Creating Wealth

by Gwendolyn Hallsmith

  This longer-term approach has two key advantages. First, it asks city leaders to think beyond the life of their current infrastructure, which helps focus the question on more sustainable alternatives. Second, when stakeholders are asked about the kind of world they want for their grandchildren, it doesn’t matter if they are Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, Socialists, Communists, Conservatives, Liberals, NDPs or Greens; it turns out that they all want the same thing. They want a healthy environment and good job opportunities. They want their grandchildren to have a voice in their own destiny, to have safe, high quality housing, clean water, friendly neighborhoods and good health. So when you start a planning process with questions about longer-term outcomes instead of the usual short-term problem solving, you tend to start from a place of agreement rather than conflict.

  The second flaw traces its origins back to the scientific revolution and the advent of empirical, analytical thinking. The gift of rigorous analysis has led to a fragmentation of knowledge that now forms a significant obstacle to a more complete understanding of integrated, complex systems. We have lost the forest for the trees. At the same time our PhDs know more and more about less and less, our government departments have been organized in silos where one team of bureaucrats works directly against the interests of other teams, and there is no one who understands the whole system well enough to help it become more than the sum of its parts. When the parts are working at cross-purposes, the synergy that would otherwise be possible is seriously compromised.

  Integration and whole systems understanding are the antidotes to fragmentation, but given the culture of specialization promoted by our educational system and the increasing complexity of the world we inhabit, these are not easy to achieve. It’s hard to know enough about the wide variety of issues cities face every day to see the links and tie the strands together so that they support each other. How does wastewater treatment relate to chronic, intergenerational poverty? Do property rights have an impact on biodiversity? Do some strategies we use to solve problems make them worse? Principles alone don’t help answer these questions, but learning something about whole system dynamics, complexity and even chaos theory can help.

  The EarthCAT workbook walks city leaders through a process of considering all the issues they face as part of a larger system. Some rudimentary exercises and tools help them make the connections, although it is difficult to teach a short course in systems dynamics in a workbook format — it really requires more intensive, hands-on training. Calgary had allocated $2.5 million to the planning process, and so Gwendolyn provided the imagineCALGARY planning staff a set of training sessions on city system dynamics and technical assistance in applying the insights from system dynamics to the issues in Calgary.

  Roundtables, Stakeholders and Working Groups

  In a city of a million people, the organization of the planning project was in itself a complex system. There were a wide variety of constituencies to involve, all with their own agendas and degrees of influence on the outcome. As a starting point, the mayor convened a group of people who would serve as his advisory team — the Mayor’s Panel on Long-Term Sustainability. The panel members advised the mayor on stakeholder selection, the measures of success and the contributions of their own organizations to the project. The panel also provided feedback on the question on how imagineCALGARY would be sustained after the planning project was complete.

  The mayor’s panel helped identify some of the key constituents who were then invited to be part of the Round Table, a stakeholder group that served as the steering committee for the project. Members were chosen from all walks of life and also from key organizations that would need to partner with the city to implement the plan. The members of the Round Table didn’t necessarily represent the groups and organizations they were part of, but their affiliation with the constituencies helped them bring that perspective to the dialogue. This Round Table made a commitment to meet at least monthly throughout the project and oversaw the work on the vision statement, the goals, targets and strategies for the plan.

  The third key set of participants were members of the Working Groups. These were formed around each of the key city systems — social, economic, governance and the natural and built environments. Here, experts were invited to participate with the Round Table members, and in an exemplary effort to insure that integration was part of each dialogue, specialists from each system were also part of every other working group. So the governance committee had representation from the natural environment, built environment, economic and social systems groups, and the other committees had representation from governance.

  Stakeholder Training

  The groups started their work with training on the way the imagine-CALGARY process was going to work. The training included a timeline and a detailed schedule of meetings, with preliminary agendas for all of the meetings included. This provided both the staff and the stakeholders with a sense of certainty; even when they were moving into uncharted waters, they at least had a map. It also gave people a lot of food for thought, because the questions to be answered in the meetings were not so easy. The training also included some background information about Calgary and an overview of how systems dynamics would apply to their planning process.

  It became clear at the beginning that there were different levels of training needed for different participants, at least in terms of the ways in which lessons from systems dynamics would be used. Three levels emerged — the advanced, intermediate and beginner level — that guided the content of the training that was offered. Systems dynamics is a vast subject area, with many possible schools of thought ranging from what is characterized as hard systems dynamics (the world of computer modelers and mathematical formulas) to soft systems thinking (where diagrams and stories are used to convey the ideas and hard data is not used). Calgary was unusual insofar as it already was using hard systems models to manage its traffic planning, so they had experts on staff. The imagineCALGARY project, on the other hand, was primarily using soft systems thinking, where causal loop diagrams were used to convey the interrelationship of different variables to each other both within and between city systems.

