Redefining Winning: The T.F.W. Process

by Jim Waldo

Waldo, Jim. 1988. Redefining Winning, The T.F.W. Process. Forest Planning Canada 4(3):14-19.

[Original pagination indicated with slash marks, e.g. /16/]

The experience in our State is that for the last fifteen years we have had a ferocious series of battles over forestry, fisheries, wildlife, and water quality. These battles have been fought in our State Legislature, in the courts, in the ministry bureaucracies, in the federal courts, in Congress, and in some cases in the White House. And the rules of the wars have been relatively simple—I'm going to win and you're going to lose. There was no quarter asked and no quarter given by any of the participants from the industry, the various governmental agencies, the environmental groups, or the Indian tribes.

So there never was an end. People would win a battle, and the people who lost would look for the next place where they could overturn the results that has just occurred. And in fact, one of the largest growth industries in the northwest United States is land use. Lawyers and consultants were making decisions about going into business on the strength of assisting the various contestants in these battles.

Everyone won some battles. The tribes have been incredibly successful in federal district court, the environmentalists have a very good track record in State court and administrative proceedings, and industry was very effective in the State Legislature and in the State court system. All had allies from and without our State and the federal level. But some of the more thoughtful people began to realize that even when they won they only held their own.

If you're an environmental group challenging a proposed action or court decision or activity and you won, preventing something you perceived as bad from happening, you didn't gain any ground. You didn't improve your position. And if you were in industry, and there were a new, proposed set of regulations, or a new regulatory framework, or a new lawsuit that you faced, if you won, you probably just held your own or probably lost only half the ground, in your perception, that people wanted. And if you were a state agency, you had a hard time governing and managing these resources because every time you tried to move somebody sued, and if you tried to move somewhere in the middle, everybody sued. You can spend years planning for and responding to litigation.

Now, I don't know that it has to take ten to fifteen years in every circumstance, but at the end of this period in our State, the thrill was gone. Being in one more court battle or one more legislative battle no longer had the thrill it had in the first four or five go'rounds. At about this time, several years ago, there was a major decision of the federal court system called Bolt II, relating to the Indian treaty tribes. The district court judge held that those treaty rights extended to the protection of the fisheries habitat.

To be very frank, that scared the hell out of the forest industry. So they formed a group called the Northwest Water Resources Committee representing all the basic industries throughout the State of Washington working in and around water. And that group had to decide how to respond to this court case. They looked at a number of options and asked a number of people, including myself, what they ought to do. I had been in the U.S. Trades Office and been involved in the initial Bolt decision and my advice to them was, before they headed off to court and before they headed off to Congress, that maybe I'd try sitting down with the Tribes first and saying, ":What is it you really want here? What are you looking for?"

Number one and number two: let us tell you what is important to us—to stay in the business of harvesting timber. At the time, 1982-83, that was considered something close to lunacy by all the participants. The tribes immediately said, "Where is the hook. Why are you guys here to talk to us? Nobody ever talks to us until they try to beat our brains in court, and we have only won the first round in the courts. What are you doing here?" For industry, many of their legal counsels within the various trade associations also said, "This is never going to work. It's time to get on with the real action, which is either in the courts or the Congress."

Well much to everybody's surprise—and there were eight major lawsuits filed in nine months over implementation of the Bolt II decision—over the course of the next two or three years, all the problems got worked out. The lawsuits were either dropped or accommodations were made, and a number of long-standing issues in the water basins were solved. In 1984, the man who was then the Washington State director of fisheries, who had watched all of this, came and talked to some of us and said, "I don't quite understand how you do this, but we have been in court last year with the tribes a total of 97 times over the management of our fisheries resource. The smallest of these was over how we will provide for six fish coming back to a particular basin." He said we'd like to change this relationship.

In early 1985, the fisheries management /14/ agencies in the State of Washington, Columbia River drainage, the Washington coat, and Puget Sound, cooperated with Oregon in negotiating the U.S.—Canada treaty, and are now about halfway through developing comprehensive basin plans for fisheries redevelopment in the State of Washington.

