Choose a Direction for the City
Just over ten years ago, the local city government in Edmonton organized its work with a new set of policy documents called “The Ways:”
The Way We Grow
The Way We Move
The Way We Prosper
The Way We Green
The Way We Live
The Way We Finance
Together, these plans were “The Way Ahead.” They were a coherent means to articulate who was doing what, to accomplish what, across city government.
I’ve been working with people across this city government for 14 years. When city council adopted The Ways, I witnessed uncertainty among the administration. From today’s vantage point, it doesn’t seem reasonable to think these documents could be confusing. At the time, people were used to working a certain way, and they were being asked to think about their work differently. They were being asked to work under policy direction that was specific to them.
My take: the confusion wasn’t confusion. It was frustration with a game where the rules had changed. Instead of the comfort of knowing how to navigate a system without clear direction, people had to adjust to having direction—and more clear expectations of their collective performance. There were two reactions: those who struggled with having less room to hide or who simply enjoyed the power dynamics in incoherence, and those who thrived with the role clarity that comes with structure.
Sometimes, all it takes to upset a system (a person, family, neighbourhood, organization, city or the whole population) is to ask them to do something different, even if it is more straightforward.
The Ways were adopted over a few years, and over time there was a new degree of coherence in the city government system. There were a series of plans, each with its own focus. Clarity of roles emerged for departments and branches of city government. They knew who was doing what work.
We often disparage silo thinking, but the value of silos in a system is clarity around who is looking after which kinds of work in the system. For example, the planners rally behind The Way We Grow, the official municipal development plan, while the transportation engineers rally behind The Way We Move, the official transportation master plan. Both of these plans are statutory; they are required by a higher order of government.
What was new was the opportunity for other roles of city government to take the stage with planners and engineers and craft a coherent way ahead for the entirety of city government. For example, The Way We Live raised the profile of city government efforts to make the city welcoming and vibrant, inclusive, safe, and attractive. The Way We Green put the city’s environmental strategic plan out front. The Way We Prosper defined the city’s economic development plan. The Way We Finance made the city government’s efforts to be financially sustainable explicit.
Each of these plans had great value. I imagine them as a book series: they each read well on their own, and they also go well together. As a whole, they articulated a vision, what Edmonton’s city government called, The Way Ahead.
Here’s another way to look at The Ways: like a wheel. Imagine all the pockets of city government working to implement the policies articulated in The Ways on the rim of the wheel. At the center are The Ways. Each spoke connects one of The Ways with the people out on the rim who are doing that work.
Whether we imagine the silos of hierarchy or the spokes of a wheel, both of these structures share something significant in common: people know their work and the work that belongs to others. They know their lane. Even though it was different from what they were used to, working with The Ways became very comfortable and familiar over time.
And now they are asked to think and work differently again.
Edmonton’s City Plan
Here’s how I think of Edmonton’s new city plan: take all those separate and distinct documents, The Way We Prosper, The Way We Grow, etc., and combine them into one. They are no longer independent and distinct; they are integrated in a way that is hard to imagine.
Instead of clear silos, or spokes, where clear groups of people are “in their lane” beside others “in their lanes,” The City Plan lays out the shared values, objectives and intentions for the city, with targets and measures, so we know if we are moving in the right direction.
The document that guides the city government is one now, rather than several. And it feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
Where the culture was, “this is my work, and this is yours,” the ask embedded in The City Plan is now, “this is our work to do.”
The value of The Ways was in the differentiation of separate—and valuable—bodies of work. The value of The City Plan is how it invites integration and intersection. People across local government are figuring out how they share the responsibility to make something happen. And they are noticing new connections between their work.
Each project or initiative is interconnected to so many others. As I witness people across this local government, I see people who longed to do this before City Plan, but they didn’t know how to do it or didn’t feel compelled to do it. It’s far easier to stay in a familiar lane. Just as we didn’t like the clarity that came with The Ways, now, we don’t like the messiness of integration when asked to work differently again.
