Flying Tapmaster at the Detroit Jazz Festival

People from Detroit call their hometown the “D.” The reason at first appears obvious—Detroit, the letter D—it’s straightforward.  But below the surface, that single letter represents so much more.  Walking around the city center, it’s impossible to miss the Diverse city culture.  Artists and foodies intermingle with suits rushing from one meeting to the next.  White faces intermingle with black.  From Dawn until Dusk, the business district is a melting pot of culture and creed.  But as evening approaches, faces grow darker, not for lack of light, but because 8-5 Detroit has gone home for the day, leaving 24-7 Detroit to its reality.

Harsh Reality
Beyond the gleaming high rises and art-deco sky scrapers, is the real city center.   Detroit, which was home to over 1 million-souls just 20 years ago (and close to 2 million 40 years ago) will be lucky in the next census to reach 800,000.  The aftermath of this Decline includes 30,000 homes that must be raised in just the next few years; 10,000 school children who leave the school district every year in search of a quality education; the collapse of median home values from $50-60,000 just five years ago to $7,500 today; and a population where over 1/3 live in poverty.

Detroit Moxie
Despite this reality, Detroiters are proud, professing their moxie and facing challenge like home-town hero Joe Louis, chin set and fists flying.  Thousands of homes lost? We’ll develop green space and explore urban farming.  School children lost? We’ll build a robust charter school system that outshines the old. Adults left behind? We’ll promote broadband access and help thousands cross the digital divide to promote access to learning and information.  National media reports negative views of our city?  We’ll launch Declare Detroit, Detroit Yes, Model D, and an array of grassroots community and media efforts to organize, provide a balanced view, convey hope, and clean up our act.

Detroit takes punch after punch and keeps on rolling, but if the city is to move forward it must do more than endure. Various transformation efforts underway in the City have become points of pride that drive passion and hope.  A recent Knight Foundation/Gallup study shows that strong passion for community is highly correlated with economic growth.  The question is how to best help these transformation efforts not just stay on track but maximize their capacity to yield a brighter future.

Transformative Engagement
A 2004 MIT book, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, looked to two struggling manufacturing communities in Pennsylvania (Youngstown and Allentown) and found that, despite sharing very similar economic histories, the two took very different transformation paths.  The critical success factor for Allentown over Youngstown was the mobilization of key organizational actors around desired outcomes.

Both communities had prevalent and strong social networks and relationships, but in Youngstown social ties among the community’s leadership tended to reinforce civic relationships among actors who were already well-connected.  In Allentown civic ties tended to bring together more diverse actors who were not traditionally well connected and emphasized idea-sharing and alignment.  The book concludes that, an important element of Allentown’s relative success was its broader, more interactive civic-engagement approach.

Communities that emphasize the development of smart social networks, and that cultivate those networks around a common vision and goals, experience more inward investment, innovative thinking, and ownership and action-taking. It is a positive outcome that numerous stakeholders are organizing to take on Detroit’s many challenges and are harnessing passion to build a new community future.  But understanding how to harness the strength of social networks and to maximize the power of well-conceived civic engagement could accelerate positive momentum and shift efforts to a higher playing field.

Winning Team
Communities are made up of complex webs of systems and networks that emerge and recede depending on the moment’s need.  If those systems and networks fail, communities can fail, regardless of the passion people have toward an alternative outcome.  Detroiters are not willing or ready to admit defeat, despite unprecedented socio-economic and other challenges.  In fact, many Detroiters are struggling against all odds to repurpose and rebuild.  In the midst of the scramble, we can give these efforts a significant boost by helping them align with and engage key players that can help them innovate, connect resources, and succeed in moving their implementation strategies forward.

In these unusual times, we must look beyond the usual suspects to cultivate innovation and commitment that can turn the tides for the city.  Moxie counts, but it’s the people who are in your corner who can help you lose or win the fight.  Being deliberate about engagement and collaboration can make world of Difference in the D.

