The New Problem-Solving Skills That All Cities Need

(Illustration by iStock/Jumpeestudio)

Here’s a new axiom fit for the 21st century: The greater the global challenge, the more likely it is to fall to local governments to fix. But this modern reality comes with an inconvenient truth: Our public institutions are not equipped with the updated skills they need to effectively tackle the world’s ever-escalating challenges—not by a long shot.

Consider the climate crisis. Cities are home to more than half of the world’s population and, as the source of more than two thirds of the world’s carbon emissions, have the potential to solve a good percentage of those climate problems. But, even as local governments consistently take the lead in driving climate action, their ambitious, cross-sectoral efforts present distinct implementation challenges: Only a third of American cities were meeting their emissions targets in 2020 and, as of last fall, less than half of the world’s cities were tracking their progress. 

Or take the ongoing global migration wave. As a record number of refugees head to North American and European cities, the resulting divisive discourse has done little to lead to solutions. Local governments are left bearing the brunt and have, understandably, so far struggled. Asylum seekers to New York City have, in the past year alone, more than doubled the city’s shelter population—from 50,000 to more than 100,000—which has both necessitated an extraordinary and expensive peacetime mobilization and raised questions about cities’ and regions’ capacities to effectively respond.

There are, of course, lessons to be learned from the global pandemic. It was city leaders—more than state or federal officials—who stepped up to communicate risk, implement behavioral-change interventions, and find new or improved ways to reach and engage vulnerable and skeptical communities. This required a sustained emergency posture and high degrees of creativity, agility, and collaboration. In fact, I’ve argued that local governments were one of the few things that worked well during the pandemic. Yet, one need only consider the lives lost, the school time squandered, and the continued mental-health toll to know that we will need to be much better equipped next time.

Today’s public officials are most often trained in areas of administration, policy development, fiscal analysis, and in stewarding public resources and promoting public accountability. There’s good reason for that, as these skills are foundational to the work of a well-run city. However, if public officials are to effectively address our biggest global concerns—while also managing local challenges and the interplay between the two—they’ll need to expand their skill set to include “problem-solving capabilities.”

There’s increasing discussion in the academic literature about this problem-solving orientation. In organization (large firm) theory, a “dynamic capability” positions a firm to adapt resources and efforts in the face of shocks or other change. Rainer Kattel has extended this into the public sector by introducing a synthesis of key routines: sense-making, which is about information gathering and pattern analysis; connecting, which is about boundary-spanning routines that bring new networks and coalitions to action; and shaping, which reinforces through practices and routines new directionality for an organization or policy. Quinton Mayne, Jorrit de Jong, and Fernando Fernandez-Monge have defined three categories for public problem-solving capabilities in government agencies: a reflective improvement capability (focused on defining and addressing problems), a collaboration capability, and a data-analytical capability. Tara McGuinness and Anne-Marie Slaughter position this as a new approach at problems that is distinct from traditional policy making and is people-centered, experiential, data-enabled, and designed to scale. And Demos Helsinki offers an inspiring set of values for the modern problem-solving civil servant, describing the need to equip them to infuse rules-based orientation with humility, to supplement short-term accountability with the wisdom to look to the future, to bring imagination to incrementalism, and to complement vertical responsibilities with a collaborative ethos.

For the past decade-plus, we at Bloomberg Philanthropies have, together with partners from Harvard University, the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University, the Behavioral Insights Team, Results for America, the National League of Cities, and many other organizations, focused on strategically bolstering the problem-solving capacity of local governments, primarily through leadership development, skills-building programming, and applied learning through supported project work. This intensive work—with more than 280 mayors, data teams in nearly 300 cities, 60 innovation offices, and 600-plus other senior leaders—has provided us unique insight into what works, what’s possible, and how to build more demand when it comes to building skills at the local government level.

What has emerged from this work is something akin to a Civil Servants’ Toolkit for Public Problem Solving, which includes the skill sets, mindsets, and practices needed in four critical areas: 1) problem spotting and definition, 2) invention, 3) collaboration, and 4) agile delivery. This toolkit contains the capabilities that, our experience has found, cities need to develop if they’re to successfully toggle between day-to-day program-management concerns and the problem-solving approaches required to tackle global challenges at the local level.

Anticipate and Define a Problem

Today’s cities need to better envision and detect emergent challenges. That means developing a shared understanding of what those problems are (or will be), how to tackle them, and what success looks like. The mindset shift, here, is critical: It is no longer enough to set sights on big improvements to current services, important as that is; city leaders must invest time, energy, and resources to understand what’s around the corner. This requires a fluency with skills such as futures thinking, scenario planning, community listening, data analysis, problem definition, and benchmarking.

Singapore, for example, places such an emphasis on strategic foresight methods that it introduced scenario planning as an entry-level skill for all policy makers. Other cities, such as Wellington, New Zealand, are using digital twins to visualize future challenges and facilitate participatory planning with residents.

Imagine and Develop a Way to Make Progress

Once those problems and opportunities are identified, cities need to flex another set of muscles to develop or uncover ambitious solutions that can be tested and, when they work, scaled up. This requires both the understanding that many of the best ideas come from outside city hall and a fluency with a set of skills—including crowdsourcing, open procurement, and literature review—to invite, find, sort, and implement those ideas.

