How to Execute Local Government Strategy: 8 Years of Data & AI Insights

Good morning, everybody. We will start in just another minute. This was going to be our test for a webinar close to the Fourth of July. We got just under 100 people registered, but I was suspecting many would be prepping their fireworks. Okay. It is 11 o'clock Eastern, so I thought now would be a good time to get started. So my name is Ted Jackson. I'm one of the founders and managing partners here at ClearPoint. Um, today I'm going to be talking about, you know, our data and what we learned from local government strategies. So please Let's make this as interactive as possible. I know it's close to a holiday weekend here in the USA. So please, if you want this to be less than a monologue, just put in information in the chat and I will do my best to keep up. But I do have a fun presentation for you. And let me just share my screen now. This should be about a half hour. So, so thank you for joining and let's get started. So the topic today is going to be about how local government, how local governments execute their strategy and how really the top 10% of local governments in our dataset perform well. As I said before, my name is Ted Jackson. I'm one of the co-founders here at ClearPoint, and, and we've done an interesting thing with our data. So first, let me, let me give you kind of an overview of where we're going to start. We're going to look a little bit at the research, then talk about how plans are built, who's accountable, and then just completion rates and strategy overall. And then I'll show you a little bit about how we think about the topic that's on everyone's mind, which is kind of AI, and AI as it relates to strategy. So with that, let's, let's push on forward. What we've done over here at ClearPoint is we, we thought about the richness of the data that we have. So, you know, as an overall organization, What we do is we help people execute strategy through our ClearPoint Strategy application. So people are managing their, their goals, their KPIs, and their projects, and they're tracking them year over year. So we took all of the data— this should say through 2025— and pulled it all out, completely anonymized it, We did look at it by industry and whatnot, so today we'll be focused a lot on local government. And so we looked at 20,000 strategic plans. And what do we call a plan? So if an organization has a strategic plan at the enterprise level and they have 10 departments, and each of those departments has an individual plan, then we call that 11 plans. So they have 10 department plans and 1 enterprise plan. So that would be, you know, 11 plans. And then when they revise the plans in the next year, so over 2 years, they could get to 20 plans or so. So it's 20,000 plans, 11,000— 100,000 goals, 300,000 measures. 130,000 projects. And so we looked at it over, we segmented it by multiple sectors, and I'll be pulling out the local government data for this. So, so given that, let's talk about, you know, how strategic plans are, are built and, and what happens in the plans and where do we, Where do we see, you know, interesting changes and divergence in the plans overall? And so, we say, well, what does a typical local government plan contain, right? So, and you may use different terms in your organization. So, when I say goals, I mean objectives overall. Like, what are the main things that you're trying to, to track. And so we see, you know, on average, you know, or the median, depending on where you look at it, so we put both numbers in there. So let's say the median number of goals people have, or organizations have, is 5, and the medium number of measures they have is 9, and the medium number of projects is 8, and the medium number of milestones is 17. So a milestone being like steps within a project overall. And so when I see these numbers, I think, wow, like that is really small. Like, like I normally see bigger numbers than that. And I think if you look at the average, you see it does go up to maybe 7 with 24 measures and 18 projects. That seems a little more realistic, and that is the average. So, but it does show that there's pretty big divergence overall. And sometimes it's when some organizations try to measure thing— measure things all in one plan overall. And it is, you know, I'd be curious. I know we don't have many people on this webinar, but if you would like to post in the chat, it would be great to see if your numbers are bigger or smaller than this. I think our clients— I mean, clearly this data is coming from our clients. But when I think a lot about them, the difference in that that medium and the average is typically how many plans or how detailed they get in their planning process. So, we see some organizations that try to put everything in one place, and then they end up with 10 to 15 goals and 40 measures overall. Sorry, Mike, to hear that you do not have a strategic plan. So, maybe this information will help guide you in the planning process. But, but organizations that do have department plans and department plans that are clearly linked to those enterprise plans or the overall city or county or state agency plan, this is where you would see, you know, these smaller number of plans overall. And then when we look more, much more closely at local governments, What we see is some clear themes in the local government area, and we pulled these themes from about 800 different