One of the things that all of us were encountering was the fact that most of the technical people advising timber managers in the State of Washington came from the University of Washington School of Forestry and that most of the fisheries biologists came from the U. of W. School of Fisheries. However, they knew nothing about each other's disciplines and most often they would be the ones to lead the fight, would say it's time to start a little conflict here. To those of us who had some interest in seeing some long-term solutions and answers, it seemed anomalous that people who were supposed to be scientists interested in getting the facts were more interested in the conflict.

So we, along with the Renewable Resources Centre, along with the Schools of Forestry and Fisheries, put together a forum on the interaction of timber and fisheries. And much to our surprise, we ended up with nearly 400 people coming to our symposium. Much of the information that was presented had been developed by not only universities in our State, in Oregon, but also by private industry and a number of the tribes. All of whom had largely never had a chance to publish or advance the work they had done independently. One of the outcomes of that conference was that a lot of people left feeling, correctly, that a lot of these problems were a lot more solvable than when they were only listening to a narrow set of people who had a very entrenched viewpoint, but had the label of being scientists and technical experts.

That conference, and an impending set of forest practice regulations by the Washington State Forest Practice Board on riparian (fish/water) zones became sort of a lever for what has been called the Timber, Fish, Wildlife Project. In our State, the Forest Practice Board administers forest practice regulations on State and private timber lands, which account for slightly over half the timber base in the State of Washington.

The proposed new regulations governing riparian zones was roundly disliked by every key interest group involved in the process. Industry felt that many of the proposed regulations would cost them substantially in timber that they would have to leave or in increased operating costs. The wildlife people felt, correctly, that they had been largely excluded from any significant improvement related to their concerns. And while the fisheries people were somewhat satisfied, they felt the riparian zone proposals had not gone far enough in considering cumulative impacts and sediment transportation outside the riparian zones. So we faced the situation where every one felt here was one more battle that provided no long-term answers and no long-term certainty. And, that they would all be back at it again. Everyone knew they would be back to battle on this issue again.

And the board, faced with such conflicting testimony, was expected to split the difference. Everybody got out on the extremes, people said, "If you do this, the way the industry talks, you (the Board) will destroy every fish in western Washington." The fisheries people would get up and say if you don't do this it will hardly protect the fish, you should do four times what you're considering. So the Board was left with no consensus on a technical basis as to what the impacts would be, or what the benefits would be.

Now, as to your situation here in British Columbia, what occurred to us from a discussion among some people from the industry and the tribes initially, and some of the State agencies, was to say, why don't we take a shot at what type of management/regulatory framework would make sense that we would all agree to abide by for an eight-to-ten-year period. And out of those discussions, which eventually involved all the appropriate State agency people, industry, environmental folks and tribal representatives, came an agreement for an exploratory meeting.

At that meeting, all the people had to commit to was that they would be willing to send who they considered to be their best people, at a political, technical and managerial level, to a two and one-half day meeting. The grounds rules were somewhat different from the normal adversarial process that all of us are intimately familiar with. First, everyone has to leave all the armaments of war at the door. Second, you have to separate personalities from the issues. After fifteen years of battling, needless to say, this had become a very personalized situation. Rule three for the meeting was that you have to spend as much time listening as you do talking. Up to that point, this didn't happen. People would say, I've heard Tom here speak on this issue twenty times. So when Tom gets up and says I want to talk about riparian zones, they just shut him off. The point is, they never have heard Tom talk about riparian zones. Not once, because they never really thought it was in their self-interest to listen.

And in point of fact, people would come away quite amazed at what they learned. They had heard it twenty times before, but they never listened. They may have disagreed with part of it, so they tuned out everything that was being said. And they certainly weren't listening to find out if there was anything they might be able to agree with.

An agreement was worked out in this first session that if we were to proceed, we would first define a set /15/ goal—in timber, for wildlife, fisheries or tribal archeological matters. We would define some very broad outcomes in each group and each person was asked to define their goal for each area of interest to them. And the only test in getting to the floor for discussion was that it had to be stated affirmatively: what do you need? Not in terms of what you don't want other people to be doing, but what do you need for whatever set of interests you are there at the meeting representing. And you would be amazed how many people had never thought in those terms. Most particularly, the private timber industry which had been fighting defensively for so many years. They knew what they didn't want to happen, but they had never flipped it around and tried to describe, looking ten or twenty years into the future, what they wanted to have happen.

