In this episode Stephen Goldsmith talks with Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, about his new research on the crucial role of collaborative capabilities, data analytics, and innovation in addressing complex urban challenges.
In this episode Stephen Goldsmith talks with Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, about his new research on the crucial role of collaborative capabilities, data analytics, and innovation in addressing complex urban challenges. They discuss the three key principles outlined in de Jong's article State Capabilities for Problem-Oriented Governance and accompanying Action Insights paper "Tackling Big, Thorny Problems: Building the Capabilities Your Organization Needs." They also touch on applying these principles to address cross-sector problems like homelessness.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
About Data-Smart City Solutions
Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
This is Betsy Gardner, editor of Data-Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. And you're listening to Data-Smart City Pod, where we bring on the top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
Stephen Goldsmith:
This is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center at Harvard University with another one of our podcasts. This is an interesting podcast, I can't ask the person on the other side too many really confrontational questions because I work for him, so this will be a different sort of podcast where we're respectful to our guest. With us today is Jorrit de Jong, who is the director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University where I work and faculty co-chair of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership, and Emma Bloomberg senior lecturer in public policy, et cetera. I first became aware of Jorrit early on when he joined Harvard and even before actually and was interested then in his book on Dealing with Dysfunction in government, and particularly on the regulatory side. So we are delighted to have him today and to welcome him to talk about his new paper Tackling Big, Thorny Problems: Building the Capabilities Your Organization Needs. That introduction took half our time. Jorrit, welcome.
Jorrit de Jong:
Thank you so much, Steve, and thank you for that kind introduction. I have to correct the record here, we've been working together for a long time, but originally, I was a student of yours and your work and Governing by Network and the Responsive City really shaped my thinking about data and cities, so it's an honor to be on this podcast and wonderful to have this conversation.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Good. Thank you for your kind comments. Just before we get into the paper, talk to us a little bit about your transition from doing some work in government to coming to Harvard, what brought you to Harvard, and what made you apply the concepts of Kafka to government regulation before in the book that I referenced?
Jorrit de Jong:
I was born in the Netherlands, and that's where I did grad school and PhD, but I've always considered myself a pracademic, a hybrid version of a practitioner and an academic. And I feel most comfortable if I'm interacting with people in cities, in governments who do the work of public problem solving while also taking that as an opportunity to study what they're working on and the conditions under which they can do it more effectively. And you mentioned the Kafka Brigade, which is one of the organizations I've been involved in that helps cities improve their ability to deliver for residents and fix bureaucratic problems. And, of course, that is an endless opportunity for fixing smaller and bigger problems in governments. And that led to the book that you mentioned dealing with this function, which really explores why it is so hard to fix red tape and to create a better experience for residents who seek to engage with government.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Last question before we get to the papers, the Bloomberg Harvard Leadership Program, how many mayors have come through the program that you manage?
Jorrit de Jong:
Well, we have since 2017 worked with 465 mayors and 2,271 senior city officials in 524 cities worldwide. So that's the count to date. It's been an extraordinary experience learning from and with these city leaders as they navigate the many challenges that they're facing.
Stephen Goldsmith:
That's good background obviously for the paper you wrote, so let's chat about that for a little bit. State Capabilities for Problem-oriented Governance, there are plenty of problems, what sort of capabilities are you suggesting that should be brought to bear towards those problems?
Jorrit de Jong:
It's a great question. Obviously, to run any organization you need many capabilities from procurements to HR to data and information systems and so forth. What we were particularly interested in is figuring out what governments need to rip their heads and hands around wicked problems, elusive, intractable social issues that don't neatly fit into the organizational silos. For example, when you think about homelessness, that's a very multifaceted problem. It has a public health component, it has affordable housing component, there may be mental health issues, addiction issues and so forth, and all of these aspects require different types of expertise, different sources of funding and different types of services. Now, if you really want to understand a problem and develop a better way to mitigating it, you cannot simply ask one department to take that on, they depend on the expertise and capacity of other departments, and that immediately raises the question, well, how do you organize something like that?
