Data Driven Leadership with guest Bob Bennett

Chris 0:27

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the inaugural edition of Uncharted leading through uncertainty and change. Today, I am excited to be here with Bob Bennett, CEO and founder of B squared consulting. I've had the pleasure of knowing Bob now for probably five or six years as we've intersected careers over a number of journeys now and couldn't be more excited to have you, Bob, as our first guest on the on the show today. Why don't you start off about telling us about yourself and be squared, and then we'll we'll jump into it.

Bob 1:03

Hey, number one, it's great to see you. And I'm excited that actually zoom allows us to do this bit but looking also very forward to where we can start interacting in person again. It has been an awesome six years, I came to you through the city of Kansas City, which I joined after 25 years in the Army. I did my first I guess 17 years in the field artillery world. And then my last eight years I was a strategic planner and did a lot of work in Iraq with God or no and General Petraeus followed that up with operations in Africa, before coming to a teaching role here in the Kansas City area. When I left the army, I was the chief innovation officer for Kansas City, Missouri for the better part of about four years during the mayor second term. And at the conclusion of that term, when he was term limited, came out to form v squared. So essentially, we can continue helping cities figure out ways to better understand their environment, better take action, in how they provide good services to people, and the right services to people in a lot of cases, and then also help to make government function. And I think one of the things that I learned over the course of the last 40 years or so is that certainly local government seems to function more aggressively than other levels of government, and certainly more responsively to resident needs. And so that's been kind of fun to kind of cap off a career doing this thing.

Unknown Speaker 2:37

Awesome. Well, the topic today is data driven leadership. What's What's that mean to you? Let's define that?

Unknown Speaker 2:47

Well, I guess it's using data. To go after that initial premise of eastward civic solutions, which is use data and not just anecdotes or gut feelings or ideology, to understand what's happening around you and to define the problems that an organization needs to solve. And then by using that data, figuring out how to most effectively create that solution, so that you actually have the most bang for your buck. Now, when you think about it, local governments are absolutely the world's most amazing nonprofit. They have to spend every dime they get in revenue. But it's a very limited number of times. And we need to use data to do that most effectively. And earlier in my career when I was doing the army thing, how do we use data to actually identify the critical part of an operation so that we could have the effect desired where we put our people at the least amount of risk and data allowed you to make that decision? The most dispassionately as you possibly could, and in most cases, the most correctly.

Unknown Speaker 4:03

There's a there's a whole lot to unpack there. So maybe, maybe we start there. I mean, I think, give me stock about an example of that. In the military,

Unknown Speaker 4:15

here we were in Iraq in about: 2008

Unknown Speaker 8:14

Yeah, that's, that's an amazing transformation. Right? And a journey that took what a couple of years you're rolling, that sounds better part of 18 months, yeah. 18 months and a lot of cross stakeholder engagement in that, right. I mean, and, you know, oftentimes, when we, when we talk about stakeholder engagement, we're thinking about bureaucracies in corporate America, we're in a city in a government, right? You're talking about people that hate each other in some aspects. It Have you

Unknown Speaker 8:46

met a water department and a public works department fighting over the last $10 of a budget,

Unknown Speaker 8:51

that could be worse than racks and bays. But you're talking about, you know, an amazing cross section of people with with with different competing interests in a lot of ways, but you're able to find common interests, common grounds, get this massive organism working together. What was the data aspect to that? I mean, what data did you have? What did you look for, like, and how did you kind of get everybody on the same page with with what you were doing?

Unknown Speaker 9:23

problem. There were literally: 1000

Unknown Speaker: 11:25

How did you get them on board with that approach? Goal ser and cultural and, I mean, you've got people that maybe were trained or untrained, you know, they're used to doing things certain way. A lot of this is all new, like, how do you kind of mentor and get folks, you know, to to leverage this new data and insights and pointed in the right direction?

