Megacommunities and the Government Sector
As a global strategy and technology consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton defines its core mission as working with clients to deliver results that endure. Today, our clients face large-scale issues of unprecedented complexity: global climate change; rebuilding urban infrastructure; water scarcity; preparing for pandemics; dealing with aging populations; and maintaining quality of life in the face of globalization. These issues significantly affect national security, economic well-being, and the health and safety of citizens around the world. As we work toward developing solutions to these mounting, many-headed problems, more and more often we find ourselves repeating a four-word mantra: It takes a megacommunity™.
We have come to the conclusion that, in many cases, no sector—government, business or civil society—can solve these problems on its own. Each sector comes with its own discrete cast, skill set and sphere of influence. Many of today’s complex problems require us to find ways to blend these sector-specific advantages and join together into what we've dubbed "megacommunities" (a term most simply defined as a tri-sector, action-oriented “organization of organizations” focused on a shared issue).
“Megacommunity” is a relatively new, emerging idea but we’ve begun to see it play out successfully in many different situations, in many different parts of the world. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a cluster of NGOs, local businesses and city council members have created the Hope Community Center, which has been able to rebuild houses, garner materials and get the required variances through government to speed the restoration of an area shattered by Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on help from all three sectors, Biloxi is not only recovering; it has also been able to improve its overall tax base in the process.
Hewlett Packard (working with the Nigerian government and such groups as the World Federation of Engineering Organizations) has put together a core team to activate the issue of engineering education in Africa. The Italian energy utility Enel is having much success in building a megacommunity around the issue of overhauling “green coal” plants in the Veneto region. Recently, The New York Times featured a piece on the Climate Action Partnership in which business interests (such as Ford and ConocoPhillips) and environmental groups (such as the Natural Resources Defense Council) have joined together to develop proposals for climate change that they are taking to the U.S. government. And working together with a diverse group that includes Newt Gingrich and the bipartisan Alzheimer’s Study Group, a wide array of health professionals, and the Center for Health Transformation, we have developed a megacommunity around the issue of Alzheimer’s (with the ultimate goal of curing Alzheimer’s).
Although any organization in any sector might initiate a megacommunity, our recent experiences have tended to underscore how important it is that the government sector takes a pivotal, if not leading, role. Consider the recent disaster in Myanmar where, for so many weeks, the government refused to play an initiator role.
Clearly, many megacommunity goals could never be reached without government involvement and support. When the underlying issue comes tightly wrapped in regulatory oversight and law, the government becomes the ideal initiator because they have, in effect, “first mover” status. Also, the government is the one sector with access to a “bully pulpit.” And the government may be the only possible initiator when the issue is simply too huge and immediate to be handled by any other entity. That's exactly what happened in Florida in the wake of 2004's Hurricane Andrew. It was Florida's local government response agencies that drew together a group of national and local government leaders, non-profit groups, and Florida-based corporations–including insurance and logistics companies. In turn, that group developed a rapid response approach for future natural disasters.
Forming a megacommunity presents a challenge for the government sector—as it does for all sectors. It will take hard work, bright thinking and the best intentions to figure out how to reach across sectors and sector-specific interests to find what we call the “overlapping vital interest.” But these overlapping interests must be defined and acted upon if we hope to tackle some of our most serious problems. Each new megacommunity increases our knowledge of how to shape a megacommunity effectively. And the government sector is a critical part of this new equation.
story posted January 22, 2009
