The discipline of governance
ONCE a “vision” for the city had been agreed – with various representatives of key sectors in the city as well as of key departments of City Hall – it became necessary to undertake the preliminary additional homework before everyone was sent back to their respective places to begin working on their contribution to the realization of the “vision.”
This is where the discipline of governance kicks in. Additional homework had to be completed first, before any decision and action could be undertaken; and it included the following:
— Agreement on the other elements of the “governance charter” for Dipolog. Along with the “vision” statement, the City of Dipolog needed to articulate very clearly just what its core purpose is. In other words, it had to put forward what its specific “mission” is, i.e., the fundamental role it must play for the community of Dipolog. The formulation of the “mission” statement of Dipolog was finally adopted to read as follows” “We provide an enabling environment that continually improves the quality of life of the Dipolo-gnons.” Very clearly, the city wanted to be a leader and coordinator, and not a knowall as well as do-all bureaucracy. And when asked to specify the “core values” the city is resolved to decide and act by, as it provides that enabling environment, the following values were adopted: “integrity,” “common good,” and “professionalism.” These are helpfully few; they are easy to remember; and they are at the very foundation of any good governance and transformation program. The “vision” statement that had been adopted gets to be fully complemented with a “mission” statement and a set of “core values,” thereby completing all the constitutive elements of the “governance charter” of the City.
— The “vision” also needs to be fleshed in. After all, the vision statement presents a picture of the future Dipolog, one that is going to be built on the basis of the determined efforts and substantive contributions on the part of all key sectors of the city. But the practical question that crops up is: what are the key priorities – of a strategic character – that the city must pursue in order to get its vision realized, in this case by a pre-determined end-date, i.e., 2020. Here, the balanced scorecard- PGS framework helps: it identifies the perspectives that must be taken into account in choosing the strategic priorities. Once these priorities have been clearly identified and laid out – showing their close inter-relation with each other – the city would end up having a Strategy Map for realizing its vision.
— Finally, for each of these strategic priorities in the City Strategy Map, the governance discipline demands that there be a few initiatives (the strategic “must do” items), with measures for assessing progress on these initiatives; and with corresponding targets of performance that must be achieved at certain time periods, as the city moves towards the end of its vision period, i.e., towards 2020. All these get to be listed and formalized in a Performance Scorecard for the city. They send a very clear signal: the governance discipline is not all about dreaming or presenting a picture of the future (a vision, a desired or dreamed- of future) that must be attained; it is also very much about being very clear regarding the strategic priorities the City has chosen to give a lot of importance to, if it wants to realize its vision in the future. Moreover, the city has to commit to delivering actual performance, meeting targets of performance at the end of each year, using pre-agreed measures that help define the substance of those targets.
A very determined city mayor, like Mayor Uy, would not let the workshop participants go and claim that they have completed their initial governance homework, without delivering to her an agreed Governance Charter, a proposed City Strategy Map, and a set of Performance Scorecards related to the Strategy Map. To the credit of the “re-visioning workshop” participants, they went home only after delivering their agreed version of the elements that the governance discipline required.