Unknown Speaker: 11:47

Well, we first tried to understand what their self interest was, what was it that they wanted to achieve? And that took a lot more listening than talking. And it took a very non traditional American response of saying, maybe what we want isn't the answer. And, yeah, that was that that was kind of an eye opening moment. That, you know, I have kids, so I've kind of been figuring that out, too, that way. And it that that was kind of we asked them what they wanted to achieve. We started most meetings, by doing a survey. And by doing data collection of that focus group in the room. And from there, we asked them, essentially, to give us what their wisdom told them. And it's, it's the same thing, when you look at a city government. There is wisdom in that engineer, who is managing a traffic light system, and or a water system, who just knows by their experience, where the next break is likely to be. But they have not necessarily articulated the specific indicators that tell them that. And by actually having that conversation asking those questions, you get to that point. And quite frankly, the things that we were able to do inside the city government came from sitting down and listening to the Iraqi border patrol, who told us I don't have enough trucks to do the patrolling that you Americans think is that successful? What I need are not just trucks, but the drivers and the ability for those folks to know that they are safe. And then we'd ask the next question. Okay, cool. How what does it take for them to feel safe? Well, they need to know that their colleagues will not sell them out to another neighboring tribe or to somebody else. So we want to make sure that we actually kind of control who does the hiring and keep it within a certain tribal area, which the United States obviously we could not do with our contracting rules. But in Iraq, it was totally acceptable. Okay, cool. And we actually picked this up from the Brits, one of their planning techniques, or their planning methodologies is called five questions. And every time someone brings you a point that they make an argument, you ask them a why question. And by the time you get to the end of five to seven, why's, you've really drilled into the essence of a problem set? And maybe that thing, which is incredibly useful, and incredibly insightful, is for them just part of their inherent day, and they never thought about it being an insight. And so you have to, you have to ask that fifth and seventh question to get down to that point. And for us, it was I need more trucks, and I need to know who's driving them so that I can control them effectively using our culturally acceptable way of doing business, which is doing it within the tribe, so that the local Sheik was both the employer, the leader and the resource or so he had power over three areas, which met the cultural dynamic

Unknown Speaker: 15:00

That's, that's fascinating. The five why's is actually made itself made its way into to the startup world as well. Eric Ries wrote a book, probably 12 years ago now called the Lean Startup, I think. And in one of the chapters in there, he talks about, you know, continue to ask why until you peel back those layers of abstraction and really identify the root issue. Right, you know, my car died. Well, why well, the battery died. Well, why was it old? Was it the alternators? You know? So? I think that's, that's a that's a fantastic technique. And so how did it I mean, so so what? What ended well, with this as you transition this over, so it's, you've got this data, you've diffused that you got a lot of competing ideas, managed to align those you devote diffuse responsibility for the execution down to the local, you know, stakeholders that that should own it, right. At the end of the day, and how do you transition? Like, how does that end? Well, and then on the flip side of that, what didn't like in sort of what's a lesson learned out of out of the exercise?

Unknown Speaker: 16:14

Well, I think the things that went well is there was certainly a embracing of what it takes to manage a community by the nascent Iraqi government. And what ended well was they did a really good job of pushing us out to go and do that. much to the frustration of some of our partners, especially on the US and the Allied side, who didn't feel like maybe they were being either repaid in terms of loyalty or some other again, Western concept that wasn't necessarily part of the equation from their perspective. And that frustration and that messiness. Perceived from our perspective, I think, is the success. Again, you had a, a relatively low, I guess, was 48%. turnout election in Iraq just few weeks ago, were a party, which we didn't necessarily like while we were there, when a majority, but it's actually including the minority partners. In the governance plan moving forward. It's it's a functional democracy. It's not necessarily what we designed. It's not what we wanted in 2003, or 2004. But the fact that it is their democracy working for them, that ended well, what didn't end well, was it was kind of chaotic there in 2009, and 2010. And the establishment of the the caliphate in northern Iraq, the fall of Mosul in 2009 2010, the human suffering that took place as our departure, which was a little bit more hasty than we had envisaged resulted in in, in some tragedies, a great number of tragedies for a large number of people. But the fact that our participation in overcoming those tragedies was minimized. On our end of the equation by our Congress, and by our political leadership, is probably that crucible event for Iraq that allowed today to happen as a success. Not pretty. But in the end successful.

Unknown Speaker: 18:43

Expand on that for me, so I do want to come back to, to one of the themes you mentioned earlier about how the end result might be a different vision than, you know, what we just kind of cuz you really announced I mean, you played a role there. But But really, this was about getting the local environment, to be able to transition and take care of themselves and sort of build out their, their, their new democracy and what that meant to you, which I think is fascinating theme. And then we'll come back to that. But But this kind of crucible moment, like this trance, like you're going through a lot of pain, meaning not us specifically, but But you know, the local constituents, then then on the other side of that, now they're having failed actions. Right. I mean, maybe expand on that a little bit for me what you mean, and what you think the importance of that as? Well, I think that

