Class of 2024 Track Offerings at a Glance
Data Track Innovation Track Collaboration Track
Best suited
for…
A city with some systems and capacity to analyze
data, but limited experience in performance
leadership and routinely using data to solve
problems and track operational performance. The
city should have a strong commitment to growing
their data capacity.
A city that is open to trying something new
to tackle a challenging problem, committed
to innovation across city government, and
committed to growing their innovation
capacity.
A city that is interested in strengthening their
collaborative problem-solving skills and
wants to advance a specific problem (new or
stuck) that requires the cooperation of
multiple departments, jurisdictions, and/or
sectors of the city to make progress.
By the end of
the program
you /your city
team will …
• Know how to use data to identify and
understand a problem, and to set measurable
goals and manage toward them.
• Learn how to establish a performance
management routine to monitor and evaluate
progress towards goals.
• Share a consistent language and approach to
using data to inform critical policy and
operations decisions and communicate them.
• Develop greater awareness of what data to
ask for, how to interpret it, and how to use it to
reduce bias and guide progress toward a goal.
• Enhance your understanding of how
leadership affects the conditions for success.
• Identify another problem facing your city to
apply your data knowledge and routines and
to build upon this new approach.
• Develop insights to help you better
understand the primary pain points for
residents interacting with a service.
• Have new ideas to address your selected
problem that you are excited to build out
and implement.
• Complete at least two rounds of
prototype tests of selected ideas.
• Learn how to build broad buy-in for the
implementation of ideas.
• Gain awareness of the enablers of and
the barriers to innovation within city hall
and what to do about them.
• Enhance your understanding of how
leadership affects the conditions for
success.
• Identify another problem facing your city
to which you will apply this process.
• Learn how to define problems, break
them into root causes, identify entry
points, and search for actionable ideas.
• Apply an equity lens to your problem and
learn how to conduct an equity
assessment.
• Conduct four iterations where teams will
test ideas, reflect upon learning, adapt,
and act again.
• Engage with diverse stakeholders and
build buy-in.
• Enhance your understanding of how
leadership affects the conditions for
success.
• Gain skills, key frameworks, and concepts
that can be applied to various strategic
collaborations your city pursues.
• Develop a shared language and approach
to mobilize high-impact collaborations.
Nature of
support
• Virtual sessions with Harvard Faculty
• Team coaching and workshops supported by
the Bloomberg Center for Government
Excellence (GovEx)
• Virtual sessions with Harvard Faculty
• Applied learning of public sector
innovation curriculum, supported by a
dedicated innovation coach
• Virtual and in-person sessions with
Harvard Faculty
• Applied learning to designated problem
and implementation support
Data Track Innovation Track Collaboration Track
• Mayoral coaching • Mayoral coaching
• Cross-city network of support
Unique track
offerings
The city team will:
• Participate in regular, biweekly coaching to
apply concepts from the virtual sessions to the
selected problem and meet key milestones
such as developing a data inventory and
selecting key performance indicators that
align with the theory of change
• Create data routines to help address a specific
problem or priority area and be able to apply
these skills to a new priority area.
Mayors will:
• Participate in coaching with former mayors
and data experts
The city team will:
• Participate in regular coaching
workshops with experts to learn and
apply core elements of design-based
innovation to selected problem
• Develop and test a portfolio of innovative
ideas to make progress on city’s selected
problem
Mayors will:
• Participate in kick-off call, coaching with
public sector innovation experts, and
periodic briefings with their city team
The city team will:
• Attend and help organize in-city kick-off
meetings (November-December 2023)
• Attend 12 virtual sessions
• Attend a weeklong, immersive program in
NYC
Mayors will:
• Participate in onboarding call, in-city
meetings and at least three update
meetings with their city team
Required
participants
and
anticipated
time
commitment
Mayor – approx. 2-3 hours per month
Core team of up to 6 city staff – approximately
3-4 hours per week plus at least a couple 1-day
site visits, and
Project Manager – additional 1-3 hrs/wk
Senior Leader Team Lead – additional 1-2 hrs/wk
Performance Lead - additional 2 hrs/month
Senior Subject Matter Expert
Data and Performance Staff
Mayor – approximately 2-3 hours per month
Cross-departmental Core team of 6-12
staff – approximately 5-6 hours per week
plus four 1.5-day site visits, and:
Project Manager – additional 1-3 hrs/wk
Innovation Lead – additional 1-3 hrs/wk
Learning Lead – additional 2 hrs/month
Equity & Community Engagement Lead–
additional 2-3 hrs/month
Mayor - approximately 2 hours per month
Team of 8 City leaders (Designated by the
mayor - Minimum of 4 city staff including 1
Bloomberg Harvard Senior Leader)
Team members – approximately 5-7 hours
per week plus 1 week in New York City
Senior Leader – additional 1 hour/wk
Dates October – Summer 2024 (9 months) October – Summer 2024 (9 months) October – Summer 2024 (9 months)
Data Track Overview
What is the Data Track? Are you eager to get a better handle on the root causes of your city’s challenges, yet often make decisions based on gut feeling or anecdote rather than data? Are you setting big strategic goals and then challenged in using data to track progress and make adjustments? As a mayor, you need to know which data are essential and how best to use data to improve outcomes for your residents. Developing data-informed systems and practices and being able to determine which data you need and how to use it can enable you to more effectively and equitably allocate resources, analyze problems, inform decisions, and manage performance.