plans overall. We say there's like a canonical way to do it, which is like the, the average of all the different variations. And so, so it's a way to consolidate the words that we see inside of ClearPoint. We see a lot of local governments end up with neighborhood and community vitality, culture and recreation, economic health, safe community, transportation mobility, high-performing government. This is where you capture a lot of that operational excellence and all those pieces to it. And the environment and sustainability, and then infrastructure, and sometimes You know, what I see is depending on how you think about infrastructure, you could see a lot in public works like water, sewer, utilities, but you might also see some infrastructure in transportation. So if we go backwards one and think about these numbers, if it's 5 and an organization has sorted out their goals this way, Sometimes they do goals within these themes, and sometimes the themes are the goals overall. Then you might see just 5 of these, right? You might see some level of culture and recreation, maybe connected to economic health, like we're a healthy community if we have a walkable downtown, which is safety. So you can see these pieces kind of merge together. But what I think is the, the important takeaway, uh, in this scenario is more that you need to have clear communications and focus, have those fewer number of, of elements, uh, that you're trying to track. And so, you know, when we dig into that with organizations that have fewer than 20 total elements. So imagine that's my 5 objectives, my 9 measures, and even 8 projects. The average, that's a little more than 20. I think that's like 22 or something like that, right? So if you end up with fewer than 20, you execute at a really high rate, and if you end up with 60 or more, you execute at a really low rate. And so, so, and what we mean by executing is, is you are managing and tracking your strategy on a regular basis. So you are putting in your goals, you're updating them on a monthly basis or on a quarterly basis, and you are, you're You're regularly making changes, you're writing an analysis, you're actually managing your strategy. Whereas when we see organizations with 60 or more elements, what we end up seeing is a little bit of, of the strategy overwhelms the process. You know, if you're trying to report, you know, every quarter, you still need to go in, you may have 10 plans, right? So one in each department. If you have 60 or more elements, you need to have 600 items being updated every quarter. And then if you go to every month, you know, then you're updating even in, in like a public works or public transportation, you're trying to get 60 items updated on a monthly basis. And if you're reporting monthly, means you need to, to do that those 60 updates within that first week so you could do the report in the second week so your information is not stale because you're reporting monthly. You know, if you wait, if you give 2 weeks to make those updates and then a week to prepare the report, and then every time you're about to have a meeting, your month is almost over that you haven't reported. So you need to really be able to have very effective reporting You need to have a very focused strategy. So I hope this makes sense, and I hope you can, you can take away from that that focus is the real key here, because the more complex your strategy is, the more information that's in there, the harder it is to, to execute. So while we're staying on focus here, Let's look at just how these plans have evolved over time. You know, what we saw was— this is again the median goal count, so think about the average being, you know, almost 2x this, right? So, the median goals right at the very beginning of COVID dropped a little bit and then went back up, but more or less, I would say, you know, we've stayed consistent overall. But one of the things we've seen over the last 5 years really is the number of projects have surged quite a bit. And so, if we go back and think about those projects, is, you know, each of the projects has, you know, this is a little over 2, some, you know, but if you go up here, it's more like 3. Milestones, so 3 steps in the project, right? We need to plan and execute and do an after-action item review. Or if you're— if one of your projects is building a road, it's, you know, plan and communicate, make the changes, and tear up the old road. So you can imagine some projects have quite a few steps in them, right? But so here, what we've seen is the projects, you know, increased. The number of projects are increasing over time. So, they've been, there've been fewer projects early on, and then, you know, one of the things we saw is kind of as COVID started happening, people started, they were telling us, I should have pulled in the measures in this report to show it, but they're telling us that their measures were showing them a little less helpful data because as everyone went remote, it was harder to collect the data. The data started going haywire when, when people weren't collecting tax revenue on time because people weren't in the office. They were having trouble pulling in the data. So then federal government funding came into local governments. And so just a lot of the measures started jumping around a lot. Organizations started focusing on projects a little more, things that were within their control. So it's just an interesting, you