Unknown Speaker: 19:36

when we designed what we thought would be the transition plan, we envision something lasting from 2009 till about 2000. And, yeah, 13 or 14, by the time that we had left completely with our own forces. And the idea was that in terms of securing the border in terms of focusing in on those foreign fighters and the malign Iranian influence, because the intertribal conflicts had largely solved themselves by to 2009. So we'd actually, you know, downsized our diadem down to just the two strategic problems as well. But the Obama administration changed the rule and said, No, we're pulling everything out in 2009. So those elements that DOD and the State Department thought we would still be doing in terms of training, in terms of augmenting in terms of mentoring, the military forces to go through this process, or just pulled out instantaneously. And so the success that we had had against the foreign fighters, we'd essentially eliminated, okay, to Iraq. But by pulling out as quickly as we did, we created a vacuum, which created ISIS. And it was that ISIS moment, which took over northern Iraq. And for both the Sunni and the Shia, majority in the South. They initially saw the problem as well, they're, you know, going after people who are Kurdish or more than Iraqis, and we don't necessarily like them as much anyway. But by the time that mozal had fallen, it became this unifying Iraqi concept of okay, we have to go back and get Moses, we have to eliminate this caliphate. We, as a community, have a stake adness. Prior to our departure, a weight of nine, the Kurds would have been quite happy with an independent Kurdistan, and probably at some level still are. But because of ISIS, the Kurds had to work with the Shia and Sunni from southern Iraq. And together those three with a very minimal amount of outside support, pushed out ISIS destroyed the caliphate. And now you had a new Iraq, which, unlike the Iraq from the Balfour Declaration, days to the Brits was not arbitrary lines on a map. It was instead a collection of people who had overcome this caliphate. And so there had been a common purpose that was not externally driven by the United States. It was externally driven by this caliphate that even that had. I mean, Al Baghdadi was an Iraqi when he was running his operations out of Mosul. And so they had to work together to overcome that. And the United States was not going to be the driving factor in eliminating that force. And so that was that crucible event, where they had to look each other not necessarily as age old foes. But wait, there is something to this Iraq thing. And now it has real meaning instead of something imposed on us by the Brits, and 1918.

Unknown Speaker: 23:09

Yeah, that's interesting. So I mean, you know, I'm a Ron Heifetz fan and adaptive leadership. And Ron Heifetz, he was the guy we used to read in the army quite a bit, yeah, whether you're in this, this kind of strikes a chord there, because, you know, he talks a lot about putting the work back where it belongs, right, like, so the United States, we're in there kind of peacekeeping, I use that in air quotes, right. But but the real day job needs to be this, this ownership of your of your country, and the functioning and these he'd be needs to reside with people that own the country that live there. Right. And so a part of this exercise, it seems, is you kind of building capacity, you know, with with the local government and stakeholders. And then along comes this common enemy, you know, this common threat, really to their existence that brings these otherwise combative individuals together, you know, part of me, too reflectively wishes that it seems like when COVID hit the United States, that should have been a unifying event. Right, because we have a common threat to, to draw. In other ways, not so much. Right. And somehow that turned out to mean for a lot of reasons, I think, unified a lot of people but then fractured, you know, a lot of a lot of our culture as well. So how does this then, you know, play forward into, I mean, these lessons learn play forward into Kansas City and your role in government there.

Unknown Speaker: 24:41

So yeah, I left the Army. I was teaching at Fort Leavenworth. I was actually teaching what we did in Iraq, and got a chance to meet several local leaders through those trainings because we brought some local leaders into Fort Leavenworth where I was teaching and through Through that experience, I had a chance to meet some members of Mayor James's administration. And when my predecessor went to go work from Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, I responded to the opportunity to be the chief innovation officer in Kansas City. And as a part of the interview process and talking with Mayor James, the important task for that role was not to just quit tech into place or not just to play with technology in an environment, which is known as Kansas City. But instead it was how do we prepare our community for what we want it to look like 20 years hence, not just going through the daily grind of having police cars on the street, filling potholes, making sure the water is clean, having a world class parks department, all of those things, which are almost the foundational assumptions of what the city of Kansas City could do that how do we actually set the conditions so we could attract new businesses, so that we could actually interact with residents who live on cell phones and who interact with their elected officials via Twitter and who order their goods via Amazon or other vendors? And oh, by the way, and a piece of that, which got even enhanced during the COVID years? How do we bring our government to do that same level of interaction so that we are competent to serve 21st century people? And when he really wanted was a strategy he didn't, he wasn't looking for technology for technology's sake. And so that's part of the interview process, it was back to that question is that the wise, you know, what is our biggest problem? Well, by the time we got down to the seventh or eighth why it was we have a grand total of about between 508 $100,000 worth of disposable income in the city that has not spoken for, and all of her other requirements to make a fundamental transformation for a city that is digitally engaged, that is more efficient, thereby freeing up dollars to do the modernization that's required, because one of the earlier questions told us that our infrastructure was failing. And at the time, there was no ARPA, there was no infrastructure act. But the crisis had already come to us in Kansas City. Because the weird nature of our community, we're one of the least densely populated communities in the United States. And our infrastructure was aging very rapidly. So an hour we

Unknown Speaker: 27:45

diverse as well, right? I mean, you've got the downturn, urban core, you've got some high crime areas, and then you've got rule, right? I mean, really, Kansas City, people don't think of it that way. But But I mean, you've got the data and the math, it's how many square miles and how many people like once you kind of get out of certain pockets. It's incredibly diverse. It's a little microcosm of American in many ways, which which poses, and that's the data sending challenges, right?

