THE RESCUEOF DETROIT

How Creative Leadership Could Save aFailing City

ABSTRACTThis is the second of a two-part series that outlines the failure of leadership in the city of Detroit, MI, and proposes methods for cultivating change ideas that would assist in the resurgence of Detroit.

Ralph Johnson

Part Two

In our previous article, we articulated the woeful lack of leadership in failing municipalities, such as Detroit, MI, and lamented the fates of these once great cities. We further examined the directions that certain American leaders have suggested as the means for exhibiting supernumerary leadership. Our concentration for this article arises out of the following two quotes:

A leader is one who can clearly communicate a vision and motivate others to action…one who discovers and maintains a lifelong pursuit of God’s truths to positively impact individuals and the world1

Innovation distinguishes between a follower and a leader. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.2

With these two leaders as inspiration for how we may decide to rescue Detroit (and any other of her sister cities in equally dire straits), let us delve immediately into applying these criteria to our current problem: clearly communicating God’s truth through innovation and excellence.

The initial assessment of the troubles facing Detroit (Detroit will be used throughout this article as an exemplar for any municipality that finds itself mired in great difficulties – author’s note) present themselves as a four-sided matrix, as such:

1 Winston,Bruce quoted in Inner Reflections on Leadership on the Inner Resources for Leaders blog, August 31, 2007, http://innerresourcesforleaders.blogspotcom/2007/8/interview-bruce-e-winston-phd-at-online.html2 Jobs, Steve, BrainyQuotes, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_leadership.html

The four main contributing factors we find to the demise of Detroit are: poverty, government, crime, and leadership. Correctly considered, each of these criteria present themselves as failures in leadership as a whole; but it is preferable to consider all four quadrants in order to make the situation manageable and to better focus the efforts of individual teams oneach subject. For the purpose of this article, we will develop the process of addressing the needs of just one quadrant of this matrix, that of poverty. However, the same processes will be fundamental to each quadrant.

In order to develop ideas that meet our requirement, namely;clearly communicating God’s truth through innovation and excellence; we are going to employ two methods of inspiring creativity among individuals and groups: Zwicky boxes, or, the Lotus Blossom3 and methods of brainstorming.4

3 Michalko, Michael. Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, Berkeley,CA: Ten Speed Press, 2006, page 117. Zwicky boxes are “morphological box(es) credited to Dr. Fritz Zwicky. and pages 132-136: The Lotus Blossom is a methodof diagramming Zwicky Boxes to give us “an oceanic view of our problems.”4 Ibid., “The Spirit of Koinonia,” pages 294-360. Koinonia is Greek word utilized by Socrates and others as a “spirit of fellowship.” Christians recognize a still deeper understanding of this fellowship as it includes the Spirit of God as an integral part of the koinonia group.

Applying the principles of morphological boxes, we find the chosen quadrant of “poverty” broken down as follows:

We have chosen one quadrant on which to concentrate, that being poverty. We then consider all of the various boxes we can reflect on as either affecting poverty or being affected by poverty. In our present example, we find, “State Aid,” “Unemployment,” “Auto Manufacturers,” “Single Parent Families,” “Churches,” “Women,” “Business,” and “Children.” Each of these boxes play a part in the effect that poverty has had on Detroit and the financial failures of that society.

We can briefly state the following as the criteria for including each box as a part of the “poverty” situation:

State aid: The impoverished of Detroit place enormous strainon the financial circumstances of the city and state through their necessary use of city and state aid. There is no question that it is in the spirit of fellowship and care for one another that government aid is established. However, as other aspects of the failure of governmental leadership, i.e., unemployment, lend

themselves to growing dependency rolls, the God-mandated spirit of “loving one’s neighbor,” is stretched beyond reason.

Unemployment: At present, “less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of sixteen are working.”5 Massive unemployment not only fattens the rolls of those in need of financial aid, but it significantly shrinks the tax base of the city.

Auto Manufacturers: In the specific case of the city of Detroit, the plight of American auto manufacturers (and the concomitant union labor issues) has led to the increased unemployment as well as the financial woes that beset Detroit dueto the overwhelming pension benefits the manufacturers owe to their retirees. “In 1950, there were about 296,000 (mostly automotive related) jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.”6

Single Parent Families: It is immaterial whether the single parent is mother or father, raising a family in Detroit with onlyone parent is a leading factor in the poverty of the city. Singleparents are torn between one job and spending time with their children, or, working multiple jobs and relegating the raising oftheir families by extended family or strangers.

Churches: Churches carry both a positive and a negative relationship to the poverty of Detroit. Typically, churches are relied upon for social benefits to their parishioners and their communities. This helps take some of the burden off municipalities. Conversely, the churchgoers in a poverty strickencity are often unable to support the social activities of the past.