It turned out to be a very positive experience for most of the participants, because most of them thought in negative terms. The wildlife people said we don't want the timber industry cutting here. That isn't a goal. The goal is we need certain kinds of habitat, we need certain types of things to occur, and to have certain types of disturbances not occur. They were trying to tell the timber industry how to manager their industry in order to achieve their wildlife goals, instead of describing their goals and letting the timber industry tell them how to meet them. And the same sort of thing was true for virtually all the participants.

We agreed that anybody who stayed in the process after the two and one-half days, had to be committed to achieving all of the goals. If you couldn't subscribe to that, you took yourself out of the process. And if you stayed, agreeing to abide by the goals, decisions would be made by consensus, not by vote. There are two critical reasons for both of these rules, which grew out of an earlier experience and proved to be vital here. Number one, you don't want to take advantage of anyone else. You have to be as interested in their staying all the way to the end and supporting the agreement as you are in accomplishing your goals. Otherwise the effort is wasted.

All of you at this Future Forest conference, you're veterans of these issues, I don't need to tell you what sort of culture shock we were talking about within every community of interests we were dealing with. Each representative had to go back to the group they represented and try to tell them why we were taking this approach. It might be an environmental group, and here was a goal which said "Enhance and improve the long-term viability of the timber harvesting industry in the State of Washington.": Well, that is not the normal kind of thing that comes up on the Sierra Club or Audubon's list of things that they're committed to. And similarly, if you go to the Washington Forest Protection Association, which is the major private landowners, and have them accept a goal doing a top notch job of enhancing the wildlife habitat in the State. It wasn't high on their list to the extent that it required any significant trade-offs with their harvesting plans.

Each party to the agreement understood that they reserved the right to go back to the techniques used before. You had to agree, at least for now, to put your old ways on the shelf and see if you could come out with a better alternative.

We also agreed that this process had to be considered a priority in terms of participation. You could not have people wander in and out of this process. Participation had to be a priority at both a management and technical/scientific level. And if people weren't willing to make these commitments up front we were not willing to start the process.

We have three levels of contributor to this process: the scientific, technical or managerial, and the policy or political level. In each of these levels, it takes a different kind of leadership to make one of these processes work.

An example of common goals: Fisheries people started out saying nothing is going to cross a riparian zone on either side of a river or stream for x number of feet going back. The timber people said, of course, you realize that if we can't cross those zones we're going to have to build twice as many roads. A road for each side of the river. If we can figure out a couple of places mutually acceptable to cross, we eliminate a lot of roads.

On the issue of clearcuts. Many environmentalists have said the clearcuts must be no larger than forty acres, period. After a whole series of discussions we realized this was incompatible with the goal to minimize the number of roads. If we make the size of the clearcut more flexible we can reduce the number of roads and the length of time they are open to use. So instead of dealing with absolutes, we began to deal with how can we look at timber-harvesting impacts in ways that also take into account wildlife and fisheries. Obviously, one clearcut size fits all, was not the answer.

It took six arduous months to complete the building of the TFW process. The entire premise of forest management in the State of Washington was changed from a regulation-based system (in other words if it's in the regulation you're going to have to do it, but if it's not in the regulations you don't have to do it). From this we went to a system that is based on managing toward certain goals and far more sensitive to site-specific situations, location by location. Regulations are still there, but only as a stop-gap where the parties find it impossible to find any /16/ better way to conduct their business.

Under the goal-oriented system, we ended up with riparian zones of different sizes based on what appears to be required to meet certain temperature and woody debris requirements for the fisheries. But the net cost to the industry is less than it was if the proposed regulations, one size fits all situations, had to be enforced. What you need in a riparian zone for a flat-bed gravel creek is different from what you need in a riparian zone gravel creek that has boulders and large rocks.

We also set up a priority matrix where we have concerns about how an operation is conducted. And instead of trying to deal with it by regulation, we identified where those conditions are likely to occur and through a whole series of fundings at the State level and agreements between industry, environmental groups, the tribes, and state agencies, we have inter-disciplinary teams that go out and look at those proposed timber cuts. And they don't start with a set of regulations. They start with a set of concerns, or issues about those cuts, and they tailor how that cut is going to occur.

