The PerformanceStat Potential

A Leadership Strategy for Producing Results

Robert D. Behn

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780815725275
• eBook ISBN: 9780815725282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It started two decades ago with CompStat in the New York City Police Department, and quickly jumped to police agencies across the U.S. and other nations. It was adapted by Baltimore, which created CitiStat—the first application of this leadership strategy to an entire jurisdiction. Today, governments at all levels employ PerformanceStat: a focused effort by public executives to exploit the power of purpose and motivation, responsibility and discretion, data and meetings, analysis and learning, feedback and follow-up—all to improve government's performance.
Here, Harvard leadership and management guru Robert Behn analyzes the leadership behaviors at the core of PerformanceStat to identify how they work to produce results. He examines how the leaders of a variety of public organizations employ the strategy—the way the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services uses its DPSSTATS to promote economic independence, how the City of New Orleans uses its BlightStat to eradicate blight in city neighborhoods, and what the Federal Emergency Management Agency does with its FEMAStat to ensure that the lessons from each crisis response, recovery, and mitigation are applied in the future. How best to harness the strategy's full capacity? The PerformanceStat Potential explains all.

1

CompStat and Its PerformanceStat Progeny

How and why was the original PerformanceStat leadership strategy adopted and adapted by many different public agencies and government jurisdictions?

Jack [Maple] is the smartest man I've ever met on crime.
WILLIAM BRATTON, Police Commissioner of New York City¹

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
PETER DRUCKER, Claremont Graduate University²

One night in the winter of 1994, Jack Maple was sitting in Elaine's—an expensive, four-star restaurant and celebrity hangout on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—drinking. As befits any urban legend, the reports on what he was drinking differ. As Maple remembered the night, he was on his third glass of champagne.³ Maple's boss, William Bratton, recalled that he too was in Elaine's that night and insisted that Maple, because he knew that he “might get called to a crime scene at any time,” usually drank multiple cups of double espresso.⁴

Regardless of whether Maple was inspired by the grape or the bean, the dozen words that he scrawled on a napkin that evening have been engraved on the minds of numerous public executives who seek to improve performance and produce better results:

1. Accurate and timely intelligence
2. Rapid deployment
3. Effective tactics
4. Relentless follow-up and assessment

These are “the four principles”⁵ of CompStat, the leadership strategy developed in the New York City Police Department by Commissioner Bratton, Deputy Commissioner Maple, and their NYPD colleagues.⁶ Their purpose? To improve the department's performance, and thus to produce better results. Specifically, when Bratton became NYPD's commissioner, he committed himself and his organization to reducing the city's crime by 10 percent in the first year, 25 percent over two years, and 40 percent over three years.⁷

The “CompStat Craze”

Indeed, in New York City, crime did drop. It dropped significantly. George Mason University's David Weisburd and Stephen Mastrofski and their colleagues have called CompStat “a major innovation in American policing.”⁸ To George Kelling of the Manhattan Institute and William Sousa of Rutgers University, “Compstat was perhaps the single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the 20th century.”⁹ William Walsh of the University of Louisville labeled it “an emerging police managerial paradigm.”¹⁰ Dall Forsythe, now at New York University, called it an “effective management innovation.”¹¹ Mark Moore of Harvard has described it as “an important administrative innovation in policing.”¹² Indeed, in 1996, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government honored NYPD's CompStat with an Innovation in American Government Award.¹³

As in any field of human endeavor, an innovation that proves successful (or merely appears to be successful) is disseminated through professional networks and informal channels to others who adopt and adapt it.¹⁴ By 1999, five years after Maple first scribbled down his four principles on Elaine's napkin, a third of the 445 police agencies in the United States with more than 100 sworn officers that responded to a survey reported that they had “implemented a CompStat-like program,” and another quarter of these agencies said that they were planning to do so.¹⁵ This “Compstat Craze,” as Christopher Swope called it in Governing magazine,¹⁶ was certainly a broad and rapid diffusion of this innovation throughout the policing profession.¹⁷

Moreover, as police departments across the United States—and around the world—created their own versions of CompStat, they found Maple's four points worth saluting. In the Los Angeles Police Department, where Bratton served as police chief from 2002 to 2009, “the elements of CompStat consist of four distinct principles.”¹⁸ To the Philadelphia Police Department, “the philosophy behind COMPSTAT is deceptively simple. It is based on four principles which have proven to be essential ingredients of an effective crime-fighting strategy.”¹⁹ In Columbia, South Carolina, the police department introduced Maple's ideas about CompStat using almost exactly the same words: “four principles which have proven to be key ingredients of an effective crime-fighting strategy.”²⁰ In Escondido, California, the police department reported that “the CompStat process is based on four crime fighting strategies.”²¹ The Minneapolis Police Department used a different name, CODEFOR (for Computer Optimized Deployment—Focus On Results), but still emphasized the same “four elements essential to crime control.”²²

Big-city police departments are not, however, the only ones using the CompStat approach.²³ Numerous departments in small cities and towns have also adopted this leadership strategy; they too have emphasized the importance of Maple's four principles. Sandy Springs, Georgia (population 100,000), simply called them “the elements.” In West Vancouver, British Columbia (population 42,000), the police department listed them as “the four principles.” To the police in Shawnee, Oklahoma (population 29,000), they are “four key principles.” Burlington Township, New Jersey (population 20,000), called them “essential principles.” Warwick Township, Pennsylvania (population 12,000), echoed Philadelphia, describing them as “four principles which have proved to be essential ingredients of an effective crime-fighting strategy.”²⁴

Moreover, CompStat and Maple's four principles have been adopted not only to fight crime but also to reduce traffic accidents. And they have been employed not only by municipal police departments but also by police agencies at the state and provincial levels.