know, change in the data. So, so be curious. I know there are only a few of us, 10 or so of us in this meeting, but if you want to post in the chat whether you've seen your projects increase over time? That would be good to know. I know even within our organization, we're not a local government, but with the advent of AI, we feel like we can do more overall. And so rather than execute all of our projects faster and easier, we're adding more projects. So, so even though we're not a local government, we've been able to see some of this change. As well. So let's focus to the next piece, and this, this ownership piece is probably one of the more alarming pieces that we've seen in our data overall. And I've kind of didn't even bury the lead right here in the very beginning is saying, well, 74% of strategic goals have no owner assigned. So let's look at that data, and I'll tell you what we've— you know, where we got this data and what it looks like inside of ClearPoint, because later you'll see people are still executing their strategy, but, but how are they doing this with, with goals not assigned? So, so inside of ClearPoint we have a field called owner, and what we believe is that, you know, we should have individuals owning elements like goals, measures, projects, and then the milestones, the extra pieces of the projects. We should have people owning those, and then we can run workflows and automation, and we can communicate with the owners about making changes and making updates inside of an application to actually execute your strategy. And so when we saw these numbers, we first did this analysis, we thought, wow, there's so many elements that are not owned, what's going on? How are people actually using the software? And they might put in things like, for an owner, just remove the ownership field and put in a new field and call it, you know, who's responsible for this? And they would say, well, Parks and Rec is responsible for this, or the leadership team is responsible for this, or the project team is responsible for this, or the strategy execution team is is responsible for this. So they were not putting in individuals, they were putting in groups of people as responsible, as people that are responsible for things. So does this make sense? So we're seeing like 26% of goals overall across all of these plans had individuals' names associated with it, with like 30% of the measures, 40% of the projects. So as we get more granular inside of strategy management, we're seeing people put more detailed information in there. And I also have this just on the next slide as well, is kind of their phantom owners we see. And that's why we say, like, well, this group of people. And so one of the challenges with, you know, phantom ownership is, you know, I think if I sent an email out to the— to those of us on this call and said, you know, respond to one of my questions, then all of you would think, well, someone else will respond, and therefore no one responds, right? And so, and that's what happens with group ownership is if you reach out and say, hey, tell me, tell me, you know, what's going wrong with this measure, then and you send that to 4 people, you know, maybe you'll realize, ah, I see someone else will respond to this. I know, you know, Mike or Danny or, or Lee always responds to this, so I'm not going to respond. And then we end up with a lot less responsiveness, and with a lot less responsiveness, you have a lot less insight into your strategy overall. So I would say, you know, what you should do when you're our managing strategy. I know some of you are new to this with no strategic plan or just working on implementing a strategic plan today, is think about putting individuals responsible for key elements and think about it not as necessarily a responsibility for executing all of, you know, a goal in public safety, but being responsible for understanding what's happening across that goal. What are all the measures that are responsible or linked to that goal? And what are all the projects that are linked to that goal? So when we know what is linked to those areas and how it's doing, then we can make decisions and say, here's what we should be doing about it. Or based on everything I know, I can make some recommendations for it. And, and what I would say is, you know, think about how you get people to, to do things. We've had— we've seen organizations One local government in North Carolina made it a privilege to be an owner of one of the particular areas inside of their strategy. They said, well, you get to do this— you get to be this owner for 60 days. You get to meet with the city manager. You get to present in front of council. So it was a way to raise your profile within the organization. And you only did it for a short period of time, and then it rotated to someone else. And so that was one way to incent people to do it. I think the opposite side of that carrot is the stick. You could have, you know, something like, hey, if you haven't made your updates in a particular period of time, we're going to take away some responsibility for you as well. So then let's look at completion rates overall. And you can imagine if you have too many elements, and nobody owning each of the elements, what are we going to see? We're going to see some low completion rates. But we have seen, you know, just, you know, one of the things I thought was interesting, and we'll get into some additional