Where Are Our Nimble Cities?
Can our cities be nimble, like Jack?
In our increasingly urbanized world, cities offer great potential. Yet when one looks at how the typical city is managed – elected leaders, career bureaucrats in senior management and unionized staff – one wonders whether they can change quickly enough for the times.
The sexy stuff of urban thinking is the ‘what to do in the future’ brainstorming. The considerably less sexy but more important question is how civic organizations can be rebuilt to better lead change.
In an era of crowd sourcing, flash mobs and news that breaks first on Twitter, we need nimble cities. There don’t seem to be many great examples of such organizations out there. The online journal Slate recently sponsored a Nimble Cities initiative but that too focused on the types of transportation, housing, or urban developments we need – the what rather than the how.
Nimble organizations tolerate risk and as we know organizations headed by elected officials try to minimize risk. In my consulting work, our most recent urban plan called for the client city to aggressively pursue unnamed pilot projects – short, small, economical tests of bigger concepts. The city adopted the award-winning plan enthusiastically, and announced ten capital projects that it would initiate. Yet no process was identified for pilot projects and (not surprisingly) none have happened. Civic organizations like formal plans that can be broken out with timelines and budgets. They are not fond of quick-response creativity. Or perhaps they simply don’t know how to do creativity.
A college that we worked with faced similar challenges and chose to adopt a values-based process. They identified six core values and invested considerable effort in integrating these into everyday operations – using them as guiding questions at virtually every meeting and planning discussion held at the college over a period of years. Every initiative was tested against the six core values – and in many cases given additional life and energy by the values questions that arose.
Cities, of course, have the additional challenge of electoral politics. When the Greater Toronto (Canada) municipalities were amalgamated in the late 1990s, the director of amalgamation noted, “Notwithstanding the city’s large size, the new city government needs to be nimble, not unwieldy, flexible, not rule-bound.” I wonder what citizens think of that goal now. Municipal responsiveness is not generally high on the list of large cities’ attributes.
Management consultants like Daryl Conner have written about nimble organizations and many corporations give organizational development the attention it deserves. In civic environments, new and creative models are needed.
I am currently collecting examples of innovative civic organizations – examples of how cities can be quick on their feet. I welcome your examples and suggestions.
Great article with important observations and suggestions. Somehow the grip of greed will need to be loosened, ideally broken for cities to become nimble. Too many wealthy and powerful urban property lords fight municipal improvements that would help all, including those urban property rulers. Many major cities are experiencing serious infrastructure near collapses that often blame tight budgets, but full research shows too much power politics are at play for it to just be cost avoidance. Cities are actually social organisms and right now they are dangerously ill.
Insightful article. Unfortunately most cities view bureaucracy & nimble as mutually exclusive.
Can cities be Jack? Good question Lorne. Touching on the citizens role, I wonder... If cities want its' citizens to participate in the city vision (eg. be nimble) & implementation of that vision - has the "concern" actually been established? If there is limited public concern (eg that city be nimble), then next steps; building consensus, setting norms (eg expectations for nimbleness), building capacity towards satisfying those norms, etc. becomes problematic. Perhaps its an education question, or marketing question... why don't more citizens want their city to be Jacked?
Good questions Ben. In my experience, citizens today are often moving faster than their municipal governments. Cities don't often seem able to do the small, important things quickly - they sometimes seem like cruise ships compared to the kayaks of citizen ideas / interests. (apologies for attempted coastal metaphor) LD
compelling insights. I enjoyed your article very much. in my past life as a mental health professional i often found that crisis was what most catalyzed rapid and valid change. Waddell's comment is astute; i believe complacency is the mother of stagnancy. How does a city planner/organizer/leader, even at the grass roots level, convince people that they are actually in a crisis situation?
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