Things aren’t always what they seem. Some would even say that perception is reality. That statement has always bothered me because reality is reality and I hate to admit that something else could substitute for it. Of course, what the saying really means is that perception is just as real as reality and is often substituted for it.
Take for example the City of Portland. Every year the auditor presents a performance report to the City Council. The auditor also does a survey of citizens to see what they think of the performance of city departments. That’s where it gets interesting. City services have improved on a number of fronts when measured with real data. The public perception, however, is that things are not getting better but are indeed getting worse. The Oregonian newspaper was intrigued by this disconnect and wrote an article about it. What they missed is their own role in all of this.
Portland has been doing this report for several years but this is the first time I’ve noticed an article in the newspaper about it. I guess the old reports weren’t news. Or they weren’t presented in a way that would catch someone’s attention. Or I just missed this piece of news when its been covered before.
Here’s what I think is happening. I think that the public is just like me and gets most of its news from TV and newspapers and the Internet. News isn’t a daily report on how well things are going. News isn’t even a report on what happens most of the time. News is what’s unusual and what’s maybe even lurid. So if we get most of our information from sources that are biased towards the interesting stuff that’s what forms our opinion about the uninteresting stuff. This last year there have been a lot of news articles in the Portland area about government failings of one sort or another. It’s not unreasonable to assume that such information would color a survey respondent’s attitude about city services. The one report with the factual data on how things are going isn’t even easily available. It wasn’t reproduced in its entirety in the newspaper article so most people haven’t even seen it.
I don’t mean to be critical of anyone here but I do think it’s important to point out what’s wrong with most governmental employee’s thinking. Governmental employees think that everyone is watching them all the time and that everyone reads everything that’s printed about governmental operations. Wrong! They only read the stuff that catches their attention. I once was going door to door to solicit signatures on an annexation petition. At the same time the local newspaper had been covering the less than positive activities of our city manager. He’d been on the front page above the fold for several days. At each door I went to I was refused a signature and heard a whole slew of arguments for why they didn’t want to annex to the city. Never once did anyone even mention the City Manager. They all subscribed to the newspaper but apparently didn’t need any new information to solidify their ant-city position.
There may be a way to change governmental thinking that isn’t all that painful. When I was a member of the Route Jurisdiction Committee in the late 80’s, we hired a public relations firm to prepare a video about our report on the $13 billion needs we’d identified for the Washington transportation system. There was a scene in the video where they discussed the computer analysis we’d done to come up with our estimate. What they showed was someone working at a computer doing an AutoCAD design. If they had shown the real computer we used, the scene would have been pretty boring. They knew they needed to spice up the scene to make it more interesting to the viewer. If an engineer had prepared the same show, the boring computer would have not only been shown but its activities described in detail.
That’s the change in thinking we need. I discovered a long
time ago that the public is more likely to believe a simple lie than a complicated
truth. If it’s complicated it must be some sort of scheme to deceive us.
That’s what goes on in their heads. Our job isn’t to come up with
simple lies but to try to make the truth simple. That may sound like a big job
but it deserves more attention than it’s getting. Until it gets more attention,
we’ll continue to have a problem with perception trumping reality.
Incidentally, if you thought my example of the public relations firm was kind
of weak because you’ve never heard of the Route Jurisdiction Study, therefore,
how good could they have been? The answer is that telling the story in an interesting
way is only part of the package. We need to get the message heard too and people
need to follow up on getting the message out. In other words, execution is what
makes a plan work. That didn’t happen with the study.
As usual, comments or questions can be fielded at ostrowj@pacifier.com.