Could Baldrige Help Detroit?

 As a young child, I spent most Sundays visiting my paternal grandmother in a declining inner-city neighborhood of Detroit. By then, the city had already seen large-scale losses of middle-class residents. Many had fled to suburbs that offered better public schools, more reliable services, and safer streets. Over the decade stretching into the 1980s, I watched my grandmother’s well-built bungalow become a virtual jail cell for her.

Yet my grandmother met the continual erosion in city services (and correspondingly, in her quality of life) with a ferocious obstinacy. No matter what happened, she would not  abandon the city she had loved in better times—and the home that had witnessed her immigrant family’s years of striving to secure the American dream (through decades of steady earnings from a manufacturing job). So she stayed indoors nearly 24/7 throughout her seventh decade. Redundantly deadbolted doors alone protected her from the pervasive robberies in the area.

As family members urged her to move during weekly visits, I became a sentinel in the barred window of the back porch, awaiting the regular backyard parades of ever-more-robust rats scampering to and from a nest down the block. Along their route, the ironically thriving rodents were seemingly cheered by unruly rose bushes—which my aunt had stopped pruning after she was robbed at gunpoint in the driveway. I sometimes wondered about symbols of lost life, such as a charred shoe decaying unburied near the burned-out house next door (which had been rendered uninhabitable by a suspicious fire years before). And I listened for sirens that might signal another movie-like spectacle like the dramatic chase my grandmother had watched. As the story went, an alleged drug dealer reached his home across the street moments before police to flush illegal commodities into the city’s sewer lines.

My grandmother could describe the growing pathology of her neighborhood and the city at large with alarming details from her daily observations and reading of the news. But she had no solutions beyond prayer. She had seen enough evidence over several decades to doubt the city government would save any such street from a further descent into blight.

Recalling these memories, I was saddened but not surprised by recent news of the impending bankruptcy of the once-prosperous city. I realize my experiences were limited, and that even now there are pockets of hope in the city, for example, in historic neighborhoods with thriving businesses. So I wonder what Detroit might be able to do to leverage strategic advantages it still possesses and make progress toward tackling its colossal challenges.

In considering the latest news of Detroit, I have been thinking about the excellent budgetary and other results achieved by two other U.S. cities (Irving, Texas, a 2012 Baldrige Award winner; and Coral Springs, Florida, a 2007 Baldrige Award winner) that have used the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to improve their performance and become national role models. The Criteria focused them on treating their city governments as businesses—forcing them to consider financial stewardship, strategic priorities, customer engagement, and all the other considerations that must be addressed to keep a business sustainable.

While those cities are smaller than Detroit—and their current and past challenges are not necessarily similar—the Baldrige Excellence Framework (which includes the Criteria for Performance Excellence) has been used by organizations of wide-ranging sizes and sectors to improve performance and achieve sustainability. For examples, see profiles of nonprofit, education, health care, and business organizations on our website here and case studies and results in our book Baldrige 20/20. 

So I have dreamed recently of the great possibilities of a Baldrige-based transformation in Detroit. What if its leaders were to embark in earnest on a Baldrige journey of improvement? Perhaps the city could begin such a journey by considering how it could adopt and demonstrate the core values of the Baldrige framework for organization-wide performance: visionary leadership, customer-focused excellence, organizational and personal learning, valuing workforce members and partners, agility, a focus on the future, managing for innovation, management by fact, societal responsibility, a focus on results and creating value, and a systems perspective.

Next, Detroit could begin using the Baldrige Criteria requirements (which are phrased as self-assessment questions) to consider and improve its approaches to leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce focus; and operations focus (also known as categories 1 through 6). And it could track its results (category 7) in measures of all key processes. While the Baldrige Criteria do not provide for a quick or easy fix, using this framework has helped organizations in every sector of the U.S. economy build management systems that enable them to better serve their customers and other stakeholders and become profitable and sustainable. This is why I believe the Baldrige Criteria can help Detroit remake itself into a steadily improving and higher-performing city.

My grandmother, who would be over 100 years old today, is long gone. But in my lifetime, I sure hope to see a Detroit commitment to major change and continuous improvement draw large numbers of new settlers and businesses to help rebuild and diversify the foundations of the municipal economy. And of pressing importance: to see the city be able to improve the quality of education and services for all Detroit residents.

Note: Michigan organizations can look to the Michigan Quality Council for expertise and support in improving their performance using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (most other states are similarly served by local Baldrige-based programs that are part of the nonprofit Alliance for Performance Excellence network); Detroit also is fortunate to be home to a high-performing role model and national Baldrige Award recipient, Henry Ford Health System.