You will nominate a problem that is important to your agenda. Through leadership training from Harvard faculty, applied technical assistance from data experts at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Government Excellence (GovEx), and direct coaching from former mayors and data experts, you will:
• Use data to set goals, monitor indicators, evaluate results and identify opportunities to improve performance. You and your team will work with experts and apply learning to tackle your nominated problem. By the end of the program, your city team will know how to articulate and understand problems by using data and will have set short-term and long-term goals that are measurable and linked to progress on your nominated problem. • Establish a performance management routine to monitor and evaluate progress. By the end of the program, your team will have held at least one performance management meeting. They will have established a routine for collecting and analyzing data to better define a problem and to conceptualize and iterate solutions.
• Enhance your understanding of how to use data to make your city more effective, efficient, equitable, and accountable and of how your leadership affects the conditions for success. By the end of the program, you will develop greater awareness of what data to ask for, how to interpret data to probe assumptions, and questions to ask to reduce bias and interrogate progress. You will learn how to diagnose resistance to change, change practices, and advance a culture of data- informed decision-making.
• Communicate about the city’s challenges and opportunities in ways that demonstrate use of data and evidence. By the end of the program, your team will share a consistent language and approach to using data to inform critical policy and operations decisions. • Transfer the learning. By the end of the program, your team will be able to apply learnings to solve another key problem facing your city. City teams commit to this next problem prior to the track’s conclusion.
Which cities will benefit from the Data Track?
Your city will benefit from this support if you are:
• Dissatisfied with how often the city’s leadership team gets back anecdotes or data that hasn’t been analyzed or validated, and you want to ensure conversations and decisions are better rooted in data and evidence.
• Aiming to improve your city’s ability to use the right data to set and monitor measurable targets to achieve its strategic initiatives and to communicate progress and challenges to residents. • Eager to make meaningful progress on one of your most pressing challenges by articulating problems, aligning outcomes, measures, activities, and resources. • Already investing in data infrastructure and governance with some policies or standards for data collection, sharing, and improving quality.
• Able to dedicate 1-2 analysts to collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data related to the mayoral challenge selected for the track
What support will you receive in the Data Track?
You and your team will receive support designed to improve your city’s ability to address your nominated challenge, make actionable and data-informed decisions, and enhance your city’s data infrastructure and performance management capabilities. Support includes:
• Virtual classes: Harvard faculty will introduce you to key concepts that will help you develop the conditions necessary to embrace using data more frequently in problem-solving. Faculty will lead you through highly interactive discussions on your role (as a mayor or senior leader) in modeling and effectively consuming data; how data bias impacts decisions; and how to build performance leadership into your city’s DNA.
• Team Coaching: This tailored support will meet each city’s unique needs and GovEx senior advisors will work with your team to use data and inquiry to better understand the problem, engage stakeholders, set goals, evaluate, and communicate progress, and cultivate a data-informed culture.
