I tried not to look shocked when he went on to explain that he got shot on a second occasion as well, and that was the one that really prompted him to set out on a different path. Then he challenged the older participant to apply what he had just learned about mastering the neurological impact of his trauma during incarceration.
The students didn’t have all the answers, but they had some very relevant things to say to a group of people trying to move past violence and addiction. In a different life, the students might have decided to help ex-offenders by helping cook dinner at a halfway house in town. That would have been a worthy project, too, but who knows if these kids had any special talent when it came to cooking. What they did have was real expertise in a field that directly impacted this audience. When one of them asked how long it would take the impact of addiction to be potentially reversed in the brain thanks to neuroplasticity, this wasn’t a theoretical question—it was a personal and urgent one.
This could be the future of what it means to be a college town, as students and faculty at the top of their fields get more involved in the life of the cities around them. Those at the university can come to see community members not as the subjects of a service project but as genuine neighbors who can draw benefit from their work, while helping to educate them in the realities of the problems they are trying to solve. The residents can offer the students a far richer education than they can get on campus alone, and in the process the students form a relationship with our community not just as a place they passed through but as part of what shaped them, no less than the university itself. If talent continues to prove the coin of the realm in today’s economy, then this is a style of development we have only begun to understand—one in which talent is reinforced through a community that knows how to connect talent with purpose.
11
Subconscious Operations
John Martinez has a problem. About my age, with a shaved head, a dark beard, and eyes that dart around looking for the next problem to solve, he is one of the stars of our Venues, Parks & Arts team (formerly Parks and Recreation). He oversees a parks maintenance staff that numbers about fifty in the wintertime and swells in the summer as seasonal workers join us to mow lawns at parks and vacant lots, irrigate soccer fields, repair lights on trails, clear storm damage, and fix whatever else needs fixing across a city with over sixty park properties.
John’s problem is that the three supervisors who collectively oversee all of his operations have untold amounts of knowledge in their heads—and are all close to retirement. We’re in my conference room going through numbers and flowcharts for the quarterly “SBStat” meeting for parks. Inspired by the “CitiStat” model that brought modern performance management to Baltimore under Mayor Martin O’Malley and became a template for data-driven local government everywhere, SBStat is a sequence of intensive meetings where we identify issues and vet new ideas, with rigorous analysis by city staff as the basis for our conversations. We explore lots of advanced and novel ideas in these meetings, but the title slide currently being presented bears a phrase I’ve not seen used before: “Subconscious Operations.”
The question John brings up is how to get processes and procedures onto paper—outside of the supervisors’ heads, mapping steps that they don’t even know they’re taking. Interviewing the supervisors and drawing process diagrams, the team has tried to get a better idea of what the supervisor does, some of it so automatically that he doesn’t think about it. They have found, for example, that by the time the downtown grounds maintenance supervisor gives the daily list of jobs to his staff, he has gone through sixteen previous conscious and unconscious steps. Often without even thinking about it, he adjusts tasking based on equipment conditions, weather, or even just the day of the week. If it’s, say, the first Thursday of the month, he just knows by instinct to route more resources toward preparing the area around Michigan Street, which gets more foot traffic for downtown’s monthly “First Fridays” events.
ANALYTICAL WORK SESSIONS like this meeting aren’t just the result of a mayor indulging his inner geek, though I admittedly enjoy them for this reason. More importantly, they are the backbone of our effort to make the city’s management more rigorous, efficient, and fact-driven. When I took office, it was clear that too many decisions were still made based on gut feel, rather than data—and some operations never got rigorously analyzed at all. Old-fashioned local government is notoriously full of seat-of-the-pants operations, even as financial pressures and resident expectations should be forcing us to become hyper-efficient. No one could tell me, when I took office, how much it cost to fill in a pothole, or how many times we missed a trash pickup in a given neighborhood in a given week. If a problem arose, I would hear about it only when it became serious enough that someone contacted a council member to complain, wrote a letter to the newspaper, or buttonholed me at the supermarket to talk about it.
Fresh from a job in management consulting and eager to unlock whatever efficiencies could be found, I had promised during the campaign to set up a 311 system, so residents wouldn’t have to figure out the relevant department and its own contact information in order to report a pothole or get a streetlight fixed. When the 311 center opened, a year after I took office, we gained something even more valuable than a new mechanism for customer service; for the first time, South Bend had a central, constantly updated data set on what people were calling about. Using the data, the city was able to make countless operational improvements, from cutting the time it took to get a large item picked up by our trash crews, to simplifying the way residents paid their water bills.
ARRIVING IN OFFICE, ESPECIALLY with my consulting background, I took it as a given that more data was a good thing—the more objective and analytically driven our work, the better. There was an emerging bipartisan consensus about this style of government, and I bought in. Just as Martin O’Malley had gained a reputation for excellent work modernizing Baltimore’s government with improvements on everything from overtime costs to pothole patching, Republican Mayor Steve Goldsmith of Indianapolis racked up a number of wins from increased child support collection rates to the reduction of sixty-eight thousand pieces of unnecessary paperwork per year.
But this style of government also had its detractors, as I saw when Councilman John Voorde stopped by my office one day to discuss an upcoming budget vote. “Have you seen that documentary on Vietnam?” he began, in what I assumed was just small talk as he settled into a seat at the conference table. The office of mayor had once belonged to his father, Edward “Babe” Voorde, whose term ended tragically when he was killed in a car accident in 1960. Wearing his usual sweater vest over a shirt and tie, John smiled benignly and leaned forward a little in his chair. I liked him, though our styles were certainly different. John was mainly a creature of the old school—he had worked various city jobs, beginning on the street department, and was city clerk at the time I first got elected. He was one of many people of my parents’ generation to support me when I first ran, and we got along well. But as a council member he was sometimes unpredictable, and I couldn’t count on his vote without spending time with him to make sure I had made my case and asked where he stood.
To answer his question: I had not seen Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary series on Vietnam, but it was getting a lot of attention. It seemed to be especially resonant for the generation that had experienced it as the dominant issue of their coming-of-age. As John reminisced about various people in his St. Joseph High School Class of 1962 affected by the draft, I worried that it might be a while before we came to the topic of my budget proposal. Then he said something that made clear he had been thinking of city affairs all along: