James Anderson: How to Encourage Innovation in Local Government

Chuck is joined by James Anderson, head of the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. Under his leadership, the program has helped thousands of cities worldwide embrace an innovative, people-based approach to local governance.

Today, Chuck and James discuss why local governments matter now more than ever. Then they explore ways that residents, advocates, and organizations can encourage city leaders to embrace innovation.

• Click here for the transcript. (Lightly edited for readability.)

  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. Today I'm going to chat with someone a little different than we usually have. Not an author, not a rabble rouser -- maybe a little bit of a rabble rouser. We'll find out. I've got an opportunity today to chat with James Anderson. He is the head of the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. Jim's worked now for more than a decade with 1000s of mayors and municipal advisors, bolstering their problem solving capacity across the world, and as a trusted advisor to them. Jim, this is the first time you and I have met and had an opportunity to chat. I'm really excited about this. I'm of course, familiar with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the work that you all are doing, and I'm excited for our audience to get to know you as well. Welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.

  James Anderson 1:02

  It is great to be with you today.

  Chuck Marohn 1:04

  Can you talk a little bit about Bloomberg Philanthropies? Give me the overall mission and the vibe, and then let's talk a little bit also about the work that you're doing specifically, if you don't mind.

  James Anderson 1:16

  It's very nice to be with you. And it's great to speak with the Strong Towns community. So we started this work nearly 15 years ago. We are the only major foundation in the world that is funded and overseen by somebody who sat in the seat of a mayor. So Mike, I think, has a very unique perspective on the opportunity of towns and cities and also the incredible challenges that local governments face to do big things. And he asked us to set up a set of programs that focused on beefing up the problem solving capacities of city halls, originally around the country but now around the world. Cities matter so much. You know this as well as anybody. For innovation, for growth, for opportunity for young people and old people. More and more of the world's population is living in cities. So the decisions made by local governments matter more than ever. At the same time, local governments are hugely undercapacitated. They are stretched thin from a staff perspective. They're still struggling with silos and analog tools in our digital world, and so there's a huge need to upskill and reinforce the ability of these cities to set ambitious goals, to do innovative things, and to deliver results that really matter in people's lives. So over the past 12, 13 years, we've built a series of programs that are focused on building up the capacity of local governments. We focus on leadership. How do we make sure that mayors, Chiefs of Staff, budget directors, HR directors, procurement leads, everybody who has their hands on the lever of power understands what a 21st Century job description looks like, what it means to be ambitious and to lead in those seats? We make sure that they have access to world-class leadership development training, we focus a lot on the innovation and data capabilities of local governments. And we do a tremendous amount to beef up data teams, innovation teams, so that city halls can count things, can detect trends earlier, can set ambitious targets and measure their way to results and unlock creativity within city halls. Finally, we do a lot around ideas. We have big global ideas competitions where we invite city halls to partner with community actors to focus on a big challenge in that community and show us what they've got. Each time we run the competition, we award millions of dollars to help those cities test those ideas, and then we help spread the best of them. So this programming, I think last year, reached somewhere close to 900 municipalities globally. 700 of those are in the United States. And so that's sort of the thrust of what we're doing.

  Chuck Marohn 4:26

  Talk a little bit about how you got involved with this. Who are you, James Anderson? How did you get involved with Bloomberg Philanthropies, with this work? I think you've got an interesting story. I'd like people to hear it.