In the Canadian province of Manitoba, the Winnipeg Police Service created the term “CrimeStat”;²⁵ the name may be different, but “the philosophy is built on [the same] four principles.”²⁶ In the State of Washington, the Highway Patrol named its approach “Accountability Driven Leadership,” which “embraces many of the principles of COMPSTAT.”²⁷ In Australia, policing is the responsibility not of the municipalities but of the states, all of which created their own versions of CompStat (each with its own distinct name): Queensland named it Operational Performance Reviews; New South Wales, Operations Crime Reviews; Tasmania, Management Group Performance Reviews; Western Australia, Organisational Performance Reviews; and South Australia, Performance Outcomes Reviews.²⁸ Only Victoria calls it “COMPSTAT.” Not surprisingly, the Queensland Police Service reports that its Operational Performance Reviews are “based on the [same] four key elements.”²⁹

In 1998 the NYPD created TrafficStat for the purpose of “reducing crashes, injuries, and fatalities, and increasing public safety.”³⁰ Others did the same. Troop C of the Louisiana State Police, based in Houma, created its own TrafficStat “composed of four components.”³¹ In Canada, one of the components of the traffic safety program of the Ontario Provincial Police is “result driven policing,” which is based on principles that include Maple's four.³²

For all of these police agencies, the purpose of creating their own version of CompStat is the same as the NYPD's: To improve performance and thus to produce better results, specifically, to reduce crime (and traffic accidents).

How, however, do Maple's four principles do that? How could they do that?

“Compstatmania”: From CompStat to AgencyStat

Police departments were not the only public agencies to adopt CompStat. In what the Gotham Gazette called “Compstatmania,”³³ other public agencies in New York City—public agencies that had no responsibility for crime or traffic—also sought to adapt the NYPD's leadership strategy. Obviously, however, each agency had to adapt the concept to its own needs to improve its performance and thus to produce better results (whatever that agency's specific results might be). The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation launched ParkStat.³⁴ The Human Resources Administration created JobStat, as well as VendorStat, Homecare VendorStat, HASAStat (for HIV/AIDS Services Administration), and MAPStat (for Medicaid).³⁵ The city's Administration for Children's Services established ChildStat. Even the Off-Track Betting Corporation created BET-STAT.³⁶ Honest!

Not all of these “children of CompStat,” as the Gotham Gazette labeled them, had the suffix “Stat” in their name. For example, the city's Department of Correction created TEAMS, which stands for Total Efficiency Accountability Management System. Essentially, this is CorrectionStat. Similarly, the Department of Probation created STARS, for Statistical Tracking, Analysis and Reporting, or what might be called ProbationStat. The city's Housing Authority created APTS, for Authority Productivity Tracking System; think of this as HousingStat. The Department of Transportation called its version DOTMOVE.

Each of these New York City departments was seeking to improve performance—and thus achieve better results. Each of these public agencies sought to adapt the CompStat leadership strategy to its own purposes. Now the city didn't just have policing's CompStat. A variety of different city agencies had their own “AgencyStat.”³⁷

During the years that Bratton and Maple developed CompStat, Rudolph Giuliani was New York City's mayor.³⁸ Thus it is not surprising that when Giuliani ran for president in 2008, he promised to create CompStat-like programs in the federal government—FedStat, BorderStat, TerrorStat, and GAPStat. In the process, Giuliani invoked Maple's principles: CompStat, he told the press, “is all about: accurate and timely intelligence, effective tactics, rapid deployment of personnel and resources, and relentless follow-up and assessment.”³⁹

Actually, several units of the U.S. government had already created their own AgencyStats. For the San Diego district of the U.S. Border Patrol, it was, indeed, BorderStat. And the Environmental Protection Agency called its version EPAStat.

Then, in December 2010, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed the GPRA Modernization Act.^4...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 - CompStat and its PerformanceStat Progeny
• 2 - Searching for PerformanceStat
• 3 - Clarifying PerformanceStat
• 4 - Distinguishing CompStat's Impact
• 5 - Committing to a Purpose
• 6 - Establishing Responsibilities Plus Discretion
• 7 - Distinguishing PerformanceStat's Effects
• 8 - Collecting the Data
• 9 - Analyzing and Learning from the Data
• 10 - Conducting the Meetings
• 11 - Carrying Out the Feedback and Follow-Up
• 12 - Creating Organizational Competence and Commitment
• 13 - Learning to Make the Necessary Adaptations
• 14 - Thinking about Cause and Effect
• 15 - Appreciating Leadership's Causal Behaviors
• 16 - Making the Leadership Commitment
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Cover