Mark Sylvester: John Davies has a method and approach he systematically developed over a career spanning three decades. He's proven it to be invaluable for dozens of industries and thousands of projects facing public acceptance. Up until now, the method is only been available to his select client list. John is unpacking his insight and wealth of knowledge to overcome opposition and earn public support for the first time right here. Throughout these episodes, we'll take a deep dive step by step with John into his strategies to overcome opposition and create support. Nothing is free in this world, but good ideas are priceless. The show could be just the thing you've been looking for. I'm Mark Sylvester. Now, let's get started and talk with John.

Mark Sylvester: Welcome back to the show, John. We're now in our second week of the deep dive into just the tactical things that people can do and they've had this tremendous amount of research and knowledge and insight, I would say, into the three areas we talked about, which was the psyche, what other projects are going on or what the political climate is and you called this phase dreams and fears. Help me understand that.

John Davies: Well, I call it addressing or address dreams and fears. Don't we all have dreams and fears?

Mark Sylvester: Of course.

John Davies: And so, the problem is that we want to talk about their dreams and their fears, not ours. If you remember my little tag on listening first is we've got to know what they think, rather than tell them what we think. And so, same thing here, it's like we have dreams and fears. I mean we're developing a big piece of property. I mean the dream is we're going to get it developed or we're going to sell it. We're going to sell homes or we're going to sell it after it's entitled and we're going to make a good profit. We're going to succeed, we're going to have a success under our belt. Well, that's not their dream. They have dreams about their communities. Our fear is that we fail. Our dream, as we get conditions so badly, there's not enough money at the end of the day for this to be economically successful. So, we're addressing their dreams, their fears to go forward.

John Davies: So, we got to really think through how that is, and that comes back, again, to that moral case. We're making a moral case for new homes. So, that's where it comes in and so, how we play with it.

Mark Sylvester: Are you thinking about how certain pieces of information that you got from the research helps you acknowledge those realities that ... I mean because that came up.

John Davies: Yeah. Right.

Mark Sylvester: Acknowledge kind of is let's talk about the fears first.

John Davies: Right, exactly. So, looking at it, so let's acknowledge. What we do is like, okay, so acknowledge. We heard from the research, we looked at the community, so what are the dangers that your project will create that would be most in the public's mind. So, the dangers your project will create that would be most in their mind. Think about it, right? Most in their mind.

Mark Sylvester: Exactly.

John Davies: Right. You go through it, it can be traffic. Past developer's promises are a big thing you got to acknowledge, water issues, loss of open space, loss of ag land, negative impacts to their daily quality of life in some manner. And so, we might do a list of 10-20, maybe it's five, and we want to get it down to three and then, we get a little more details. So, we talk about traffic and we're going to get down to other things. New homes will add cars and require improvements. It's like "Duh." But I mean we have to acknowledge that. We have to deal with it right from the start. We're trying to get all these things down in our thought process.

John Davies: Now, if you noticed, we're listening. We're addressing their dreams and fears. We're not creating the flyer today.

Mark Sylvester: Right. You're still understanding the landscape.

John Davies: Well, the most important thing we have is what are we going to say, how we're going to say it and who we're going to say it to.

Mark Sylvester: So, you still don't know what we're going to say because we-

John Davies: We're putting it together, that's this whole process. And we will talk about, well, how to get it out there in this era of new media and what we need to do to create the relationships.

Mark Sylvester: What strikes me, John, is by framing it as addressing dreams and fears, that's an emotional discussion.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: You're not talking about finances and data. I mean we're going to talk about that, but dreams and fear are emotional responses.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: So that's what you're tapping into.

John Davies: Right. When you're acknowledging their biggest fear, how do you address that? Well, you've got to also understand their biggest dreams. So, what can overcome a fear.

Mark Sylvester: A plausible dream.

John Davies: Exactly. And so, that's the idea.

Mark Sylvester: And a feasible one.

John Davies: But it's got to be theirs, it's not yours. So, yeah, we do the same thing with contrast and embrace, we do a whole big long list of all the things we can contrast with. We're going to do purple line, we're going to do recycled water that do all the landscaping in all the parks and it means that we're going to be like totally reduce water use. The project that I'm thinking about, again, talking about Napa since I presented it, is we're doing a reuse of a brownfield instead of taking a greenfield. We do a lot of greenfields too, so I can't say it every time, but the idea is we're going to lower the demand for greenfield development. And we know in that community, that's one of their greatest fears.

Mark Sylvester: Right, because that came out.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: Back to the questions, give an example of a question that the answer is going to lead you to a dream.

John Davies: It's so painfully easy ...

Mark Sylvester: You keep going back to that.

John Davies: ... you make me do that. It's like, so, what do you envision for your community, what do you look to see in the future of your community. If your kids are going to stay here and live here for their life and have your grandchildren here, what do you want it to be like.

Mark Sylvester: Now, I imagine that if I'm asking someone that on the phone that they're going to take a thoughtful pause and visualize what that future looks like, and then, give you the truth.

