deeply appreciate how reaching out to include, to center, diverse perspectives give us our best opportunities for the kind of change we all need. It’s still Important to do your homework and be brave, but more and more I find that crowdsourcing wisdom is our strongest secret weapon — provided that we are crowdsourcing from as much of the full and rich and deep complexity of humanity as we can. And paying particular attention to the voices that have been left out before.

Not to be nice, but because we need them. Really need them.

Not just because of morals or ethics or a sense of Supposed To, but because those voices that have been left out have the best chance of helping all of us understand what the conventional leaders have missed by getting stuck in their own boxes.

Finally, my writing style has evolved a bit. When I wrote the content of the first version in the early 2010s, I was trying to re-discover my real voice after a couple of decades of churning out mind-numbing professional blah blah blah. In some cases, I think I trended a little too goofy, a little too harsh, a little too… something. Or maybe I’ve just mellowed. Who knows. So I reserve the right to put an extra polish on the occasional clunker.

Enough. As I said back then, Let’s get on with it.