Blog
The City That Learned to Say "Yes"
By Teasha Cable
What happens when you start saying "yes? Kumbaya...
I talk to a lot of economic development professionals... about the tools, TIF districts, tax abatements, the enterprise zones. My recent Dynamic Desicions Podcast guest Samantha Mlot talked about all of those too. But what she kept coming back to was something simpler: building invaluable relationships and being the one with the courage to ask uncomfortable questions.
Samantha is the Economic Development Advocate for the City of Bloomington, Illinois. Not director. Not manager. Advocate.
The distinction isn't semantic. Advocates don't just execute processes. They protect both sides of the table. She is the person a developer calls when something isn't working, when a fee is too high or a timeline is three times longer than it needs to be. And then she goes back inside the city and figures out if that can change.
It didn't happen overnight. As Samantha put it: "We haven't always been a community of "Yes." And so when we had some leadership change, we also had some mind shift happening inside our municipality. And that's when things started changing and moving."
That shift is visible. And it's working.
She described it like this:
No two projects are exactly the same, so why should the process always be exactly the same?
Boom.
That's a decision intelligence principle wrapped in plain language. Context matters. Rigidity that ignores context isn't efficiency. It's just friction with a policy number attached. (Read that 2x).
What struck me most in our conversation was how Samantha talks about documentation. In economic development, she says, documentation is king the way cash is king outside the walls.
If you color outside the lines, you document why. You capture what you did and why you did it differently. That's not bureaucratic overcorrection. That's how you build institutional knowledge that lets you be flexible without being reckless. (Can you hear me clapping?)
She also said something that I'm still thinking about as a strategist and as a CEO:
Ask what you're doing wrong. Not what you're doing well. Not what the data says. Ask where you're failing the people you're supposed to be serving.
Because if you assume everything is running smoothly, you won't see the places where it isn't.
That applies to every organization. Mine included.
The piece that clicked for me in terms of our work at CModel is how Samantha thinks about decisions. She's a Feeler first. She wants to understand the project, the person, the community, before she reaches for a spreadsheet. She's not anti-data. She will always go for the data. But she won't reach for it first.
That's not a weakness in a decision-maker. That's a design choice. And it's working. Bloomington is busier than it has ever been, and Samantha is at the center of it, making sure the people doing the work can actually get things done.
So what's the takeaway?
Build the relationship first. Understand the context. Document your exceptions. And then, periodically, have the discipline to stop and ask: what are we getting wrong?
The best decisions come from great conversations. This was one of them.
Tune in!