CONFERENCE REPORT: MANAGING PERFORMANCE
High-Pressure Performance
Lessons from the front lines of government
AUSTIN, Texas — The ideal of "performance under pressure" can easily shrink into clichéd advice: Be prepared. Have a plan in place. Use data to make decisions. Think outside the box.
But too often, government struggles to convert that advice into action.
At Governing's annual Managing Performance conference, held in Austin this fall, public-sector leaders from across the country discussed the challenges — and shared their experiences — of managing through tough times.
 | |
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak | |
Coping with Crisis
Few came better equipped to discuss performance under pressure than a set of local leaders from the city of Minneapolis. When the I-35W bridge collapsed there during rush hour one evening in August 2007, it was a multi-faceted crisis that would challenge any community. But Minneapolis has received high praise for the way it handled the disaster. City officials reacted swiftly and efficiently, with an expertly coordinated response on everything from emergency search-and-rescue to family counseling to handling the hundreds of local, national and international media outlets that descended on the scene.
It was, by all accounts, a nearly perfect response to a completely unexpected emergency situation. How did this happen? Turns out it was the result of years of preparation and training.
From the Conference
The team of Minneapolis officials, led by Mayor R.T. Rybak, spoke about their city's experiences preparing for and dealing with a disaster. Rybak was elected mayor in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks. (He won the mayoral primary on September 11, 2001.) So when he assumed his office and established his leadership team, emergency preparedness was a top concern, as it was for cities across the country.
But while cities everywhere were talking about their disaster preparedness and first-response capabilities, Rybak and his folks actually did something.
They responded to an invitation from the Federal Emergency Management Administration to be trained in crisis response. And only a few months after becoming mayor, early in 2002, Rybak took 60 city employees (along with 10 county employees and 10 state workers) to the National Emergency Training Center in Mount Weather, Virginia, for a Minneapolis-specific course.
A few months later, in mid 2002, the city launched a five-year, $60 million investment in improving its emergency response capabilities. About $20 million was used to build an interoperable communications system for first responders. Other new initiatives included an emergency operations center, security cameras located throughout the city and — most important — a well-articulated and carefully thought-out action plan for how to handle a catastrophe.
That initiative was completed in July 2007 — one month before the collapse of the I-35W bridge.
 | |
Minneapolis' Rocco Forte | |
Part of the particular challenge of the bridge collapse, noted Rocco Forte, the city's emergency management director, was that the incident involved every level of government. "Here we had a federal bridge, maintained by the state, that fell into a county river, with the city of Minneapolis on both sides."
In all, Forte said, some 140 agencies were involved in the response effort. But the city's preparations allowed it to coordinate all the different players.
"Five years ago," Forte said, "there's no doubt in my mind that we would have stopped and looked around and said, 'OK, who's in charge here?' But now we were able to immediately identify who's in command and put our first responders in place."
In addition to learning how to respond during the first critical hours after a disaster, Rybak said, Minneapolis' training and preparation enabled it to address other, longer-term considerations. In such a crisis, agencies such as public works and family counseling can be a critical — but often overlooked — part of the response. "Everyone always talks about the first responders," Rybak said, "and they should: Those are the people who are risking their lives on the front lines. But we also need to remember the second responders, the third responders and the fourth responders."
Combating Crime
Not every crisis that challenges governments is as immediate or dramatic as a bridge collapse. But those more complex, ongoing crises can sometimes prove even more difficult to manage. Just ask Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton. In the 1990s, Bratton led a historic turnaround of New York City's decades-long rise in crime. Now he's doing the same thing for the city of Los Angeles.
In cases like these, where a city is facing a sustained and seemingly insurmountable crisis, Bratton says there's one tool that can transform the way a government responds to such pressure: data.
Gathering information to describe the problem and existing response and then using that data to push for accountability are essential to improving performance, Bratton declared. But you have to be sure you're collecting the right data. "In government, we have a tendency to measure everything and drive everyone crazy with data, rather than measuring what matters," he said. "There's never been a more distressed time in our nation's history. The importance of measuring what matters is going to be even more critical."
 | |
Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton | |
Bratton's record of success underscores how the use of real-time, specific data can enable a government to manage through a crisis and improve its effective response to the underlying problem. The revolutionary CompStat program he implemented in New York City used data to drive an overhaul of the way police addressed crime. In just 27 months on the job, Bratton reduced New York's epic crime rates by dramatic percentages. Felony crime was reduced by 39 percent. Homicides fell 50 percent. Just as important, the data-based culture he instituted remains in place a dozen years later. Bratton is now applying the same data-driven approach to crime in L.A., where he's been chief of police since 2002. In the six years since Bratton took the job, homicides are down 44 percent, robberies are down 23 percent and overall violent crime is down 49 percent. Gang homicides have fallen by 57 percent, and overall gang crime is down 25 percent.
"It's working," he told conference attendees. "We do have the capability to really make improvements, and the reason we have that capability is because we have a way of measuring our success."
But CompStat isn't just about collecting data. It's a framework for changing the culture of a government to being acting comfortable acting on data and holding people accountable. The tenets Bratton developed for CompStat form the backbone of a responsive, information-based approach to governing through tough times. "It takes timely, accurate intelligence, rapid deployment of resources, effective tactics and relentless follow-through to make sure you're accomplishing your goals," Bratton said.
Guts and Goals
The information-based approach of CompStat enables government to do more than just fight crime. Data analysis is a tool that can help states and localities manage any number of challenges. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley knows that first-hand. Prior to being elected governor, O'Malley served as the mayor of Baltimore for two terms, from 1999 to 2007.
As mayor, O'Malley adapted Bratton's information-focused approach to help Baltimore tackle a number of pressing issues. Baltimore had some of the nation's highest crime and drug-addiction rates, coupled with a crushing population loss. "Too often, this left us a legacy of underperforming schools, underperforming and unresponsive city services, littered streets and alleys, and thousands of vacant buildings and, worse, a lot of vacant hearts. In Baltimore, a city with limited resources, we learned very quickly that progress was only possible if we took control of the compass and if we started measuring performance," he said.
"We felt that if the NYPD could successfully use CompStat to put crimes on the map and deploy police officers to those dots, then data-mapping technology could also work for everything else that our government does." The result — CitiStat — helped turn around Baltimore's 40-year downturn. By the time O'Malley left Baltimore in 2007, the city's violent crime had fallen 40 percent. Baltimore was filling 98 percent of its potholes within 48 hours. And O'Malley's team was cleaning up the city's streets as well: CompStat helped them pinpoint and reclaim more than 5,900 vacant homes for redevelopment, and the city eliminated its lingering backlog of cleaning trash-filled properties.
Now O'Malley is applying the same approach for the state of Maryland, through a program he's titled StateStat. It's already resulted in a 20 percent reduction in homicides across the state, as well as progress combating Medicaid fraud, reducing state overtime and cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
But O'Malley isn't shy about the demands that this approach places on state and local leaders. It calls for courage and a willingness to be held publicly accountable for results. "You have to have the guts to measure performance openly and transparently," O'Malley said, "and the guts to declare goals."