Unknown Speaker: 28:13

Yeah. And that was why we needed the data. And we needed to contextualize the data. And we needed to understand the variations, both in time and space across our communities. And we found that we had as diverse concerns and needs within the boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, as you have in states or nations, just as you stated. So, you know, what are the three or four things that we can do with that very small amount of budget, to improve economic opportunities to improve the educational foundation for kids in our city so that they can be a 21st century workforce. You need technology for that you need connectivity for that. So we chose to do a connectivity activity. Half of that we tied to our digital inclusion Coalition, which focused on the east side of our community, which is the poor area of town. And it focused on hardware focused on training, it focused on getting connectivity either through fiber to the home, which we did as part of a public private partnership with Google and other partners. But also we did a a public Wi Fi, a connectivity, a data analytics a, a holistic understanding of our environment, pilot in the heart of our downtown, largely because I could do it cheaply. I had a 2.2 mile long hole in the ground, which was the creation of our street car starter. And so we could do testing there without disrupting the lives of our residents. And we knew that if the testing were done successful. And if the pilot were successful, the outcome of it would be significantly larger in any investment that we made, and would serve as an example, so that we could then replicate it elsewhere throughout our community. And so we did those two activities, which became the focus of my little office. And we had a lot of success. By the time the mayor left, we had the 54 smartest blocks in America, in the heart of our downtown, we had digitized a lot of the very good things that we had done as a city in terms of using data to understand ourselves, and to guide our budgeting process. And to guide our prioritization project, of our prioritization of projects within the city. We also made headway in eliminating our digital divide, and effort that when you look back on 2020, and 2021, with the impact of COVID, significantly mitigated the disaster that occurred in so many other communities, where you didn't have the poorest kids able to connect to school. And all of those Google laptops and laptops from other providers and the network that we had established, those kids got to go to school. And they had the tools, and they had the connections to be able to do that. So coming out of the pandemic, yeah, our kids suffer from zoom school compared to in person bits. But you look at other communities that did not have the connectivity that we have, right? We're in a lot better shape.

Unknown Speaker: 31:35

Yeah, and I think that digital infrastructure and connectivity is probably one of the hallmarks of Kansas City success, right? I mean, when I look at, because data, data is a chicken and egg problem in a lot of ways, right? Because you can have a problem that you want to go solve with data. But you know, as you know, working particularly think in cities and governments, sometimes the data just doesn't exist, or it's locked up in a Excel file on somebody's PC that's been manually generated. And then on the other side of it, you know, you've got these smart city projects, you know, that come in and want to center up the environment, which I've been guilty of, and we'll we'll talk about some of the challenges with that approach. And then expect to go solve problems. Right. And so I think what, what I've observed is, or experienced is kind of finding the middle of that path is the challenge, right? Like, how do you how do you identify? You know, what is? And this is? I think the question is like, how do you identify what the strategic long term strategy is, versus like solving acute problems, day to day with data? And then I want to talk about the road button, you know, some of the bumps that that we ran into along the way with that?

Unknown Speaker: 32:52

I guess I'll I'll say very quickly, and turn it over to you to talk through that that experiential bit that we did, it comes down to that same Venn diagram piece that we did in Iraq. What is the Mayor's vision for a community 1020 30 years hence, because truly, those folks and public servants who are doing it right are frequently talking about establishing the foundation for things which are well beyond the term limit under which that they're mandated. And so it's creating that generational change, vision, and having other people embrace it. That's the first piece of that. And for us in marriage, James's time, it was a connected base of residents, all of whom have access to the benefits of the 21st century, all of whom have the opportunities to get the education, the training, the interview opportunities, the transportation network, which became another project to get to where those jobs are located. And that was sort of the mayoral piece of that. And then the city manager side of that, that project based piece that you just alluded to, is okay, one of the things that we have a problem with is a transportation system, which right now is deficient in getting people from our challenge communities to where the work is. So how do we change that? What are those projects, which allow us to make that transition from a education and from a sheer connectivity base? What is the problem with that last month? For many folks, the fiber may be at your doorstep. But the cost to attach that fiber to a device in your home, even if it's given to you for free is exorbitant, and you have to choose between that and eating. So maybe it's a free public Wi Fi, which may not be as fast as that fiber, but it is sufficient for you to get on a zoom call to do a web research project. So You can write a paper, which teaches you about particle physics. And so the next great Nobel laureate is coming from Easter Troost. Right? If you can't do that, that's kind of what we're trying to do. So the project then is the Wi Fi, until we get that per unit cost for the fiber connection down to a point that achieves that longer term vision. So I think I think that was our piece of it. And it's where is that common ground between the short term projects and that long term vision? And I mean, obviously, you are a part of that, that journey with especially on the 54 blocks, right? How do you see it? Well,

