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.

Mark Sylvester: Welcome back to the show. John, we've now spent the first several episodes talking about the philosophy of the method and the four steps where we acknowledge and we do those steps, and then your inspiration from Aristotle, that was great. I really enjoyed that. However, what's interesting to me is, you have this philosophy that everybody else is doing it wrong and that this way of thinking about it is right. Explain that to us.

John Davies: I wouldn't say everyone's doing it wrong, but I think when you approach it in a different way you're bound to have problems, would be better. It is a wrong way of doing it, but it's the natural way that you would do it based on the fears you have with things. So as we've talked about, I want to acknowledge the impacts we're going to cause. I want to contrast the impacts we're going to cause with the benefits we're going to bring, or what would happen if we didn't do anything. And then I want to really embrace and engage with all the good things that we're going to do. Then I'm going to take a moment, and we're going to bridge. We're going to go over it, time for people to enjoy the good stuff, and talk about the economics.

John Davies: So what happens, in most cases we talk about the economics. Let's start with the economics, so it becomes bridge first.

Mark Sylvester: When you say, in most cases, so general way of dealing with a way to overcome opposition, you're suggesting is backwards because they start with ...

John Davies: Yeah, it's just in your head. So the deal's in your head. You're like, "Okay, I've got to talk about the economics." And if you did a public opinion survey the thing that would get you the highest number probably would be economic numbers. Well, because duh, who doesn't want good jobs for their community? Who doesn't want tax revenue? But it's not going to be the thing that is going to persuade people to come find out more and join you. So what ends up being bridge and brace, contrasted knowledge, but what it really is is promise. So bridge actually becomes promise. Embrace/engage becomes spin, and then when you're trying to contrast it becomes complain. And then confess. So let me unpack those really quickly.

Mark Sylvester: That'd be great.

John Davies: So the promises, it's this promise of great jobs, so promise of economic benefits and economic impacts to the community that you're going to have all this tax revenue, you're going to support the schools, all this stuff. All good things after people have already joined you, but it's a promise so it becomes a little slick and a little salesman. And then you spin. So you start spinning the concept of only the project benefits. But we live in a society where anyone go on that thing on the computer ... where do they go?

Mark Sylvester: I think it's Google, or something.

John Davies: Oh, yeah. It's a ... I think the webernet. So people go out on the webernet, and they look up, or they talk to their friends, or they're sophisticated. You know, we talk and do these interviews in communities. People know so much about planning jargon and things in the communities that are having growth. So if you spin it, they're like, "I don't trust you." And you can't spin anything, because spinning is like getting in that teacup ride at Disneyland. And you don't like being spun.

Mark Sylvester: It feels like ... it was interesting that you brought up our instant access to information that while you're making your presentation you are being Googled in real time. You are being fact-checked in real time, and you're actually improving the chances that you're going to be opposed in real time.

John Davies: You got it. Yeah, that's it. And it's a good thing, because our philosophy for decades has been, when we're honest from the start, when we're transparent we build trust. Even though it hurts us in the beginning, we build trust. Even though when we reach out early and start conversations early, we create a little weather, people get upset, but we can deal with it. It all happens at the end, and if you're doing the promising, you're spinning it. And then, instead of contrasting, as we acknowledge and contrast, they complain. And they complain that they point out how unfair the opposition is. "This is just not right. They're attacking us." We go into City Council, and you know, I come into projects at this stage all the time. We got, "City Hall, it's not fair they're attacking you. That's not the facts."

John Davies: Well, it doesn't do us any good to complain. It just doesn't do any good. And then the last one ties right into it. So you complain, and then the people that are going on the interweb, or the webernet, and they come up with information, and then we have to confess. We have to say, "You know, there are impacts." Yeah, of course there's impacts. Well, it's too late because you just promised all these good things. So what happens is, each step of this process goes down. So if you start to process and let's say you're lucky and you have a community you have 50% of the people with you. You just start dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping support to the point where you get in a death spiral.

Mark Sylvester: When did it become apparent to you that ... you may not have actually articulated the method by this time, but you saw, "Wow, that's really wrong." To your point, we had that declining support over time, and that the only way that you were going to resolve that was to invert it. Did you think about inverting it at that time?

John Davies: No. No. It's interesting. I believe that all things you do in life, you set these goals and you start going to them and you start working at it, and I had to put this down when I started being asked to speak about what I do. So I had to start putting down how we did it and how it was. So a couple decades ago I started laying out what we did, and I was like, "Oh, that's why that works." And what happened for us is, we come in at the spin and the complain level that people are already in a mess, and we're like, "Oh man, you didn't say that." And they just start thinking about, "Oh yeah, of course you shouldn't say that. You shouldn't do that." So it's learning how to do something by doing it wrong.

Mark Sylvester: You also gave me a real clue there, which was you didn't realize it until you had to go tell someone else. You had to teach.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: And that's what we're doing right now.

John Davies: Right.