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Kim Didier is from Newton, Iowa, a little town of 15,000 that rests smack-dab in the middle of the state.   In my imagination she regularly belts out would-be top-40 hits in the shower, but only when she’s not on tour with her entourage and counting the millions she’s made from going platinum.  In reality, Kim’s—well—totally normal.  She’s friendly, inquisitive, entirely approachable, and generally nice to be around.  She has a professional haircut and sports business casual with the best of ‘em.  So, what makes her so undeniably cool?

Regional Economic Crisis
In 2001, Maytag Corporation, which had been headquartered in Newton for 113 years and employed 4,000 people at its peak, announced it would reduce the local labor pool by moving to new facilities in Mexico.  On October 25, 2007, Maytag ceased operations in Newton for good, with closure of both a production facility and corporate offices.  That day, a final 1,800 Maytag employees lost their jobs.

Townsfolk began going through the seven stages of grief, starting with shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, and depression.   People might have gotten stuck there but, rather than wallowing in their sorrow, the common loss brought the community together.  Community leaders, including Kim Didier, pounced on the opportunity to shift negative energy focused on confusion, grief, and anger to more constructive purposes.

Taking Action
Like any good counselor, Kim called on community residents to do a little role playing.  The process started off with something called “The Futures Game.”  An Australian “gent” from rural Australia, David Beurle, led the exercise, which helps people understand how, when faced with tough futures about growth and development, different choices at critical points in time can lead to drastically different community outcomes.  This process led to development of a community vision, steeped in the understanding that if people stray from the decision or don’t make collaborative, mission-driven choices, the community’s future outcomes could be sharply affected.  Salt brines or development

In addition, Kim prodded the community to participate in a process called “network weaving.” This entails understanding how strongly connected community leaders are to one another, where their passions and expertise intertwine, and how they view one another as collaborators, innovators, and trusted partners.  U.S. national intelligence agencies use the process to understand the effectiveness of terrorist networks, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has employed the technique to control deadly infections in hospitals.  Kim Didier and her peers employed the process to understand how to most effectively move their community forward.

Did these hokey processes really make a difference for Newton?  The answer is an irrefutable “yes.”    These processes helped the community establish common desired outcomes and rallied leadership around it—fully leveraging the full strengths of the communities assets and building trust relationships that have allowed the community to move forward.  Today, Newton isn’t “formerly the home of Maytag.” They are at the center of innovation, becoming a manufacturing and design hub for state-of-the art wind turbines and, with just one employer, home to 400 new, related jobs.

Recovery
Slowly but surely, the town is moving through its phases of grief: the upward turn, reconstruction, and acceptance and hope in abundance.   This transition was possible because some folks dared to do the unthinkable—to step back, create a vision, create safe spaces to build trust, and understand how to focus community leaders’ energy at the right places at the right time.

What do you call someone who recognizes the need for this kind of process and gets the buy-in to make it happen? Yep–that’s a “Rock Star” in my book.

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Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo Romaní in Flickr.

NOTE: This is the third in our recent “let’s share the findings from all those OECD reports with each other (and the world)” series. Again, the content is not likely scintillating, but it’s important to us, and we’re happy to let you in on it.

The OECD Designing Local Skills Strategies Report (2009) focuses largely on questions of balance in locally designed workforce strategies: balance between short- and long-terms needs, balance between training and placement, balance between meeting the needs of people, firms, and communities, and balance between workforce players – private, non-profit, and a diverse collection of government agencies at different levels.

Authors Francesca Froy, Sylvain Giguère, and Andrea Hofer offer case studies of the following communities:

• Shanghai (China)
• Michigan (U.S.)
• Choctaw Tribe (Mississippi, U.S.)
• Mackay (Australia)
• Malmö (Sweden)
• New York City (New York, U.S.)

While, other communities are also cited in the narrative, these communities’ launched initiatives representing what the report calls balanced strategies, the authors’ recommended approach. Balanced strategies focus simultaneously on:

• Attracting and retaining talent
• Integrating disadvantaged groups
• Upskilling those in employment – though in most cases, this was the most difficult strategy because of its complexity (designing opportunities for working adults, often with families).