5 Snyder, Michael. “25 Facts About the Fall of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head”, July 20, 2013, http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/25-facts-about-the-fall-of-detroit-that-will-leave-you-shaking-your-head.html,, downloaded on 9/1/13.6 Ibid.

Women: Women make up the majority of the single parents in the municipality. Bill Johnson, an editorial writer for The Detroit News reports on the Dads Against the Divorce Industry website:

Single parenthood should not be viewed with indifference. Indeed, the number ofsingle moms poses serious social and public-policy dilemmas. It has been well documented and reported, for example, that children born to unmarried womenare far more likely to live in poverty, suffer abuse and be neglected. Girls born into these families are more likely to become pregnant than children living with their married parents and continue the generational cycle of unwed motherhood.

    Children from low-income, fatherless households are also more likely to become school dropouts. Children in these families tend to be lower achievers than those from two-parent, higher-income families. These trends generally existeven when a stepfather is present.7

Business: Business may very well be one of the saving factors for cities in financial turmoil. However, if they fail torespond with entrepreneurism, innovation, and creativity; they may find themselves as the final nail in the coffin.

Children: Undoubtedly, children are among those who are mosteffected by poverty. “Sixty percent of all children in Detroit live in poverty.”8 If the children of Detroit are to become the productive adults of Detroit’s future, action must be taken now.

This brief overview does not do justice to the reality of the poverty in Detroit, but it serves to emphasize why these morphological boxes were chosen to begin the process of brainstorming for solutions to Detroit’s ailing ways. The next natural step in the “Lotus Blossom” technique of creative thinking is to then explore each of these subsets into subsets oftheir own. Our brainstorming team9 broke out the eight subset

7 Johnson, Bill. Detroit’s Single Families Define the Real State of the City,”downloaded from http://www.dadi.org/dn_bleak.htm on 9/7/13.8 Snyder, Michael. July 20, 2013.9 Our brainstorming team was made up of the author, two former residents of Detroit, and two fellow students in the School of Business and Leadership at Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.

problem categories of the poverty quadrant into the following examples:

The State Aid Breakdown

The Unemployment Breakdown

The Auto Manufacturer’s Breakdown

The Single Parent Families Breakdown

The Churches (and other Faith-Based Organizations) Breakdown

The Women Breakdown

The Business Breakdown

The Children Breakdown

Brainstorming in the Spirit of Koinonia

As previously mentioned, koinonia is a Greek word indicating“a spirit of fellowship.” To gain that spirit of fellowship, the Greek philosophers valued three things: establish dialog, clarifyyour thinking, and be honest. (Michalko, p. 256) “The basic rulesof dialog for the Greeks were, ‘Don’t argue,’ ‘Don’t interrupt,’ and, ‘Listen carefully.”10 These serve well as the basic tenets for successful brainstorming sessions. According to dictionary.com, brainstorming is defined as, “a conference technique of solving specific problems, amassing information,

10 Michalko, Michael, 2006, page 256.

stimulating creative thinking, developing new ideas, etc., by unrestrained and spontaneous participation in discussion.”11

In a spirit of koinonia, our brainstorming group gathered tosolve the problems related to just one of these Lotus Blossom “breakdowns,” namely, “Faith-Based Organizations.” To do so, we amassed a list of the eight breakout ideas that arose out of “Faith-Based Organizations Can Help,”

Community (koinonia) The Lord is My Defender Increased Familial Relationships Pastoral Counseling Voluntary Giving Prayer Job Training Spiritual Life

In unanimous agreement, we decided on three brainstorming techniques to exploit the potential within each of these eight ideas produced through the Lotus Blossom, or, Zwicky technique. The techniques chosen were: SCAMPER,12 Fantasy Envelopes,13and TheEssence of a Crazy Idea.14 The varied techniques were employed with different breakout ideas in the following manner:

SCAMPER Fantasy Envelopes Crazy IdeaJob Training Increased Familial

RelationshipsSpiritual Life

Voluntary Giving Community The Lord is MyDefender

Pastoral Counseling Prayer

11 brainstorming. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved September 08, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/brainstorming12 Michalko, Michael. Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Berkeley, CA: TenSpeed Press, 2001, page 95.13 Ibid., page 248.14 Michalko, 2006, page 346.