Mark Sylvester: This whole series is teaching and unpacking this way that's gotten you to what, 87% win rate. It doesn't really matter which industry we're going after. We're going to overcome opposition. Give me an example ... I really want to hammer this one home for the listener because they're probably hearing this saying, "Oh man, that's what we do." Give us an example, an epic fail that was a perfect example of this way of doing it wrong.

John Davies: Oh man, you know, there's so many. I'm in the industry and I know these people. There was a city on a coast in a nice state with high taxes. Since we're talking about high taxes, why won't you do that, right? They just got up there and talked about their jobs and like crazy, and everything was a spin, everything was crazy. They attacked the opponents, they brought us in to help working on it, and they wanted us to go to meetings and videotape the planning groups where the opponents were attacking us so we could intimidate them. I was like, "I don't think that's a great idea. I think we'll pass on that."

Mark Sylvester: Seriously asked you to do that?

John Davies: Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then it's like, "Yeah, yeah, we're going to add a block traffic, but you know we can deal with it. It's not a really heavily-trafficked area." It's like, "Yeah, but it's like 3500 homes. You're going to add like 40,000 traffic trips." And it's like no understanding. They ended up going to a ballot measure on that project, and they lost like 65-35.

Mark Sylvester: Hmm.

John Davies: They spent three and a half, four million dollars on the ballot measure. They'd already spent probably $10-15 million on entitlement and legal going in. And just the entire method was the reverse of what we believe is the way to do this.

Mark Sylvester: And it's interesting, you've said a couple of times now that you'll get called in, because during the spin or complain stage, and I think you have a part of your practice that's crisis management and crisis communications?

John Davies: Right. I would love to do a series just on that. I think what would happen is, if we got enough people doing the Davies method, or at least rethinking what they're doing, we wouldn't have as much need for crisis communication. So, most of our crisis is on different issues in real estate, but we actually call. We do call and we come in at a later stage of crisis. But it still is in the entitlement. But the deal, when we come in ... it's in the world we live in these days, we come in where people have been forced to a referendum. They've had a plan, they hand me a public opinion survey that was done two years before.

John Davies: They're up like, 30% in the poll from reputable polling firms, and then they want us to take a look, "What do you think? How do we win this?" And we'll do another poll. They're down 25-30%. I mean, their method of doing it wrong tips the poll upside down. And I have to be painfully honest. You look at it, and you go up and down all the best messages we could have and there's no winning message. So my deal is, you need to go with the flow, withdraw your project.

Mark Sylvester: Withdraw?

John Davies: And start over. Because if you lose 65-35, how do you get restarted? What do you do? You've got to change everything. You've got to change the name, you've got to change the whole deal. So, I mean, we worked on one which was a rescue, and we had in the newspaper, they had a deal which was the Weekly Onion and Orchid award. So we came, we did our focused interview method of research. We'll talk about it a little bit. We did the poll, we just took a look at it. They had gotten a negative vote by the local planning board, and like big, like 2-3 to 1 against them, the big 12 member planning board. And we got done and went to the planner and the project manager for a big company, and they said, "What do we do?" I go, "Change something. Isn't there something you always wanted to change in this project?"

John Davies: They said, "Yeah, a bunch of things." So I go, "Well change it." Like what? What do we need change? I go, "Just change it. We just need to remessage this project and create a better relationship with this project. They will buy this project. We will win this. We won the onion that week for being tough and bitter, and we won the orchid, and we won approval because we turned it around in about 60 days. Just by remessaging it and telling the story better.

Mark Sylvester: And reimplimenting and going out and talking to people and doing what you do.

John Davies: And doing what we're going to talk about in the next series, which is how we do reach out. So this, these ones we just talked about ...

Mark Sylvester: Right, doing it wrong.

John Davies: Doing it wrong, doing it right. That's a philosophy. That's a mindset you have to have. And then what I want to talk about next, if we can ... can we keep doing this?

Mark Sylvester: I think we're going to ... would you like to keep doing these?

John Davies: Why not. So I want to go through the five steps next, which I call mastering the basics.

Mark Sylvester: And before we get to that, is there something ... I kind of like that forensic analysis of the last campaign. So if our listener could look at their last campaign and kind of think about it. The last one that they lose, and say "Did they promise then spin then complain, then confess so they actually see how they did it because I think that's going to help them kind of cement this particular-

John Davies: Well, maybe they didn't complain. So they just promised and spun and confessed. Maybe they didn't confess. Maybe they needed to confess. So maybe you didn't do all of them. But how did you not frame this issue in a manner that builds trust from the start? How did you frame it in a way that it makes people question whether they can trust you.

Mark Sylvester: That's what I want them to think about, and John, next week what I want to do is I want to go into more tactics. We've been talking philosophy. I want to get more tactical. We'll dive into the five steps that you can actually action on those, okay? We'll see you next week.

John Davies: Yeah.

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 forward to you subscribing. Join us as we uncover and explain the nuances of John's distinctive approach. For more episodes, visit the DaviesMethod.com. I'm Mark Sylvester recording at the Full String Press studios in Santa Barbara, California.