  James Anderson 4:42

  Well, first of all, I'm a Montanan. I come from Missoula, Montana, that's where my roots are. And came out to New York in late 1990s to work on LGBT student issues. I started working for a very small organization that was focused on protecting gay and lesbian students from discrimination and bullying in schools. It was really cutting edge work back in the day, and I was one of those people who really looked at local governments as the problem. You know, when kids were getting harassed and when discrimination was running rampant, there were very rarely mayors and local legislators standing up for these young people. And so I really had a cynical view about local government, and did not think local government was a place that that took care of vulnerable people. So when I got a call from a recruiter in 2002 right after Mike had been elected as mayor, and they started talking to me about joining the team at homeless services, I honestly was like, "You have the wrong guy." But they convinced me that they were trying to create a different kind of team within city hall, a team of people who were advocates and who were interested in shifting these systems from the inside. And I, of course, was really intrigued at the opportunity to work on homelessness in New York City. It was an epic, massive issue, and a huge challenge. I took a leap of faith and came in, and what I watched over that next four years was an incredible commissioner under the guidance and direction of Mike Bloomberg, to fix what was really screwed up about the way we were approaching homelessness in this city, to change the incentives of the system, to shift the way that the poorest people in the city interacted with the with city government, and to change it from a shameful, punitive experience to something that was respectful. And I saw local government with new eyes. Mike then asked me to come into City Hall, and I served as his communications director for the next four years. That, again, was incredible. This was 2006, the moment when cities were coming out as global actors on issues like climate change and asserting a different kind of authority and results on topics that national governments were failing to get traction on. And I was completely compelled by that. And then Mike asked me to come up here to the foundation in 2010 and kick off this work. So it's a long path from Missoula, Montana, to becoming a believer, and then a real supporter of the role of local governments in solving the most important problems we face, and really understanding that not every city hall is built like Mike's, like New York City, and there's really an important role for philanthropy to help raise the ambition of city halls and then give them the tools and the resources that they're not otherwise getting, so that they can our bigger solutions.

  Chuck Marohn 7:54

  I feel like I'm going to have 1000 diversions today. I'm going to try to use our time wisely, but I've got to ask you this. One of the tensions that I see a lot in our work and in work with people who work with cities is that there's a New York experience that rhymes with a San Francisco experience, or a Chicago experience, or an LA or Houston experience. And then there's a Missoula experience. You know, I live in a small town in central Minnesota. I see a lot of similarities here. I see a lot of like overlap. A lot of people that I interact with says these places are completely different. They have nothing in common. You can't take one thing from one place and bring it to another. You've lived in this cross spectrum of places. What do you bring from Missoula to New York City that makes you effective at what you do? What do you get out of living in New York City that helps you do this work when you're out in a Beaverton, Washington, or Oregon, for example.

  James Anderson 8:59

  I am probably one of the least cynical New Yorkers you're going to meet. And I attribute that 1,000% to having grown up in Missoula, Montana. Your question about, what from New York to other places? In many ways, I think it's Mike's experience and what I saw in terms of the role of the mayor to raise the ambition of the system. That is uniquely a job for a mayor. Both to say to civil servants, "Are we really satisfied with a 1% decrease in unemployment or 1% decrease in murder rates? Shouldn't we be pushing ourselves for more?" To say to the public, "You should ask for more from us. You should insist that we run schools that give our kids a quality education." So that idea of raising the ambition of the system, I think, is the job of mayors everywhere, whether they are strong mayors. Whether they're weak mayors, whether they're big city mayors, whether they are small town mayors. I think what I learned from Mike Bloomberg was City Hall is a platform for problem solving. We didn't solve every problem on our own. We invited the private sector, we invited civic actors, and we understood that part of the role of government is to be a platform that allows anybody who has a problem or who has a solution to be part of it and to feel engaged and activated and enabled by local government. And again, I think these are the ideas we're really promoting around the country. I think this is how the good mayors see the job. This is the way that Fort St Lucie in Florida or Boise, Idaho, are thinking about the role of local government and the role of the mayor.

  Chuck Marohn 10:52

  Let me build on that, because I do feel like there's this tension that I see a lot in City Hall. And, you know, one of our six core principles has to do with the role of government, and we actually explicitly say local government is not the lowest level of a hierarchy of governments. It's not like the algae of government. It is the highest level of coordination for people working collaboratively in a place. What is your view of the role of local government in this kind of ecosystem of private sector, public sector, federal government, state government, regional government, local small business corporations, global corporations. Where does local government in your mind fit into this ecosystem of both problem and solution?

