The Core Drivers of CitiStat: It's Not Just About the Meetings and the Maps

Abstract

CitiStat—Baltimore's performance-management strategy—has been described by many different observers using a variety of different labels and attributing its effectiveness to a variety of different features. Yet, an examination of the underlying mechanisms by which the mayor's leadership team keeps the managers and employees of city agencies focused on improving specific outcomes, suggests a set of different hypotheses based on six core drivers: the active engagement of the city's top executives; the breadth, depth, disaggregation, and “nowness” of the data plus the thorough-ness of the analyses of these data; the perseverence of the questioning, feedback, and follow-up (which is more persistent than relentless); the consequences for both good, poor, and improved performance; the focus on problem solving, continuous experimentation, and learning; and the institutional memory of the city's top executives. None of the drivers in any of these hypotheses is sufficient to make a CitiStat strategy effective. None may even be necessary. Collectively, however, these core drivers contribute more to the effectiveness of this performance strategy than do the attributes found in other descriptions of CitiStat.

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