Overcome Opposition: Wind Ep 2 – Acknowledge

Overcoming the Opposition: Acknowledge

Mark Sylvester: John Davies has a method, an 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 has 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. This show could be just the thing you've been looking for.

I'm Mark Sylvester. Now, let's get started and talk with John.

Welcome to the show. I am glad that we are now able to take a deep dive into the whole method. John, why don't you set the tone for what we're going to learn?

John Davies: Well, everyone always says, "What do I need to do? How do I deep-"

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, yeah, right.

John Davies: You want to do it different.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

John Davies: Right? And the first thing you gotta do is change your paradigm. You gotta change how you're going to approach this. There's a great quote from George Bernard Shaw, and he says, "Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." So, if we're trying to change the mind of the two-thirds or four-fifths of the public that want to oppose wind farms in their neighborhood, we've got to change our own minds first to how we approach them.

Mark Sylvester: So, the method really is a completely new way of looking at how you overcome opposition.

John Davies: You know, it is.

Mark Sylvester: So, let's start with A, with acknowledge.

John Davies: So, acknowledge, the first step of this isn't to go out there and talk about how great everything is. The first step is to acknowledge that there will be impacts. Putting up the big towers, I mean, they're huge. They're as big as they can be, and you've got to acknowledge, there will be an impact. Life will change in their community in some way because you're putting those up.

Mark Sylvester: Do you exaggerate the impact to make it sound worse? Or, it's already, going to feel bad, so you be as truthful as possible?

John Davies: Well, there's no reason to exaggerate that it's gonna be bad. There's no reason to exaggerate that it's not gonna be bad. The deal is, things will change. You're going to see on the horizon, a big, tall tower.

Mark Sylvester: With a propeller on it.

John Davies: With a propeller on it, and you know, some people think they're beautiful, and some people don't.

Mark Sylvester: But why is it important to just come up and just hit them with the truth right off the bat? Why does that work? Because obviously you've done this for years now. Why did you learn, because that's counterintuitive.

John Davies: Well, if you're trying to build trust, and credibility, you've got to tell the truth. And telling the truth allows people to have a relationship with you. So, my belief is when you're trying to talk about pros and cons, you talk about pros, people's eyes start glazing over. You get to cons, and they wake up. They go, "Oh, I see." But if you start with cons, these are the three reasons why we shouldn't take this path. Here are the three reasons why we should take this path. When you do the three reasons why we shouldn't, you've earned instant credibility. People will listen to the pros.

Mark Sylvester: I'm curious. I'm imagining a city council meeting someplace, and you're going to give a presentation, and the opposition is gonna give a presentation. You get up there and start with your acknowledge, and you just go right to the, "Hey, it's gonna be bad," or whatever the acknowledgement is. And you go through your way of doing things, and then they get up and do it the old fashioned way. How does that work? Have you built up enough trust with that audience by that time?

John Davies: First off, let's back way up. I'm hoping that I don't have to go into a city council or a county commission meeting and start at that point. I hope that I have a great group of supporters sitting behind me, who have already figured this out, and have joined us because they trust us. And to get them to join us, they have to trust us. And the more they dig in, the more they realize it's actually the right thing. But with a local government, hopefully we're able to do that through our supporters talking to them because local decision makers care more about what their local residents say than what the wind industry representatives will say.

Mark Sylvester: So, how much in acknowledge is ... How deep do you go in that? Do you just get it all out there so someone doesn't come back and lay something on you?

John Davies: No, you don't have to get into every detail. So, some of the issues in wind that are totally overplayed, such as property values. There's evidence that there is no impact to property values, and there's some evidence that in places that property values actually are enhanced when a community has a wind farm, especially small, rural communities where the wind farm brings economic benefits to the community.

So, the deal is, what we want to acknowledge is something that we look at when we do our research that the community sees, they accept to some level that we just need to tell. And the best thing with wind, is that it's what you see is the thing we need to acknowledge. We can do anything about that, and that's not a misnomer that they're big.

Mark Sylvester: That's not fake news. They are big.

John Davies: They are big.

Mark Sylvester: So, you said that you do the research. So, the thing that you acknowledge might be different from project to project?

