Moving from Vision to Action: How to Not Ghost Your Data Program
Mastering the Fundamentals of Data-Informed Leadership (Part 3)
This is the third installment of Mastering the Fundamentals of Data-Informed Leadership, a series by What Works Cities on how chief executives can create a data culture that’s built to last. Read our previous installment here.
[Update: Check out the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth installments.]
By Molly Daniell and Zachary Markovits
We’re all familiar with the well worn saying, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” There’s a similar question in city halls when it comes to building a data culture that lasts: If a mayor establishes a data program, but does not see it or use it, does it really exist?
In this installment of Mastering the Fundamentals of Data-Informed Leadership, we’re building off the actions that city leaders can take to implement their data-centric vision and diving into how executive leadership can ensure that their data program — and the team that they have set up — are actually being used.
Too often we see city leaders putting in the hard work and political capital to establish new data infrastructure and staff in their city, only to inadvertently “ghost” the program over time. It is understandably difficult to overcome a career’s worth of decision-making habits founded in intuition and shift to a process that regularly embraces — and uses — data. Few mayors like to admit this challenge openly, but game-changing leaders see this opportunity as a way to push themselves and their cities to a new level.
To be one of these game-changing leaders that invests in a long-lasting culture around data-informed decision-making, we’ve outlined and expanded on these four instrumental steps you can take on your path to modeling data leadership and ensuring your data program is used:
- Show up regularly
- Participate from a place of curiosity
- Get into the habit of making decisions based on data and evidence
- Talk about how your decisions are informed by data
1: Show up regularly
We get it, mayors are busy. It’s easy for chief executives to assume that their staff doesn’t need them involved past a certain point, or that, giving staff the agency and space to “do their jobs” without executive oversight is best for everyone. But we’ve seen that part of being an effective leader is setting priorities; a leader’s physical presence in meetings demonstrates that this process is a valuable use of their and staff time. Any good team knows how busy their executive is, so their attendance at critical data or performance meetings will speak volumes to the priorities they’ve set.
Showing Up in Action: Louisville, KY
When Mayor Greg Fischer decided to start a regular performance management meeting (his LouisStat process), he made it a point to chair every single LouisStat meeting.
Although he is often called away from Louisville on business, he makes it a priority to spend the time in these meetings whenever he is in town. His attendance sends a clear message to his staff about the importance of performance management, and how their ability to achieve success and critical city goals are tied into the use of data and their participation in these meetings. People pay attention to who is and isn’t in a room, and because you are taking the time to focus on what your team has to say about how data processes and systems are being used, they will be more likely to treat these meetings as a priority. (For more information on LouisStat, see our write up from 2018.)
Getting Started:
Block off time on a monthly basis to hear an update from your data team, and direct your administrative assistant to schedule your attendance at cross-departmental meetings on a regular basis. Demonstrate that these meetings are a priority in your schedule by physically showing up — especially in the early stages.
2: Participate from a place of curiosity
One of the benefits of standing up a city’s data practice is that everyone walks into a performance meeting as a student of the data, no matter seniority or title.
As such, rather than leading a meeting through directives, leading by asking questions about the data can clarify staff decision-making and model how to create a clear connection to the city’s strategic plan. Using probing questions to understand the background and reasoning that led to a particular measure and/or outcome can encourage other staff to ask critical questions that help build a culture of exploration and team problem-solving.
In some cases, city leaders review data products, such as visualizations, dashboards, or memos, in advance of performance or departmental meetings so that they are prepared to actively participate in discussions and to ensure in-person time is an opportunity to collaborate and dive deeper into the work.
By doing so, a leader can model a culture of inquiry and a safe space for critical examination, discussion, and collaboration that uses data to identify solutions and actions.
Participation in Action: Tacoma, WA
In Tacoma, the data team designed a series of ambitious and focused questions that leadership can use to guide discussion and spark new lines of inquiry. These guiding questions can help leaders plan for meaningful discussion whenever performance inquiries arise and ensure a whole team approach in examining data.
Getting Started:
Consider how you like to receive and digest data-insights. Do you prefer to review a data product before participating in a group discussion? Do you like to dig into the data yourself or view high-level insights? Use your answers to identify a process with your staff that allows you to contextualize and interrogate information directly. For example, this could mean setting up performance management meetings or incorporating more data-insights into department meetings.
3: Get into the habit of making decisions based on data and evidence
Once the data team has built a process and infrastructure for data-informed decision-making, it is a leader’s responsibility to show (as opposed to tell) how decisions should be made through the regular and disciplined use of data and evidence set forth by this process. Getting into the habit of data-driven decision-making is about modeling how to use data insights to make concrete choices about how time, money, and other resources will be spent. This kind of data engagement and usage must be understood universally as the leader’s leadership compass.
Even if a city is not quite ready for citywide performance management meetings — although our colleagues at GovEx could get any city there quickly — the chief executive’s actions regarding performance data creates a powerful incentive for staff to get engaged. This could include convening regular check-ins on indicators of interest, deliberately asking pointed questions about how to interpret specific data or dashboards, and explicitly drawing out the connections to staff how the data-informed a decision.