completion rates in one more slide, but what we saw on the projects side of things is we did see this surge in completion of projects., you know, right during, you know, some of the COVID peaks. And we saw that, uh, we've talked about this in several different local government groups and surveyed our clients and talked about what this change was. And they said, well, during COVID we introduced some new projects that were specifically related around public health, and, and those were completed at a high, a high level. But also we stopped doing a lot of our big projects. We cancelled them. We postponed them. And we focused in on smaller projects that we knew we could complete. And we had shorter timeframes for them. So we saw the average project length go from about a year to 18 months— sorry, not to 18 months, to 6 months during this timeframe. And so we went from 1 year to 6 months, and we started seeing— Completion happen, you know, that was a really great way to, to be executing on key elements in your strategy. And of course, you know, as we come out of COVID we see the completion rates drop a bit. But have you ever heard the saying, you know, 9 out of 10 organizations fail to execute their strategy? It's not that they fail, is that they fail to execute their strategy. And we've seen this data since like the early 1990s when I got into strategy. Drs. Norton and Kaplan would always talk about this. And then people try to do research and say, well, where did you get that number from? And it was tricky to tie down the number. I think we saw it in a Fortune magazine and in a Harvard Business Review article. But then we finally can see the data in here. If you say, Well, about 6% of plans have a 93% completion rate, and another 4% of plans have a 60% completion rate. You add these two numbers together, you see like 10% of organizations are executing their strategy with some level of fidelity. And then, you know, the remaining, you know, 85, 90% are really completing at a very low rate. Right? And it's not that they're failing as organizations, but they're failing to execute on the plans that they put in place. And we attribute a lot of that to the ownership, and you could call it the complexity of the plan or just overall engagement across their organization. But when we do look at— In strategic planning now, we do see across projects overall, you know, again, we just wanted to focus in on one element. The report that I'm going to refer you to at the end of this has all of the data across all of the elements in it, so you could find that interesting. But a little over 50% of projects that people report on are green, and the other— 50%, you know, kind of spread out over that, that yellow or amber, the red, or not started, or unclear. And people ask us about, well, what— how could it possibly be unclear? You know, it should be, you know, green, yellow, or red, or green, amber, red— that RAG, red, amber, green acronym. So the unclear ones is because inside of ClearPoint you can You can add custom status indicators, and we took the ones that were really, really positive and we mapped them all to green, and the ones that were, were kind of in the middle, we mapped them to amber, the ones that were off track, we mapped them to red. People had a variety of indicators for not started, but then because we're looking at over 20,000 plans, there are some that we just couldn't quickly interpret in the data, so we left them. As unclear. So just to wrap up this piece of it, you know, we really said, well, what are the success formulas overall for executing your strategy? We said that's having that focus. Remember having those, you know, less than 20 elements per plan. It's not less than 20 in your overall organization. So if you're a state agency in Minnesota or working at the governor's level in Vermont or in South Africa, you're going to have multiple departments. And so it's thinking about focus within the department, thinking about clear ownership in your organization, you know, highlighting elements where you don't know who owns them, you know, really assigning them out to individuals. Not to departments, and then getting that level of engagement. One of the things I didn't show in this data, but I put in here as one of the bullets to think about is stagger your project start dates. We saw that in our data that I, I didn't share with you, most organizations that were struggling would launch all of their projects on like January 1st, the beginning of their fiscal year, and put an end date of December 31st. And do nothing kind of in between, but organizations that had smaller projects or launched different projects each quarter, they were having much higher completion rates overall. So I hope this has been helpful. I wanted to spend the next few minutes thinking about where AI kind of fits into your organization and how it can be used for executing strategy overall because we are seeing, you know, AI is really— maybe in 2023, came out late 2022, let's say 2023, 2024, it was kind of optional and interesting curiosity. But now here we are midway through 2026. It is kind of a necessity, right? I'll show you a little bit of ways to think about it, and then I'll show you a little bit about how we're thinking about it. Inside of ClearPoint, right? Because you can use AI to help you with writing that plan. I would say you definitely need human in the loop here. We did have one of our clients who