And it's not just homelessness. When you think about climate change or crime or economic developments, these are all very multifaceted issues, and so increasingly we see that if governments want to succeed at solving these difficult problems, they need to think about capabilities differently, they cannot just rely on the traditional organizational functions. So what we did in this paper is to look at the literature on problem solving and problem oriented governance, and really distill those capabilities that are most likely to get you to a better place. And we identify collaborative capability, the ability to forge relationships and collaborations across organizational boundaries, which is easy to say, but incredibly hard to do, as anyone knows who's tried it. The second capability is data capability, which has a lot to do with how do you effectively use data, not the IT systems, but actually asking the right questions, finding the right data to help you better understand a problem holistically. And finally, the ability to innovate.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I want to talk about those, but maybe drill down in particular on data and analytic capabilities, that's most of our listeners. We run the Data-Smart City Solutions site that Betsy Gardner does, and Kate Coleman and I wrote a book on using mapping and GIS as a platform for cross-sector collaboration, wicked problems, I've got an interest in that subject. A couple questions, what type of data analytic capability, and then an issue that I've been particularly focused on is if you're using cross-sector organizations and multiple organizations inside the city to address a wicked problem, where does the data analytic capability to bring them together reside? How should that be structured?
Jorrit de Jong:
That's a great question, and there's not one answer to it. We actually did a few empirical studies on how collaboratives who work on educational opportunity in cities use data, and we looked at some of the most advanced data practices among them and found that they were very different. Some of those collective action initiatives, as they call them, were using data primarily for accountability purposes, to let their funders know how they've spent the money, others were using it for performance management purposes to really drive performance, and others were using it in a much more learning orientation kind of way where they were trying to better understand where the educational attainment gap came from. And so I think what we're seeing around the world in cities, but also in other levels of government, is that there is no specific standard for using data across organizational boundaries, but increasingly organizations learn how to be better consumers and commissioners of data and evidence. And I think that's really the place to start.
No data set and no information system will do the work for you. You have to develop your ability to think critically and ask the right questions before you can get meaningful answers, and so I think that's where those three capabilities, collaboration, data, and innovation come together. Once you have identified the partners that you need to do the work, a really good first step is to say, "Well, the data that we currently have, what does that tell us? What does it not tell us? And how do we ask the questions that can help us get additional data that will give us a better understanding of what we're looking at and what the next steps might be?"
Stephen Goldsmith:
Let's stick with this subject just for a second. Let me raise a couple problems, if you will, and see if you have suggestions. One may be that the data formats among agencies are different, which makes the utilization of the data in a commonplace a common problem, difficulty A, that's one problem. Another problem is a people problem. We've got this environmental project, and one of the challenges is the level of sophistication needed to make analytic insights in cross sector data. So two questions, one's the data issue, the second is the people issue, what suggestions you have if you're not London or New York City or LA about where and how to afford the data analytic capabilities?
Jorrit de Jong:
Yeah. When we look a little bit more closely at this abstract concept of capabilities, it really has two components. You can think about individual capabilities, and then we say those are skills that individuals have and the skills to ask the right questions, as I mentioned before, but also the skill to detect bias in data, the skill to analyze and really draw the right conclusions from piece of information that you'll have in front of you. But then there's the other component, organizational capabilities, and those are the practices, you mentioned data standards, but can also think about organizational routines CityStat as a famous way of using data to monitor progress and manage performance. And so when I think about data capabilities, I think about the interaction between individual skills and organizational practices. And these organizational practices vary from having the infrastructure, the hardware and software to be able to do the work, to routines, working processes, professional norms, and standards and so forth.
Stephen Goldsmith:
What's a city somewhere in the world that you think has done this particularly well in addressing a complex problem?
Jorrit de Jong:
You mentioned the big cities that have a lot of staff capacity and resources, so you would expect them to do well. What I'm always interested in is looking at those medium-sized and smaller cities that do not necessarily have the resources, but the wherewithal and the motivation to, despite those constraints, make progress. And we wrote a teaching case about Rockford, Illinois, and they were facing, like many cities in this country, a problem with homelessness. And so they were trying to help housing insecure individuals, but they had not developed a granular understanding of who they were dealing with. And so many different care providers had their own databases, there were no systematic ways to triage problems and keep track of services offered, and therefore it became one big problem that they couldn't get under control.
