I was delighted to attend the Asia Pacific Cities Summit, held this week in Brisbane. As a Brisbane City Council initiative, the summit was another step in the right direction for discussion on how to keep developing prosperous, sustainable and harmonious cities.

While listening to the likes of Graham Quirk, Randi Zuckerberg, Tyler Brule and an impressive collection of city leaders, it struck me that every theme discussed at this conference for cities is incredibly relevant for our organisations. In fact, given people spend more time inside an organisation’s culture than they do in the outside environment, perhaps, by affecting some positive change within organisations, we can make improvements to people’s lives and contribute to the wellbeing of a city?

With this analogy brewing in my mind, a very engaging session on the final day of the summit gave the concept much more fuel. This session involved a panel discussion of mayors or their equivalent from most capital cities in Australia, in addition to Len Brown from Auckland (who made the point of confirming that New Zealand had not been declared part of Australia overnight). During the session, each leader was asked to outline what they see as the most important considerations for prosperous and sustainable cities. The session produced some rich dialogue with some common themes, which included:

• Integrated planning for growth – economy, liveability, housing, accessibility
• Creating spaces for people
• Building community involvement – not just the squeaky wheels
• Utilising digital opportunities
• Urban renewal
• Building transport infrastructure for the future – getting the balance right
• Discovering and applying a city brand– allowing a city’s unique culture to thrive
• Better collaboration across regions
• Collectively growing the cake – complimentary growing of the economy
• Building strategic partnerships
• Advancing and embedding sustainability
• Being ready to embrace technological and social change
• Economic diversification economy to reduce reliance
• Policy Reform

Blow me down if I have not been part of discussions within companies that have looked at these very elements as being critical for its success. As a microcosm of a wider city and society, organisations need to consider and take actions against all of these areas, in addition to understanding how this connects with the vision of the city and region.

Let’s pick out some of these themes and consider how they can contribute to a prosperous and socially-successful organisation.

Future-focused

The pitfalls and successes of cities and regions can consistently be compared to how future focused they were at the time and potentially, how much they considered the benefit of a short term win versus a long term success. The same can be said of organisations. Both entities need to have strong long term visions that enable their people, which strategically connect their initiatives, while directing their people to a future aspiration. This vision needs to be well informed through research, learnings and extracting the collective knowledge and aspirations of the people and the community.

While it was not specifically discussed during this session, this all comes down to the strength and the skill of your leaders.

The true test of a future focused leader is their willingness to do the right thing at the expense of short term popularity. Political cycles and quick wins at the expense of a long term strategy are the enemy of this approach the strength of your leaders will become apparent in their own decision making in this area.

Integrated planning

Integrating planning across multiple functions, organisations and entities in a city-sense is a big challenge. Equally, managing interfaces between three levels of government in Australia, when the interests often overlap is a headache to say the least.

The same challenge exists for organisations through geographical and functional separation. Silo’s are alive and well in the corporate world. Without a common platform for planning that leverages a shared vision, effective communications channels and the drive of very good holistic leaders, the chances of realising organisational efficiencies are greatly diminished. Morale and culture also have to be considered alongside planning as it’s a big blow for a department to find that they have not been included or, worse still, that they have been doing exactly the same thing as their colleagues in a different department, duplicating efforts towards the same goal.

Living your brand

An interesting discussion led by Asaf Zamir, Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv Yafo) was focused on cities being comfortable as themselves and staying true to their own unique brand. This conclusion was shared by a number of leaders who readily spoke to past mistakes involving following the lead of other cities without considering how this related to their own strengths. Len Brown of Auckland shared the historical mistake of Auckland’s planners following the lead of American transport planner’s in prioritising motorways over public transport investment. Others discussed focusing on a global powerhouse like London and after investing time in trying to emulate them, finding they had more success in backing their own unique offerings.

For organisations, authenticity is more important than ever and it’s more visible than ever. In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins emphasises the importance of recognising what you can and can’t be good at and aligning your strategy to it. This does not mean you can’t diversity and capture new opportunities, but don’t do it at the expense of your unique strengths.

Open and collaborative

It was interesting to learn how in Tel Aviv, public consultation discussions included tens of thousands of people instead of just the “squeaky wheels” that don’t always represent the people. This mass discourse emerged through both harnessing digital possibilities with their local carrier but also through setting an expectation that contributions can come in any shape or form and that everyone can contribute.

At an organisational level we need to be ready to facilitate interactions inside organisations in the same organic and efficient way that our people would do in their social lives. If we don’t, we can’t expect people to abandon the constraints that hold them back in their roles and further, we can’t expect a collective workforce to perform at the speed in which a more innovative competitor’s workforce is.

As corporate citizens, we need to be open to external influences and interactions which can help to build trust, inform our decisions and profile our strengths.

In both the internal and external environments, the quality of the connection is paramount. Set an expectation, meet it, open the conversation through organic channels, demonstrate you’re listening and let go of the control. It sounds simple but if you don’t do it today, the change can be daunting.

Agility

A common point of discussion amongst the city mayors was being ready to embrace change, with the two targeted areas being technological and social change. Funnily enough, these two elements are often changing together.

Certainly, technological change is, as always, rapid and potentially rewarding. The focal point for such change is organisational IT infrastructure. Despite the difficulty in staying flexible in this area, many financial and efficiency rewards can be gained from taking advantage of the opportunity to change your approach to storage, networks, interfaces and work practices.

There is much discussion around the generational change that is embracing changed workplaces with “The Millennials” craving new work methods leveraged by technology. The challenge is being agile enough to support that with your use of new technology.

Places for people

There are two parts to this. The first is being smart about culture. By that I mean, understanding what it is, what you want it to be and what contributes to it. As Randi Zuckerberg said in her address to the summit, “if you have even two people you need to consider culture”.

The second aspect is creating great spaces for people. While this is commonly discussed at a city level, it is emphasised enough at the organisation level. Great spaces improve our working and social lives. They create the right moods, setting for creative endeavour and targeted collaboration. Often you see companies invest a great deal in building new spaces for people, working with architects to make them the best they can be, but not emphasising this enough with their people. We see the benchmark organisations like Google and Facebook support their intraprenuerial culture through making their workplaces entirely creative, dynamic and flexible spaces and this has a proven effect on culture and by association, outputs.

Sustainability

The summit contained some exciting conversations and success stories around sustainability. The scope of opportunity in this area is broad and in each area it is equally applicable to organisations.

In a physical sense we need to consider creating natural spaces with natural light, fresh air, vertical gardens, natural materials, recycled water, low energy solutions, end of trip facilities and facilities that encourage positive behaviours such as recycling, exercise and public transport use.

But the opportunity is bigger and we also need to use the critical mass we have in a workplace to deliver against social sustainability objectives such as reducing mental health issues, empowering people to achieve in every part of their lives and reducing instances of discrimination. In this area, the workplace and the city can collectively achieve some truly transformational shifts.

Conclusion

In summary, there is much that cities and organisations have in common in their quest to be prosperous and sustainable. The benefit of taking a city-building lense to an organisation is the way it keeps the focus holistic. A holistic focus helps an organisation to be internally and externally aware and ready to approach the next challenge with a great deal of confidence.