Unknown Speaker: 35:36

I want to talk more about future robots. But I think you're right, because because when I look back, we did a number of data projects and analytics projects for the city, across different departments. And the two that I think were most successful and successful, subjective, right, but But I think, that had the biggest impact with digital inclusion, right? Remember, we went through that exercise and mapped broadband access across the entire spectrum of the county, so that in then we've started bringing in other data sets, right, like we talked about crime, we brought in transportation networks, like we really wanted to paint the picture around, you know, the digital divide. And I think that resonated and I think it was successful, because it provided an objective data layer, that can foster debate around policy, right about interventions about things that could happen, and then you can measure those results over time, right. And it was something that aligned with with the Mayor's vision, you know, in the leadership vision and in the city, and and so I think that was definitely one of the ones that was more widely adopted, because a lot of what we've experienced in these data projects is, you know, is what I call the now what moment, which is you deliver something and then it's now what Oh, shit, you mean, I gotta go change the way I work. But then the other project that still going today is, is the Micromobility transportation analytics and insights, the E scooters, the bikes, you know, we work still work very closely with with public works, and that team around leveraging the data coming from all those these scooters to help understand policy around transportation and mobility, but also the impact of bringing these types of things into a community in the in the economic mobility that that can provide a community. And so I think there's very much tie back into the macro themes that that you mentioned, right around digital inclusion and accessing connectivity along with with transportation, some things that did not go well, and I think is indicative and of, of shared leadership challenges and lessons learned would be, you know, we, we built an algorithm to predict paddles. With built an algorithm to forecast crime, we, we built an algorithm to to assign a probability on whether or not a property was vacant. Now, these are all projects that you and I and, and fool people didn't sit around and cook up, you know, in the bar one night or in your office, like these were, these were projects where, you know, again, coming back to your ability to to bring multiple stakeholders together in a room and talk about what's important. What can we do, how do we execute? These are our projects that bubbled out of that, right crime was on the rise. So we wanted to kind of forecast that it turns out that there's in Kansas City is a bit unique, because there's such a big bifurcation between the police department and the city. So that went almost nowhere, right? Because we got we never got buy in, we never got the buy in. Yeah, from the other key stakeholders there. It was almost us trying to be prescriptive. And I think that that caused some pushback. You know, the property thing came right out of the office of performance management, like, you know, you guys can do this, it's going to solve all these problems even had a list of the problems. It's all right. But then we got into it. And city came back and said, you know, really don't think citizens would like us predicting this about their house. And so Okay, well, that, you know, there's privacy implications is the big brother implications, like Well, that makes sense. Maybe we should have thought of that. Before we

Unknown Speaker: 39:29

know what it's like, oh, what do I do with this?

Unknown Speaker: 39:31

Yeah, now what Okay, so put that one back on the shelf. And then titles right, you know, which which we got a lot of coverage for, for that algorithm and forecasting and it was 100% accurate, right? We went a lot about potholes, but it was pretty good. And we ran into was okay. We can forecast this give you a relative degree of certainty, like you said, and we also better something. Yeah, it was above 80%. within a time range, right, we didn't predict it down to the day. But you know, next month 80% probability, there's going to be a pothole here. And the reason we were doing that is because in our original engagement with the public works, there were ways to administer preventative maintenance on the road. And then that was less damaging, and less costly than after the pothole opened up, and you're sending out the road crews to patch it. Right. So that was, and it was

Unknown Speaker: 40:25

predictive. So you could tell people when their road was going to be messed up so they could actually plan?

Unknown Speaker: 40:29

Yep. So we delivered it, and the thing fell flat on its face. What

Unknown Speaker: 40:34

Works Department was like, wait a minute, now you're telling me that an algorithm is going to tell me when I'm going to be doing STS as opposed to the way I've been doing it for 30 years? Yes. It's the internal issues caused us to lose that project.

Unknown Speaker: 40:51

So how do you how do you account for that, and in fact, are up front, because now what we're talking about is, you got a bunch of data. And you know, it's good data, it's, it's effective, where if it's applied, you're gonna have a quantifiable impact to the community and to the city. And you've got stakeholders that are to what, to threatened to change the way of life that the valley there's a values conflict here. I mean, what's underneath that? And like, how do you navigate that and avoid these kinds of costly, but turned out to be a costly experiment?

