Decentralisation of tasks, the emergence of the participatory society, digitisation, and the network society in which citizens and businesses express their wishes quickly – these are just a few of the huge number of changes that towns and cities are confronted with.
The developments are far-reaching and are following one another in rapid succession, says Marcel Meijs, city manager of Tilburg since 1 January 2017. “In recent years, municipalities have become much more important for people because national government is withdrawing from the social domain. Help in the household, debt counselling, or referral for juvenile care – they’re all arranged via the municipality nowadays. And partly thanks to digitisation, individuals and businesses are finding it much easier to get in touch with the municipality. And they also expect us to respond quickly and effectively to problems in the city.”
A necessary transformation
These changes are forcing municipalities to transform themselves. “It used to be that we worked from the inside outward,” says Marcel Meijs. “The municipality devised products and services within the walls of the town hall, and people and businesses then had to make do with what was thus on offer. Nowadays, the community demands that we do exactly the opposite: first identify what problems exist outside. We need to know what’s going on right down ‘in the capillaries of the city’ – so to speak – and then respond with appropriate solutions. We can only deliver those solutions if we work together with all the parties involved and operate flexibly. That requires a municipality that unites, renews, and demonstrates decisiveness.”
Clever collaboration as part of a smart urban region
Besides the increasing number of tasks for municipalities, the battle for scarce space in city centres is leading to new challenges in the areas of the environment, infrastructure, and mobility. Mr Meijs says that the importance of regional cooperation is growing because the spatial, social, and economic challenges facing Tilburg increasingly transcend the city limits. Moreover, partners in the business community, education, healthcare, and social institutions also work across those boundaries. By working together as a smart urban region, municipalities can make use of one another’s strengths. “Tilburg,” says Marcel Meijs, “wants to innovate, for example, but a municipality can’t be the innovator in every area. That’s why we’re working together in the ‘BrabantStad’ partnership with Eindhoven, Breda, Helmond, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and the Province of North Brabant. We exchange innovative ideas via that administrative network.”
Collaboration within the chain
”Moreover, the decentralisation of tasks makes it essential for Tilburg to cooperate with relevant public and private parties within the chain,” says Mr Meijs. ”Municipalities have to offer lower-cost solutions for a wide range of social issues such as healthcare, education, and housing. The same trend can be seen in all the tasks facing municipalities: they no longer just control the reins but also partly depend for their success on other public and private parties, such as housing corporations, healthcare and education institutions, and real estate developers. The municipality is increasingly acting as the ‘go-between’ that gets all the relevant parties involved. Take Spoorzone013, for example. That’s an area covering 75 hectares in the middle of Tilburg where living, working, recreation, and catering come together.”
A wealth of city intelligence
Marcel Meijs sees great potential for improving the services provided to individuals and businesses by streamlining cooperation with other parties, not least because a wealth of valuable data becomes available when organisations and departments exchange data. He says that, among other things, such “city intelligence” offers opportunities to do more in the field of prevention within the social domain. “We have a great deal of data that we can deploy to help people. We can use data analysis, for example, to prevent people from ending up needing debt counselling, or neighbourhoods from becoming run-down.” But he stresses the need for restraint in the use of this data: “It must absolutely not be at the expense of privacy.”
New organisational structures
Marcel Meijs favours an approach in which the demand expressed by the community is central. This may require other organisational structures that transcend the existing ones. For example, Tilburg has decided to set up a cooperative in which the municipal health service (GGD), the Social Work Institute (IMW), and other civil-society organisations are partners. This involves a type of cocreation in which the various parties develop services together in the field of juvenile care, debt counselling, and benefits. “The usual route,” says Mr Meijs, “is to put out a call for tenders: a single party is commissioned to provide juvenile care, for example, and the municipality is the point of contact for the individual. But within the cooperative, we have entered into a system of long-term cooperation, in which we share the responsibility for devising solutions that best meet the needs of our citizens.”
A transition to different behaviour
Such new partnerships are slowly but surely taking shape. The challenge is to jointly create an effective and efficient organisation. “We are currently in a transitional phase. All the different parties are looking for a new role with the appropriate behaviour. Together you discover what does and doesn’t work well. This takes time, because within this transitional phase the new patterns of behaviour are not yet always properly coordinated. And people also need to get used to their new role.” Marcel Meijs cites the director of the GGZ mental health organisation as an example. “In the past, the director himself determined which services he would provide and money was hardly ever a problem. Now he has to work with other parties and be accountable for the expenditure. As a municipality, we need to adapt to that change.”
"We can only deliver solutions if we work together with all the parties involved and operate flexibly. That requires a municipality that unites, renews, and demonstrates decisiveness.”
Flexible organisation
Marcel Meijs recognises that the municipality of Tilburg itself also has to make a major change. If the municipality wants to become a flexible organisation that can respond quickly to changes within society, then a behavioural change will be required at all levels of the municipality. “Our employees,” says Mr Meijs, “must learn to think in terms of the tasks we face as a municipality, rather than in terms of the products and services that we provide. We want to customise things as much as possible. That means, for example, that civil servants who are in touch with citizens and businesses are given sufficient scope within agreed frameworks to weigh up matters for themselves.”
Organisation scan reveals mechanisms and obstacles
In order to get a better idea of the options for improving cooperation within and outside the organisation, the municipality of Tilburg asked PwC to carry out an organisation scan. To do so, PwC made use of a “high-performance organisation model”. That involves looking at the combination of the hard and soft sides in the development of an organisation, with the emphasis on behaviour.
Roline Roos (PwC) explains: “In the scan, we zoom in on mechanisms and obstacles that explain why things operate the way they do. That has to do with such things as working methods, the characteristic behaviour of employees, shared convictions, management instruments, and the extent to which the organisation’s aims are converted into an applicable strategy.”
According to Roline Roos, the results of the scan provide an insight into the potential for improving the organisation: “Visualisations let the organisation know where the levers for change lie.”
Marcel Meijs explains that “PwC has identified a number of behavioural patterns that may hamper collaboration. The study underlines the fact that behaviour is the key to the success of any intention you may have.”
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