Who has the microphone

A wind farm project near us was scrapped this week, and the most revealing part was not the policy debate itself or even the formal decision.

It was how clearly this became a story about who had the microphone, who knew how to extend it, and who did not have any real way to get the word out in the first place.

For two years, the wind company had focused primarily on private conversations with landowners to secure leases. Public support was a much weaker effort. They had only recently begun negotiating with residents adjacent to some of the proposed infrastructure.

This might have been manageable if those conversations had stayed private. They did not. Copies of the offer letters surfaced on Facebook, and what may have looked strategic inside the company started to look sneaky outside of it.

At the same time, two residents in the area of the proposed wind farm, both well-known teachers at our local high school, figured out how to move the conversation beyond the immediate room.

As a part of this effort, Grammy-winning country songwriter Nicolle Galyon got involved. She lives in a community on the edge of the proposed site and has relationships across Nashville. Soon John Rich, one half of Big & Rich, began posting about it as well. At that point, this was no longer an ordinary local land use conversation. The frame had widened, the audience had widened, and the company was no longer shaping the story people were hearing.

With this effort came a website with a map of the landowners who had signed leases and the locations of the proposed turbines. Wichita news stations showed up for the public meeting hosted by the wind company, which was canceled with such short notice that the catering cookies were left in the parking lot. (Not exactly the visual you want attached to your business.)

The formal outcome was that planning and zoning placed a one-year moratorium on a decision, and the company then scrapped the project in a very public way. But that was really the trailing indicator. By then, the more important shift had already happened.

What made this even more noticeable was that I had a separate conversation this week with someone on the opposite side of the issue, a strong advocate for renewable energy. While the substance of that conversation was entirely different, the frustration underneath it was not. It was not just about not having the microphone at that moment. It was about not having the people, process, or system in place to build reach before the moment arrived.

This person was talking about how hard it is to even know where to begin when you are trying to shape public opinion with a tiny staff, very little budget, and no real system for reaching people beyond the small circle already inclined to agree.

I sit on planning and zoning board in the next county over, where the transmission line would have come through, so I can feel the practical weight of a decision like this. But the part that interests me is larger than this one project.

Community organizations run into this same problem all the time, just in different forms. Most are not dealing with wind farms, but many are working in areas where public money, public priorities, or community tension are involved. A food pantry, a youth organization, a city department, a housing group, a local nonprofit, a foundation—any of them can find themselves under scrutiny at some point, whether they expected it or not. Good intentions do not prevent that. They do not create understanding on their own, either.

By the time the key moment arrives, the organizations that can shape the conversation are the ones that already have some combination of people, process, relationships, and communication in place.

The wind company assumed that securing leases was the hard part and that broader understanding would follow. It did not. On the other side, there were people who believe deeply in renewable energy but are still trying to figure out how to build even a basic system for sustained reach and reinforcement. And then there were the people who understood something very practical: how to use the microphone. They knew how to bring in voices with reach, widen the audience, and mobilize an entire community in their favor in a matter of days.

That is the part organizations miss. They think they are managing the decision itself when the conversation around it has already moved somewhere else.

Building the amplifier does not happen overnight. Neither does being in a position to take hold of the microphone when the moment comes. That takes people, process, and communications long before the key moment arrives. By the time many organizations realize that, they are already reacting inside a conversation someone else built.

Lori