The report concludes by recommending that local workforce actors seeking to implement effective (and balanced) approaches focus on five key strategic issues:

• Access to relevant data and information. Local actors need to understand their “skills ecology” and its impact on the wider economy to be able to design appropriate policy and program interventions.
• Balanced and long term strategies. It is tempting for local actors to focus on only one or two strategic objectives. Focusing on all three areas is more difficult, but also promises to deliver more substantive impact over time.
• Batter mapping of skills provision, for example through “career clusters” or “career ladders.” This provide a focus for otherwise disjointed systems and creates opportunities for individuals to advance in meaningful ways. However, careers advice is a key (and often lacking) component of this approach.
• Building strong relationships with employers. While necessary to ensure effective connecting of supply and demand, public-sector and non-profit entities can play an important role in emphasizing long term needs and suggesting changes in workplace practices in ways that round out employer’s tendency to focus on short-term needs.
• Look to the future and anticipate change. Skills strategies should be subject to regular review and change, and should build toward local areas of “flexible specialization” (sometimes called workforce or talent competencies, or clusters of talent) that encourage the development of local talents and skills that are specific enough to make the community distinctive, but broad enough to avoid dependency on narrow industries or occupations.

Not rocket science, but it does take determination – people who do this work rely on persuasion and trust, not hierarchy.

Leadership and Governance Really Matter

While the report does not emphasize leadership and governance as a theme, the frequency with which the difficulty of this work is noted in the narrative is striking.  Meeting many diverse public and private needs, balancing the short and longterm, collaborating with large and changing networks of partners absent a structure, meeting shared national policy needs and in a local (and sometime divergent) context, developing and allocating resources fairly and in ways that deliver results – this is complex work all over the world, and speaks to the level of management expertise and leadership talent it takes to do well.

What’s our strategy for developing the workforce workforce?

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Thanks to Flickr pal woodleywonderworks.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the series we warned you about a few days ago. We are summarizing several large reports for each other (members of the Community Team at CSW), but we’re doing it here so you can benefit too – you know, if you are interested (since you found your way here for some reason). You won’t find a lot of wit, but there might be some wisdom for the taking.

One thing we love about OECD reports (and international comparisons generally for that matter) is that they remind us that the challenges we face are more universal than we think – and we can learn from looking up and out. On this count, More than Just Jobs: Workforce Development in a Skills-Based Economy does not disappoint.

At its core, the paper argues that although workforce development – the ecosystem of people, policies, and organizations concerned with the intersection of people, skills, jobs, and the economy – has been primarily concerned with narrow targets, transactions, and sets of activities, the field has an increasingly important role to play in improving the prosperity of communities. Author Sylvain Giguère suggests a broader goal for workforce development than the field (on the whole) has adopted to date:

“The comprehensive management of human resources, so as to better meet the demands of a global economy at both the national and local levels, through improving economic competitiveness and social cohesion.”

The reports names governance - leadership, policy coordination, adaptation of policy and program to diverse local conditions, and community engagement – as among the most significant challenges faced by workforce organizations seeking to advance this important aim. It calls for local policy to reflect a better balance between national aims and local needs and greater experimentation throughout the system, tempered with efficiency and accountability.

Policy Recommendations
A comparison of policies in seven OECD countries (United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and Korea) yielded the following recommendations:

• Inject flexibility into management. Decisions about strategic priorities in the implementation of public programs and services should be made locally, using a management by objective framework negotiated with central government.
• Establish an overarching management framework that embeds local flexibility to ensure alignment while also encouraging differentiation and experimentation.
• Build strategic capacity. Local staff should have strong knowledge of local economic conditions as well as effective human resource development practices, and the analytical and strategic capacity to be able to set priorities and development methods for addressing them.
• Build up local data and intelligence. The ability to aggregate and organize data in a way that supports local strategy development is essential and could be better supported by national level efforts to develop tools that adapt to local circumstances.
• Improve governance mechanisms. Labor market and workforce organizations should collaborate with education, economic development, business, and civic organizations. There is no governance mechanism for this kind of collaboration, but networks of partnerships go a long way in increasing and extending the capacity of workforce organizations.
• Improve administrative processes. Aligning policies through institutional reform is a difficult challenge, exacerbated by the scale of larger countries. Still efforts should be made to review the cross-agency implementation of broader workforce policy with the aim of better promoting collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Other Findings

• Workforce development matters because it directly impacts four drivers of economic growth: Skills, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Social Cohesion.
• Three major obstacles impede adoption of the broader goal of workforce development: 1) speeding up education and training systems; 2) fragmentation of local decision-making and workforce resources; and 3) lack of willingness to look long term. All of these could be ameliorated though larger investments and more serious support for governance (collaboration).