John Davies: Yes. Some places may have some issues with their roads that we go through, and we come through and we deal with roads. We have to acknowledge, yeah, we could have an impact on the roads. But places in wind, we go right to the visual because that's the one thing we cannot fix.

Mark Sylvester: The research is interesting to me. How much time do you do on research before you get into that first step? When do you feel like you've asked enough questions?

John Davies: Well, never. That's just the nature of the beast. I want to know more and more and more. The more you know, the more questions that come up. So, when we carry out our tactical, we will talk about how we do our research, but we do open-ended questions and long conversations. We listen to what people, how they feel about their life in their community. What's going right. What's going wrong. How's the last 10 years been, what's the hope for the next 10 years. And then we'll drop wind into it, and how does that impact things? And you see their instant reactions, and you'll read the verbatims of what they say, and it's very interesting because you get the words and the music, because how they pace it, how the energy they bring to the words, the type of words they bring to it. So, you get a feeling for what we need to acknowledge.

Mark Sylvester: I'm curious, how receptive are people to those kinds of phone calls?

John Davies: Well, our biggest problem usually is getting them off the phone because-

Mark Sylvester: Really?

John Davies: Yeah. When you do a poll, and it tells us what you think, do you strongly agree or strongly disagree. Usually it starts, "Do you agree or disagree with this?" And it's like, "I disagree with that statement." "Is that strongly or somewhat?" "It's strongly." And then they go to the next one, and the next one, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, all of this is so poorly written, I hate it."

So, with this, we just open up and say, "Hey, let's have a conversation." We have an outline. "Let's talk about this." And we take them through, "What's going on in your community? Why do you live there? What's it like to live there? What is an issue for you every day? What's an issue for some of your neighbors that's not an issue for you?"

Mark Sylvester: So, through that research then, you get a pretty clear picture of what you're going, what that blinding glimpse of the obvious is gonna be.

John Davies: Exactly. In the past, when we first started doing that, we might just go sit in coffee shops for a week.

Mark Sylvester: Really?

John Davies: Yeah. And just hang around and talk to people. They eventually figure out, "That's that guy." I went into one-

Mark Sylvester: Big flag on your table.

John Davies: Yeah. Well, working on a real estate project I went into this little steakhouse in this little town outside of Davis, California, and I first walked in, and I was dressed not like a, with a suit, just dressed like a regular citizen. I sat down and the bartender looked at me, said, "So, what developer are you working for?"

Mark Sylvester: Oh. Busted.

John Davies: So, we sort of knew that era was over. We had to do it by phone. And by phone is so much better. It's just a better deal.

Mark Sylvester: So, when you have got enough information and you can do the acknowledge, tell me, is there ever a time when you want to skip that step?

John Davies: Every time. Every time. I mean, why, I mean, it's so ... My staff, we all developed this together, we all agree with it, we all refine it, and we always want to skip it because it's so hard. And it's so hard to tell our clients, "You gotta acknowledge you're causing a problem."

Mark Sylvester: Have you found a good way to tell them that? Because I'm thinking the person who's listening now is working in a company, they said, "Listen, I'm listening to this great new podcast, and John says that we have to acknowledge this and this is what we need to do," and the boss is gonna say, "No, you're killing me. No, we're not gonna do that."

John Davies: So, the deal for me is, so, the first two steps are acknowledge and contrast as we're developing our method and our message. They have to be connected. They can't be done separately. You can't acknowledge and say, like this podcast. Let's do acknowledge and come back in another week and we'll talk about contrast.

Mark Sylvester: So, you're gonna tease our next show.

John Davies: Yeah, well, the contrast has to be immediately tied to it.

Mark Sylvester: Got it. Got it. Because it's big and small, or whatever that is.

John Davies: Exactly.

Mark Sylvester: John, thank you so much for this. I know that we're only just barely covering this and it's hard to do in a short format, right?

John Davies: It's really hard, yeah.

Mark Sylvester: But what we're gonna do is over the period of these 12 weeks, we're gonna have covered a lot of things and people can actually get in touch with us if they want to ask other questions and we can dive deep into it.

John, thanks so much.

John Davies: Hey, this is great. Anyone who wants to pop a question at us, I would love to be able to listen to it, acknowledge it, and give them an answer.

Mark Sylvester: Thanks John.

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