Three Lessons on Friction
As the inaugural Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow, I spent 2 years studying how cities navigate friction in partnerships. As I conclude the fellowship, these are the 3 main things I learned.
In 2021, I got a surprising call. Bloomberg Philanthropies and Johns Hopkins University were setting up a new center to support cities across the world in public innovation. One of the ways to bridge the world of research and practice was to offer two fellowships for public sector leaders to reflect on their experience, develop original research and thought leadership, and actively contribute to public sector knowledge and practice. I was asked if I would be interested in moving to Baltimore to be the inaugural fellow. While I loved my life and work in Helsinki, this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reflect and go deeper into questions of when government works best. With my husband, we rented out our home in Helsinki and arrived in Baltimore with four suitcases on 13 January 2022.
I had spent the last nine years in Helsinki’s senior leadership, the last five years as the first Executive Director for arts and culture, sports, library, and youth services. Next to our team of 1,800 professionals directly providing over twenty million annual resident experiences, we were the city's largest grantmaking division. While we were one of the largest culture and leisure experience providers in the country, it was clear that a great city was not created by government action alone. We needed partners for innovation, creativity, speed, and equity at least as much as they needed us. The COVID-19 pandemic had demonstrated the need for faster ways to support nonprofits and arts institutions during a crisis but also shown what we can do when the government works with partners to deliver help and support quicker than ever. To describe this collaborative potential, one of the last things we completed in the culture and leisure services before I left for the fellowship was gaining political approval for service strategies, which for the first time defined what was and what was not the city’s role in providing culture and leisure services and where we seek new partnerships. I was and am a firm believer that policies like this are foundations of good governance as they create predictability and accountability.
During my fellowship, I wanted to go deeper into the question of collaboration and led a research project at Johns Hopkins University on the skills and practices local governments need for innovative and legitimate partnerships. During the last two years, I carried out case studies of park and library partnerships in Amsterdam, Fortaleza, Los Angeles, Mecklenburg County, Memphis, and Philadelphia; discussed the theme with 300 researchers and practitioners from 77 cities, gave 36 talks in 21 cities, and visited 23 cities in 10 countries.
A series of case studies and a policy brief are forthcoming from the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, which synthesize our findings from this work. But before that, I would summarize the key lessons in three points and three images.
1.Friction
It is beneficial for innovation and legitimacy if local governments approach friction as inevitable and desirable when working with stakeholders with differing goals, assets, powers, and traditions. Rather than striving for harmony or consensus, governments benefit from creating conditions for tensions to be experienced as democratic, predictable, innovative, and respectful processes. The Latin American notion of convivencia, understood as a capability to co-exist across differences, encapsulates the ideal state where the parties do not strive to resolve differences but have the ability and willingness for pragmatic solutions.
2.Partnership Capabilities
Public-private-people partnerships have a proven potential to do things faster, better, bigger, and smarter. But they also pose risks of ceding control outside democratic decision-making and enforcing existing inequities. The risks are elevated by the fact that many governments lack codified and public guidelines for partnerships. The lack of guidelines makes it difficult to hold the government accountable. Ad-hoc arrangements can result in public backlash, mistrust, or controversy harmful to trust in government and create reputational risks for partners. Governments can seize the potential and mitigate the risks in partnerships by investing in four capabilities: 1) intentional convivencia practice with staff, 2) convening with partners for learning and recognition of differences, 3) collective experimentation to produce evidence, and 4) codification of guiding principles.
3.Libraries
People, not only institutions, need convivencia skills. We as people need better skills to co-exist across differences and to find our place in cities. Public libraries are ideal learning grounds for convivencia. A good library for convivencia is like a three-legged stool. Its legs are 1) being a place, 2) providing a mix of services, and 3) opening access to content. Every library needs to find its answers to what these mean in their city, town, or neighborhood. When it does this successfully, libraries can abandon the defensive and reactionary language of being “more than just books” and position themselves as critical civic institutions developing our sense of self and our skills for convivencia.
In conclusion
The fellowship has made it clear that this is the work I want to be doing in the future: how museums, parks, recreational services, libraries, cities, philanthropies, and nonprofits can operationalize the complexity and friction of urban life into services, policies, structures, resident engagement, partnerships, leadership, and organizational cultures that deliver both outstanding outcomes and build people’s trust in government. I believe that culture and recreation can play a far bigger role in civic learning as we come to these places often with curiosity and openness and at their best we are welcomed as our full selves — even merely to hang out and be among other people. Next to doing projects with partner organizations across the world, I will be starting a monthly newsletter on clever policies of co-existence and the people behind them. You can subscribe to it for free here.