  James Anderson 11:40

  I think local government is the first line and the last mile in solving almost every major challenge that we face today. I think the climate community woke up to that when the IRA was passed, and we suddenly realized that all implementation comes down to local actors. We talk about local government as being the JV of government to our great detriment. Certainly that is the way that it looks if you follow the money and if you follow the news media. The fact that local governments are under invested in and under appreciated for the critical role they play is is a widespread phenomenon and a huge part of our challenge. I think of local governments as an institutional layer. It is an institutional layer that is global, number one. It is an institutional layer that has a huge advantage in that the people who work in it are actually from the community that the institution serves. That is a glorious advantage that local governments have. It is a layer of an institutional layer that so far has not been ensnarled in the partisan gridlock that has stopped other levels of government from functioning. And it is a layer of an institutional layer that is very concerned and focused on upgrading the tools it uses to solve problems, with a real orientation around people-centered policy making. This is the breakthrough that we are seeing in city halls all over the country, all over the world, and I think it is a big part of the way we solve the institutional crisis that we see at every other layer. If you think about city halls, they are using design, and they're moving beyond the sort of qualitative data to get into the community, to talk to the woman at the homeless shelter system, to understand why the existing service is not working for her, and to build solutions backwards from that. That's the answer. That's the way that we put people at the heart of policy making and program design and those methods and tools we've been promoting for the last decade, and they are increasingly becoming the norm in city halls all over the place. I think that local governments will actually show other levels of government how to right the wrongs and rebuild trust with the people that they intend to serve. Because of those advantages and because of that orientation.

  Chuck Marohn 14:20

  I share your enthusiasm. Let me give you a pushback and let you respond to it. I walk into a lot of city halls and I see an org chart personified. I see that we got a finance department, we have an HR department, we have a planning department, we have a public works department, we have a parks department. Never shall they meet or cross. They all have their own fiefdoms, their own thing. The large ones run like the military would have run in World War Two. The smaller ones tend to embody some of that hierarchy and silo mentality as well. This is, in the private sector, the antithesis of innovation. How do you look to local government as part of the answer, part of the dynamism, part of the innovation that's going to help us in that last mile, that first front line of public service, when a lot of the structure of local government is really antiquated?

  James Anderson 15:32

  Well, I mean, this is not a problem solely with local government. This is a problem with government at every level, which is that we're still operating with a Fordist delivery model. We're still very siloed.

  Chuck Marohn 15:49

  A Henry Ford, assembly line model, yeah.

  James Anderson 15:52

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Which is antithetical to the way that problems actually exist in our society, which are horizontal and cut across these agencies. You can't solve poverty in New York City by looking at the welfare department. You have to be thinking about growth. You have to be thinking about schools. You have to be looking in a cross cutting way. So governments at every single level are still organized in ways that don't align with their purpose. What I would say about local government is that, while that is that remains a huge issue, I think local governments are also at the front line of experimenting with different methods and models to disrupt that. Innovation offices and innovation teams are one way that they're doing that. These are now in widespread use across cities of every size. Boise, Idaho, is one of my favorite examples. Mayor Lauren McLean came into the Bloomberg-Harvard city leadership initiative. She went into the innovation track, and she has done so much to unlock innovation from across her organization. Frontline ideas competitions, teams assembled around different problems that cut across silos, innovation funds to pilot ideas that wouldn't get funding from within the strict sort of funding silos that the City Council and the government is organized around. So I think local governments are experimenting with ways to get out of those boxes and to bust through those silos. You're absolutely right that we do not have a single local government, nor a single state government I would say, that has redefined that sort of organizational chart and organizational model. That is a task still undone. But I do think the level of experimentation and the willingness to try different things at the local level is where we'll begin to get to those longer term fixes.

  Chuck Marohn 17:58

  Can you talk a little bit about the innovation team model? Because I'm intimately familiar with Memphis. A while ago, I want to say 2012, 2013 they had a really kind of old school, siloed, dysfunctional government. But they also had a mayor who wanted to do things differently, who cared passionately, who was from South Memphis, who really deeply cared about the community. And that mayor creates with Bloomberg this mayor's innovation team, and they did some of the most revolutionary work, empowering people working with neighborhoods. I've looked at it as a model that other cities can learn from. My guess is that you've got many more examples than Memphis, probably some more recent that have even pushed the envelope more. Can you talk a little bit about what are you trying to do with this model and give us maybe some success stories?

  James Anderson 19:04

  So the first thing I would say is, this is a fun story. When Mike was in City Hall, he funded at least three or four different sort of innovation programs in City Hall. He had a poverty innovation action lab, where he raised philanthropic funding to test new models to address poverty. He set up an innovation team in the education department, because that was his top priority, and he wanted to make sure that they were innovating new pedagogical approaches that met and sort of advanced the structural reforms undertaken. He created a big data analytics team, the first one done by any major city, to try and get data, to talk to each other across different silos, to see problems in new ways. I came out of local government, started looking around, and mayors everywhere were like, "We want one of those. We want to do some of that innovation stuff." Memphis was one of the first five grants that we gave. And Mayor AC Martin, at the time said, "I understand that the problems we face cut across sectors and cut across silos, and I have no way to bring people together in a meaningful way, to think outside the box and drive those solutions." He hired an incredible leader out of the military to come in and run the program.

  Chuck Marohn 20:26

  Doug.

  James Anderson 20:26

  Yeah, that's right. Well, Doug who has gone on to serve in a bunch of different capacities over time, and they pioneered a lot of new thinking by bringing diverse expertise into the room. I think one of the hangovers from the Progressive Era reforms and the Fordist model that we have in place is that city governments and governments at every level think that the expertise is in the agency experts. That's why we hire them and why we pay them the big bucks, quote, unquote. Part of the innovation model is saying that good ideas and expertise lives in your community. It lives in your civic sector. It lives in your neighborhoods. Part of your job is to go out and to invite it in and to blend with it and to mold it and to uplift good ideas. That's what the innovation teams really do. I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that a really important part of the model is how they use data to help ground diverse actors in a shared understanding of what the problem is. I remember going into another of our first cities. I won't name them, but the mayor said to me, "We don't have a gang problem. The reason we have a big murder rate is because the police department is not considered legitimate. It's been corrupt. It's been problematic. People don't trust the cops, and therefore we have a high murder rate." And the innovation team went in and brought all the data together from across all of the different agencies, and we were able to show the mayor that, in fact, all of the murders were being perpetuated by or enacted upon small groups of affiliated young people who knew each other. It was a gang problem. It wasn't a Colombian gang problem, but it was about local groups of people who were working together and were in groups of friends, and that radically shifted the solution set. All of a sudden that Mayor could look at all of the evidence based group violence reduction strategies and bring them into his city. And that made a huge difference. So the innovation teams pool data and bring data to reveal the problem in new and different ways. They bring in folks outside of the agencies to think outside the box, to think in bigger ways about the solution set. They then help City Halls test stuff and take risks to try things to see if it works. If yes, great. Move forward. If it doesn't, shut it down, and feel good that you shut down something that doesn't work. That's the method that we have promoted. We've now funded innovation teams in about 100 communities around the world. But Chuck, what's exciting to me about that is that it's moved so far beyond our grant funding. There are innovation officers and groups operating in cities all over the world that use those same methods. When I started this work, if you said "innovation" to one mayor, he'd have one definition. The next mayor, totally different definition. We've tried to build a field around how you solve public problems more effectively, shared language, shared methodology, just like you do with Strong Towns in your approach. We're trying to get people to use the same tools the stuff that works. You don't need to throw spaghetti at the wall. You don't need to innovate the job of innovation. We actually know how to do this well now. Really it's spreading because the transaction costs are reducing, and people understand that this is a proven model that just works.

  Chuck Marohn 24:09

  So let me ask you about this tension that we run into all the time. We created this tool called the Finance Decoder. It takes publicly available data and rearranges it so that people can see the long-term trajectory of their city's balance sheet. We made it available for free. We've got groups all over the country that are putting this stuff together. They bring it to City Hall. City Hall freaks out. We put together this thing called the Crash Analysis Studio, the idea that when there's a fatal crash or a traumatic crash on a local street, we assemble a cross disciplinary team. We go out and take a look at it, and we talk about all the different factors that led to it, as a way to change common knowledge and understanding on our street of what safety means. We see local groups embracing this, but we see City Halls really scared. If I had to put my finger on it, they're scared of having blame pointed at them. How do you navigate this difficult social conversation, difficult cultural conversation, where we say, "Here's data, here's information. It doesn't always paint the rosiest picture. It maybe helps us see with more clarity." How do you navigate that without people feeling defensive, like "Oh, you're attacking local government." How do you get people who are in the middle of the storm to embrace this often difficult introspection. I feel like Memphis as a model in leadership, in terms of asking hard questions of themselves, acknowledging things that they had maybe done wrong, looking at ways to do things differently, were so inspiring to me. But part of what's also going on in Memphis is they could see rock bottom in a lot of ways. I mean, it's one thing to have a conversation in a Memphis or Detroit or, you know, I've seen Shreveport do some amazing things, Buffalo. These are cities that are struggling. Go to a city that is a little bit higher up on the affluent scale, and a lot of the reaction is about circling the wagons, as opposed to saying, "Okay, we're going to try something here. It might not work." It's more like, "We don't really want criticism, so we're not going to try it." How do you how do you navigate that? Because I know you have to navigate that all the time.