Choosing direction
The City Plan scales up the clarity that came with The Ways. Where The Ways offered role clarity for individuals, branches and departments of city government, The City Plan provides a clearer sense of direction. The City Plan states the direction we want to move and the kind of city we want to be.
The question that guided the creation of The City Plan now guides its implementation: What choices do we need to make to be a healthy, urban and climate-resilient city of two million people that supports a prosperous region?
To understand the choices, we have first to ask: Who do we want to be as a city? The City Plan does this with six values, with a handful of outcomes identified for each, that guide every policy for city government:
I want to belong and contribute.
I want to live in a place that feels like home.
I want opportunities to thrive.
I want access within my city.
I want to preserve what matters most.
I want to be able to create and innovate.
People in the traditional silos, or multiple lanes, have to allow their work to intersect and integrate. Individuals, branches and departments of city government are, at every turn, required to now notice if their work moves the city in the chosen direction.
The work of choosing will not end. With the implementation of The City Plan, it continues daily.
Choosing accountability
In my lifetime, the prime criticism of bureaucracy, whether in the private or public sector, is that “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” We criticize city government, for example, for not being coordinated enough. When they make efforts to integrate their work, to coordinate their work better, it is our responsibility to acknowledge that we want our governments to perform better. When they need to organize themselves better to serve the city better, we need to pay attention to the results rather than how they’re organizing themselves.
Our city government employees are stepping into a new realm of reflection and evaluating their work and the results. And to help them, The City Plan set thirteen targets and thirty strategic measures (go to pages 11 and 12 of The City Plan).
They won’t always get this right—and it’s not all on them. The work of improving our cities is a complex endeavour, not a simple one, that we all influence. Our familiar, linear ways of assuming cause and effect are often irrelevant and irresponsible. When we don’t get the results we want, we will have to inquire about why and adjust our actions. And the inquiry will rest on the role of our local governments and citizens alike and community and business organizations.
Accountability
Accountability and blame are not the same. Accountability is knowing who is responsible for what and expecting those who are responsible for accepting that responsibility. Accountability is about ownership and initiative, so I expect our city governments to declare what they aim to do and why and lay out how they intend to accomplish what they desire to do. And along the way, as they hit and miss the mark, I expect accountability: know the actions taken and their impacts and be willing to inquire about what worked and did not, and why. And then be willing to shift and adjust, so we stay on course.
Improving our cities’ quality of life is not on government alone, so I also expect governments, citizens, community, and business organizations to step up and share in this accountability. There are four things to pay attention to in our collective practice of accountability: responsibility, blame, guilt and shame.
Responsibility
Here are a few definitions of responsibility from the Cambridge dictionary:
Responsibility (noun)
Something that it is your job or duty to deal with
Blame for something that has happened
Good judgement and the ability to act correctly and make decisions on your own
Responsibility is a way of being—good judgement and act correctly, make decisions on my own—and the ability to acknowledge that something happened as a result of my action or inaction. When we know each other’s responsibilities and experience each other as responsible, we can work well as a team, knowing how and when to lean on each other. As appropriate, we each accept the blame for things having gone awry.
Blame
Here are some definitions of blame according to Merriam-Webster:
Blame (transitive verb)
To find fault with (censure)
To hold responsible, to place responsibility for
Blame (noun)
An expression of disapproval or reproach (censure)
A state of being blameworthy (culpability)
Responsibility for something believed to deserve censure
Blame is a mechanism to assign accountability to myself or others when something has gone wrong. It can be either acknowledgement of our roles in things gone wrong or placing blame on others.
It takes great effort to watch for those instances when I need to take responsibility—and the blame—for things gone wrong. If my default is to externalize blame on others, I deflect blame from myself. In the short term, this may feel good, but it erodes my trustworthiness and ability to work well with others in the longer term.
