Return and Report

In this final installment addressing community-based strategic planning, I promised to address the final stage of the planning process.? I am often asked to explain the difference between what I advocate and the strategic planning methods typically employed by other local governments.? That difference lies in three areas:?

· How and to what degree citizens and stakeholders are integrated into the process itself,

·? How the loop is closed at the end with citizens and stakeholders, and

·?How the plan is ultimately implemented.

?If you look again at the five stages of community-based strategic planning, I’ll bet you don’t need a lot of clues or promptings from me or anyone else to identify where local governments usually fail in the process.? Most are very astute at identifying priorities and composing the plan.? Where they don’t show a lot of aptitude is in the areas of “listening” and “return and report.”? We’ve already addressed listening, so I’m going to harp on the second principle.

The stage of the process that I label “return and report” begins with an internal strategy of implementation.? After all, if we don’t implement the plan, there’s not a lot to report.? Once the committee has finished its work, a beautiful plan is created and presented to the governing body, the lights are turned-out at city hall, and everyone goes home … Then what?? The next morning you are inevitably going to ask, “Now what are we going to do with this?”? The answer is that you’re going to implement the plan, but let’s back-up just a bit chronologically.

My hope is that when the plan was presented to the council members, they adopted it in some official manner as the city’s five-year strategic plan.? If we’ve done our homework during the process and have broadened the base of participation in the manner we should have, our elected body should take some courage in officially recognizing this plan as the blueprint for their jurisdiction.? This official gesture is important because, without it, the staff may be left wondering whether they’re expected to place it into action.? Beyond this, your committee will appreciate the vote of confidence in their work and the satisfaction of the plan’s acceptance.

So this brings us to the morning after.? There it lies on your desk from the night before, right next to the PM Magazine and the APWA newsletter.? For a city manager, the questions are almost spontaneous, unless preceded by some understanding of and discussion about how to put this plan into action.? Because most cities haven’t demonstrated a lot of implementation acumen, this grand strategic planning process perhaps ends and dies on that desk, or maybe it’s placed on a shelf.? In my book “Elevating Trust in Local Government,” I go into some detail about a city I once advised.? They had a strategic plan; but when I asked how the implementation was going, the assistant city manager informed me that from its composition and presentation, until the moment I asked to see the plan itself, it had not moved from a bookcase in their conference room.

It's not that the city planned to “shelve” the plan, but it is unfortunately true that most plans are destined to molder on a shelf; not because the original motus or intent wasn’t good, but because no one gave a lot of forethought as to how the plan was going to be implemented once created.? Another reason why some plans never see the light of day is because very few people even know about it.? It’s like making a New Year’s resolution.? The power of that resolution lies in something called accountability. ?You know this, so you share your resolution with your friend, spouse, or colleague.? Now the cat’s out of the bag, and there’s someone who will notice if you don’t make good on the resolution.? Remember, a commitment made in private isn’t a commitment at all.? That’s why we have made the community-based approach a conspicuously public initiative.? Now thousands of people know what you’ve committed to doing, and the ability to simply shelve the plan is almost nonexistent.

Beyond the very public aspect of strategic planning and its official adoption, we want to make sure that your staff has access to this plan.? In my cities, I make sure that it’s on the Intranet site, on our website, and that every department head has a hard copy of it.? My employees have participated in the process as a very important stakeholder group, so many are already aware of the plan and usually feel gratified to see the end-product.? I make it a point in my one-on-ones with directors that we spend some time discussing the initiatives of the plan and possible strategies that will enable us to realize those ambitions.? The key is to draw their attention to this guiding document and get them accustomed to almost intuitively thinking, “I wonder what our plan says about ...”

On the elected side, I use the strategic plan as the backdrop to our annual goal-setting retreat.? I recall in the beginning of my career using a prioritization exercise with my council.? I painstakingly penned every city program on large “sticky” notes and then distributed red, yellow, green, and blue dots to each member of my governing body.? I asked them at a given point to place dots next to program names.? I’d later tally the points I had preassigned to each color to determine the highest priorities and perhaps even a hint of what they didn’t care about at all.? Boy we’ve come a long way!

With a community-based plan, I can ask elected officials, weeks prior to the retreat, to review the plan, its directives, and initiatives, and come prepared to discuss ways we can move the plan forward.? There’s no “reinventing the wheel” every year.? There tends to be a minimal amount of grandstanding or even contention.? Everyone knows what we’re going to be doing.? We are going to focus on the citizens’ priorities.? Meanwhile, I won’t go into the granular way the retreat unfolds.? Perhaps that’s fodder for another article.? What I will say is that having a community-based strategic plan that the governing body recognizes and has adopted turns a full-day retreat into a half-day retreat, because much of what used to consume so much discussion was determined by the very people the elected body serves.? With such a plan, we know why we’re here and what we need to do.? We just need to discuss how we’re going to make it happen.