• Workshops: Cities will participate in hands-on workshops to activate each learning phase in the track and use tools that bring the concepts from the virtual classes to life. • Dedicated data coach: Sustaining culture change requires strong leadership. A former mayor or leading subject matter expert in the field of data and evidence in cities, will provide one-on-one support to your mayor (or designated senior leader depending on your city’s governance structure) on how to lead this work at scale by reinforcing the leadership lessons from the virtual classes.
Expectations and Commitments
• Engagement from the mayor: Your mayor is essential in empowering your city team and setting expectations for engaged participation including attending the kick-off call, key team engagements, virtual sessions led by Harvard faculty, and meeting with their data coach once every two months.
Mayors should anticipate a commitment of 2-3 hours per month. • Engagement from the senior leader: You will be the bridge between the mayor and the core team and ensure the team’s activities align with the mayor’s expectations and ambitions for how to address the nominated challenge area. You will keep the mayor informed about team-level progress and proactively address barriers to collaboration, data sharing, or team engagement. • Recruitment and engagement of core city team: Your core team will include 5 or 6 city leaders including:
o A project manager will be the primary contact for scheduling and organizing the team. The project manager will also gather and report back on ways that the city has advanced its data practices.
o A senior leader who will serve as the team lead and share key updates and ensure alignment with the mayor. Please note that we expect at least one of the Bloomberg Harvard Senior Leaders to participate.
o A performance lead who will implement the processes needed to run a successful performance management meeting. This person holds the relationships with the key stakeholders required to attend the meeting and is well-positioned to support the mayor in running the meetings (and will follow up before and after each meeting). A senior leader is a likely performance lead, but others can be nominated for this role as well. o A senior subject matter expert who possesses in-depth knowledge of the operational aspects of the problem that you and your team nominate. o A data or performance analyst (at least one) who will provide data-analytic capacity. • Time commitment from team members: Project teams should fully participate in routine calls, complete tasks agreed upon by the city team and drive the learning throughout their respective organizations and departments. Team members commit to 3-4 hours per week.
Innovation Track Overview
What is the Innovation Track? As a mayor, you are asked to design and deliver the points of interaction for residents seeking critical services from local government – whether it be accessing food stamps, applying for a business license, or navigating city recycling processes. This has never been more true than in the last few years, as you led your city during a complex pandemic and resident demands on local government services have only increased. You have been asked to balance providing immediate services while also reimagining and redefining your government and city, making them more effective, legitimate, and human. Through the innovation track, your city team will receive instruction and hands-on coaching from experts to help you develop innovative solutions to improve a specific service interaction between your city and the community and to help you develop quick wins that help you demonstrate how innovative ways of working can improve the ways government serves community. Throughout the Track, your team will also receive support to think about how to leverage what you’re learning to build plans to scale innovative ways of working across your city hall to both other specific service interactions and more complex challenges facing your city.
You will learn creative problem-solving approaches that have been proven to help cities with their toughest internal and external challenges. We will help you learn and apply these new approaches by selecting a specific resident-facing service interaction to improve within your city. By working collaboratively within city hall, with external city stakeholders, and with residents to identify and test ideas that have lasting impact to reduce the pain points of an existing resident facing service, you will:
• Cultivate a deep understanding of the selected problem by engaging stakeholders and residents most impacted by the problem, building trust, and promoting collaborative relationships. By the end of the program, through in-depth design research, you will have developed a set of insights that help you better understand the primary pain points residents face when interacting with your selected problem.
• Build a portfolio of ideas grounded in a richer understanding of the problem by working with residents most impacted by the issue to brainstorm and co-design a portfolio of ideas that will generate lasting impact. By the end of the program, your city will have a portfolio of ideas to address your selected problem that you are excited to build out and implement. • Build prototypes of solutions and test them with impacted residents to document actionable learnings that improve your ideas. By the end of the program, your city will have completed at least two rounds of prototype tests.
• Build broad buy in for your ideas and start identifying the support necessary to turn them into reality. By the end of the program, your city will have communicated a commitment to implement one or more of the ideas from your portfolio that will have a demonstrable impact for residents. • Carry forward this new way of working and apply these new skills to another city problem. By the end of the program, your city’s staff will have identified another problem facing your city to which you will apply this process.
• Enhance your understanding of how your leadership affects the conditions for success. By the end of the program, you will gain awareness of the enablers of and the barriers to innovation within city hall, tools to empower staff, questions to spur progress and promote agility, and how you might structure the organization for innovation.