Guilt and shame
Responsibility and blame may lead to guilt, defined by Cambridge Dictionary as:
Guilt (noun)
A feeling of worry or unhappiness because you have done something wrong
A fact of having done something wrong or committed a crime
Guilt can be the fact of having done something wrong and also the feeling of anxiety for having done something wrong. This anxiety can lead us to avoid assuming responsibility or blame, always assigning blame to others.
How we handle our feelings of guilt, over-internalizing or over-externalizing or finding a healthy balance dictates how well we as individuals, organizations, and cities hold ourselves accountable.
The biggest obstacle to healthy accountability is shame. Here are some definitions from Merriam-Webster:
Shame (noun)
A painful memory caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety
A condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute
Shame (verb)
To bring shame to (disgrace)
To put to shame by outdoing
To cause to feel shame
To force by causing to feel guilty
Shame is both something we “do” to ourselves (if we don’t acknowledge and process the grief we experience) and do to others when we engage in actions that humiliate others for their mistakes.
Guilt, while uncomfortable, is healthy. It may well be what holds us accountable to ourselves. When guilt goes too far, when we humiliate ourselves and others, we are in the realm of shame, and it’s not healthy. We can destroy ourselves when guilt takes us too far, and we can destroy others when we shame them. Cultivating shame is to humiliate, cause intense distress because of having done something wrong.
When shame is in the mix, it will impede any group of people who want to move in the same direction, to create a world for themselves that meets people’s needs and works well. Shame provides equal opportunities to erode the best intentions, either with the old way of doing things (The Ways) or with the new way of doing things (The City Plan).
New ways of organizing for city movement
The City Plan removes the familiar lanes in which people like to work. It also removes the familiar lanes for people outside city hall, who use those lanes to navigate bureaucracy. It is important to remember that the bureaucracy remains; it is necessary as an organizing structure to coordinate the work of thousands of people. (For many, the arrival of The City Plan changes nothing in their work.)
Here’s what’s different:
Identify accurate accountability. It is unreasonable to expect a small group of people within a city government to be responsible for an entire government, let alone the wider city, to reach climate targets, for example. It is more accurate to say that “city government will look after ‘X.’”
Share accountability across the organization to enable the recognition that multiple people, branches and departments are responsible for reaching the targets. Further, organizations and citizens outside city government are also responsible.
Facilitate integration between projects, allowing projects to align and even support each other. Not only will this let the “left hand know what the right hand is doing,” it will allow each project to be wiser. Impacts, both positive and negative, can be better anticipated and addressed.
Welcome the intersections between many interests and values in city life. Acknowledge unintended impacts and make adjustments, and foster creative ways to meet diverse needs.
None of this was disallowed by The Ways documents, but this way of working was not required to be successful under their guidance. Working this way is now amplified, more explicit with The City Plan, and if we don’t behave in these ways, we won’t move in the direction we choose. One thing has the power to bring The City Plan to its knees: shame.
Shame gets in the way
Outside and inside city hall, we rage around with blame and shame. When something goes wrong or not as intended, we look for others to blame. When it comes to shame, we look for clear handles to assign blame to someone else. And if there are no clear handles, we put blame wherever we like.
The City Plan asks us all, within and outside of city hall, to grow in our capacity to experience and feel guilt, to grow in our capacity to take responsibility. When we shame ourselves, at the encouragement of others our ourselves, we erode our ability to be accountable. To move together, in a direction where we preserve what matters most, have equitable access to the city around us, are able to thrive, create and innovate, and where we feel we belong and feel at home, we need to hear each other.
We need to hear what is working and what is not working, and we need to hear and support ideas to improve our cities, the places we call home. But when shame runs the show, we only hear pain, not what’s possible.
And what’s possible is only accessible when we each explore our accountability, alone and together.
Reflection
What ideas and efforts do you see around you that are wanting to weave themselves together?
What can you do to support the integration of those ideas and efforts?
What can you release or let go of to allow ideas and efforts to flow together better?
“Vivamus pellentesque vitae neque at vestibulum. Donec efficitur mollis dui vel pharetra.”