How West St. Paul stopped writing strategic plans and started building a system that actually runs one. Most strategic plans don't fail because they're poorly written. They fail because the operational side of a city runs on an entirely separate track, and nobody ever builds the bridge. The plan lives in a binder or a PDF, the real work lives in everyone's inboxes and department meetings, and by March of year one the document is already gathering dust while decisions get made somewhere else...

There’s something oddly comforting about walking into a CALPELRA conference ballroom and knowing that almost everyone in the room has likely been through it: the 2 a.m. phone call, the “should we say something?” debate, the department head who’s burying their head in the sand, and the attorney who‘s convinced that silence is mandatory. Public sector HR doesn’t get to control when the next crisis hits, but we do get to decide how prepared we’ll be when it does. This year, I had the...

In early September, I went to Washington, DC for the Abundance Conference. It’s only in its second year, but the rooms were packed with...