We've been at this process informally for about five months now, with eight or nine of these interdisciplinary (ID) teams in the field. You're not trying to do everything the same. You're trying to find out how to tailor the answer to the circumstances, so you still take the most timber fiber out and still be responding to the water conditions or the soil conditions or whatever it is that gives people some concern.

So far every ID team that has gone out has been able to match a solution that has been acceptable to the land owner or the harvester involved and the environmental groups and fisheries interests. Why? Because they are dealing with facts on the site and they are dealing in a process they all have confidence in.

We built a research and monitoring component to the process. It turns out we have a tremendous amount of data. We found on some critical issues we have almost no data. Much of the data that are there is done by industry, or government, or the universities, but little of it has been done collaboratively. We now have a group of scientists coordinating the direction of research into areas where we need to obtain information. The research and monitoring effort is funded both by government and private sources. We learned we had to own up to the fact that many of the decisions we have been making today are made purely as a guess or a political accommodation. We had to own up to that, up front. And we asked how long will it take for us to come up with the facts. Then we'll come back and revise today's management decision. This has two very healthy benefits. First, you're not distorting your scientists' opinions and undermining their credibility by asking them to get out and say something when they really don't want to, because you're in an adversarial setting. And it gets people to admit up front that we don't have perfect knowledge and we're going to have to go ahead anyway. The real question then is how are you going to balance benefits and risks, which can range from doing nothing today until we have the answer, to doing everything today until we have the answer. We learn to admit that in some instances we are taking educated guesses that are not based on fact.

We still have a lot of kinks in our process. We have a lot of people who were trained in fifteen years of combat and they find it hard to give up. It's comfortable. It gets the adrenaline going for some.

But I think almost all the participants will tell you that today we're a lot better off in the State of Washington than we were a year ago, regardless of which community of interest you come from. And the agreement has been ratified by virtually every environmental organization, every timber organization. It passed our State Legislature 96-0 in the House and 49-0 in the Senate. A new system was now in place and operating.

But what are the key factors if you want to get something like this in British Columbia?

• You have to have a critical mass of people who really want it to happen. It is very easy to pay lip service to cooperation and working together. At every conference I have ever gone to everyone gets up and wants cooperation, which usually means that if those other jerks over there would just do things my way we could get along fine. It takes a certain mass of people all at the same time saying we are going to make this thing happen. It cannot be done by just one or two people, and it cannot be done by just a group of people coming out of one segment of interest in this kind of field.

  The other thing that people believe is that going to court is tough, and fighting in the Legislature is tough—that's a crock. What's tough is when you have to take the responsibility yourself and not put it off on somebody else. You've got to start making these judgments that you've got to live with and go defend in your community where you know they're not going to be popular, they're not what everybody wants. You will not get rose petals thrown in your path for going out and taking care of somebody else's interests as well as your own.

• You need a leadership group who perceive it in their interest, and the interest of the people they represent, or the organization or institution they represent, to achieve two things. 1) Long-term accommodation—the shorter term the issue the less likely you are to change anything. So if you're talking about long-term you're talking about major change, and you're not going to get everything you want. /17/ And anybody who thinks this process is a key to deliver 98.9 per cent of what they want, ought to find a different process, stay with the old adversarial ways. 2) The leadership group needs certainty, because one of the benefits from this different approach is that you lose the emotional satisfaction of "I might win the next war." But what you gain is a sense that maybe the war is over. If we can live by the spirit as well as the letter of the TFW agreement, maybe the war is over.

  In Washington State, there are still a lot of areas where industry and environmentalists are fighting, but it is no longer in timber.

• You have to have strategic cooperation. There are always going to be conflicts and differences, The question is, is it in your self interest to have them resolved in a different manner from today. There are still differences within the process we're dealing with, but we've set up a different way of getting to the answers than existed last year.

• What is realistic to accomplish today? From an enlightened self-interest point of view, you need to know what is a realistic goal. Most people have never thought this through. Most people stumble from one battle to the next and never sit down and look at it as a matter of choice. And remember, if somebody still believes they can win 98.9 per cent of the battles, then they won't participate in this process. And there is no way you can force them to stay in this process.

  The leadership has to have credibility with the groups they represent, and respect from other participants in the process. Often these sorts of efforts are started by people who have never been in leadership positions and don't have any credibility from the groups they're coming from. But these people will never give us solutions because they lack standing from within the groups that have the interest.