Which cities will benefit from the Innovation Track?
Your city will benefit from this support if you are:
• Willing to take a new approach to an existing service challenge. If you have an existing service that city provides where you know there are pain points for residents and are open to trying something new to generate impact for your city, then you are an ideal match for this program. • Committed to building innovation into city hall. If your city wants to grow innovation efforts more broadly across city government, then you are an ideal candidate for this work. While the program will focus on one problem, your city will work as a cross-matrixed project team throughout this track and team members and mayors will receive specific coaching on how to incubate and sustain innovation practices from the ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ across city hall. • Either currently have or plan to add dedicated staff for innovation. Your city is well-suited for this work if you have made a commitment to growing your innovation capacity with dedicated innovation staff. For example, if your city just hired a Chief Innovation Officer (or equivalent) who is tasked with solving problems in the city or building an innovation team.
What support will you receive in the Innovation Track?
You receive comprehensive support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Harvard University, Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University, and the implementation partner, the Centre for Public Impact, designed to help you develop new ideas to address your chosen problem while cultivating innovation skills among city staff.
• World-class, tailored public sector innovation curriculum: Expert designers deliver regular interactive webinars focused on breaking down the core elements of design-based innovation into specific skills. You also receive access to a content library with recordings of all instructional lessons for ongoing use.
• Dedicated innovation coach: Each city will have a designated innovation coach who will lead virtual coaching workshops where they help core teams apply design thinking and other innovative approaches to their problems through state-of-the-art innovation curriculum and project-based learning. The coach will conduct four in-person site visits at critical program moments, including a kick-off site visit in November 2023.
• Virtual classes: Harvard faculty will lead remote sessions on where and how to deploy approaches to innovation to try new things, address uncertainty, and manage risk, and how to overcome barriers to building innovation in your city and creating organizations that can learn. • Mayoral coaching: Mayors participating in the Innovation track will receive a series of coaching sessions with innovation experts on scaling and championing innovation in your city. • Network of support: Cities will have access to virtual cross-city collaboration platforms that foster a support network with other cities in the program. Together, you will share knowledge, lessons learned, and support with this wider network of cities that are also using innovation techniques.
Expectations and Commitments
• Engagement from the mayor: Empower and support the core city team (6-12 city hall staff) and set expectations for engaged participation among team members. Attend the kick-off call and periodic briefings to learn about program progress and innovation opportunities in your city. Attend virtual sessions led by Harvard faculty. At a minimum, the mayor will need to spend 2-3 hours per month on the track engaged in related work.
• Recruitment and engagement of core team: Recruit, set expectations with, and regularly engage 6-12 of the city’s top creative minds to participate in this work, across all levels of the organization. They will attend regularly scheduled coaching touchpoints to learn and apply the innovation curriculum. Core teams should have diverse representation, including senior leadership roles in the administration, those who work closely with residents, SMEs on the specific service you choose to tackle, and those who might be considered ‘up and coming’ talent in related departments. We will help you identify the right size and mix of team members based on the service you choose to improve.
• Time commitment from team: Project teams should be prepared to fully participate in calls with expert coaches and complete tasks agreed upon by the city team and their coach. Team members will also work to drive the learning throughout their teams and departments. Team members should be able to commit to an average of roughly 5-6 hours per week for the duration of the track. • Team roles: Each city will be asked to appoint multiple team leads, including a project manager and innovation lead, who supports the team in building and scaling innovation capacity beyond the program. These team leads will be asked to commit an additional 1-3 hours per week to the program, but this may vary in intensity throughout the program.
Collaboration Track Overview
What is the Collaboration Track? Is your city facing a complex issue that requires the involvement, know-how, and heft of a cross-sector team to tackle? Do you need to build alignment for the initiative across the interests of your constituents, your internal government departments, and an ecosystem of nonprofit and for-profit organizations? Do you feel like the effort is somehow mired down under its own weight? Mayors are charged with solving many of the most pressing problems that our cities face. Often, these challenges have been festering for decades as rather narrow interventions have failed to make a difference - and all for good reason. These problems are hard to solve, and they require the working together of disparate groups with competing interests and unrelated priorities.
