Look Beyond the Crisis

Strategy management can help public organizations address the pandemic and prepare themselves for other challenges beyond.

Introduction

Your community has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic. As the steward of your community, your Council and local government are working hard to respond to a changing reality. From setting up a work from home policy and keeping up essential businesses, to closing down public facilities and identifying and implementing necessary financial measures, it is a test of your organization’s operational readiness and responsiveness. But it can also be an opportunity to improve your municipality’s strategic capabilities.

Even before the pandemic, your organization was already being challenged by the external environment, such as dealing with complex and interconnected issues and meeting ever-changing community expectations and internal conditions like fiscal constraints and  competing priorities. So how can you leverage this opportunity and look beyond the crisis? Here we introduce Strategy Management, a new discipline that can help municipalities address the pandemic and prepare themselves for other challenges beyond. We will use the pandemic as an example throughout this article to illustrate its key concepts and components.

The essence of Strategy Management

The heart of this new discipline is a series of lines of sight:

• Looking Forward

Imagine your local response planning work started in January and your health authority started communicating and issuing instructions and orders and storing medical equipment at the same time. Would your community have been better off? Anticipating future conditions is easier said than done. But looking into the cases where this was done well, we can clearly see the actions can be transferable. The city of Surrey, Canada activated their emergency operations centre on February 17th. Alberta Health Services, in Canada, took a proactive step and stockpiled additional emergency supplies including masks, gloves and gowns back in December 2019. Both Surrey and Alberta Health Services were responsive to the news about the situation in Wuhan, China. This was not done by intuition. It requires ongoing monitoring of global and local issues and being able to sift key events that impact your community and your organization. 

To develop this capability (a forward view) in your organization, it is important to scan the environment, understand key implications to your community and your organization and manage them proactively and to be able to do all three continuously. To help you apply this approach to the not-too-distant future (fingers crossed) when the pandemic is in control and over, we list a few questions for your consideration:

• What will likely change in your community?
• What will the implications be to your organization?
• What will the opportunities and threats be?
• How can you address them accordingly?

• Looking Into

Public organizations are entrusted by the community and the people we serve. It is important for us to understand the needs of the community and people so we can better serve them. Since the beginning of the crisis, municipalities are making big decisions to enforce physical distancing: closing down or limiting access to public facilities and open spaces, allowing staff to work from home and moving Council meetings online to name a few. Those are measures to fight against the pandemic from the municipal perspective. 

In the meantime, what can municipalities do to ease the challenges the community is experiencing, in addition to just maintaining the public health standard? This requires us to look inward and put a community or citizen centric view in what we do. There are different and intersecting groups within the community: residents, businesses, essential workers, and vulnerable populations to name a few. Each relies on different municipal services and infrastructures. Oakland and Denver have opened up the city’s underused roads for pedestrians to get outside safely, keeping 6 ft. apart. The city of Toronto, Canada has launched a business support centre to help local businesses access government support programs. The city of Winnipeg, Canada is analyzing the transit schedule to better accommodate essential workers. The town of Sidney, Canada has opened a shower facility and collaborated with the local food bank for the vulnerable populations. Or you could simply follow the city of Lethbridge, Canada and ask the community’s input directly on how the pandemic has affected their daily life through an online survey. 

To develop this capability (an in-depth view) in your organization, it is important to recognize the existence of a range of needs and desires in your community as not everyone has the same need. The one-size-fits-all service approach will probably work for many of us but certainly not for every one of us. To be able to capture the diverse needs, you will need both demographic data and behavioural data. The former helps you understand the characteristics of your local population while the latter helps you know how they access your services. When you overlay this information with the services you provide, you start to gain an in-depth view of the “hidden” demand of your community instead of learning them from the media or your Council. To help you apply this approach to your local community, we list a few questions for your consideration:

• Who will likely have different needs when you are enforcing physical distancing measures?
• What are their characteristics?
• What do they need? How do they access the services differently?
• How can you address the diverse needs accordingly?

• Looking Around

Our organization is like a human body. You want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. When the organization is set and ready to move, you want all areas in sync. Looking around presents an internal view across your organization. It includes a series of commitments that have to be in place to ensure the coordination and collaboration – in the delivery of the actions you identified in earlier views. 

Across the globe, leaders of different countries and different levels of government are championing their respective response initiatives and demonstrating the values and behaviours the people in the organization and the community should behave. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister was in self-isolation for 14 days after his wife tested positive for the coronavirus. Moreover, he left the podium to grab his coat during a live press briefing on a chilly day, saying ”I’m supposed to model health behaviour. I am going to grab my coat and I’ll be right back.” In addition to the leadership, many organizations have committed resources and identified the pandemic response as an organizational priority. Theresa Tam is Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer. Despite criticism of her downplaying the severity of the virus and being slow in self-protection measures – wearing masks in public – she continues to advise the government on issues of the pandemic and guide public health measures. As of April 30, the epidemic curve has been flattening. “…That’s got us all quite excited about what that means…,” said Tam.