Unknown Speaker: 41:32

I mean, I almost liken it to where we were talking earlier about COVID, where you have a problem, a solution presents itself in the form of the vaccine. And yet, despite that vaccine, because it's causing me to do something with which I'm not necessarily comfortable or changes the way I, it forces me to accept another viewpoint, I refuse to change. And that has been true, obviously, in the last year and a half with, you know, about a third of our community in the United States, maybe a little bit more than that. In the case of our pothole project, it was true within the leadership of the Public Works Department. Because no organization once, you know, their boss's boss's boss, in this case, the city manager to dive into the question of why aren't you working on X Street today, I can read the data to and I know that that street is likely to have a pothole at which point the public works director who has been fielding so many calls from so many neighborhoods, and there are parts of the community who have learned how to manipulate the 311 system with everyone putting a call in from a different phone number at different time intervals to get a higher priority for pothole filling. And oh, by the way, some of those people are also heavy donors to campaigns for council members. Right? And so we solved the physical problem without appreciating the negative impact of the political problem. And so we solved the physics without accounting for an atmosphere. Yeah, like any human being, you can't breathe without an atmosphere. And that's what happened to us in that particular activity. Yeah, again, the team was not willing to take as much risk in 2019. Because 2019 was an election year. And with the mayor being term limited, and with many of the senior leaders reporting to the city manager, who had also clearly articulated his intent to move on to another position, that leadership sponsorship at the top levels, was no longer driving the department directors to embrace change.

Unknown Speaker: 44:11

Is Is there a lesson and change management there? Which is Oh, my God, yes, you're presented a sea of opportunities and things that you want to change and impact. How do you filter through that? Because you're right. I mean, there's there's you know, as Heifetz would say, there's there's technical problems, right, which is there's known problems and known solutions, and you break an arm, you go to the doctor, you get a cast. And then there's these adaptive challenges, which really require people to dig in and do work right to change. And those are always met by systemic roadblocks and challenges that you have to exercise leadership to move a community through. And and so I think each of these, you know, as an example of that, where, you know, I think a topic like digital inclusion and connectivity resonates pretty broadly right? That's not

Unknown Speaker: 45:00

only that, but it had total sponsorship from both the mayor and the council. It was a priority because we knew it would set the conditions for Kansas City for the next 25 years. And that the the specific project of potholes? Well, it could have if you would have looked at it as a systems change, that the loss of the city manager and the articulated loss the city manager, prior to that thing, taking off, it goes back to your the now what problem, you're the dog that caught the car, what do I eat first? Yeah, you're forcing public works to change the way they manage their staff, and change the way they manage their work. That's a fundamental, a fundamental reorganization of a department which has a lot of people in it and has its own political force, which again, if you if you add political force into a physics equation, it doesn't exist. But in terms of this application, not only does it exist, it was greater than our ability to solve the technical problem, which is when is there going to be a puddle?

Unknown Speaker: 46:11

Yeah. In you also kind of implied another challenge, too, which is like the transparency, that having data and access to data exposes threatens a lot of people, because I remember, we were having conversations with different departments, and they didn't want people to see how they were doing their job. Right? Oh, well, it's great that we can have this dashboard. But now that means my boss does too. Or it means it's gonna go out on the open data portal. And citizens have more things to scream at me about. And I think that was a challenge that, you know, so today is difficult to overcome. Like, you've got to get people bought into again, those common interests and priorities and themes, and to kind of show them how their world is going to be better. Or how at least the broader ecosystem and their role when it is going to going to improve as part of that

Unknown Speaker: 47:02

fight comes back to a Heifetz thing. In the case of when we created the data culture in Kansas City, which took about seven years, yeah. You had Troy Sheltie as a city manager talking about it in terms of its results, and highlighting the good that could come out of it in terms of all city operations. And in doing so he very clearly articulated that this is not a challenge, or a means to restructure your Department Budgets. It's not, it is not going to be used as an evaluation tool in your leadership. But once he had become a lame duck, all those folks who were running departments were not going to be working for new city manager. And the idea that that data were available, could cause them to lose out in negotiations for city budget. And so they did not have that top level vision piece that hyphen talks about is how do you get people to do the right things, you insulate them from threats, you reinforce the ideas of what the ultimate goal is, and you clearly articulate both the goal and how you're going to measure it. If you take the leader out of that equation, all of a sudden that dashboard becomes a threat. Right?

Unknown Speaker: 48:28

I think that's that's an important point. But let's fight that forward, then, you know, to vet your role as vaccine hero and on the other side of the state line, right? Because because these are all valuable lessons, and I think I should I know, I was able to kind of apply those to how we helped some COVID response and particularly in Wyandotte, county, K ck, under your leadership there. I'm intent.