  The beginner level training in systems thinking was given to the Round Table and working group participants. At this level, participants needed to understand that systems dynamics was part of the methodology being used, and if systems diagrams were presented to them by the staff or consultants, they needed to understand the diagrams. If they had more understanding than this — and some of them did — it was fine, but the majority of them would not. Gwendolyn provided some of the training to this group, but the city also invited in local experts to demonstrate why systems dynamics were important — one of the first Round Table meetings featured a speaker from a local institute that made connections through a discussion of locally grown food.

  The intermediate level training was given to the consulting team that Calgary hired to manage the Working Groups. Two facilitators were assigned to each group, one to lead the discussion and one to keep a record of their work. In addition, the team members from the planning office also attended each meeting. At this level, the facilitators and record keepers needed to be able to not only understand the diagrams and the logic of systems dynamics that was presented to the group, but they needed to be able to explain it to other people. The workshops for this group were designed as more hands-on training, so they worked with different systems diagrams and were given more practice applying the ideas to real life situations.

  Finally, the advanced level training was provided to the core staff of the imagineCalgary team. For this group, it was important that they be able to use an understanding of systems to both describe the existing situation and to identify possible interventions that could be made to improve things. This team was provided a lot of material on systems archetypes, and they used the different archetypes to analyze trends over time and describe the causal patterns for different situations in Calgary.2 Then they were also given
instruction on how to identify leverage points in the systems that were causing problems. Leverage points are a seductive idea for planners — they offer the hope that small changes can lead to big results. The challenge of leverage is that often the “small” changes needed are quite countercultural or expensive, even if in the larger scheme of things they aren’t significant.

  The training helped make a challenging project — developing a 100 year plan for a city — something that people from many different disciplines, from all political stripes could understand. It established a common language to use, defined a set of goals and created a map to follow through a long series of meetings where controversial issues would be discussed. In many ways, the training and early project organization created a safe space to discuss difficult issues, and the new language of systems also provided some tools to diagnose intractable problems in new ways.

  For example, some of the more difficult issues in Calgary and in other cities are those associated with economics and livelihoods, since any discussion about poverty and wealth can immediately turn into a politically charged debate. Yet there are systemic patterns of behavior within the economy that can be described with systems diagrams to give participants a new way of looking at a story which otherwise might be layered with ideological misinformation. The staff and working group on the economy in Calgary came up with a diagram to describe a problematic pattern that leads to a high level of economic inequity; this diagram also opened up a good discussion about ways in which different interventions might help reduce the resulting systematic impoverishment.

  The story they outlined is simple, really, describing how money and power interact to keep more resources flowing to people who already have money and to deny income potential to people who don’t already have it. In a society where the myth of upward mobility and individual success is powerful, this story is often hard to discuss in a group of people who don’t share the same political orientation. A discussion of the need for more economic equity quickly devolves into labeling and ideological positions that tend to obscure real issues. While diagramming the systems does not completely eliminate this tendency, the patterns of behavior and feedback loops do provide a new lens with which to view the story.

  FIGURE 14.1. Flows of Money and Power

  In Figure 1, the feedback loops describe a common system archetype known as Success to the Successful. This pattern of behavior occurs in many places in society, including bright children in school getting more attention from teachers or people moving up the ladder within a corporation. There is no denying that it is easier to be successful when you already have some advantages. What the archetypical diagram demonstrates, however, is that when people who are already successful are gaining the resources their success allocates to them, this can turn into a zero sum game where others are denied the same resources. So, in this case of money flow, the systemic economic imperatives work in a reinforcing feedback loop that makes the situation go more and more in the direction of the accumulation of wealth on one side and impoverishment on the other.

  If you start at the bottom of the diagram, people who have income from their investments tend to have more power to influence the rules of a given society. Moving upward in the diagram, since wages are a cost for enterprises, and since profit depends on the revenue from sales being more than the costs of production, there is a lot of pressure within our system to reduce costs and keep wages low. The lower wages are, the more income people can make from investments. So policy changes are made to reduce or eliminate minimum wages and restrict collective bargaining rights by people who have more influence. As this book goes to print, the state of Wisconsin has been making headlines for several months where the Republican leadership there is trying to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. So the pressure exists in both the public and private sectors to keep wages low.