John Davies: Yeah. They do. "And so, we'd like to have a ... I mean so many places and smaller areas, we'd just like to have some more stores here today," "We'd like to have not have to drive to go to a store," "We'd like to have a place where our kids and our grandkids could actually buy a home." Communities that are growing faster usually communities where the price of housing is going up. "We'd like our kids to have a place where they could afford a home." Recently, in a project in Virginia, the issue is we just want a safe place to live. We live in this beautiful, beautiful place and it's so big, large acre lots but we need a place where we can live because we don't own a 10-acre or a 100-acre property but we want it in a place where it feels safer, not where all the industrial stuff and other things are. Like their dream is really simple.

Mark Sylvester: It must be challenging, I mean you gave the example in our last show where you had two communities that were three miles apart and they were so different.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: And you wouldn't have presumed that. So, this gets back to your kind of hammering on  it's not your story, it's their story.

John Davies: Right. And it's not about your development, it's about their town. Let's think for a second about a community that has a fear about change. So Northern California, booming right now, been booming. Hard to find housing. The tech industry is going, everyone's got an app, everyone's got something new, so there's a lot of people moving there. A lot of people moving there from all over the world. So, there's some xenophobia issues. But people's towns have changed. Grocery stores are [building 00:09:09], hard to find a parking spot. Schools are getting overcrowded but with more development, there's more money. So, all this is happening and they just fear more people.

John Davies: And so, in this one project we're working on, it's in a downtown area, they've wanted their downtown to be done that's been left behind, the core of their downtown. It's been left behind for a decade, a decade and a half. Their dream is have a beautiful downtown like in some of the other places. And so, to do the downtown, we need to do higher density, higher up to afford to do all the retail and all the parks and all the stuff. So, their dream of a downtown overcomes their fear of people.

Mark Sylvester: Interesting.

John Davies: Right. And so, you're able to overcome some of these things. We're working on two projects now in Southern California that are going to be carbon-neutral, and it makes the decision-makers happy and the public's like, "What does that mean?"

Mark Sylvester: I was just going to say the leading question would be what if your town was carbon-neutral. That's leading the witness, your honor, right?

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: So, you wouldn't ask it in that way, but that is a perfect example of something that is a dream for the developer to be able to use that as a selling point and it doesn't matter, so that's a perfect example.

John Davies: It's one of those things that if I wrote the question, I'd probably say, "So how do you feel ... what if this project was carbon-neutral? How would that make you do it?" And they'd answer and it would be awful and it wouldn't give us any results because they'd be focused on what I want to talk about, and when I've written them in the past, I get too leading on it. I mean I can write them now, it's my excuse not to. We have a couple of people that are great at writing them, but the deal is you've got to write them so they can answer questions that are easy and fill in ... The more specific you make it, the more you limit your question.

John Davies: So, it's like the closed in question, "Mark, were you in jail last week?"

Mark Sylvester: Absolutely not.

John Davies: Well, no, you weren't. You're in jail two weeks ago. And so, I limit the question, and I limit the answer.

Mark Sylvester: I'm curious ... again, back to operationalizing this and someone is following along here. Are there some universal fears and dreams in real estate that have a gravitational pull and you go, "Oh, that's really like that," but you have to really fight hard to keep it central to that person's thoughts and what's unique and nuanced about that community?

John Davies: It's unique and nuanced. It is. And it's little things, and it's also the words they use and the phrasing they use. I mean think about it. If someone comes to you and says, "I'm your real estate agent," and they have a big checkbook and they want to find a house, "So Mark, I'm looking for a quaint cottage," and you go, "Well, these guys got a big checkbook. I'm going to show them, "This is a fabulous cottage," "This is a really cottage-style big home" and you know, "This is a very unique cottage." Just tell me you got five quaint cottages for me to see. People, when they're using words, we want to use their words. And so, in this process, that's what we're doing, we're using their thoughts, their words, their dreams and fears. I mean every community has different dreams and fears that really matter. I mean all the small communities want more shopping. They want all the mom and pop stores to come back.

John Davies: Yeah. Well, you know what, they know and we know that's just not going to happen. That's not the area we live in. So, I'm not going to spend a lot of time addressing that. I'm going to address the ones that are more nuanced, more of a real dream and a real fear.

Mark Sylvester: Help me understand how much time I want to spend in this phase. This is a nice logical outgrowth course of the listening, how do I know when I've got that moral case?

John Davies: You know when you have your first encounter with the public, they shake their head to [yes 00:13:48]. I mean literally, you got to be fine-tuning the whole time. So you can't come up with a message month three year one when you're doing a project that's going to take two or three years to get done, especially a big master plan may take four or five years. But even a small one-year, two-year project, you can't start with one message and hold it to the end. Your message has to keep changing and growing, organically change as the process changes, as people's claims, as people's fears, as people dreams change. So you got to keep updating your message. You can't end with the same message you started with.

