Thanks to wanderingone on Flickr!

“The Economy.” The phrase suggests one economy – as if our experiences of markets and the forces that shape them are universal. But we experience different economies, based on the industries in which we work, the particular jobs we hold, the communities in which we live, and our own unique circumstances.

Some people have suffered (real) wage declines for decades and have little experience of “the economic booms” that carried the country through the late 1990s and mid 2000s. And today, the similar economic experiences of people thousands of miles apart can make them seem like neighbors.

National Public Radio and its affiliate stations have been delving into this story – sharing the experiences of resilient people and painting an aural mural of the secular transformations underway.

Three noteworthy examples follow.

• All Things Considered‘s week-long series on southeast Michigan. Today’s story featured the state’s flagship transition program, No Worker Left Behind, Macomb Community College, Macomb/St. Clair Michigan Works, and some very courageous Michigan workers and students.
• Frank Langfitt’s Shifting Jobs, Adapting Workers series (NPR) profiles workers transitioning out of the North Carolina’s shrinking furniture industry, while the industry itself moves overseas. Set in Lenoir (Caldwell County), NC, this is the story of large-scale economic change in a small town, helped along by Caldwell College and Google.
• The Rural Economy Project. More than a collection of (great) stories, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) is connecting people to each other and to resources that help their communities thrive. (Hat tip to The Oregon Consortium & Oregon Workforce Alliance, and all the other sponsors).

Full disclosure: CSW advises the State of Michigan on workforce, energy, and economic issues, and supports Michigan Public Radio – many of our employees are also members of their own public radio stations across the country, including OPB).

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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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Thanks to ell_brown for the Flickr photo.

Training vs. Jobs

In communities across the country where unemployment is especially high, leaders and policy makers urge workers to upgrade their skills and search for employment in new and growing industries – like wind energy. But often, the jobs aren’t there yet.

Better Bridges Between Economic and Workforce Development

Yes, the world is getting smarter. Technology has enabled us to work in new and different ways: to collaborate, partner, and innovate in the way we do our work. Yet in regional economies, where programs are increasingly reliant on federal and state resources, siloed funding streams systemically impede effective collaboration. Integrated, comprehensive planning can help regions that are looking to bridge that gap. And new tools for practitioners and better research about integrated approaches are emerging.

Regional Research Symposium

In late October, the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) partnered with the Regional Research Institute at West Virginia University on a Regional Research Symposium (links to presentations). EDA has invested in a number of initiatives that suggest areas where workforce and economic development should be connecting to create comprehensive regional strategies:

• Data. A collaborative research program between Indiana and Purdue Universities (leads), EMSI and the Rural Policy Research Institute’s Center for Regional Competitiveness created a set of data tools that take a regional approach to innovation-based growth to help identify promising paths to economic growth. While not yet complete, the tool will allow users to create their own region and access federal data all in one place.
• Funding Innovation. The same group also created an innovation index to help guide new investments. Innovation was seen as a place where economic developers could broaden their thinking and provide definition for other federal agencies. Further research into human capital qualities that promote innovative growth was also mentioned as a future funding interest.
• Linking Industry and Occupational Clusters. The research team from Indiana and Purdue Universities also created maps to help understand local workforce and education clusters to help bridge the gap between workforce and economic development. The maps can show how well the occupation and knowledge clusters strength match industry cluster strength. Location quotient analysis and changes in location quotient analysis maps can be found on their website.

Community Resilience

Another place of intersection is around community resilience. The EDA funded research from the Savannah River National Laboratory Community and Resilience Institute (CARRI) to provide a framework of community resilience. Taking a comprehensive approach to resilience, CARRI is researching communities’ ability to adapt to perceived adversity—in any situation—and suggests a long-term planning agenda to grow social capital between community assets.

We are keen to find ways to enhance our own effectiveness by integrating these new tools and approaches.

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Smart Communities Connect, Share, and Drive from Data

At the risk of making this post feel like an ad, I embedded “The Way We Work” above. The video clearly explains (from an enterprise perspective) the same theory of change we’re trying to advance from a community perspective – how connecting us to each and to the information we need unleashes talent, innovation, and gives us a shot at prosperity.

Last week, IBM convened a Smarter Cities Summit in NYC.  Adam Christensen summed up the first day’s themes:

1. The use of data and analytics to make improvements in a city.

2. The need for new kinds of public-private partnerships. Every speaker and panelist – from Melody Barnes to Tom Brokaw – touched on how creative public-private partnerships were the key to solving these complex metropolitan issues.

3. The need for “systems thinking” to solve big macro issues. Dr. Cortese captured it best when he discussed how addressing the challenges nations and cities face with health care requires first a holistic systems thought. Health care, like public safety, transportation or education, requires long-term thinking to understand the broader issues and all the highly complex interdependencies with other systems. Basically, Dr. Cortese said, the health system could use systems engineers.

Again, the same issues we are working on from a community perspective. (Day 2 comprised break-out sessions and was a little trickier to summarize).

More Smarter Cities Resources

• You can find event tweets here.
• And the smarter planet blog here.

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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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Infographic: Why Buy Local?

From Local First in Grand Rapids, MI. (These people have a sense of humor – they are on “Wealthy Street.”)

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Rural Resilience Toolkit via University of Queensland and Univeristy of Southern Queensland

The result of a three-year project in the Community of Stanthorpe (Queensland), the Rural Resilience Toolkit identifies 11 concepts central to community resilience. They are:

1. Social Networks and Support
2. Positive Outlook
3. Learning
4. Early Experience
5. Environment and Lifestyle
6. Infrastructure and Support Services
7. Sense of Purpose
8. Diverse and Innovative Economy
9. Embracing Differences
10. Beliefs
11. Leadership

Toolkit Contents
The toolkit contains a case study and literature review on each of the 11 concepts (and a great list of references). The idea is to infuse these concepts into existing programs while also building new programs around them. The project aims to promote positive adaptation, and reflects a diverse public-private partnership described in the toolkit.

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