Unknown Speaker: 48:58

I guess the fun thing with that was it was we took the data lessons we had learned in KCMO, in terms of being able to understand our varmint pull those stakeholders together. And that allowed us in probably November and December of 2020. To better figure out where we were likely to have vaccine reticence even as the vaccine was just being brought out only for healthcare providers only at hospitals. We were already working in collaboration with you guys, as to where where were we going to have the greatest challenges as a community so that we could start to work on the education process, and more importantly on the delivery process to minimize those barriers that would cause someone to not want to get vaccinated. We knew that in the 640116401 to 6415 chord or that transportation was a problem, that trust of the government wasn't at the highest in the community. And we knew that reaching out through the media through digital means was not sufficient to get people to come in and get vaccinated, they needed to talk to someone on a phone, they talked to a family member or someone they trusted, or they needed to get someone to knock on their door, almost as if they were canvassing for a vote. And then we figured out other neighborhoods and other regions, were simply sending out an SMS message when someone was eligible would be sufficient to get them to a vaccine site. And so we physically located our three vaccine sites, in areas that were not necessarily the, you know, the three exact centers of the of the community, but were the three centers where they would have the most impact based on a look at the census data based on a look of civic trust data. So some things that were very there were things you could get through surveys, there were things you could get through a reading of social media stuff, things that a lot of political figures would use, to figure out where trust factors were low, so we would go in a more convenient spot for them. Knowing that the folks who trust in the vaccine and trusted the government would drive for extra miles, they're gonna show up, they're gonna show no worries about them. And so the first piece of what we did that I loved the way you guys put the problems out was, how do I place these locations in a place where people will be wanting to respond to it because it's convenient, and they trust the location. So much so that we did not vaccinate. In a public health building or in City Hall. We chose an old Kmart, we chose an armory, which was already a known quantity in the community, because a lot of Kingston Jada's that were held there. So people were used to going there, it was right next to a bus stop. It was a place that people trusted because they had had happy memories there. And so we established a vaccine site there. In the western part of the county, we chose an old The Best Buy, because it was in a place that had easy access to parking, we knew a lot of the folks going to that site would likely be driving. And so we had a large parking lot, it was easy for those folks to get vaccinated. And then the second bit and I think you guys did a beautiful job with this bit was almost in its market analysis, all the marketers in the world who are watching the podcast, they'd be like, Well, yeah, that's that's one on one dude. It was figuring out

Unknown Speaker: 52:44

sound 101 For most governments, but but it is,

Unknown Speaker: 52:47

for a marketing organization, it is for you guys. It was yeah, it was, hey, these guys will respond to text messages. So we send them text, these guys need phone calls. And these guys need a little bit of something else. And so for the first group, we sent text messages when they became eligible for the second group, we had you guys establish a call center and actually engage with people and respond to questions and get it again, make it easy, set up the appointment for me Tell me when I need to show up. And then oh, by the way, those two datasets then funneled into the vaccine site itself. So there was only one dataset, which was managing the, when someone needs to show up to get their job in the arm so they can move on with their life and minimize the time they were on the ground. And we ended up having people do on average, I think it was 20 minutes on the ground, which included the the 15 minute observation. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker: 53:45

the observation period,

Unknown Speaker: 53:46

if people would just come in, we'd have enough lanes, I had enough staff pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop up, go sit down, have a nice day. And I

Unknown Speaker: 53:53

think that was an example of us, partnering with us to create a lot of data. Because you had like the planning around where to where to where to locate the sites, I think was incredible, right? Because you had the outcome in mind, you had the end in mind, which is we want to vaccinate as much of the population as possible. Here's the barriers to that. Here's what we think we can do to overcome those barriers and to get more people in the door and then you're right when it moved into that engagement funnel, right bringing interest forms in identifying the different demographics and outreach what's working what's not. We even dial that into the point where we knew if we were going to send an outbound SMS blast we knew a percentage of those were going to end up calling us to book the appointment and so we could throttle the call volume based off of you know the real time staffing and response rate so you know we got Brian behind the scenes what you know the what on off switch throughout on the thing. But But no, I think that was incredible. You guys, and we came out are strong early like from a vaccination because we had you had to Ain't West. And you had an incredibly efficient operations on the ground. And each one of these locations, which again, was all data driven, right, enabled, enabled by the platform that we ended up building a lot of on the fly for you guys.

Unknown Speaker: 55:19

On the fly is, I think, a little bit disingenuous, it wasn't quite enough why it was incredibly adaptive, let's put adaptive

Unknown Speaker: 55:24

and Yeah, way to put it. Nobody knew what we were walking into. Right. But, but we got it done. And like you said, also got that done in such a way that it provided an experience for residents that they could trust, you know, they knew they knew of sprained it, it was coming from from, from from the county it was met them where they were at, and where they were comfortable, you know, because this touched every aspect of the community from, you know, 16 year olds, 18 year olds through 90

Unknown Speaker: 55:58

Something year olds, dude, we did a lot of 12 year olds there towards the end of my time there

Unknown Speaker: 56:02

towards the end, right. And so, using that, and, you know, putting together those cross functional dashboards that, that you mentioned, I think was was critical. And I think, larger, we view that as a company, and one of our six big successes as well, is just how we were able to collaborate, which actually kind of

Unknown Speaker: 56:23

the dashboard wasn't the outcome. The dashboard was a tool, which allowed the health department to take steps and to measure those steps, and to execute on a timeline, with the specific outcome in mind being higher than 75% vaccination rate for the county.

