Moving the Needle with Better Metrics and Smaller Experiments

Data-Smart City Pod

In this episode, Jessica McLeod, San Francisco's Chief of Strategy and Performance, discusses how to drive urban improvement through data-dr

Key takeaways

• Increasing park lighting in San Francisco led to a 54% reduction in drug-related complaints in specific areas.
• Targeted interventions in the Mission District, including increased cleaning and security, reduced drug-related 911 calls by 65%.

Main topics

• Performance Management
• Public Safety Interventions

Notable quotes

The antidote to that fearfulness is a culture of curiosity.

Conclusion

The episode provides a blueprint for city leaders to move beyond assum

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) From Data Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, this is the Data Smart City Pod. In each episode, we bring you conversations with experts in public service innovation, the application of data and artificial intelligence, and responsive city leadership. Here's your host, Professor Stephen Goldsmith. Speaker 1 (0:24) Thank you and welcome back. This is Steve Goldsmith from the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. I'm joined today by Jessica McLeod, who recently, kind of recently, was appointed by Mayor Daniel Lurie as San Francisco's, okay, wait for this title, Chief of Strategy and Performance. Jessica spent a lot of years across government and in civic tech and was the co-founder of the U.S. Digital Response during the pandemic. Welcome, Jessica. Speaker 3 (0:51) Great to be with you. Thanks Speaker 1 (0:52) for having me. Thank you. Well, you've got a lot of background and most of it is really relevant to the current job. So talk us through a little bit kind of what your background was and how you think that relates to your current job. Speaker 3 (1:08) Sure. Like you mentioned, I've been in the government technology, civic tech space for about the last 18 years, both in the... Public sector side was the director of digital services and technology for the city of San Rafael. And then also on the private sector side, running customer success for several different government technology companies. And as you mentioned, had the real honor of being one of the several co Speaker 2 (1:32) -founders of the U.S. Digital Response back in 2020 when COVID-19 hit. So that was a great Speaker 3 (1:37) experience during a huge crisis, but to see the whole community come together and be part of that effort. Speaker 1 (1:42) Well, you have an enormous amount of tech talent in that city administration, maybe more than at least almost any other city. So in that constellation of people with important titles, what is chief of strategy and performance? Those two are not necessarily always together. Speaker 3 (2:02) This is a really interesting role. It's all about helping our city get really concrete about what the top priorities are. how we define what success looks like and how we create an evidence-based plan to achieve it in creative new ways. The second piece of it is building a culture and operating norm to get teams who don't normally come together to solve problems doing so, collaborating, experimenting, using technology, using new innovation techniques to try things, double-checking their assumptions, and getting more data-driven about how they make progress against our citywide goals. Speaker 1 (2:35) How do you think about your job as it relates to other folks who are experienced in technology and have other responsibilities? I'm thinking about, I was deputy mayor for Mike Bloomberg and Do It reported to me. And it was a service agency for the other agencies, but also was the protocol setting agency, right? It was a rule enforcer and a service agency. So what is your role, your agency's role with respect to? servicing, providing, working with the other departments? Speaker 3 (3:08) In our mayor's office, we have an interesting structure. It's a very large city. So even though we're only 49 square miles, we have over 32,000 employees. We have over 52 departments across the city. We're the only city and county in California. And so we have a unique structure in the mayor's office where we have a chief's structure. So when I came on, there were already four other chiefs in place all overseeing specific. portfolios of work in a policy vertical such as health and human services or public safety. And my role was brought on to really be the horizontal layer to help us achieve goals across all of those different verticals. So make sure that we're operating as effective as possible and we're coordinating well with our partners across the city to deliver in the best way that we possibly can. So a lot of that also looks like working closely with our central technology teams, whether that's our Department of Technology, our digital services team, our data SF team and our merging technologies team. So it's been great to get exposure to all of these different ways of working and also try to create some consistency and some uniformity to it. Speaker 1 (4:13) You and I have spent a lot of time talking about stat programs, but as you think about your job, the performance measures or the causes of better performance may be scattered across agencies, not just in an agency. And the more intractable the problem, think homelessness or the unhoused, will have multiple drivers. So how do you define performance across multiple agencies in a way that can make an impact? Speaker 3 (4:43) Well, just to say when I came on board, we already had citywide scorecards that our controller's office publishes. So lots of great metrics that are already out there and available to the public. Several of our departments have strategic plans. They publish their own goals and objectives. But to your point, most of the most... Complex challenges that we face cannot be solved within one single department. They require multiple different departments coming together to look at different aspects of the work and identify what their piece is in helping to achieve a shared objective and then coordinating that's going to allow them to do that hand in hand with other folks that they may not be used to collaborating with. So when I joined, we reviewed and refined the mayor's priorities and set specific objectives around those priorities. And then worked with each chief to name specific strategies that we would have to develop to achieve those goals, whether that's in public safety, reducing retail theft or reducing the presence of our public drug activity. And then would gather leaders from all different departments, whether that's our neighborhood street teams, our public health leaders, our public works managers that are out in the community. all of the staff that would touch those issues to create these cross-departmental teams. And those groups are really built around one specific named condition in the city with a clear owner and a clear way to measure progress. So the questions that would guide the work of those teams are really simple. It's what are we trying to change or improve? Who owns that? Who owns what aspects of it? What is the evidence telling us about how we're making progress or not making progress? What can we learn about the problems? We understand it