In Syracuse, New York, those capabilities resulted in, among many other innovations, the creation of a data-informed tool that empowered the city to quickly evaluate and repair approximately 55,000 feet of damaged sidewalks, which is the length of more than 150 American football fields. In Boise, Idaho, hundreds of ideas solicited from agency workers strengthened internal operations and improved results. And in Colombia, where only 19 percent of residents borrowed money from a formal financial institution in 2021, Bogotá city leaders developed a novel solution that welcomes unbanked shop owners and street vendors into the formal banking system and is on track to issue 10,000 loans by year’s end.

Collaborate With Residents and Across Boundaries

Another reality of today’s world is that its stickiest challenges seldom adhere to administrative, departmental, or geographic boundaries and, as such, they compel cities to convene and nurture robust collections of partners in order to drive toward more effective solutions. This will, again, represent a break from the past for some, requiring a change in the culture of “looking in,” to one of “reaching out.” Local civil servants will need to master the art and science of working across silos through mission making, collective action, and managing the sometimes-mismatched priorities and egos that can come with partnerships, co-creation, and co-production.

These skills helped Leuven, Belgium—named the European Capital of Innovation in 2020—develop what Mayor Mohamed Ridouani calls a “radical participation approach” to climate change: Leuven 2030 brings together more than 600 government, nonprofit, university, and business partners together under a plan to make the city carbon neutral by 2050. And in Calgary, Canada, they enabled then-Mayor Naheed Nenshi to convene a coalition of public-sector and nonprofit agencies to overhaul mental-health services, even though he had little funding or authority over the issue.

Delivering Today and in the Long-term

Local governments are in no way off the hook for service delivery. But today’s challenges call for city governments to manage this fundamental responsibility in new ways. This means doubling down on agile approaches, such as rapid prototyping, short-cycle iteration, and methods like human-centered design to keep the needs of residents at the forefront. These build trust in the context of existing service improvement and reduce risk when undertaking innovation. Data, here, takes on a new role, not just to evaluate past performance, but as a robust mechanism to get feedback, learn, adjust and pivot. Local governments have made a lot of headway in the past decade building up some of these skills. The leap forward will occur when these skills define how all of government works, rather than only data or innovation units. That’s about culture and mindset change and it starts with leadership.

That’s certainly what we’ve seen in Mexico City—where former mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, who went on to run for president, launched a people-first model for centralized innovation focused on simplifying procedures, building and deploying in-house technology to improve public policies and services, and reducing corruption. Her team launched the country’s first digital I.D., which now has more than 5.7 million users; created the world’s largest, free citywide WiFi network; and enabled more than 70 percent of all government interaction to occur digitally—enabling the kind of digital access most local governments can only dream of. They’ve made big things happen by taking one small, urgent step after the next, embodying the test, learn, adapt ethos that was first championed by then-Mayor Sheinbaum.

Together, these skills emphasize curiosity, cooperation, and creativity over bureaucratic rigidity and adherence to how things have been handled in the past. They acknowledge uncertainty about the world and emphasize humility in the way local governments approach challenges, importantly by recognizing outside expertise from the community, other sectors, or peer cities. Additionally, these skills align with the appropriately growing ambitions of local government officials around policy and program innovation. Problem-solving skills empower bureaucracies to take well-defined risks, while reflecting the unique ethical considerations of the public-sector operating environment.

Among the many insights to emerge from our continued work building these key capacities in local government are three primary learnings:

First, it works—even in the face of our most pressing global challenges. Beginning in 2019, for example, we funded partners including the National Resource Defense Council, Delivery Associates, and numerous other mission-based groups to help 25 cities cut their emissions in line with the Paris goals. In addition to funding, we provided technical support for key components of our toolkit for civil servants, including resident engagement, coalition building, prototyping, evaluation, data analysis, and establishing daily routines. Within three years, these cities were collectively on track to reduce emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, which surpasses the goals of the Paris accords.

This work also paid off during the pandemic, as data officers played leading roles in creating public-education dashboards conveying threat levels and innovation offices were consistently tapped to help mayors develop quick interventions in response to ever-changing conditions on the ground. In Baltimore, this meant bucking the trend of hiring consulting firms as contact tracers and, instead, creating a home-grown team of 300—hired from among residents who lost their jobs in the first months of the pandemic—who were trusted by the community they needed to reach and, as a result, helped the city outperform the majority of its peers in COVID incidence, mortality, and vaccination rates.

The second learning: There is strong and growing demand from cities for support in building these skills. When the mayors participating in the 2023 class of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative were asked what they’d most like to improve about their organizations, their top answer was “innovation and experimentation”—ahead of more traditional goals like improving government performance and customer service for residents. Similarly, the mayors applying to participate in the City Data Alliance, an initiative aimed at helping 100 cities across North, South, and Central America set a new standard for data-informed government, indicated a shift in how they want to use data—from an emphasis on efficiency to a focus on solving complex challenges, such as climate, homelessness, and public safety.

Clearly, the ambition for advancing local solutions to complex challenges is growing in cities and among their leaders. But, as Mike Bloomberg pointed out when he opened the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University earlier this year, there’s a difference between wanting to do big things and actually being able to do them.

That difference is our third learning and what demands our attention today: Cities need help. As we continue to look to them to lead on our most pressing global challenges, we must rethink what they need to get the job done. Philanthropy has a huge role to play—not only because so many foundations focus on improving lives in cities but because these efforts can rarely achieve scale without local government leadership. We can’t just hope that cities are able to respond to ever more complex challenges, we have to build local governments that consistently can. That starts by making these problem-solving skills the norm, not the exception, in our public institutions.

Read more stories by James Anderson.