Unknown Speaker: 56:47

So and I think too, so you're right, because I always say, dashboards are good data goes to die, right? Because it's not about the dashboards. It's about what you do with it. And, you know, one of the things that always I kind of sit back and watch these days now is, you know, there's data, and then there's the interpretation of data. And the interpretation of data tends to be subjective. Data can tell you some stuff like if you're hitting a goal or not. But sometimes, like when you own a vaccination data, you're looking at populations. And you're trying to set policy around that you're going to again, have competing values, competing interests. And one thing, you know, and you mentioned this theme with Iraq, right? You're like, they've got a democracy. Now, it doesn't look like ours, but it works for them. Or they've got a system in place. Now, that isn't what I would have done or, but it works for them. I think policy and providing data is notionally similar, right? One of the things I have to work with our team on is not not trying to intervene with policy, right, we're going to provide the tools and the data, to what, you know, we can guide, but we don't set policy and we had a new member of our team that waded into those waters and got his hands back pretty quickly. Because well, you know, you should do this population next, because then here's the data, I was like, No, dude, you're gonna get, you're gonna get hurt. If you go down that path, right? And then sure enough, he learned that lesson. But I think that is an important lesson, right is really understanding where you need to step back and be objective, and listen, and provide the infrastructure and the data versus letting the local policy individuals, which which policy gets said both from data, but also, again, those competing interests and values, sort of what that play out, I wonder if you have a reaction to

Unknown Speaker: 58:45

that. Go back to our initial phone calls before we had this zoom call. Data is a tool, just as policy is a tool. The thing that is consistent between my early days and my KCMO days, my windy days is things worked best when you use data to be dispassionate to make a decision. And if that decision is a tactical or strategic decision, like it wasn't Iraq, or if it's a policy decision, like it was within KCMO, or whether it was a specific, large project like it wasn't the vaccine effort. Being able to set that vision and define what you want to achieve. Almost takes you down to the point of writing the equation first, before you start collecting data. Yes. So even if the equation has some variables still within it, so all you're looking at is a trend and not a specific or defined number but allows you to modify your policy when the trend is achieving what you want to achieve for the community. That Then you're in the right place. And it is a leadership challenge, to embrace data and to embrace the fact that it may not give you the answer you want. But that's okay. Because you know, it's the Rolling Stones, you don't get what you want, you get what you need. And when it comes to governing human beings, when it comes to trying to meet people's needs, people are weird, they're going to, they're going to move the problem for you. And so, to your point, you know, you don't, you don't set policy with data, you understand the environment, and you inform policymaking with data, that it's the leadership piece, that's the most critical. And it's being able to be transparent in that subjectivity. And in that interpretation of the data, and then the interpretation of the dashboard, to be able to gain the trust of folks you're leading. And that doesn't matter if you're a mayor running a city. And you're trying to talk through the priorities, which are going to get you to the next century. Or if you're a health department trying to figure out how we're going to get the most number of people vaccinated as quickly as humanly possible. Or if you're trying to win a military campaign, you have to be able to have that conversation that's transparent. So that a lot of the pettiness and the jealousies and the bureaucratic infighting and that those obstacles that we, you know, met and defeated us in the in the police case study and in the pothole case study, that you get over that by focusing on real problems and solving.

Unknown Speaker: 1:01:42

Yeah. I think on that note, you're probably the only person I know that we can go from Iraq to potholes to vaccination, and have a common leadership thread here. It's been absolutely great. Having you having me on today. Yeah. in person soon, I hope. Any, any closing thoughts? Anything you want to last us and wisdom to impart?

Unknown Speaker: 1:02:15

Oh, I don't know about wisdom, I think that the one thing we've learned is the trend is positive at the end of the day, and, you know, we will we, as human beings are inclined to want the best for one for another. And I think that, you know, by getting to the point where we got to with Wyandotte, we validated that. And I think that governments on the whole, and organizations on the whole are going to figure out how to do this. Because it just makes sense. And as we have a rising workforce that is already data inclined. And they are already used to ingesting information in this format, that they will make it a part of their process and that when you and I are retired and living on the beach, we can have great confidence, right? The folks who run the show after we're gone,

Unknown Speaker: 1:03:12

will continue doing our job and setting the stage for him right is to get the foundation in place and share these lessons learned that hopefully, you know we'll we'll move, move, move the world forward. Well, thank you again, Bob. How do people get a hold of you?

Unknown Speaker: 1:03:31

Just email me Bob at BB civic solutions.com or fill up your mailbox and I'm sure you can afford them.

Unknown Speaker: 1:03:38

Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you everybody, and we'll talk soon.

Unknown Speaker: 1:03:44

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