Case Studies: Out of Date?
Warning: Although the paper was published in 2008, the analysis of the U.S. Workforce System is very dated. It builds from the original six Workforce Investment Act (WIA) principles (one of which was “strong boards” which was summarily eliminated from WIA implementation documents within a matter of months). Baldridge work (ancient history when I realized I’d become part of the “field” of workforce development in 2003 or so) features prominently, and some of the organizations named in the local case studies have long since been replaced, some more than once.

Having some context from my work in the UK from 2001-2003 (in economic and workforce development), I could see that the U.K. case study was also quite dated, though Departmental names, and configurations change more frequently there (often coinciding with budget reviews).

This made me somewhat suspect of the case study portions of the report, but the larger trends and recommendations identified in the content chapters seem quite sound.

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Promising Practices in Regional Economic Development: Northeast Ohio

Last week, I attended an event focused on the importance of regional planning, partnerships between government, workforce, education, and economic development, and how encouraging entrepreneurship in regions can help spur economic growth and prevent further population loss.

My own organization, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), has initiated or has involvement in several regional strategies in Michigan, Arizona, and across the country. Though CSW is not working in Northeast Ohio, this region won notoriety in its efforts to transform the region into a global economic competitor. We can learn from this example.

Regional Strategic Planning

In 2003, philanthropic and corporate leaders committed themselves to building a strategy from the ground up. I was living in Cleveland at the time and took part in the focus groups called Voices and Choices that informed the region’s efforts.

Moving to Action

Advance Northeast Ohio, the region’s economic action plan was launched in 2007 and creates a common vision for more than 80 partner organizations, institutions and leaders from business, philanthropy, and government. The 16-county partnership is committed to collaborating and implementing strategies that help create jobs, increase incomes, and reduce poverty, collectively strengthening the region.

Clear Priorities

The partnership has identified four clear priorities to guide its work:

• Business Growth and Attraction
• Talent Development
• Racial and Economic Inclusion
• Government Collaboration and Efficiency

Regional Investors

A regional funders collaborative, The Fund for Our Economic Future, emerged to support the region’s effort, and demonstrates how corporate and philanthropic partners can invest in a common vision.  Of the over $60million raised, most of the resources have been granted to regional economic development organizations that work to start, accelerate, attract, and grow companies in the region.

Tracking Progress

To monitor progress, partners, assisted by George Erickcek of the Upjohn Institute, created a community economic dashboard which is now updated annually by Cleveland State University. The dashboard is an index, tracking indicators in the following nine areas:

• Skilled Workforce and Research & Development (R&D)
• Legacy of Place
• Urban Assimilation
• Racial Inclusion and Income Equality
• Locational Amenities
• Technology Commercialization
• Urban/Metro Structure
• Individual Entrepreneurship
• Business Dynamics

Award Winning Practices

Jumpstart is northeast Ohio’s venture development organization that invests in early stage businesses and ideas. Through the end of 2008, it invested in 34 companies, which have raised more than $100 million in growth capital. The program was recently recognized for Excellence in Urban or Suburban Economic Development by the U.S. Economic Development Administration.*(See footnote)

Community engagement, regional action guided by strategy and clear priorities, consistent investment, and innovative practices—these are key ingredients in a recipe for regional transformation.

* Other finalists in the same category: Composites Kansas (WIRED Initiative, Wichita, Kansas); Conway Development Corporation (Conway, Arkansas); Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (Los Angeles, California).