In order to limit the length of this article, I will explaineach category, then give examples of the outcomes of that brainstorming technique on only one of the subjects covered by that technique.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is a mnemonic whereby you can “elaborate on your ideas by applying a checklist of nine creative-thinking principles that were first formally suggested by Alex Osborn and later arranged by Bob Eberle as such:

o S = Substitute?o C = Combine?o A = Adapt?o M = Magnify? Modify?o P = Put to other uses?o E = Eliminate?o R = Rearrange? Reverse?”15

For example, we utilized SCAMPER to brainstorm Pastoral Counseling. Each of the brainstorming team took two of the letters in the mnemonic and applied those creativity-inspiring questions to the matter of Pastoral Counseling. Here are examplesof how this developed:

1. SUBSTITUTE: Can I substitute pastoral counseling with something else? How about having every member trained to do counseling? Can they give something other than spiritual counseling; maybe financial counseling, job search counseling, or counseling people on ways to make money go further or to take greater advantage of municipal services?

2. COMBINE: What can I combine with pastoral counseling to be of even greater advantage to the parishioners? Maybe feed them at the same time?

3. ADAPT: Can I adapt the way pastoral counseling is practiced to make it an even more beneficial service?

15 Michalko, 2001, page 95.

What are others doing? Could we offer pastoral counselingat a different venue? At someone’s house? Maybe at the mall? Online?

4. MAGNIFY or MODIFY: How can I expand pastoral counseling? Could I make a counseling blog that covers a different topic facing the distressed, frustrated and impoverished?Could we do a television public service announcement periodically in order to counsel those in need?

5. PUT TO OTHER USES: Can the pastoral counseling session beused for some other purpose as well? Could we also contact loved ones to help?

6. ELIMINATE: Is there any part of pastoral counseling that could be done away with? We could do away with it being done at the church, or in the church office.

7. REARRANGE or REVERSE: What is the opposite of pastoral counseling? Pastoral belittling? That wouldn’t be a good idea. What about allowing the parishioner to counsel the pastor? There’s promise in this idea.

TWO IDEAS THAT WE DECIDED NEEDED GREATER FOLLOWUP:

1. A daily counseling blog2. Arrange the counseling session to let the parishioner

first counsel the pastor about how she’s doing, things that may be troubling her, etc. Then, the pastor (or trained laity) could offer the same service to the parishioner.

FANTASY ENVELOPES

In Fantasy Envelope, the brainstorming team is divided into three groups. Each group gets a different question to fantasize about regarding the problem at hand, in this case, community, andsee what ideas develop. The questions are:

“Question One: ‘What is impossible to do today, but if it were possible, would change the nature of the problem forever?’

Question Two: ‘What would I do if I had all the resources (money, people, time, facilities, etc.) in the world to solve this problem?’

Question Three: ‘If I were a superhero with supernatural powers and could accomplish anything I wish, how would I handle this problem?’”16

Each team collaborates and writes one idea or answer on the outside of an envelope. The envelope is then passed to the team to the right. That team then writes a practical idea for solving the problem is response to the fantasy idea generated on the front of the envelope. All the envelopes are passed around until every team has had the opportunity to pose a suggestion (without looking at anyone else’s responses). The cards are then removed and discussed as one group to see what innovative ideas may spring to mind to address the problem.

Some examples of our teams’ directions include:

Question One: Every family would be a business owner, socialism would really work, and every family would remain intactthrough generations.

Question Two: Give every family in Detroit $45,000 of buyingpower annually, repair all the houses and dilapidated buildings in Detroit, filling them with jobs for everyone, and give free gasoline to every citizen.

Question Three: I would capture all the criminals and use mymind-melding powers to set them on a productive life path, I would heal all of the sick and broken people in the city, and I would eradicate all the vacant warehouses and underutilized land and convert it to farms and factories that produce electronic widgets.

ONE IDEA THAT WE DECIDED NEEDED GREATER FOLLOWUP: providing vouchers for food and other necessities to prisoners in the overcrowded jails that rebuild one of the 78,000 abandoned homes

16 Ibid., page 248.

in Detroit,17 reclaims a portion of the 46 square miles of vacantand derelict land in the city18, or repairs ten of the 40% of Detroit’s street lights that do not work.19 This would allow the reunion of families that have been torn apart by crime and rebuild the community needs that Detroit faces.

THE ESSENCE OF A CRAZY IDEA

With this creative-thinking/brainstorming technique, “[one] can actively seek the accidental discovery by deliberately exploring the odd and the unusual. It is this freedom from designor commitment that allows [one] to juxtapose things that would not otherwise have been arranged in this way, to construct a sequence of events that would not otherwise be constructed.”20 Our group decided to apply this technique to the matter of the spiritual lives of the citizens of Detroit.