  It follows, therefore, that more income from existing investments directly influences the level of wages paid to workers. The more income going to the investors, the lower the wages are for the workers. Lower wages mean lower possibilities for workers to invest themselves so that they can benefit from a profitable enterprise. The lower the investment possibilities there are for the workers, the more income from investments flow to the people who are already benefiting from the system. This pattern forms a vicious cycle where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

  Figure 1 also suggests ways that the system might be fixed. In this particular system, if there were a way to allow workers to have access to investment income that would supplement their wages, it would help break the cycle of impoverishment. There are many ways to do this — through Employee Stock Ownership Programs (ESOPs), cooperative ownership structures, small business loans and entrepreneurial training. This also illustrates the idea of leverage — one of the leverage points in any system may slow or reverse the positive reinforcing feedback loops. Finding ways to intervene in this system might involve adding a variable that changes the feedback. If more income from existing investments, for example, meant an increase in profit sharing plans for workers, the system could be changed so that the increasing inequity could be reversed. This could be facilitated with complementary currencies within businesses or governmental agencies that rewarded innovation and cost-cutting.

  Training in how systems work provides planners and stakeholders with a new way to look at strategy development and sustainability planning. It isn’t a panacea, but combined with: 1) the integrated principles of the Earth Charter, 2) a comprehensive framework of human needs so that city issues can be considered as a whole system and 3) a long-term time horizon for a vision and goals, these four methodological elements can put city plans on a more sustainable path than the current planning paradigm.

  Principles serve as the guardrails, the guidelines for action within the constraints of ecosystems and social justice. The systems orientation and human needs framework provide the vehicle that gives the planning initiative focus and structure to move forward — a series of important questions to ask and an integrated way for the questions to be answered. The long-term vision and goals give the vehicle both its drive and its destination. Bob Miller, a strategic planner in the City Manager’s office in Calgary, summarized it this way: “The systems view creates connected pathways; the focus on human needs energizes and grounds the ‘why we are doing this planning initiative at all’ — providing the urgency and momentum to move forward.”3

  Calgary’s Vision

  While the stakeholders and working groups were starting their work considering the existing condition of the different city systems and setting goals for the future, another major effort was underway to involve as many of Calgary’s citizens as possible in creating a vision for the future. As happened in Burlington, the city staff asked people to answer five open-ended questions designed to elicit people’s values — the things they cared about that make Calgary special. These questions were:

  • What do you value about Calgary?

  • What is it like for you to live here?

  • What changes would you most like to see?

  • What are your hopes and dreams for the next 100 years?

  • How can you help make this happen?4

  Posing the questions is relatively easy; finding ways to make people aware that the questions are being asked and getting them to answer is a lot more difficult, especially in a city of a million people. It’s a challenge faced by more than city leadership — each day billions of dollars in marketing campaigns try to do the same thing, to get people to pay attention to a product or service that is offered and respond to it. City leaders can learn from these marketing campaigns at the same time as all the commercial messages occupy the space that more important questions might have. City leaders can also learn from other activities that engage people — after all, people turn out in large crowds for events like the Calgary Stampede, for the arts, for celebrations, to practice their spiritual and faith traditions and for competi
tions and contests. Even the name of the initiative — imagineCalgary — was designed to be a way to interest people in the effort.

  A special team on the Calgary staff was tasked with reaching out to the community. This team spent a lot of time developing materials, going to events and dreaming up new ways to reach people. One of the principles for public outreach and engagement that was included in the training session on the methodology at the outset was that cities need to go where people are, not simply to expect people to come to them. So the special team set up lemonade stands on the pedestrian mall and had a local team mascot there to entice people to come over and fill out the survey. They developed a special guidebook for Imagineering Sessions that neighborhood groups could use to have coffee table discussions about their collective future. They sponsored a photo contest, turned up at the cross-country solar car race and found lots of new and innovative ways to reach out to people who normally wouldn’t be involved in anything as specialized as city planning.

  In the end, over 18,000 people participated in creating the vision statement, one of the largest public outreach campaigns by a city in history. Even the effort made in New York City to solicit citizen input into the redesign of downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center attacks only managed to reach 5,000 people in the end. The way the city summarized all of this outreach in their final plan provides a flavor of the enormity of the effort.

  Developing the vision was a celebration of community participation and imagination! It was an adventure in exploring values, building on assets and incorporating citizens’ hopes and dreams for the next 100 years. Based upon the success of Imagine Chicago and other community movements around the world, imagineCALGARY reached out to Calgarians using a variety of strategies. Over 18,000 responded via: