Comments by Thomas I. Miller at the CMS Education Program on the next 100 years of City Management

In a small town west of the Mississippi, local elections became politicized. The Tea Party majority was installed and immediately cut funding for libraries, parks and open space. They borrowed no money and rolled back fees. Then the floods came and council sought federal disaster relief to pay for housing and human services that residents needed.

I tell this story because of the tilt away from government we all recently have witnessed, mostly at the federal level, but now infiltrating local government. History, however, proves that there has been an enduring role for government and its leaders back six hundred years to the Incas, two thousand years to the Romans and even ten thousand years to the Paleo Indians.

The job of the city manager will remain inviolate as we look forward even one hundred years because clans always will need leaders who can manage and distribute critical resources. But the job of the manager will change. And one of the biggest changes will come from data. In the first ten thousand years of written history, human kind generated five exabytes of data – that’s five quintillion digital pieces of information. That number looks like this: 5,000,000,000,000,000,000. We now generate that amount of data every other day. The science taught to a child in elementary school today largely will be obsolete by the time that child graduates from college.

These days managers can receive data not only from their traditional sources – like utility bills and library cards - but the assault of information comes at managers from roads, street lights, cars, water, shirts, watches and even from outer space.

Managers need a new framework to distill and triage these data; to harness them for good. Not only should managers rely on their traditional staff to help with these data - staff like IT professionals, auditors, budget analysts and performance managers - but they need to hire evaluators. Evaluators are uniquely trained to create research designs that will help interpret data and distinguish practices from best practices.

The biggest change for managers however will need to go beyond staff, to one of attitude. The manager of the future will not need to know the right answer. She or he will need to know the right question. The future manager will need to be willing to be wrong and try again. In essence, the manager of 2030 will need to become the experimenter presaged by the famous social psychologist, Donald Campbell, 50 years ago. For the manager of tomorrow, failing will be expected and constantly seeking will become the definition of success.