We first proposed the problem, “The spiritual lives of the citizens of Detroit are at an extremely low ebb.” Then we asked the group as a whole to “generate the most absurd or crazy ideas about the problem. The crazier the better.”21 Here are some of the ideas that developed:

1. Allow people to live in the church, with pastoral staff available 24/7.

2. Hire the unemployed to go to every home in the city and read Scripture to them.

3. Install loudspeakers all around town (perhaps attached toall those non-working streetlights) that would broadcast spiritual messages, sermons, and the like twenty-four hours a day.

4. Offer free bus transportation all day and all night to all parts of the city with piped-in messages, Christian music and on-hand counselors to help people.

17 Snyder, Michael. 201318 Ibid.19 Ibid.20 Michalko, 2006, page 346.21 Ibid.

Next, we chose one of the absurd ideas to work on. Our team chose “Hire the unemployed to go to every home in the city and read Scripture to them.” From here, we listed the features and aspects of this idea:

1. This would help reduce the unemployment rate and put people back to work.

2. Some of the people that were read to might have other needs that could be met by the workers.

3. People would receive hope and compassion from the hearingof the Scripture.

4. People who are not saved could come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior.

5. Those who are illiterate (47% of the population by one estimate)22 could learn to read from the Scripture readers.

Then, we selected one of the features and brainstormed to extract the principle or essence of that feature and build it into a practical idea.

ONE IDEA THAT WE DECIDED NEEDED GREATER FOLLOWUP: A literacy program based on the hope and promise of Scripture that could be manned by volunteers and set up in government centers, libraries,groceries and casinos throughout the city.

Summary

By utilizing brainstorming and creative-thinking techniques,our team developed four viable ideas related to just one of the four main concerns that hinder the rescue of Detroit. If this productivity were matched by four teams in each of the four quadrants of the threat matrix, the result would be sixty-four new, untried, creative and innovative ideas that could be utilized to return Detroit to financial, social and spiritual viability. These are only a few of the possible ways to address 22 Snyder, Michael, 2013.

the problems that face Detroit and many other municipalities. Butit is going to take leaders to accomplish these tasks. Sheila Cockrel, a former 16-year member of the Detroit City Council, says, “[F]uture leaders should embody several traits – qualities that make strong leaders from the public to the private sector – including the courage to do the right thing even in the face of the shouting protestors who often pack council meetings. Pandering to the noisiest elements of the city must stop.”23 And Vince Keenan, Executive Director of Publius.org, an organization which promotes voter education argues, “[T]he city’s new leaders must take a visionary approach: ‘They need to focus on the future– where is the city going to be in 10 to 25 years?’”24

Which leads to my final observation. With the powers of collaborative teamwork utilizing creative-thinking techniques to develop and initiate innovative ideas combined with scenario planning for future events, municipalities that now face bankruptcy, and worse, may be able to realize a light at the end of the tunnel (as long as, in the case of Detroit, the streetlights have been fixed.)

23 Tabb Jr., Clarence. “Editorial: Leadership is Key to Detroit’s Revival, The Detroit News, August 31, 2013. Downloaded from http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130812/OPINION/308120002 on 9/1/13.24 Ibid.

References

Brainstorming. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved September 08, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/brainstorming

Jobs, Steve, BrainyQuotes, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_leadership.html

Johnson, Bill. Detroit’s Single Families Define the Real State of the City,” downloaded from http://www.dadi.org/dn_bleak.htm on 9/7/13

Michalko, Michael. Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2001

Michalko, Michael. Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, Berkeley,CA: Ten Speed Press, 2006,

Snyder, Michael. “25 Facts About the Fall of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head”, July 20, 2013, http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/25-facts-about-the-fall-of-detroit-that-will-leave-you-shaking-your-head.html,, downloaded on 9/1/13.

Tabb Jr., Clarence. “Editorial: Leadership is Key to Detroit’s Revival, The Detroit News, August 31, 2013. Downloaded from

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130812/OPINION/308120002 on 9/1/13.

Winston,Bruce quoted in Inner Reflections on Leadership on the InnerResources for Leaders blog, August 31, 2007, http://innerresourcesforleaders.blogspotcom/2007/8/interview-bruce-e-winston-phd-at-online.html

(For additional information, visit the Detroit Works Project’s “The Detroit Future City” plan at: http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/The-DFC-Plan.pdf

While an admirable plan, upon brief review the author is of the opinion that this plan is too vague and non-descript to be a viable alternative for Detroit’s future. –rj)

Author Biography

Ralph Johnson, doctoral student at Regent University’s School of Business and Leadership

Author may be contacted at: Ralph E. Johnson

4289 Mira Linda Point #1214

Colorado Springs, CO 80920

ralpjoh@mail.regent.edu