With council feedback in hand following the retreat, I’m ready to work with my department directors to compose a one-year implementation plan.? This is the document we are going to use to set the stage for most of our budget requests in the upcoming year.? The implementation plan looks a lot like the strategic plan in that it provides the directives and initiatives of the original plan coupled with the council goals.? It’s here that we describe in a much deeper way how we’re going to implement the priorities of the coming year.? Once composed, I submit the implementation plan to the mayor and council.? My intention in doing this is two-fold.? First, I want them to see their ambitions on paper and get a sense of what they’re attempting to accomplish in the next fiscal year.? Second, I need to know whether the plan hits the bullseye, because it is my intention to liberally utilize the implementation plan to compose my budget proposal.

In fact, this is what makes this document powerful.? In a very real way, it becomes the basis for many of the city’s budget requests.? What’s better is that when we hold budget meetings with the elected body, we need only point to how a particular request is related to their priorities – and their priorities are based upon the tenets of the community-based strategic plan.? In fact, it has been my practice to require any new requests to carry an annotation indicating connection to a strategic directive.? Doing so provides a visible nexus to the strategic plan and the budget itself.? Of course, I understand that we must pay for a lot of things every year that aren’t part of the citizens’ or elected officials’ priorities.? However, you will be amazed how smoothly a budget process runs when the governing body clearly sees how the budget proposal seeks to implement their ambitions, which are in turn based on the citizens’ plan.

I will admit that the public reporting element of the plan’s implementation has been for me a bit more complicated.? I have nevertheless, in the last 15 years, seen the introduction of several useful tools that automate strategic plan reporting.? Remember that the goal is to allow your citizens to see the plan in action.? While I won’t endorse here a specific product, you will want one that is of course web-based, that can be updated by staff on a somewhat frequent basis, and that is both visually appealing and clear to understand.? Many cities refer to these tools as “community scorecards.”? I like to describe them as a dashboard for your strategic plan.?

It’s here that assigned staff can regularly update the status of a particular initiative, usually using the all too familiar traffic light color scheme.? Green means we’ve implemented the initiative, yellow means we’re on track, and red means that the initiative either has not been addressed or that its implementation has been delayed.? There’s nothing wrong with a “red” initiative.? We can’t be all things to all people all at once.? Therefore, most initiatives begin red.? What’s more, five years is a lot of time!? Conditions are changing so rapidly these days that I have seriously considered recommending that cities establish three-year plans!? Think of what’s changed in our nation and in your city in the last five years.? In 2019, as an example, I thought “social distancing” was something that a high school dance chaperone enforced.? The reality is that time and conditions are going to place the kibosh on at least some of your plan’s initiatives.? Laws change, the city’s financial position may change, political leadership changes, etc.? My experience is that if a city is successful in implementing 85% of their plan’s initiatives, that is fantastic!? If you are successful to that degree, your citizens will feel the impacts in a very meaningful and positive way.

Your strategic planning advisory committee (SPAC) put in a lot of time to help create this plan.? It would be a shame if you didn’t incorporate them into the “return and report” phase.? My advice is to not only invite your SPAC members to present the new plan to the mayor and council, but also return on an annual or semi-annual basis to provide their perspectives on the plan’s implementation.? This element of reporting reenforces its original credibility as a citizen-based plan.? Your SPAC chair and/or vice-chair can work with the city manager to prepare the appropriate presentation and discussion.? This ensures that the SPAC is completely informed about the plan’s status and that the city manager is not blindsided.? All strategic plan reporting to the elected body should be done in concert and cooperation with the city’s administration.? After all, they are the implementers of the plan.

I finally encourage you to return to my earlier articles addressing community-based planning and review these ideas with your mayor, city manager, or whoever is interested in elevating trust in your community.? I leave you with two critical points that I would never want to obfuscate.? First, I didn’t event the idea of asking citizens what they expect from local government and composing a plan to satisfy those expectations.? I nevertheless believe that if such a practice had been more a part of our professional DNA, we’d probably enjoy more than a 62% trust level from our citizens.? Second, community-based strategic planning is NOT the only way to elevate trust with your citizens.? Trust is the product of trustworthiness (otherwise known as authenticity) and competency.? People will trust you if they believe you share their values and have their best interests in mind, plain and simple.? Any exercise or endeavor that allows you to genuinely communicate these two characteristics to your citizens will empower you to elevate trust with them, and trust drives our local government resource engine.