  The leaders need to be fairly skillful, because there are risks in this process. To be an advocate today, in my opinion, takes no guts at all for most people. But as soon as you get into a TFW process, life is not so certain, because part of what you're going to have to do is to come back to whom ever you represent and explain why you were persuaded in certain agreements, on the merits, that an accommodation should be made.

  The leadership has to be outcome oriented There are a lot of leaders today in it for the sheer thrill of the battle, and they don't like this process. The leaders must really care about the end result.

• You have to have a good climate. There are four aspects here: 1) Where is the news media? They can help or kill an effort like this. 2) Where are your elected officials? Are they supporting or hindering this effort? Are they in the way or are they constructive? 3) What sort of communications do you have with the participating groups, the feedback loops? Most efforts like this I have seen in the past have failed because negotiators have gotten so far ahead of their groups that when they brought the agreements back, one side or the other rejected it. So we built into this process, we insisted that participants have a constant feedback mechanism, both verbally and in writing, to the people who are going to be necessary to help deliver on the support if we reached an agreement. As an example, each of the participants selected a review group of the other players, in other words, if this were an environmental newsletter, I had a person from industry and maybe a person from one of the agencies have a loot at my newsletter before it went out and tell me if there was anything that was going to cause heartburn in his interest group if this went out. So by this means we made sure that nothing was sent out unintentionally which harmed another participant. 4) It is necessary to have a balance of power. If anyone believes they're going to win, they're not going to play. And I say this up front. These people will never be able to come to agreement. These people will probably never admit it to you, but they will never be able to come to agreement on the whole set of goals and they will keep the agreement from happening. If anyone believes they are in the driver's seat, then this process will not work.

• There are four major stages which the group goes through.

  1. The first I call consultation, no formal process and no minutes of meetings. Here, you're not trying to be thorough or comprehensive in representation, but what you're searching for is to see if there is a sufficient group of people and leaders who in fact want to talk to each other to see whether this effort is worthwhile. And the participants must be given the chance to say no if they feel the timing for the process is wrong.
  2. Next comes the exploration phase, the two-and-one-half day meeting referred to above. Here we set the ground rules and approach. But the focus is on, do we want to do this, how do we do it, and at the end, is the timing right? Do we want to start the process?
  3. Next comes working on the agreement, the goals. As important as it is to set the goals, participants must not lose sight of implementation.
  4. Fourth comes the implementation phase. So often, agreements never reach their potential because people forget about the last phase. They just go back to doing business. Participants may think the agreement would be implemented by others, when it wasn't. And they didn't carry a sense of responsibility to ensure /18/ the spirit of the agreement is carried out.

In setting up these four phases, I would suggest you look at what is to be the focus, how broad, what are the results you're hoping to achieve—not the substance, that is, what happens if you're successful, what changes will occur and who has to be involved in making those changes. For example, are you looking at a geographic area, a type of problem—if we're successful, what will the solution look like?

What sort of organization and staffing is required for a TFW type process? It is substantial. It is often the organization and the staff that creates the squeaky wheel that keeps the process going. Of almost every case where we have used the process, it has required facilitation. Not necessarily traditional mediation, but it requires some people who are not direct participants to assist in the organization and the conduct of the process, to provide some channels for feedback that people can use informally without risk, and to often provide a sense of creativity when you get to some hard issues, because not having a vested interest and not having heard it for twenty years may allow a vision of some opportunities that you may not see.

One example dealt with wildlife habitat. The timber people kept talking about this worthless wood that they were supposed to go in and clean out. And the wildlife people kept talking about snags and the need for certain types of wildlife habitat. It turned out that the wildlife people needed the areas where the industry said it was too expensive to remove the timber. But at the U. of W. foresters were taught that they were farmers who, by God, had to go in to clear the land and then we put these beautiful trees in and grow a managed forest. It turns out it cost the foresters less by leaving the wildlife habitat.

You will need good technical and managerial people who are participating to make sure the agreement itself is sound and is based on the best facts that are available today. The process needs a system for intelligent accommodation and a system for solving future issues or disputes. Ultimately, it means developing a system where relationships improve over time so that pretty soon the way you solve problems is to pick up the phone. /19/