Switch - Chip Heath [28]
The community began to rally around the movement. Callies remembered the day that Phyllis, a civic-minded woman in her 80s, dropped by the office where the community boosters were meeting. Phyllis announced, “I’ve been waiting for you to call me. I thought if you needed my help, you would call. But then I realized that ‘Oh, they’re all too busy to call!’ So here I am.” On her refrigerator at home, Phyllis had posted a cross-stitch that said “Screw the Golden Years.”
When the high school students were ready to unveil their recommendations, eighty-five residents gathered in the high school gym to hear the presentation. Among them were the top leaders of the towns in Miner County: the school boards, the city councils, and the county commissioners.
The crowd listened attentively to the high school students. Parry said, “You could hear a pin drop…. People said, ‘I can’t say no because I want to make this a place where these kids can come home someday.’ Because the other option is we sit here and keep watching things decline, so pretty soon all that will be left is the dust.”
The students had prepared an impressive array of spreadsheets and charts and graphs. But they’d also simplified the complex data into one simple, surprising fact: They’d calculated that if Howard residents spent just 10 percent more of their disposable income at home, they would boost the local economy by $7 million.
The audience was impressed, and the presentation worked better than anyone expected. The students had scripted the first critical move for Miner County, and the locals responded immediately, consciously spending more of their money in the county. A year later, South Dakota’s Department of Revenue released an astonishing number: The amount of money spent in Miner County had increased by $15.6 million, more than twice the increase the kids had expected.
The change began to snowball. Suddenly, because the county was collecting more taxes, money was available to fund the other proposals the local groups had considered. And in the years following the students’ presentation, the tax receipts kept climbing, which enabled the community to tackle even more ambitious problems. Later, Howard and Miner County received $6 million in grants from various foundations to fuel the transformation. Randy Parry left his teaching job and became a full-time revitalizer-in-chief. The town of Howard became the host to twenty-first-century businesses such as an organic beef producer and a wind-turbine repair shop.
“It all started small,” said Parry. “It’s like when I took over the basketball team at the high school. They were just coming off of a losing season and you couldn’t get people to come into the gym. But then you start to win and a few people come, and then more people come. And then we started winning a lot.” To date, Parry has discussed the rebirth of Miner County with community leaders from thirty-three different states.
8.
A railroad and a South Dakota small town. Both crumbling. Both with a dense thicket of problems and no real resources to use in untangling them. In each situation, an unlikely leader emerged—a young man fresh out of business school and a high school basketball coach. And both succeeded by formulating solutions that were strikingly smaller than the problems they were intended to solve. (We’ve seen this asymmetry before, in the stories of Jerry Sternin in Vietnam and Bobby the troubled teenager.)
The challenges facing Miner County were big and sprawling: the decline of an industrial base, the aging of a population. The citizens understood these challenges well, but the knowledge was TBU—true but useless. It was paralyzing knowledge.
To the Rider, a big problem calls for a big solution. But if you seek out a solution that’s as complex as the problem, you’ll get the Food Pyramid and nothing will change. (The Rider will just spin his wheels trying to make sense of it.) The Rider has to be jarred out of introspection, out of analysis.