  James Anderson 26:34

  First of all, it's about positionality. We're working the inside game to help local governments see the value of partnerships with community advocates, community partners, civic leaders and so on and so forth. That's the way that we position ourself and position our support. We are for those mayors. We are building state capacity. We are helping them move their agenda forward. That's the way that our programs come into those communities. You're coming in, perhaps, as an advocacy organization.

  Chuck Marohn 27:15

  Sure.

  James Anderson 27:16

  And so that's a choice, and that's a great choice that raises awareness. You, of course, can appreciate that local government is constantly under attack. It's a risk averse environment. Local politics are horrendous and they may not welcome that, even as they appreciate, on the inside, getting the data and understanding things in new and different ways. But I think if you're asking, "How do we change our relationship with local governments," it may be about going in with the tool before the incident, and finding those internal champions who also want to use the tools.

  Chuck Marohn 27:55

  Let me say this a little bit better. I apologize. Local government is a risk averse environment, and a lot of that is built up of the fact that they're constantly under assault. So I was in the army, and the worst rank in the army was sergeant, because as a sergeant, everybody told you what you had to do, and then you had to turn around and boss like privates and specialists to do stupid things. So you had no agency to make decisions, because everything was handed to you, but you were charged with carrying out the dumbest orders possible. Cities function as like the sergeant in our system, often. They can't really tell state and federal government, "You guys are messing this up for us. We would rather have this and this and this. Why are you forcing us to do this?" But then everybody in their community is mad at them for not delivering on this and not delivering on that. It's almost an impossible situation. I understand why they become risk averse. How do you help them get beyond that, to try new things, to experiment, to put themselves out there a little bit. Is that a communications thing where you say, "Okay, we're going to try this and it might not work." Is it a internal cultural thing? Because if we want to break out of that silo and hierarchy, if we want to actually get to an innovative mindset, that fear aversion is the obstacle that has to be overcome. How do you overcome that?

  James Anderson 29:30

  I think it's a work in progress. I don't think there's an easy answer to what you're saying. But I'm sort of reminded that, about a decade ago, there was a new breed of nonprofits that organize themselves under the banner of "social entrepreneurs." And they sort of saw themselves as the new cut of nonprofits, more impact oriented, more evidence based. And I remember going to one of their events, and really hearing how much frustration they had that they couldn't get local governments to listen to them and to buy their services. I remember my feedback to them was that local governments are focused on solving priority problems, and if you are helping a mayor solve a priority problem, your likelihood of of getting involved and becoming a trusted partner increases dramatically. So again, I think so many mayors are focused on safety. No mayor wants to be beaten up publicly. And I'm a big fan of advocacy. I was born an advocate, so I don't ever want to diminish the role of turning up the heat and putting pressure on local officials. It's vitally important, particularly if they're not paying attention. I think there are moments also when doors open and they want trusted allies who can help them make better decisions. And to be able to use your tools and pull them in to help the transport departments make better decisions about street safety might be a goal for for for you. So again, I think this is not easy. I don't want to minimize how hard it is. That risk averse culture runs so deep. But I do think it's about relationships. It's about getting in there and meeting with that transport director, not when the fire's hot, not when the lights are on, but when they're having a boring, regular Friday afternoon. And you can go in and just say, "I think we have some tools that can help you do your job better." I mean, again, I think that's one path. That may not always be the right path, but I do think there's an openness to that. It's about trust and about relationships. These are real people who live in the community too.

