Through the years, the most common critique I’ve received regarding the creation of any type of plan is the popular assumption that it will inevitably gather dust on a bookshelf and never be seen again. I guess, to some degree, we deserve that, because I have indeed witnessed a lot of money spent on plans that were never heard of or seen again. My intention, as we continue our discussion of community-based strategic planning, is that your plan is visibly and robustly implemented. However, let’s first continue our discussion about the plan’s strategic directives.

The Plan Taking Shape

Strategic Initiatives

Once the strategic planning advisory committee (SPAC) feels comfortable that they have accurately identified the plan’s strategic directives, it is time to turn attention to identifying the strategic initiatives. Strategic initiatives assist in bringing the strategic directives to the level of application. They are more focused activities, actions, programs, and ideas designed to address the strategic directives. Let me put it this way: If strategic directives describe a destination, strategic initiatives represent the instructions or directions that will empower us to arrive at the destination. While there may exist only five to eight directives in a plan, there can be a dozen or more initiatives connected to each directive. Taking the “economic prosperity” directive as an example, a few strategic initiatives associated therewith may look like this:

• Promote entertainment and hospitality development along our waterfront.
• Attract higher-paying technology jobs.
• Inspire higher-end residential development by touting the quality of our school district.
• Position the city as a destination for a corporate headquarters.
• Revisit zoning regulations to encourage more planned unit developments and higher quality developments in general.
• Attract more youth-oriented entertainment options.

Additional Strategic Directives

I want to make the point here that not all these initiatives likely appeared inclusively in the data. Your SPAC members not only examine the data, but they also exercise their own discretion and intelligence in recommending initiatives they believe would most likely help the community realize the directive. Can you see why I implore great care in who your elected body places on the SPAC? The SPAC may meanwhile even prescribe strategic directives that did not come from the resident data. I’ll give you an example.

In an Arizona community I managed, it was the SPAC that recognized our local government lacked fiscal sustainability. They therefore inserted “fiscal sustainability” into their draft plan and provided a number of corresponding initiatives. At first, the elected body was reluctant to consider that directive in the final plan. The SPAC explained that much of the remainder of the plan depended upon the city’s ability to sustain their role in bringing the plan to fruition. The council ultimately adopted the plan with the added SPAC directive. In another Texas community I’m familiar with, I know that the SPAC added “operational excellence” to their directives to communicate the need for a well-run municipal government. The key here is that you’ve hopefully assembled a group of very intelligent and reasoned individuals. Allow them the discretion and prerogative to make this plan the very best it can be.

Expected Outcomes

For each set consisting of a strategic directive and strategic initiatives, I also encourage the SPAC to develop a list of “expected outcomes.” In other words, I want your SPAC to describe what success looks like, feels like, smells like, etc. Tell us how we know when we’ve arrived, when we’ve successfully implemented the plan. These outcomes will allow us to conclude whether our directives, initiatives, and ultimately strategies rendered the desired results.

Using our “economic prosperity” example, here are outcomes that could emerge:

• Increased quality and diversity of shopping, dining, and entertainment.
• Increase in number of small businesses served and launched.
• Increase in commercial property tax revenue from expanded operations.
• Growth in average household income.
• Continued low unemployment.
• Diversified commercial presence across the city.

The Primary Directive

One may wonder what’s going to keep each of these directives, strategies, and outcomes tied together. After all, when the SPAC completes the plan, you will be astonished at its comprehensive nature. You’ll also appreciate at the same time its simplicity and clarity. However, it is still a lot to take in and a lot to keep together for five years. That’s why I’m going to now turn your SPAC’s attention to developing the community’s “primary directive.” It is going to serve as the statement that clearly and succinctly describes the city’s rationale for existing. It represents the highest-level directive, serving as the hub of the plan to which all other strategic directives are attached. In essence, your primary directive serves as that element of the plan that you can point to and say with confidence, “If you understand nothing else about our town, you had better understand this!”

We oddly enough wait until we’ve identified our strategic directives before we tackle the composition of the primary directive. The reason for this is that it is going to be the job of the primary directive to pull all your strategic directives together, and we don’t know what those are at the beginning of the process. Besides tying your other directives together, the primary directive, as I mentioned, is a crystal-clear statement that declares why your community exists. 

Again, I encourage my SPACs to consider what they’ve learned from this process and combine this with answers to the three “hedgehog questions” I discussed before. It’s not the easiest task in the world, but it is certainly one of the more rewarding. The SPAC is basically going to develop your community’s purpose statement for the next five years! Here is an example of one:

“Our community is committed to building upon our vibrant economy and unique sense of community by strengthening a more connected citizenry that further embraces people from all backgrounds and invests in their quality of life.”

The SPAC that developed this statement—and it’s an actual primary directive—was able to capture every one of its strategic directives and answer the three questions. The statement leaves no ambiguity as to why their city exists, what they are unitedly seeking to achieve, and how they are proposing to accomplish it.

Finalize and Present the Plan

The digital and physical composition of the plan should follow the same order and pattern described. It is appropriate to begin with some description of the plan’s methodology/process, acknowledge the SPAC members who served so faithfully during the previous nine to 12 months, thank the residents who contributed to the plan, and of course, tout the virtues and beauty of the community. It is also appropriate to allow the mayor to write an introduction to the plan. Then it’s time to wrap it all up with an attractive cover with a label that leaves no doubt as to what this plan is and whose it is. It is also time to begin putting together the public presentation.

I always encourage the members of the SPAC to share the responsibility of presenting the finished plan to the elected body at a regularly scheduled meeting. The composition of the plan is such that it facilitates assigning each SPAC member a portion to present. I meanwhile recognize that there are some who would rather not address the council. However, try to coax as many SPAC members as possible into participating. That kind of team-show declaratively says, “We are united and confident in presenting this community roadmap to our city council, and we trust that they will now exert all due diligence in implementing it.” Finally, it’s important, post-presentation, for the elected body to accept and adopt the strategic plan by resolution. The council does get the final say, and we’re expecting that they will say officially, “This is our city’s road map for the next five years.”

Return and Report

It is always easier to compose a plan than to implement it. There is an old saying that even the best plans do not survive contact with the enemy. Boiled down to its most basic essence and within the context of strategic planning, it means that plans are meant to accommodate the vagaries of the future. Remember that you are creating a powerful tool for policy makers and policy implementers. The plan is their creature. They are not creatures of the plan.

I was once chastised by a developer who insisted that my city’s economic development plan was never going to become a reality. After a moment, when he finally took a breath, I admitted that the plan was ambitious, but then I said, “Our community will be a lot better off and further down the road than if we hadn’t taken the time to plan.” I know of a Texas city that had, at the end of their plan’s five-year life-pan, implemented 85% of their ambitions and initiatives—and boy, was it obvious! I’ll put it this way, if you are successful to that degree, your residents will feel the impacts of your plan in a very real and positive way.

Most cities I’ve worked with have been effective in implementing their plans. If they do fall down during the process, it is often during the return and report phase. It should never occur that your residents first hear of a strategic planning initiative at its launch and then fail to hear anything more about it for five years! Most municipal types I know are great at “doing” and unfortunately fairly inept at “telling.” Our residents deserve to know whatever happened to the plan they helped create. They not only want their lives to become better through the implementation of the plan; they also want to see the evidence, sense the effort, celebrate successes, and feel the inertia of your community.

I am often asked to explain the difference between what I advocate and the strategic planning methods typically employed by others. That difference lies in three areas:

• How and to what degree residents and stakeholders are integrated into the process itself.
• How the loop is closed at the end with residents and stakeholders.
• How the plan is ultimately implemented.

The stage of the process that I label “return and report” begins with an internal strategy of implementation. After all, if we don’t implement the plan, there’s not a lot to report. Once the committee has finished its work, a beautiful plan is created and presented to the governing body, the lights are turned out at city hall, and everyone goes home. Then what? The next morning you are inevitably going to ask, “Now what are we going to do with this?” The answer is that you’re going to implement the plan, but let’s back up just a bit chronologically.

My hope is that when the plan was presented to the councilmembers, they adopted it in some official manner as the city’s five-year strategic plan. If we’ve done our homework during the process and have broadened the base of participation in the manner we should have, our elected body should take some courage in officially recognizing this plan as the blueprint for their community. This official gesture is important because, without it, the staff may be left wondering whether they’re expected to place it into action. Also, your committee will appreciate the vote of confidence in their work and the satisfaction of the plan’s acceptance.

Beyond the very public aspect of strategic planning and its official adoption, we want to make sure that your staff has access to this plan. In my cities, I want it on the intranet site, on our website, and in the hands of every department head. My employees have participated in the process as a very important stakeholder group, so many are already aware of the plan and usually feel gratified to see the end product. I make it a point in my one-on-ones with directors to spend some time discussing the initiatives of the plan and possible strategies that will enable us to realize those ambitions.

On the elected side, I use the strategic plan as the backdrop to our annual goal-setting retreat. I can ask elected officials, weeks prior to the retreat, to review the plan and come prepared to discuss ways we can move forward. There’s no “reinventing the wheel” every year. There tends to be a minimal amount of grandstanding or even contention. Having a community-based strategic plan that the governing body has adopted often turns a full-day retreat into a half-day retreat because much of what used to consume so much discussion was determined by the very people the elected body serves. With such a plan, we know why we’re here and what we need to do. We just need to discuss how we’re going to make it happen in the coming year.

The Implementation Plan

With council feedback in hand following the retreat, I’m ready to work with my department directors to compose a one-year implementation plan. This is the document we are going to use to set the stage for most of our budget requests in the upcoming year. The implementation plan looks a lot like the strategic plan in that it provides the directives coupled with the council goals that emerged from the retreat. It’s here that we describe in a much deeper way how we’re going to implement the priorities of the coming year.

Once composed, I submit the implementation plan to the mayor and council. My intention in doing this is two-fold. First, I want them to see their ambitions on paper and get a sense of what they’re attempting to accomplish in the next fiscal year. Second, I need to know whether the plan hits the bullseye, because it is my intention to liberally utilize the implementation plan to compose my budget proposal.

Budgeting

What makes the strategic plan so powerful is that it becomes the basis for many of the city’s budget requests. What’s better is that when we hold budget meetings with the elected body, we need only point to how a particular request is related to their priorities, which are based upon the tenets of the community-based strategic plan. In fact, it has been my practice to require any new requests to carry an annotation indicating connection to a strategic directive. Doing so provides a visible nexus to the strategic plan and the budget itself. Of course, I understand that we must pay for a lot of things every year that aren’t part of the residents’ or elected officials’ priorities. However, you will be amazed how smoothly a budget process runs when the governing body clearly sees how the budget proposal seeks to implement their ambitions, which are in turn based on the residents’ plan.

Reporting

I will admit that the public reporting element of the plan’s implementation has been for me a bit more complicated. I have nevertheless, in the last 15 to 20 years, seen the introduction of several useful tools that automate strategic plan reporting. Remember that the goal is to allow your residents to see the plan in action. While I won’t endorse a specific product, you will want one that is web-based, that can be updated by staff on a somewhat frequent basis, and that is both visually appealing and clear to understand. Many cities/counties refer to these tools as “community scorecards.” I like to describe them as dashboards for your strategic plan.

Include the SPAC

Meanwhile, your SPAC put in a lot of time to help create this plan. It would be a shame if you didn’t incorporate them into the “return and report” phase. My advice is to invite your SPAC members to return on an annual or semi-annual basis to provide their perspectives on the plan’s implementation. This element of reporting reenforces its original credibility as a resident-based plan. Your SPAC chair and/or vice chair can work with the city manager to prepare the appropriate presentation and discussion. This ensures that the SPAC is completely informed about the plan’s status and that the city manager is not blindsided. All strategic plan reporting to the elected body should be done in concert and cooperation with the city’s administration. After all, they are the implementers of the plan.

A Final Note on Elevating Trust

I encourage you to review these ideas with your mayor, city manager, or anyone interested in elevating trust in your community. I leave you with two critical points that I would never want to obfuscate. First, as I admitted earlier, I didn’t invent the idea of asking residents what they expect from local government and composing a plan to satisfy those expectations. I nevertheless believe that if such a practice had been more a part of our professional DNA, we’d probably enjoy more than a 62% trust level from our residents.

Second, community-based strategic planning is not the only way to elevate trust. Trust is the product of trustworthiness (otherwise known as authenticity) and competency. People will trust you if they believe you share their values and have their best interests at heart, plain and simple. Any exercise or endeavor that allows you to genuinely communicate these two characteristics to your residents will empower you to elevate trust with them, and trust drives our local government resource engine.

RICK DAVIS, ICMA-CM, is assistant city manager of League City, Texas, USA. He is the author of Elevating Trust in Local Government: The Power of Community-Based Strategic Planning. (rick.davis@leaguecitytx.gov)