And what I love about what they did there under Mayor Larry Morrissey, is to say, "We're going to start with the basics. We're going to just create a Google spreadsheet and we're going to meet every week, and we're going to create a by name list so that we can have everything we know about the individuals that we're working with in one place." So it was not an expensive, comprehensive or sustainable software system, but it started with putting the data together and really talking amongst themselves as different organizations what data do we need, what data do we have, how do we get to a better version of this spreadsheet next week.
And the wonderful thing is, without necessarily adding more money or changing policies dramatically, just by having more discipline and a better working process, they were able to reduce homelessness for veterans to functional zero, meaning that no individuals living on the streets longer than 30 days in one year. And they reduced all homelessness to functional zero I think two or three years later. So it just shows that it's a way of working, a way of thinking, a way of approaching the problem together that helps you make progress. And then of course later you can build software systems and databases that allow you to do this more sustainably and more responsibly, but it really starts with a way of thinking.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Just a couple of final questions and we'll let you go. One is the organizational issue. In these wicked problems, how should the mayor organize the response? For example, and I saw a lot of this when I was deputy mayor of New York, that you may be in charge of homelessness, but homelessness may this week be driven by lack of access to mental health services, that's somebody else's budget, or you could fill in the blank with domestic violence, whatever the case may be. So if you were going to set up the organizational structure to take on a big thorny problem, what does that look like? Is it an agency? Is it a special task force? Is it a deputy mayor? What are the ways to organize that response?
Jorrit de Jong:
We get a question very often from mayors, should I create a task force, should I create a backbone organization, a hub and spoke model? And when you look at the literature across sector collaboration, there are different models out there, but there's no evidence that one particular model is guaranteed success. What we do find is that often particular structures or governance mechanisms stand in the way, they lock people in and they inhibit rather than enable progress. So yes, you need a structure, but that structure may need to be adaptable to changing circumstances. And if you approach that too rigidly, you may not give yourself the best chance to make progress. We did another empirical study on early stage collaborations with Amy Edmondson and Eva Flavia Martinez Orbegozo, and we found that a lot of collaborations across departments and even sectors grapple with structure, but the structure question is proceeded by something else, which is can we even agree on what the problem is and can we agree on what it takes to solve it?
Once you go through that, it's a lot easier to determine which structure is right for you and which organization should be the lead organization if you want that. But unless you tackle these other two problems, you will struggle to even agree on a structure or find the right one that you need. Again, it's about taking that step back and say, "What are we trying to accomplish? What does success look like? What do we know and not know yet about the problem that we're facing here?" And then take it from there.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So let's close with the opportunity for you to plug this article that you wrote. Our audience is unusually interested in this subject more than the average person on the street, so if you wanted to learn more about tackling big 40 problems, building the capabilities your organization needs, where would you find that and why should you read it?
Jorrit de Jong:
Yes. Well, nobody has time, I know that, city leaders are extremely busy and everybody else is pretty much very busy. So the academic article that Quentin Mayne and Fernando Monge and I wrote was published in an academic journal, and we have no illusions that people will not immediately go to read all the footnotes, so that's not necessary. We created what we call an action insight, which is a two-page summary of this article that really presents the findings in what we hope is a concise and compelling way.
And then, of course, on the website of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, we have not only those action insights, but we also have a number of teaching cases that are really narrative articles that tell the story of people in the real world dealing with real issues that bring those themes to life. So the story of Rockford, you can find it there, we have stories about many other cities and city leaders trying to make their cities more data informed. So those action insights combined with those real life stories I think are probably a more enjoyable read than the original underlying studies, but for those interested we'll link to those academic journal articles as well.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I think I'd prefer the two-pager to the 25-pager, but we'll pick up both of them. So this is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of Practice of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, thanking Jorrit de Jong for his time today and for his insightful article, which we recommend to you. Thank you so much.
Jorrit de Jong:
Thank you for having me, Steve.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us@datassmartcities.org. Find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Steven Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.