Making Decisions Based on Data, in Action: Tulsa, OK & Boston, MA
In Tulsa, Mayor G.T. Bynum and his team realized that the zip codes receiving funding were not the ones that needed it most. Early in his tenure, Mayor Bynum commissioned an Equality Indicators Report in 2018, establishing a baseline for the problem and informing efforts to address it. As the Mayor said in the city’s follow-up report one year later, “While the [2018] report did not contain new revelations for many Tulsans, it did allow us to move out of the realm of anecdotes and gut feel and into a community-wide conversation more informed by standardized data.”
This presented a tremendous opportunity to align decision-making — in this case, budget decisions — with clear and irrefutable evidence. They have now redirected nearly a half-million dollars in funding toward the city’s Crutchfield neighborhood, where the poverty rate is 2.3 times higher than the city as a whole.
In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh makes a very public display of data driving his everyday decision making. All over City Hall, and even visible from his desk in his office, there are television screens that display the city’s performance dashboard, CityScore. The dashboard tracks the performance of city departments across the day, week, month, and a quarter, giving the Mayor both a short- and long-term view of the city’s health and government performance. Staff at all levels know that the Mayor has a preference for continual access to the city’s performance data.
In one instance, Mayor Walsh noticed a drop in performance regarding EMS response times by reviewing the dashboard. Upon following the data and looking closer at the emergency response calls and patterns of ambulance dispatch, the city’s data team discovered that the vehicles were being sent to incidents for which emergency transport wasn’t required. By developing a new category of calls, dispatchers could reserve ambulances for when they were truly needed, resulting in better care for residents, lower costs, and less staff time. In this case, not only were the city’s performance metrics being publicized, but staff — and residents —also knew that their mayor was personally invested in using data to make decisions about emergency response services.
Getting Started:
Consider the forum you routinely use to discuss organizational health and performance and identify two to three high-value decisions that are coming up. In advance, ensure you are briefed on the issues, identify critical, probing questions, identify gaps in your understanding, and challenge yourself to make a decision informed by the data within those discussion forums.
4: Talk about how your decisions are informed by data
As we discussed in part one of this series, leaders who want to lead with data need to talk about their vision for a data-informed government. It is equally important to consistently articulate how that vision is being implemented and what key decisions have occurred as a result of using data.
Once a city leader has done the work to become a curious participant and base decisions on the evidence, they must take the next step to close the feedback loop and communicate to staff that evidence played an influential role in the decision-making process. Doing so will help scale and embed the change toward data-informed decision-making.
Organizational change is hard, and for real change to take root, it must be seen and internalized by staff who make decisions every day. Existing staff will be the frontline data collectors, analysts, or decision-makers evaluating whether or not to share critical data with another department. They will have differing levels of comfort and familiarity with these practices, but will nevertheless, be called upon as participants in this new normal.
As a leader, building out time to communicate and elevate the decisions made using data is an opportunity to show well-modeled behavior to the whole of a city’s staff, not just those physically proximate to the mayor. In Memphis, TN, Mayor Strickland actually shares performance data and key decisions through Twitter where not only staff but the larger community, can hear how data is being used to make decisions.
Talk About Data-Informed Decision-Making, in Action: Fayetteville, NC
In 2018, the Council in Fayetteville, NC asked the city to evaluate whether it should outsource its solid waste collection to a private contractor. After a deep performance analysis, city staff revealed its waste collection services cost $7 million less per year than outside vendors, performed better than the vendor proposals promised, and in the case of special service requests from residents (such as bulky item pickups), the city had been able to close these more quickly, reducing the number of open work orders by 66% in the past year. Moreover, results from several years of resident satisfaction surveys showed that Fayetteville’s residents were largely satisfied with the city’s solid waste services.
With the city manager’s blessing, staff presented back to city council — a highly visible setting—how their data-driven insights influenced the decision to retain solid waste collection as an internal function.
Getting Started:
Consider, as a leader, your communication preferences and existing mechanisms for communicating with staff. Take 5 minutes to write up a list for how you communicate broadly with staff — no need to reinvent the wheel — and consider how you might use those mechanisms to update staff on key decisions informed by data. Pick two upcoming decisions to pilot this new approach.
Stay tuned for this series’ next installment where we’ll break down how investing in a data program is not only an essential — and at some point unavoidable — leadership action but also a spectacular opportunity for transformation.
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Molly Daniell is Associate Director of City Progress for What Works Cities.
Zachary Markovits is the Director of City Progress for the What Works Cities.
Cities that take the time to complete a What Works Cities Assessment become members of the WWC community and have the opportunity to receive coaching support to identify a plan to update your decision-making frame and align it with the evidence.
In addition to coaching support, cites also have access to critical performance management courses in the WWC Academy (account required) to jumpstart decision-making.
