“Our city’s downtown, as we know it, is not coming back.” – San Francisco Mayor London Breed, 2023

Mayor Breed said that, but she has priorities and strategies. Like the City of Asheville resilience study, the Office of Resilience and Capital Planning program called ONE SF is of interest if establishing resilience and moving to sustainability in a multi domain manner is worth doing.

San Francisco is filled with intelligent people just like other US municipalities. But establishing what municipal performance is and making strategy and innovation work for super important places… the cities, towns, and counties where we all live… is apparently not an off-the-shelf thing. Creating a budget and spending it with basic fiscal and project management practices — and municipal comprehensive plans and Volunteer Advisory Boards — are aspects of game-change Strategic Management.

BMP

Playing craps has 50 / 50 odds of winning; and that’s the average. A municipality winning at half its strategy would seem like good odds… if anyone knew what the performance of at least half of all US municipalities was. Giving the high risk era we live in; Municipal Strategic Management would seem like something more than making sure water is running; sewage and garbage are dealt with; and there’s some regular police patrols.

Many people from past generations just assume all those and many other public good outcomes — like food in grocery stores (commercial space, but food is a public good) and a functional climate — are to be taken for granted. Guess what? A whole bunch of factors just changed since the dawn of the 21st Century. Teaching people about municipal risk management and Municipal Strategic Innovation won’t be easy, but it’s good work and it is a needed set of services.

Manheimer December 13, 2022 “city hall functional” comment

BCG Office of Strategy and Innovation

BMP can also go in the opposite direction. The point is, do we have any idea how to measure up versus down in a professional, ethical, open government Strategic Management context where any member of society has access to the data as well as the process and leadership / oversight level?

With the World Wide Web a large number of commercial offerings have appeared that offer a certain value in the BMP arena. WalletHub, for example, produces all kinds of ‘best’ and ‘worst’ municipal ratings lists. Eventually, along with a Municipal Strategic Innovation Manual, some version of BMP is part of what StratGen will offer.

There may be a common platform for BMP data visualization and other analysis; but it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge if there is. The commercial world creating that solution isn’t necessary for the common good so StratGen and SI 2 members would need to build the solution and invite government and the nonprofit space to partner.

Prioritization Matrix

Big Municipal Questions. High Magnitude Truth.

Medical errors, including the diagnostic phase, create death and disability. There is an error rate in healthcare to be expected; but what is the cost to municipal residents of the decision to not examine the possibilities of something beyond Medicaid for All called America’s National Health Service?

How does the diagnostic or solution development phase work in our municipalities? Is it ‘good enough’? Is handing it all over to pubic officials working well? By the way, improving public sector performance only makes sense; however difficult the words public sector performance strung together as a concept may be for most of us to take seriously today.

Australia is the most recent advanced free world nation to seek out an ‘on-purpose’ versus reactive path to establishing resilience and then sustainability with their Measuring What Matters initiative based on the Well-Being Economy movement. Becoming a free world nation but just about well-being and not necessarily overburdened with unnecessary advancements like ‘luxe’ culture can be a specific future state for people in unfree nations.

StratGen doesn’t have all the answers at to establishing resilience and then sustainability; however the SI 2 Lab and the StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform are part to the fresh start we all need to give those alive in 2076 a fighting chance at arriving at a successful turn-of-the century experience. The Opportunity Departure Point is 2026 and the work needed to make 2026 a game change set of twelve months needs to start right now.

What will those willing and able have in the way of Strategic Innovation set up for the H1 (Q1, Q2) and H2 (Q3, Q4) of 2026? Anything new? Let’s talk. LINK

When we say we are working to make the world a better place for future generations, how’s that going? It’s a serious question. Many may say they are driven by hope; which has to be a basic source of human internal energy. At the same time judicious assessment of risk and prioritization given reality is part of strategy and innovation for public good.

If one visualizes the challenges, solutions, and outcomes impacting our municipalities today, thinking like a trauma surgeon might help. There’s a diagnosis step. Prescription. And then treatment. After getting the patient(s) past the initial trauma in the best shape possible; other levels of healthcare can come in and learn more about the issues for ensuring patient longevity.

Here in Asheville, NC we are learning about HCA, Healthcare Corporation of America. So, HCA is just one example of why the mortality rate of Americans is not actually improving: the prices are too damn high for one. Next, Asheville has been designated a ‘luxe’ municipality. The impactful yet ‘spin’ ways the classic economy warps reality isn’t like a potential wellbeing economy. Tangibles. Many, many Americans are looking for leadership that delivers on tangibles in economic, social, and environmental arenas.

There’s a lot to exploit from the classic economy to use to establish resilience and then sustainability. Strategy and innovation are two basics of civilization that can be repurposed.

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis doesn’t create strategy or innovation by itself. However, creating a SWOT list with a Top 100 for those four arenas can be revealing. One, we don’t do that great at diagnosing the health of our municipalities outside of GDP, unemployment, crime, and more recently greenhouse gas emissions in some cases. There’s other criteria.

Like triage, adding prioritization to those SWOT arenas is also revealing. Our politicians and municipal executives don’t like to prioritize what needs to happen over 20 years and add a 3-5 year performance window. Because after four years and things not working out, that can lead to a poor performance review.

Doctors need to be straightforward in that diagnosis, prescription, and treatment practice. What if there was a common practice for municipal strategic management? It would be great if there was a platform that took insight from the multitude organizations that have a role in municipal strategic management and establishing resilience and then sustainability like the International City/County Management Association and its members and added a Strategic Innovation treatment. That platform is the SI 2 Lab.

If it feels like meaningful influence over our municipal outcomes involves something like medical school for civilization, we can wonder where we’ve ended up and then work out a standard practice guidebook with regular updates. That’s a StratGen project actually.

Federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities

Resilience to Sustainability: It’s About Where We Live

McKinsey and Company supported the 2022-2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) program theme of resilience. In one of the resulting articles and reports titled Resilience for sustainable, inclusive growth, Exhibit 3 on page 13, “Business, economic, and societal resilience are interlinked”, a model that appears to indicate that business world risks are public good risks is shown. In 2022 the WEF Davos, Switzerland annual conference included concerns about ‘de-globalization’ with war in Europe for the first time since the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Municipal Budgets versus Strategic Management… with a Budget

‘Resilience for sustainable, inclusive growth’ sounds like a concept that couldn’t have arrived sooner. Social Synergy will form nationally and globally, and 1990s-2000s era globalization will get the reboot it needs and deserves.

McKinsey and WEF are part of the movement that gave the world the current version of globalization. Here in Asheville, NC we just privatized our main hospital system in 2019; which was already a private nonprofit. Nonprofit and corporation is a difference without necessarily massive distinction in many cases.

Whose version of resilience, sustainability, and transformation is what are distinctions worth defining. Strategic Innovation is the engine behind the Digital Age and much of what globalization allows for. StratGen helps move the ‘game change’ experience into the public good space. Strategy and innovation are things you want to do as strategists and innovators versus having whatever comes along done to you, your organizations, and the vital places we live in: our municipalities.

Since there isn’t a standard for Municipal Strategic Management, we need to build the platform that makes high value Municipal Strategic Management the norm.