The City of Austin has piloted an anticipatory governance tool named the Civic Research Agenda (CRA) to help the City become future-ready in the face of complex civic challenges.
The CRA leverages a strategic foresight methodology to proactively plan for plausible future scenarios and identify implications for decision-making today, thus moving the City away from reactionary and short-sighted policy making and enable it to “look around the corner” to future challenges and opportunities.
Innovation Summary
Innovation Overview
Today’s Cities are increasingly required to respond to global challenges at the local level - from the impacts of climate change to growing economic instability and related migration patterns. In order to thrive in a rapidly changing environment, Cities must lean into proactive, forward-looking, and iterative systems thinking models that equip us with the skills, resources, and partnerships at the ready to address emerging challenges and influence the co-creation of solutions. The more traditional approach of narrowly focusing responsibilities into specific topic areas with short-term fixes is no longer sufficient.
The Civic Research Agenda (CRA) provides a framework for becoming a future-ready organization that can anticipate, adapt, and thrive in the face of complex civic challenges and a rapidly changing world. It leverages strategic foresight, community expertise, and research to identify and proactively plan around key civic topics.
The three primary objectives of the CRA are:
DETECT emerging trends and drivers of the shifting municipal landscape that may pose threats or opportunities;
RESPOND by constructing various potential and desired future scenarios to understand the specific implications of future change and plan accordingly; and
EVOLVE to better thrive in the environment of anticipated future change.
We are inspired by the work of IFTF Foresight Essentials and the Houston Foresight at the University of Houston who have trained members of our office in the 6 step strategic framework we will be applying to the CRA.
In collaboration with other City departments and community members, the CRA will leverage current planning efforts, such as the revamping of the Imagine Austin blueprint (a 30 year comprehensive plan originally adopted in 2012) to ensure we are not merely designing policy recommendations with a fixed idea of the future that relies exclusively on what we know to be true today, but rather with an understanding of several possible futures that our City leaders can use to create more agile solutions. The CRA will also leverage existing tools within the Office of Innovation such as the master interlocal agreement in place with the University of Texas at Austin that provides the legal and administrative framework to conduct collaborative research projects with the City. Additionally, the CRA will leverage our internal expertise in qualitative research and participatory processes to ensure we are centering opportunities for meaningful community engagement.
While the practice and skills building of strategic foresight will originate within the Office of Innovation through the CRA, the long-term objective will be to build out strategic foresight competencies across the organization to ensure future thinking is not siloed within one City dept.
We're in conversation with the Cities of San Antonio, and Fort Worth (the most rapidly growing city in the US) about a regional approach to the Future of Water Sustainability.
Innovation Description
What Makes Your Project Innovative?
The Civic Research Agenda brings innovation to decision making in public policy because:
1.It offers a flexible methodology for the City to anticipate and effectively prepare for future disruptive events.
2. Because strategic foresight is an inherently collaborative process, the CRA will serve to dismantle departmental silos within the City and strengthen futures literacy within the organization .
3. Externally, the CRA will enhance trust between community stakeholders and the City given the emphasis on co-creation in developing and committing to a preferred future.
4. Regionally, the CRA will strengthen cross-boundary collaboration among neighbouring cities.
What is the current status of your innovation?
The Office of Innovation is in the first phase of a cyclical three phase process to Normalize, Organize, and Operationalize the Civic Research Agenda (CRA). The Normalize and organize process for selecting key topics in the CRA include:
Work with the City demographers and leveraging existing research to overlay national and municipal trends analysis with unique Austin characteristics.
Build relationships and a shared analysis for the CRA’s civic challenge selection criteria.
By the second quarter of the year, we will be synthesizing data collected and relationships formed to convene stakeholders for the a futuring and visioning session. This practice, as described by Andy Hines of Houston Foresight, is both an art and a science. The exercise in futuring (i.e. scenario development) is innovative in and of itself because it compels us to suspend pre-conceived notions of the future, challenge assumptions and bias, and see the future with fresh eyes.
Innovation Development
Collaborations & Partnerships
The Civic Research Agenda depends on collaborations and partnerships with:
1. Community members, including leaders of the various Quality of Life Commissions.
2. Leading foresight civil society organizations such as Houston Foresight, SGR's Strategic Foresight & The Alliance for Innovation, and Institute for the Future.
3. Researchers through the local universities, including the University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston.
4. Cross-border partnerships with Fort Worth; San Antonio
Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
We envision improved trust among and between citizens and City policy makers who are part of co-creating the vision for our desired futures. Government officials will benefit from increased foresight and anticipatory governance capabilities that will broaden their capacity "to proactively explore possibilities, experiences, and continuously learn as part of a broader governance system.”
Innovation Reflections
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
A measure of success once we move to the operationalizing stage of the CRA on the Future of Water Sustainability will be measured by the extent to which we are able to:
Increase organizational capacity to anticipate and prepare for future challenges by offering 6 distinct foresight workshops.
Cultivate 12 strategic foresight champions across the organization.
Make key recommendations for near-term actions and strategies that pursue our desired futures directly reflected in the work of Water Forward and Imagine Austin.
Challenges and Failures
We’ve encountered the difficulty of balancing our own internal capacity for supporting City departments with pressing challenges in search of immediate solutions, with the need to build our own foresight expertise required for the CRA. We’ve addressed these capacity challenges by dedicating a full-time staff member to this project, investing in foresight training curriculums for staff and key collaborators, and allowing for a small budget allocation towards consulting support.
Conditions for Success
Conditions for success rest a great deal on the culture shift opportunities that exist for the City to become fluent in “futures thinking” and shift our praxis away from reactionary and short-sighted policy making and enable it to “look around the corner” to future challenges that may face the City and community.
Replication
Because we seek to build regional collaboration with other futures thinkers in neighbouring Cities, we fully expect that elements of the CRA could be replicated as a result of the effort to build cross boundary collaborations with other municipalities. Additionally, inspired by the emerging work of the CRA, City leadership has asked for support with building scenario plans related to Supply Chain Management.
Lessons Learned
We would like to share our experiences with creating buy-in for a shift in praxis away from reactionary and short-sighted policy making and towards proactive, forward-looking, and iterative systems thinking models that equip us with the skills, resources, and partnerships at the ready to address emerging challenges and influence the co-creation of solutions.
Status:
- Identifying or Discovering Problems or Opportunities - learning where and how an innovative response is needed
- Generating Ideas or Designing Solutions - finding and filtering ideas to respond to the problem or opportunity
Innovation provided by:
Date Published:
27 June 2024