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What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott

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Beets in Detroit by ellievanhoutte

Unemployment in Macomb County

I recently met with a Macomb county commissioner whose district is embedded in the metro Detroit region of roughly 5 million people. The commissioner was concerned because, despite state unemployment in excess of 15%, county unemployment exceeded 16%, and pockets in her district face rates as high as 25%. “We’re heading toward a brick wall,” she noted.  ”We just don’t know when we’ll hit.”

What New Jobs?

The commissioner voiced concern about moving forward job training strategies when, really, the potential for new job creation has no hope of matching—even remotely—the rate of job loss. “I  sometimes actually wonder if we should do what New Orleans did and offer to help people relocate to places with more opportunity.”

Exclusive Collaboration?

This commissioner, like so many public officials, economic and workforce developers, community organizers, and even citizens, is overwhelmed by the immensity of the employment challenge in Michigan and daunted by a lack of public resources to make a difference. “I know there’s the Recovery Act—I just don’t know what we’re getting out of it.”

Moreover, she expressed confusion over facing these challenges in a large geographic region where, certainly, people are working overtime to shift economic gears, but the results are dispersed, and her constituents are her neighbors who don’t see a direct or immediate benefit.

Home-grown Efforts

She knows about a host of home-grown efforts, including the New Economy Initiative (NEI), Road to Renaissance, and others, she just don’t know anyone who is part of these efforts. How can she connect? She can’t be everywhere at once. How can she learn whether and where her county benefits from these efforts?  Is it enough for community “big dogs” to drive community change, and can they do so successfully—or at least meaningfully—without bringing other community stakeholders on board?

Resilient Outcomes and Communities

Having a resilient community means recognizing the importance of social capital and having an engaged and informed community, both organizationally and individually. People at all levels need to feel they are contributing to solutions or, at the very least, feel in touch with them, and there are many ways to do this:

• IdeaMinnesota is an effort of the state community foundation, which has asked community residents to share their ideas to address community problems and has agreed to fund the best ones.
• “My Region” in central Florida has asked community members, “How shall we grow?”  Roughly 20,000 people have responded through surveys, videos and other means, and many have invested out-of-pocket in the effort, which has driven several community-change initiatives.

Michigan’s Defining Moment has engaged 2,000 people in outreach efforts to express their views on Michigan’s future. And One D’s online scorecard allows organizations to show how their efforts are moving forward key community indicators. How can these efforts be channeled to engage regional community stakeholders in thinking about solutions for the region’s future but in conjunction with stakeholders like NEI that are investing resources in solutions to improve it?

Solutions-driven engagement

Some fear that community engagement may open the door to unwarranted critique and judgment, but the alternative could remain the sense of disconectedness and concern like that expressed by our county commissioner.  And, yes, community engagement is time intensive and difficult, but investing in it is questionable only if viewed as an end in itself.  The ultimate goal in engagement should be to connect real people to the development of real outcomes and solutions and, ideally, investment in them.  This will give participation true meaning and foster a sense of pride and ownership in the outcome.

After all, is innovation really game changing if only some people feel part of it?

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We were so excited to see Joi Ito’s post about agile development as a (potential) model for policy-making, we hardly know where to start. Maybe a thank you for Reid Hoffman’s perspective on early releasing – well timed as we are still wincing at the bugs in a recent launch of our own project (WeToo).

Three More Reasons

Here are three more reasons we think the agile approach holds promise for government:

1. It encourages collaboration among policy makers, giving everyone a stake because no single idea is advanced and then “rolled out.” Iterative policy is collaboratively owned by people who want to see it work (and improve).
2. It encourages collaboration between policymakers and the citizens, businesses, and communities policy is meant to benefit—because policy makers understand that they are working toward the intended impact and not simply “to implement” a particular approach.
3. It provides a potential vehicle for not just responding to the needs of citizens, businesses, and communities, but for cultivating the information, knowledge, and networks that help them meet their own needs. Agile models encourage  “platform building” and collaborative action over the development of expert-led management systems.

That’s Wicked.

The agile approach is particularly well suited to wicked problems—and what public policy issue worth its salt isn’t wicked?

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