  Chuck Marohn 31:53

  Absolutely. I mean to me, I'm interested in how you all approach this. I think the easy answer is, "Well, we come in with lots of money so we can lubricate the conversation away." But I think there's more to it than that. I've seen more to it than that in what you do.

  James Anderson 32:11

  We don't always come in with money, but we do come in with expertise and with capacity building and with leadership development, and these are things the mayors and their teams desperately want. You know, you you have a group of people. They are so underinvested in. There's no human capital development that happens within the C suites of city halls. Most of them are starved for training. We give them training on how to lead ambitiously. We give them support to better use and harness data to understand problems. So again, we don't come in as advocates. That's not the role that we've chosen. We come in as trusted allies who are helping them build the capacity they need to address the community's priority problems. And that's why our programs, I want to say, upwards of 70% of the cities in our program this past year are under 150,000 in size. We have Republican mayors, independent mayors, Democratic mayors, left wing, progressive mayors. We run the spectrum. They all can come into the Bloomberg program of support and get the capacity building they need to go back and be responsive to their community. So we're not positioning ourselves as an advocacy organization, and I think that that's a really important part of how we work.

  Chuck Marohn 33:37

  Can we talk a little bit about that political spectrum? I'm pretty proud of the fact that we've gotten to September, when this is going to come out, and I don't think I have mentioned our president's name once on this podcast this year, which is maybe the only podcast on urban issues that hasn't done that. We're not involved in state and federal politics. We focus on cities. I found the fascinating thing is that city hall tends to strip out all those partisan divides. There may be partisan leanings that show up in conversations, but when the door closes and the cameras go off or the mics go off, people roll up their sleeves and want to get to work. Can you talk just a little bit about your experience and maybe how our national dysfunctional government conversation is going to be best addressed at the local level? I mean, how do we make progress today when progress from a top down seems so hard.

  James Anderson 34:54

  When has progress from the top down been easy? Is the question back to you. Cities have been at the forefront of figuring out, how we move forward on issues. You know, in the early 2000s it was climate, it was the migration crisis, it was covid and the challenges with national and state leadership that we saw there, and the way that trickled down to local problem solving. I think across all of these different periods of time and different presidencies, local governments have always, frankly, been on their own for the better part, with a big caveat that the last administration surely pushed a lot of funding down to local governments, which was historic and really important. I think local governments have always been at the forefront of solving these problems. When I talk to mayors today, what I am surprised and encouraged by is how much they are focused on "There are opportunities today that were not there yesterday, and we need to figure out how to seize them." Because that's their job. Mike always says they're not allowed to do the grandstanding. It's just not in the job description. People actually don't want their mayors speaking out on every national issue of the day. We've done polling on that. People in cities of conservative, Democrat, every size, every sort of political leaning, they want their mayors to speak out on national issues if it is immediately of interest to them and to what's happening on their streets. That's when they want to hear their mayor speak up. They don't want their mayors running campaigns around the country otherwise. And so I think that orientation around the street and around fixing the problems that are most near and dear. You know, every mayor in the country right now is focused on affordability. You've talked a lot about housing. Housing is the number one issue that we hear every mayor everywhere talking about so, they're trying to figure out, how this changing landscape creates opportunities. And I don't think they feel they have the privilege of focusing on what's different or being taken away. They have to figure out a path forward.

  Chuck Marohn 37:16

  Jim, one of the things that I've seen you all talk about is a theory of change that treats residents not as customers, but -- in a real Jane Jacobs sense -- as co-creators of a community. Can you drill down a little bit into that? Because I still go into city halls and hear them say, "The public is the customer, and we got to be about customer service, and the customer is always right, and we have a customer mindset." And I always cringe, because I feel like it creates a gap between the local government and the people in the community that really should be part of building the place. How does Bloomberg Philanthropies look at the role of the citizen?