Mark Sylvester: Do you then go out and test some of these ... and back to the focused interviews, do you test some of these messaging and test some of these ideas or come up with new questions and you say, "Hold it. We don't have enough information here to make a judgment or make a case."

John Davies: All the time I do.

Mark Sylvester: All the time?

John Davies: I need to find out more and I need to dig in a little deeper. Because when you're starting to create the creative part, which is what we'll talk about next, how we implement this, we'll get a piece and I'll look at it and say, "It's not doing it for me," "This isn't doing it for me." I will literally go back and reread all the focused interviews. Do you think that drives anyone crazy?

Mark Sylvester: Probably everyone. But that's why you win 87% of the time too. So-

John Davies: But I want to read it and say, "What does this mean?" "Oh, here is what I missed," "This is what we're not ..." "We're not presenting this this way." And the deal is it's got to be, again, not complex. Doing a LNG terminal in Texas, people are panicked about there's a bunch of proposals. We had this headline and I'm like, "No." Three of us banging it around the piece. Literally, in a hotel projected up against a white board and I go, "Let's take 45 minutes." I went back, and my hand up, my headline became, "Even in Texas, sometimes, smaller is better," and the cover image was a boy fishing getting a small little fish. And then, we unpacked it. Because this is the smallest proposal, it was packaged. It took up less land. It was easier for people to understand, it's easier for people to deal with. It's like, "Duh," it's the smallest project, but we had to relate it to Texas, we had to relate it to what we're doing.

John Davies: It needed to make a statement like that, and I had to go back and go, "Yeah, their fear is big. The dream is to get some job," so, how do we overcome the fear with their dream of jobs. But we can do this here. We can do small in Texas, we don't have to be huge.

Mark Sylvester: So that break then, that 45-minute break was go back and re-look at this, re-look at what they said.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: Now, we've talked about your process at length, and I love the phone calls, but then, you read transcripts. You've said sometimes though that what you missed is the emotion?

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: Tell me why. And do they record them?

John Davies: No, we do not.

Mark Sylvester: You don't.

John Davies: We can't.

Mark Sylvester: Oh, you can't?

John Davies: No, you can't. And think about that I would be listening to 25-30 hours worth of it, I mean that's like suicide watch, right? I mean it would be unbelievable. And reading it is hard, I mean it's really, really hard. You're banging through it.

Mark Sylvester: That's a discipline though, isn't it?

John Davies: It is.

Mark Sylvester: You need to be so present.

John Davies: Right. I told you I read them on an airplane, and the joke in the office is we got one in a hurry, they want to put me on a flight across the country because that's one ...

Mark Sylvester: Just so you could read it.

John Davies: Because what else can you do in an airplane? I can't stand up, you can't be interrupted, you're on a flight and I'll read 25 pages. Set it aside for a minute, read 25 pages, do that until I get to 100-115 pages and get done. Yeah, you want to look back, you really want to understand what people are saying, but then, you got to understand the community again, that we talked about, what's going on there. And for me, not filling out a form but just writing things down and getting ready. So, when I'm looking at addressing their dreams and fears, I want to end with a list of three things we need to acknowledge. I want to end with three ways we can contrast that, and then, I want to have a list of three things we can embrace, how can we embrace these things.

John Davies: Start with your long list, whatever it takes. I'll do five-10. We'll throw it around a room and we come up with this. The idea is that this is a creative process, and with a creative process, you got to have some discipline to be able to get there at the end. So, I want to end the acknowledge with an acknowledge statement. I want to end the contrast with a contrast statement, so the three. And I have all those three. They may not live through the test of time, but at least we have them.

Mark Sylvester: Well, so the end of this phase then, your work product, if you will, is a list of ...

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: ... you've gone from all the step down to three in each category and you've figured out what the dreams and what the fears are.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: Is there some homework you might suggest where someone who's listening to this right now might go back and look at some research a little bit differently?

John Davies: Yeah. I mean even look at Europe, if you've done [pull in 00:19:43]look at the [pull in 00:19:43] they're trying to go. So, what are the things we need acknowledge that we can acknowledge. What are the things we can contrast, what are the things we can embrace, How do we look at these as dreams and fears.

Mark Sylvester: It's the frame.

John Davies: What is the big dream that we can overcome the fears with, and that's the key. And you got to acknowledge the fear, right? When you acknowledge the fear, you're able to dismiss it. If you don't acknowledge it, you can't dismiss it.

Mark Sylvester: John, I love that. Let's button that one up because I think that wraps it perfectly. Next week, what we're going to talk is how this leads us to the next logical piece which is getting the message out.

John Davies: You got it.

Mark Sylvester: Talk to you next week.

Mark Sylvester: Thank you for listening. It's now your opportunity and responsibility to use the method today. You've completed one segment toward understanding the Davies Method. We look to you subscribing. Join us as we uncover and explain the nuances of John's distinctive approach. For more episodes, visit thedaviesmethod.com. I'm Mark Sylvester, reporting at the Pullstring Press Studios in Santa Barbara, California.