In this track, your city hall will strengthen its ability to harness the talents, resources, and energy of diverse stakeholders working across sectors, jurisdictions, and agencies to solve complex problems. You will apply collaboration skills to a priority issue or opportunity while also building the know-how to extend these skills to other priorities.
Through workshops, programming, and coaching, you will:
• Apply the learning to a current collaboration. A cross-boundary, multi-organizational team from your city will advance a mayoral priority. The team will make progress in establishing a shared definition of the problem and of success, engaging diverse stakeholders and building buy-in, applying an equity lens to the problem, establishing roles, and forming an agreed-upon plan of action to achieve goals. Through conducting four iterations, teams will test ideas, reflect upon learning, adapt, and act again. By the end of the program, your city will have made progress, whether in preparation or in acting, on the key issue that was nominated for the program.
• Gain skills, key frameworks, and concepts that can be applied to various strategic collaborations you pursue. The team will learn how to define problems, break them into root causes, identify entry points, and search for actionable ideas. By the end of the program, your team will have a concrete set of tools with which to enter their next cross-boundary initiative.
• Develop a shared language and approach to mobilize high-impact collaborations. By the end of the program, the team will have gained both a systems approach and the field experience to balance capacity, support, and purpose to make progress on an initiative. In addition, the team will have bonded and gained confidence in their ability to orchestrate a cross-sector team to create impact.
• Enhance your understanding of how your leadership affects the conditions for success. By the end of the program, you will gain awareness of the role you can play as an authorizer in enabling success and of other key enablers of and barriers to collaboration.
• Transfer the learning to other future collaborations. The city’s senior leadership will seek to spread collaboration know-how to other collaborations in the city. By the end of the program, you will be prepared to apply collaboration strategies to other issues requiring cross-boundary collaboration.
Which cities will benefit from the Collaboration Track? Your city will benefit if you:
• Are currently grappling with a high-priority issue or opportunity that you are working to solve through a collaboration, but you sense that the team is stuck or making progress slower than expected. • Are working to make progress on issues or opportunities that require you to harness insights, expertise, and resources across sectors, jurisdictions, and government agencies. • Find it challenging to get a diverse group to work together to make progress on an issue, particularly when that group includes organizations beyond your direct control.
What support will you receive in the Collaboration Track? Cities receive comprehensive support designed to foster greater collaborative capacity while advancing a priority initiative. Support includes:
• Applied learning: A team of leaders from your city will work on a priority problem or opportunity via:
o Classes and working sessions: A five-day convening in New York City will feature classes to build skills for collaboration and working sessions to make progress on the priority issue your city selects. Participants and the focus issue of the track will be chosen in consultation with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative to ensure that participation in the track helps advance progress on the priority as well as transfer learnings to other city priorities.
o Facilitated onsite sessions: Working sessions with an extended team to take place in your city to help define the problem and inform the collaboration’s next steps. • Virtual classes: Harvard faculty and experts will lead 12 virtual sessions on problem exploration and iterative action with a team of eight city leaders on the selected issue to be addressed in the program.
• Support: Faculty and staff facilitators will work with each team as they advance the selected issue, work to become effective collaborators, identify and build support for effective solutions, and aim to transfer learning across multiple collaborations.
Expectations and Commitments
• Recruitment of team by mayor: Assist in recruiting a core team of 8 city leaders made up of a minimum of 4 city staff including one Bloomberg Harvard Senior Leader who would commit to being part of the collaboration team for the duration of the program.
• Engagement from the mayor: Empower and support the core team of eight city leaders and set expectations for engaged participation. Participate in onboarding session and regular update meetings with the core team. Attend a portion of both the in-city kick-off meeting and final meeting.
Lend support and encouragement to the team as the critical authorizer. At a minimum, the mayor will commit 2-3 hours per month for the duration of the track.
• Time commitment from the team: The core team of eight should have the time, resources and authority needed to fully participate in the program. They will commit on average 4-6 hours per week for the duration of the track. This team will also travel to New York City for five days in Spring 2024. The team will be asked to share ongoing updates with the mayor.
Track Application Timeline and Assessment Criteria
Immediately following the senior leaders’ program, you will receive a separate online application to apply to the three tracks.
Applications will be assessed on the following criteria:
• Nominated problem and opportunity for impact
• Existing or planned dedicated capacity for the work
• Excitement for and commitment to developing the capability