Arc of Outrage: Bring the Future into the Room

Four questions that bring the fear down

Today’s installment continues the Arc of Outrage series exploring the cycle of public opposition around data centers—and what leaders can do to shorten the arc and survive. I have argued that the future has the right of way and explored who speaks for the future. Projects must defer to communities, and communities must defer to the next generation. But what does that mean in an actual project meeting?

For the future to be a stakeholder, you need to bring it into the room where the conversations are happening. Today I tell you how.

Both of these things are true:

• The idea of the future as a stakeholder is inherently abstract.

• Your project outreach needs to make the future very tangible for your stakeholders.

Four questions that put the future in the room

Infrastructure executives have asked—and today I’m answering—How do you practically make the future a stakeholder?

1. If the future is a stakeholder, who represents it in early project discussions?

This isn’t a sound-bite opportunity for you to blurt out a question like Who represents the future in this room and what won’t get built? in a hostile meeting. The question is a good one, but not one to bandy about carelessly.

In your early information gathering to understand the community, I have long advised you to learn and listen. You were likely already planning to get a sense for the needs of various business leaders and local governments. But invoking the future means you must gently expand your understanding by asking businesses and government officials these kinds of questions:

• What type of businesses are growing?

• How are demographics changing? Who is leaving? Arriving?

• What opportunities are desired but missing?

• What obstacles keep businesses or families from staying here?

• What would give former residents a reason to come back and stay here?

With political leaders you can explore important and nuanced ideas by asking these kinds of questions:

• What community elements are important to preserve?

• What are your three regional priorities for public services that need to improve?

• Do you have a vision of what your community looks like in 10 years? In 30?

In short: You don’t represent the future in these discussions. You must evoke it—through careful, open-ended engagement.

2. What does a good future mean in practical terms?

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and while specifics will, of course, vary by jurisdiction, here are my four pillars of a good future for any community. What are yours?

1. Opportunity: There must be economic opportunity for individuals to find jobs, entrepreneurs to create businesses, and corporations to thrive (and create those jobs).

2. Public capacity: The local government(s) must be able to plan, staff, regulate, and provide the roads, schools, emergency services, housing, and other services a healthy community requires.

3. Quality of life: Communities value different elements of a good quality of life, but we all know it’s central to creating a place you want to live, recreate, work, and raise the next generation. A community may value its beautiful natural environment or its upscale shopping and dining. Museums, funky small businesses, multigenerational farms, walkable neighborhoods… There are infinite varieties of what makes a community thrive.

4. Underlying systems: Residents must have the abundant, affordable, reliable energy and communications infrastructure that opportunity and quality of life depend on. Energy and communications infrastructure are non-negotiable for the other three pillars as well.

Your job is to understand what these pillars look like now in the community you want to base your project in—and then to begin to imagine how your project could shape the pillars’ potential future.

3. When does that conversation happen—and how?

Some communities have a clearly articulated vision of their future, but most do not—particularly not a vision responsive to today’s opportunities around energy and communications infrastructure. Here are practical steps you can take in your outreach to encourage a conversation that regards the future as a stakeholder, not just a destination where your project has already been built:

• Start socialization early with a broad range of stakeholders (yes, even today, when it’s really scary). Say things like: We are looking at [this kind of project]. Here is what is likely fixed to ensure that the project can proceed. Here are areas where we have flexibility to make this project work within a community. We want to understand what you care about and how you are thinking about your future.

• Be transparent throughout your project development. Be honest about what you can and can’t consider. Identify the decisions the community can influence, the constraints you face, and when choices must be made. And keep asking questions about the future and ways this project can help create it.

• Beware of the perception of the bribe. Companies have been bandying around benefits as if data center outrage could be addressed through a big enough set of gift cards. No individual or public official wants to feel as if they are being bought off. The entire purpose of evoking the future is ensuring that the project is creating something that would not be possible without it!

• Consider supporting a community planning process. If the community does not have a process for a conversation about the future it wants to create and how your project does or does not fit in, help make one possible. You will not be able to control or even shape this process—which is scary but critical to its success! Encourage a local government or trusted institution to convene it. Provide resources for, but do not get involved in the selection of, an independent facilitator. Where appropriate, have your leaders answer questions and participate in exploring the art of the possible.

4. How do you discuss the cost of doing nothing without making your words sound like a threat?

This question is smart because it recognizes the difference between important project insights and effective engagement strategies.

You can’t just tell a community that rejecting your project means forfeiting all kinds of great opportunities. That may be true, but in an environment with a deficit of trust, this is the likeliest response: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Do this instead: As part of the discussions with stakeholders, introduce the comparison of plausible futures honestly, by gently asking these kinds of questions:

• What happens if the project does not proceed?

• What alternatives exist? How long would they take?

• Which existing problems remain?

• What new opportunities might be lost—or created?

This is the tough nut every project developer must reckon with: The no-build option may be the right choice. Your job with this engagement isn’t to manufacture anxiety or urgency. Your job is to replace the easy no (which is a false option) with consideration of the real opportunities and trade-offs that community leaders must reckon with.

Put the trade-offs to be managed (opportunities and benefits) on the table: energy, water, housing, traffic, public services, tax revenue, environmental impacts, and the community’s ability to manage growth. Then move to solutions. What would have to change for the project to earn a place in the future the community wants?

If your project works only when its benefits are inflated and its costs are minimized, your project hasn’t earned a place in the community.

Seize the day

Putting the future in the room doesn’t guarantee support for your project. What it can do is open the discussion, uncover real potential benefits the project could create, and convey trade-offs—all of which help make the future a stakeholder instead of something to be feared.

Because, as we’ve explored in this series, the Arc of Outrage is fueled by fear that a future no one chose is being imposed. When you expand the futures your stakeholders can imagine to include a future worth building, that opens up some new conversations.

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To the art of the possible,

Tisha