Designed Leadership: A Case Study

MOURA QUAYLE

Designed Leadership Cases

strategic design method in many realms of activity—especially as a learning process.

Three cases follow that illustrate the collaborative aspects of designed leadership: The Campus City Collaborative; Leading Cities; and the Pacific Coast Collaborative. These examples also embody varying degrees of success in integrating the concept of collaboration among academia, business, government, nonprofits, and civil society.

These collaborative cases refer less to when and how we are creative, and more to the importance of collaboration and the exchange of ideas, voices, and experience when solving wicked problems. It is about disciplines exchanging ideas and approaches as part of designed leadership.

The Campus City Collaborative

Early in 2009, the new mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson, announced that he wanted his city to be the greenest in the world by 2020. Everyone from Robertson’s staunchest local critics to former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio were watching the process.

Robertson’s first initiative was to launch the Greenest City Action Team (GCAT), for which he recruited fourteen people (including me) with experience in urban environment and economy; he challenged us to gather best practices and ideas and then to make recommendations to the city council.

In May 2009, the team sent its first report to the city council.

It was called Quick Start (in name and process) and proposed forty-four actions within three policy areas: jobs and the economy, greener community infrastructure, and human health.4 Work then continued on longer-term recommendations and targets. Vancouver 2020: A Bright Green Future was released in October 2009. It identifies ten long-term goals, supported by a set of measurable and attainable 2020 targets.5

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Given these challenging goals and targets, implementation was critical. GCAT members were asked to ďŹ nd ways to continue their work with the city. The public servants became very engaged throughout the process, and many of them became champions for various initiatives. Two GCAT members, former Vancouver mayor and former British Columbia Premier Mike Harcourt and I, decided to take a proactive role in implementing one of our Bright Green ideas: building a collaboration between the city and the postsecondary sector.6 The Campus City Collaborative (C3) was born in late 2009.

An informal group of academics from the city’s six postsecondary institutions and key personnel from the City of Vancouver gathered to imagine ways to maximize synergy among ourselves 162

Designed Leadership Cases

and our organizations. Members included the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Economic Commission, and Vancouver’s six public postsecondary institutions.7 The initiative was designed to help the city tap into the burgeoning creativity and intelligence of its campuses to achieve its Greenest City Action Plan targets.

C3 presented an opportunity to demonstrate that, in Vancouver, things can be done differently. We can break down the disciplinary isolation in our institutions. We can collaborate more effectively while providing a real-world learning environment for students.

C3 was designed to create as many opportunities as possible for collaboration among postsecondary institutions and the city.

In its first year, three catalyst projects were funded and launched: a Green Workforce Development Symposium, Carbon Talks, and CityStudio.

The Green Workforce Development Symposium was held to consider ways in which C3 institutions could meet the growing demand for education and training to equip workers for new types of green jobs. Carbon Talks, a program at Simon Fraser University, served as a platform to discuss, define, and manage the transition to a low-carbon economy.8 Such an economy requires all sectors to collaborate and cocreate a city where talent is retained and green innovations are made. In 2012, Carbon Talks invited sixteen business leaders to discuss the opportunity to create a global urban sustainability center, thus drawing the business sector into a C3 process that had previously been confined to three partners: government, academia, and civil society.9 At this gathering, we asked the question, What are the roles and needs of businesses in the development of Vancouver as a global center on urban sustainability? Conclusions from the Carbon Talks session included the need to rethink sustainability, including introducing some form of monitoring and reporting platform for businesses. We also identified the need for a revenue-generating business case for participation 163

Lear ning and Practice

in an urban sustainability center; we were, and are, looking for concrete benefits for businesses.

While C3 and Carbon Talks were a good start on the businessconnection front, we still lacked a project with legs. As is often the case, serendipity stepped up. The Greenest City program Talk Green to Us sponsored a mash-up, where projects were proposed and then voted upon by a social media audience. The most popular project was the concept of a studio in which undergraduate students would learn together while helping the Greenest City program demonstrate some of the greenest city goals. The program recognized the potential synergy this project would have with C3, and they launched CityStudio.

CityStudio . . . The City is the Classroom

CityStudio is an innovative program in which students and instructors from C3 institutions work together to address Vancouverspecific green goals.10 Students enrolled in CityStudio (both a place and a conceptual, student-centered learning environment) receive credit at their host institutions. City staff and other experts provide background information to the program. Each postsecondary institution also develops specific partner courses that align with—and can be taught in conjunction with—the issue being addressed in CityStudio that term. These partnerships expanded student involvement from twenty students in the Core Studio to generally over three hundred students in partner courses in the postsecondary institutions. t t t t

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CityStudio projects and course work emphasize sustainability leadership, social enterprise, education of change managers, and the development of green businesses. Early work focused on a single Vancouver neighborhood and on the implementation of demonstration projects involving access to nature, local food, and development of the green economy.

CityStudio has attracted multiyear funding, and continues to receive City of Vancouver support. The broad Campus City Collaborative (C3), on the other hand, was not sustained. The C3 concept was perhaps ahead of its time, in the sense that the sectors (academic-city-business) have a diverse set of cultures, timelines, and participants. While the concept of multisectoral collaboration is strongly endorsed everywhere, it is difficult to achieve. This said, C3 offers a host of lessons learned.

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The designed-leadership lens helped us focus on the importance of long-term thinking, the need for early engagement with multiple players, the importance of openness to different orientations and perspectives, and the need to work with people who have different mindsets, time frames, and agendas.

Despite the challenges, even modest, low-commitment engagement can be worthwhile in the sense that postsecondary institutions are eager for simple exchanges of information and regular relationship building. C3 revealed the need for a single point of contact. We needed reliable portals with a navigator who was also an accomplished networker. Networkers like to know what everyone is doing, to be able to quickly identify priorities, which can begin to be tackled through short-term research assignments. Cities that are interested in working with academic partners can also post information on subject areas where they are looking for research. Graduate students are always looking for research topics; if they see the need and the appetite (and a chance for some funding!), they are often in the perfect position to help develop simple protocols for city engagement of academics.

Given the lessons we learned from the Campus City Collaborative, I started looking for a way to continue its mandate in a more global environment. Leading Cities offers a unique opportunity to provide an international dimension.

Leading Cities

The World Class Cities Partnership was founded by members of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University in Boston.11 Recently, the name has been changed to Leading Cities. Leading Cities brings together cities and their universities to undertake urban policy research projects that draw on the experience of all member institutions.

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