Give "The Slow Fix" A Try

While walking around the Library on Saturday, I stumbled into an area in the Non-fiction section with a cluster of books suggesting how to re-imagine local government, with a focus on efficiency and creativity. After scanning a few rows, my eyes gravitated towards a book, leaning on a stand, called The Slow Fix, by Carl Honore [1].  The cover caught my eye immediately, despite its simplicity, and after sitting down to read the "Introduction," there were several distinct parallels made between the book and this week's readings.

The City of Charlotte’s Office of Strategy & Budget and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill employ strategies that aid in the development of an annual Performance Report and benchmark select service areas, with the goal of "using performance measures to manage and address community needs," long-term [2]. With the City's "long tradition of performance measurement, having first instituted Management by Objectives in 1972" [3] and the creation of the first Balanced Scorecard in 1996, the department held a long-term term commitment of evaluating and monitoring the full life cycle of projects created around City Council’s five Focus Areas [4].

Charlotte’s benchmarking project demonstrates the intentionality and long-term commitment – only attainable through patience, as The Slow Fix suggests – to ensure equity for those with a vested interest. Kaplan and Norton argue that there are four perspectives to consider in the Balanced Scorecard process: the customer perspective, the internal perspective, the innovation and learning perspective, and the financial perspective [5]. Charlotte’s Fiscal Year 2017 Performance Report addresses each of the perspectives, paying most careful attention to the customer and financial perspectives since this project ensures the City be held accountable to deliver on the recommendations made in the Community Investment Plan, setting aside the “traditional notions about functional barriers” to help “keep [companies] looking – and moving – forward instead of backward [6].

To keep people – individually and collectively – looking and moving forward, strategic planning initiatives, and community planning can be helpful tools to use for gauging priorities and developing a shared vision but these alone, may not be enough for a city, organization, or business to be successful. As Charlotte’s Office of Strategy & Budget demonstrates that using a combination of tactics will help yield the most positive, long-term outcomes. Once again, this comes back to Honore’s main assertion:“…when tackling hard problems, faster is not always better, that the best solutions take flight when we invest enough time, effort, and resources [7].”  

[1]: http://www.carlhonore.com/book/the-slow-fix/
[2]: http://charlottenc.gov/budget/Documents1/2017_YearEndReport_Hyperlinked_FINAL.pdf, p.2.
[3]: http://charlottenc.gov/budget/Pages/planning.aspx
[4]: The five Focus Areas include community safety, economic development, the environment, housing & neighborhood development, and transportation & planning.
[5]: https://umei007-fall10.wikispaces.com/file/view/Kaplan%26Nortonbalanced+scorecard.pdf, p.72.
[6]: https://umei007-fall10.wikispaces.com/file/view/Kaplan%26Nortonbalanced+scorecard.pdf, p.79. 
[7]: Carl Honore, The Slow Fix: solve problems, work smarter, and live better in a world addicted to speed, New York, NY. HarperOne. c2013. p. 13.