Accelerate Collaborative Solutions Development with the ActionMap Toolkit

By Jim Johnson, President, ActionMap Inc.

The Challenge

The City of San Leandro was faced with a $4.3 million budget shortfall. The City had already gone through several years of service and development cutbacks, because of reduced property tax income due to state-wide Proposition 13. In addition, the City needed to make significant investments in seismic retrofits, in order to meet newly mandated earthquake standards. Finally, the recession had significantly reduced the city's sales tax revenue. The City was in a squeeze, and there were no obvious areas in which to make further cuts. The City Council set a deadline for the Mayor and City Manager to present a set of recommendations by January of the following year, only twelve weeks away.

The City's Approach

The Mayor and City Manager chose the approach of recruiting a Citizens Task Force of community leaders, and having them participate actively in the budget process. Members of the Task Force would be teamed with City department heads focused on three major areas: Finance, City Services, and Seismic Readiness. As well as contributing ideas and energy, the participation of these key community leaders would help ensure overall community acceptance of the final budget changes.

51 people from the community were nominated and joined the Task Force, including local leaders from the Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Association, Industrial Roundtable, and other civic organizations, as well as prominent individuals who had a record of contributing to civic debate and improvement. The Task Force was being assembled. Now what was needed was a way to channel this group's experience, intelligence and energy to produce the necessary budget recommendations.

ActionMap Technologies' Role

Following a marketing contact, the City Manager and his staff accepted an offer by ActionMap Technologies of a demonstration session of the ActionMap Toolkit procedures for process improvement and group decision support. Based on the demonstration session, the City team asked for a proposal. ActionMap Technologies produced a plan that described a schedule of workshops, meetings and other activities that would engage the Citizens Task Force and produce the recommendations for the City Council by the target date. The ActionMap Technologies team would act as designers, coordinators, and facilitators for this project.

The Plan

The plan was based on following the ActionMap Toolkit view of looking at the situation in terms of process, and applying the ActionMap Toolkit procedures according to the "large group" approach. The key challenge of this engagement was getting 51 volunteer citizen leaders, each with strong ideas about civic management and improvement, along with City department heads and their staff, to buy into this plan and follow it according to a rigorous schedule.

Implementing the Plan

Getting the plan into action required adding one layer above, and one layer below the ActionMap Toolkit procedures. The "higher" layer was selling the plan to the Task Force members. This involved preparing and presenting documents that clearly described the method and plan, and allowing for these to be openly discussed and evaluated. One of the interesting points of this activity was the fact that there was no recognized framework of authority to govern the activities of the volunteer citizens group. Fortunately, Task Force members quickly realized they needed to choose a set of procedures and go with it, and that the ActionMap Toolkit procedures were clearly suited for the job.

The "lower" layer in the approach involved the detailed mechanics of using the ActionMap Toolkit procedures not in a single workshop, but distributed over many workshops, groups, and conversations. In the actual execution of the project, the robust nature of the procedures allowed them to be stretched out in time and augmented with techniques to capture, communicate, combine and share information among different project teams. Also, because of the intuitive nature of the procedures, they were quickly learned and easily followed by the participants.

Project Progress

While there were tensions throughout the project, particularly around further reductions in City services, the plan moved forward largely according to schedule. The main variations had to do with allowing time to both absorb the information that needed to be reviewed, and to discuss the wealth of ideas and evaluations that were being contributed. Also, as could have been expected, the schedule needed to be relaxed during the holiday season. For the most part, after the initial launch activities, and some additional coaching, the combined Task Force and City staff teams moved forward vigorously and without need for extensive added support.

The Results

On the due date, the recommendations report, over 200 pages long, was delivered by the Citizens Task Force to the City Council. It included a prioritized set of possible budget reductions that totalled well in excess of the required $4.3 million. After further vigorous discussion, items from the recommendations report were incorporated by the Council into the City plan. The City of San Leandro had achieved a balanced budget.

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