  James Anderson 38:03

  I think as citizens. As residents and as community members who are vested in the city getting things right. And I think we miss that if we reduce the people that live in our communities to customers. There's been a whole explosion in the sort of tools and techniques that policy makers can use to center people in their program design and policy making work. Tools like human centered design, ethnographic inquiry are going out into the community. Again, street homelessness is an issue that so many cities around the country are dealing with. I worked on this issue when I was in New York City government. It wasn't totally unusual for us back in the day to feel that we had the answers and the knowledge around what was working or what wasn't working in the system, in the room with us. I think 20 years later, city halls are going into the street. They're talking with the guys on the street. They're understanding, in a very different way, what the barriers to service are and why the stuff that we keep throwing at them doesn't work. Being able to bring that back and to do something with it and to incorporate that feedback into policy making is the state of the art today. You know, in the gov tech world, that's called user design.

  Chuck Marohn 39:39

  User interface, right?

  James Anderson 39:40

  User interface. But I think what's amazing is that's leaped out of the IT world, and into the mainstream policy conversations that we're having. We now see that skill set existing, not just in innovation teams, but in agencies themselves. A commissioner in a department of education or a Department of Transport or whatever is hiring those skill sets in, because that sort of deeper understanding of not just revealed needs, but of deep needs, is really important to surface when you're creating or improving policy at the at the local government level. So I think there's that. I also think more broadly, the way that we are thinking about participation is changing and growing. I say that knowing that we still have a long way to go, and there's many city halls that are still very rote about the way that they engage communities on issues. But there's seedlings growing in city halls all over the country, where they realize the kind of rote community notification and feedback mechanisms that they're using are just grossly insufficient, and in fact encourage some of the problematic behavior that just stops stuff rather than improve stuff. I think that this is all an area where we're going to see a lot of innovation and evolution over the next few years, and it's important. It's overdue.

  Chuck Marohn 41:16

  There's one strain of this, which is a really often about trying to get more feedback and more people involved. I don't think those people are wrong. I'm not enthused about it as much as I am. And I'll point to Jeanette Sadik Khan and the whole experience on Broadway there in New York City as a model. The idea that, "Let's study this for a decade with engineers and people in rooms and try to model this? Well, no, let's just go out and spend a small fraction of what we would spend on the study doing it temporarily. And then let's watch how people respond, because their response to it would actually be a better indication than any poll or survey." I go back to the Steve Jobs quote. "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said they wanted a better Walkman," not something that addressed all the problems with the Walkman. Do you see a rivalry there between two kind of camps of how we engage the public? Or is it just two strains of the same thought?

  James Anderson 42:25

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's about moving it upstream. So it's about engaging earlier, before the ideas are hardened, and before you're rolling them out. And I think that's exactly what we did with New York City streets, with the pocket parks and the temporary installations to understand how people would respond to them and then to iterate and improve them. Right now, we're running something called the Global Mayor's Challenge. We open it up to the world's cities, and we say, "Come up with a really ambitious solution that engages community partners to a big, pressing problem." We focused it this year on core services, the services that you're already delivering and already funding. What's the way to take them to the next best place? Beaverton has a housing solution. Belfast has a solution to turn rundown neighbor alleyways into community-owned parks. And what they're all doing right now is going out into the community and standing up MVPs, testing minimal viable products, letting the community interact with them, letting the community say, "Wow, this makes so much sense." Or "You got this so wrong, I could never use this." And then they bring all of that feedback back into policy design, and then they go back out and test it again. You know, I'm a big fan of moving all of that feedback upstream so that we're rolling out stuff that already has legitimacy, because it maps back to the service gaps and the challenges that people have told us about, so that we're making better decisions in the first instance. That's where we really focus the cities, and where we're really putting a lot of energy. And again, I think this is another thing that has leaped out of the IT world. Prototyping is now becoming much more mainstream in mainstream service delivery for services at the local government level.

  Chuck Marohn 44:23

  I do feel like we, in a sense, create NIMBYs. When we bring people in at the last minute with a design that is clearly inferior or or has problems, we're just inviting negative feedback. I often try to defend NIMBYs. I'm like, "They're not they're not always wrong. They're in the wrong place at the wrong time." But is the solution to this to get that engagement more upstream?

  James Anderson 44:52

  I don't know that it solves it 100%.

  Chuck Marohn 44:54

  True, true.

  James Anderson 44:55

  NIMBYism is a big, scary issue. But I think the more that you bring stuff upstream, you start from real problems real people have, and you build your solutions from there, it absolutely increases legitimacy. It's more likely to build trust. And it increases the likelihood that when you finally get to that town hall, people recognize their own experiences in the solution you're selling, and it gives you a better chance of making a connection back to what is hurting them, what's bothering them.

  Chuck Marohn 45:31

  Let me do a quick follow up on that. I do feel like part of that answer then, is that a lot of our solutions, or the things we're proposing, are going to be smaller and more iterative, like, lower stakes as we go, as opposed to just doing the big thing. Is that a fair interpretation of what you said?

  James Anderson 45:56

  I remember that Mike Bloomberg said to me at the very beginning of my time working with him. "You don't build a company overnight." Nothing big goes from zero to 100 overnight. It's always about one smart step, learning, taking the next step, building consistency, momentum. And you know, fast forward to the New York City streetscape today, where we have lasting infrastructure at scale, a robust bike network that started with those small pocket parks and those test beds of experimentation way back in the day. And it builds. So I don't think it's about not doing big things. I think it's about having big ambition and building smartly so achieve it.

  Chuck Marohn 46:43

  I want to finish up by going back to where you started. One of the pieces of feedback that I get often when I'm advocating for local government action, local government empowerment, giving local governments a bigger toolbox, giving them more capacity and more responsibility on things. It's this pushback about, I think the kindest way to say it is just parochialism, the idea that small places are small ideas and defensiveness. You started the conversation by talking about your LGBT advocacy in Missoula, and a little bit of cynicism at local government, and obviously that's evolved over time. People who are worried about disenfranchisement, about parochialism, about whatever concern that they would have, how should they think about local government empowerment through that lens?

  James Anderson 47:44

  I think the answer is trying to get involved. I'm not naive. There is a lot that's still not working in the local government sector, and the legacy challenges that we face and the lack of institutional support to really help local governments become something radically different than what they were. There's not a lot of it out there. I can't think of a national government that has a "let's make our municipal governments the most effective problem solving organizations in the world" program. It doesn't exist anywhere. Federal Governments don't fund municipalities outside of funding specific services. So the the opportunities and the challenges and the new issues that are emerging on the front steps of every city hall are largely underfunded and understaffed as a result. So there's challenges there, and there's not a lot of resources out in the world to make them better. I fundamentally believe that many, many people who are in local governments are in local governments because they actually want their communities to be better places. There's something intrinsic to going into municipal service. "I want my community to be better. That's why I choose this job, which may not be as well paying as the other job that I could take." Finding ways to tap into that and to acknowledge that and to uplift that, to partner with it from the outside. Organizations, I think, like your organization, play a really critical role in sort of saying "You're not alone in doing that work. We are here for you, and we can marshal energy and resources to help you do your job better." I think that's a very powerful thing, and I generally think that that lands in open arms. I think it's about finding those relationships and building them.

  Chuck Marohn 49:48

  For people who want to follow your work, learn from your work, maybe get involved with the government innovation program, what's the best way for them to do that?

  James Anderson 49:59

  You should definitely sign up for our newsletter, which talks about different programs and projects that we're promoting across the country and around the world. You can find that at bloomberg.org. You can certainly follow us all on Twitter and on social media. And I would go to your city hall and ask them if they're engaged in the Bloomberg Cities Network. You'll be surprised at how many of them are, and there may be ways for you to engage in those programs, to cheer them on from the outside. Also, advocate for local government capacity. At the end of the day, we need local governments to be more than they are. The funding is not coming from many places, but it is useful and important for them to hear that you care at the local level, that they are more performance oriented, that they are more creative and innovative, that they are doing things in new ways. There's no good government groups out there cheering for that state capacity investment. I think that's also a very important thing that folks can do.

  Chuck Marohn 51:08

  That was James Anderson. He is the lead of the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. Jim, thanks for taking the time today to be with us. That was fantastic. I hope we can do that again.

  James Anderson 51:19

  It was really nice to be with you. Thank you so much, Chuck.

  Chuck Marohn 51:21

  Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care everybody.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 51:30

  This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Bloomberg Philanthropies (site)

• Bloomberg Cities Network (site)

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

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