was at the beginning of their strategic planning process, and they used one of the wizards inside of ClearPoint just to say, let's build that plan from start. So, so Mike, I know you said you don't have a strategic plan at all. You can use AI to build a strategic plan, but what I would say is you definitely need to engage the leadership in your organization to, to review, make decisions, contribute, and really try to refine that plan. So use it as a great starting point. It's awesome at flagging at-risk information. It's great at helping you with automating that reporting process. Writing that analysis and recommendations, looking for cross-department alignment, and then even be able to, to, to do predictions in the future. Sure, so I'm back. Sorry about that. I think I said I was in Alabama, and so my internet did drop on me. So hopefully you can hear me now, and, and y'all stayed, didn't leave. But you can do a lot of things with AI, and, you know, inside of ClearPoint, we obviously can do the basics like writing analysis, but we've also added this ability to update charts, calculations, evaluations, so you don't need to do that writing. But we've also are adding a lot more additional capabilities, and I thought I'm going to stop sharing my screen or stop sharing this presentation and then share my screen and just show you. This isn't going to be a long demo. Don't worry. I'm going to share this. Let me see if I can share from here. So what you see is this is ClearPoint. I'm just going to be talking about some of the AI pieces. We've added the ability to allow you to do a full chat to do research about your overall organization. I'm going to pull up my last chat that I did about half hour ago before we started this. Just to give you an idea, I said, can you conduct a SWOT analysis for my account? And it looks at the strengths and weaknesses of elements inside of the application. So it's not just like, you know, asking ChatGPT or Claude, because this can look at, your reporting in here. And then it did the weaknesses and threats, and I said, we're really, you know, weaknesses and threats should be done outside of the organization. So search online. So it does the strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities— sorry, opportunities and threats is where you should search online. And it cites the sources overall. Which is great, makes it really easy to know what a hallucination is or not. And then I said, can you create a PowerPoint for my executive team? Let me show you what that looks like. I'm going to share— I'm going to share the overall entire screen here. See if it does this. Pull me off. And so I asked AI to— our internal AI to create that executive PowerPoint with my SWOT analysis. It talks about the sources that it used, talks about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and it builds that 4-box matrix you might be familiar with if you know the SWOT analysis. Gives that executive summary. Gives some recommendations for your leadership team. And then, of course, gives the sources overall, which can be really helpful. And then, back here, inside of ClearPoint, Just to give you an idea of how we think about this is we believe you need a knowledge base of, of what's in here because, you know, AI could search online, but it doesn't tell you what happened in your Q3 meeting, or you can't look at additional board minutes or your own department operational plans necessarily. So when we create these libraries, they can research the data in different ways. And then of course, inside of the reports that we generate, we can see those exports and any AI artifacts like my SWOT analysis or a vision of it or memo there. And then within our configuration, we allow you to set your response style. Overall and show, you know, how you want the AI to operate. Don't worry, we, we have— we do not train the AI on any of the information there. And then where we can get into our integrations is you can ultimately connect your OneDrive, SharePoint, or your Teams inside of ClearPoint to then be able to, from Teams, be able to chat with your strategy and pull information out. So your leadership team can then be able to just have one place. They don't even need to learn a new, uh, application. They can just chat directly with the strategy and say, hey, tell me what's— how we're doing with our with our budget information or with our public safety initiatives overall. And then you as an individual can also have some AI settings where you can set your particular response and you can connect to your own apps here. So the organization would connect and then you would connect overall. And my microphone back on. Hopefully you've been able to hear me and the microphone wasn't off that entire time. But what I wanted to finish with was just some key takeaways. Is, you know, here is that your smaller plans will outperform your bigger ones. The ownership crisis overall is very solvable. Most organizations complete fewer projects, so make sure you run your projects that are very focused, have individuals own them, and make them responsible for it. And AI is not something that will come in the future. It is— it is here, and you should be implementing it inside of your strategy. So— so again, thank you for joining me today, and hopefully you all have a great holiday weekend if you're in the United States, or just a great rest of your week for everyone else. Thanks, and have a great day.