To develop this capability (to be  responsible) in your organization, it is important to demonstrate the leadership’s commitment through leading by values and examples, to allocate resources and declare priority, and to ensure accountability by taking a positive and forward looking view in dealing with criticism and failure. To help you apply this approach within your organization, we list a few questions for your consideration:

• Is your leadership ready to walk the talk not just have the talk?
• How can you mobilize resources to support the response actions?
• When it comes to accountability, are we just trying to find someone to blame or taking a problem-solving view to get the work done?

• Looking Backward

Not every action we come up with may lead to success, at least right away. It is important for us to continuously review, understand and adjust our course when necessary. We have seen examples around the globe where initial actions may not necessarily be most effective. Lombardy, a northern region in Italy was hit hard by the pandemic. As of April 26, its official death toll is 13,629, half of Italy’s total. “The biggest mistake we made was to admit patients infected with COVID-19 into hospitals throughout the region,” said Carlo Borghetti, the vice-premier of Lombardy. Quickly, they responded by tracing the source and setting up separate structures exclusively for people sick with coronavirus. Despite the overwhelmingly high death figure, people have started to see a few early signs of easing: a few empty beds in the hospital and less crushing pressure on the intensive-care units. While the experience is unique, the approach for reactions can be leveraged.

To develop this capability (a backward view) in your organization, it is important to leverage an evidence based approach that is to report, evaluate and make decisions. Reporting is about making the action related results available timely. Evaluating is about analyzing and interpreting the data. Decision making is about coming up with the appropriate course of actions based on the evaluation findings, community expectations and the reality of the organization. To help you apply this approach within your organization, we list a few questions for your consideration:

• What information is relevant and timely to monitor the outcome of our actions?
• What are the implications of the data? What does it mean to the community and your organization?
• What actions or decisions are required?

While each capability can be developed or enhanced by its own set of actions, it only represents one dimension of an integrated view to meet the needs of our community. Falling short on one or multiple dimensions will be at the cost of the community and the people we serve. They have to be developed and matured together. 

Chart 1 – Strategy Management

An evolution from the past

The pandemic is a vivid example of how Strategy Management can help municipalities better understand and serve the needs of the community; interpret the complicated and fuzzy world and do both by bringing the organization together. 

Strategy management evolved from strategic planning which was brought to public sector organizations in the 1980s from the best run private companies (source: Berry, Frances Stokes and Wechsler, Barton. 1995. State Agencies’ Experience with Strategic Planning: Findings from a National Survey. Public Administration Review 55(2): 159-168.). Fast forward to present, where we are today: the times are uncertain and volatile and the intensity of conversation around strategy in the context of global forces is very high. It has become quite clear that the current environment where public organizations operate differs vastly from that of 40 years ago. Organizations need tools to better understand the needs of the community and the world around us and to better deal with complex issues and to meet community expectations. And we have to do all of that with increasingly constrained financial resources and move the entire organization in one direction. 

How can Strategy Management add value, compared to its close siblings strategic planning and strategic management? (Table 1)

Table 1 – A Comparison among Strategy Management, Strategic Planning and Strategic Management

Conclusion

Many say the pandemic is a black swan, a once in a lifetime event. It is true, if we are ignoring all the leads and the information that is actually available to us. Both George W. Bush (in November 2005) and Barack Obama (in December 2014) warned of the next pandemic in speeches at the National Institutes of Health. Bill Gates told the world we, humans, are not ready for the next pandemic in 2015; as of May 1, 2020 27 million people had heard that message in his TED Talk. In 2019, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services carried out a pandemic simulation tagged as “Crimson Contagion,” which played out a viral outbreak originating in China that could kill close to 600,000 people in the United States alone. You can find more evidence here (Source: McGillivray, G. 2020. Coronavirus is significant, but is it a true black swan event? theconversation.com).

Is it possible that the information is available and we just don’t have the lines of sight to see it through? We will be caught by surprise if we cannot look forward, we will fail to meet the needs of our community if we cannot look into their needs, we will be stretched to multiple directions if we cannot look around within our organizations and we will keep repeating the same mistake if we cannot look backward and learn.

Fighting the pandemic may be the project of the year, or the next few years, a piece of work that happens at a point in time. But the world is connected, the change is constant, and our community’s expectation is evolving. That’s why we believe developing and maturing your organizational strategic capabilities through Strategy Management is necessary. Is your organization ready for it?

The article was originally published in the June 2020 Issue, Public Management magazine of International City/County Management association. It has been revised for general audiences.