Strategic Management Problem

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4.3 Strategic Management Problem

KYF2’s strategic shape was primarily formed through two events: the Deputy Secretary’s imaginative reconceptualization of Department

stakeholders” to foster innovation in public service delivery, and a series of discussions among an eight-member Management Team chaired by the Deputy Secretary.

First, the Deputy Secretary pushed past inherited obstacles, such as institutional preference for large producers versus small, entrepreneurial start-ups, by creating a new ground for discovery. In a memorandum to USDA agency senior leaders, she stated publicly her “challenge to think creatively about how USDA can best address President Obama’s call for a reinvigoration of local food systems ” (USDA Office of the Secretary Memorandum, “Know Your Food, Know Your Farmer,” May 11, 2009, Appendix E). The Departmental initiative announcement claimed a groundswell of public support represented in demand for local and sustainably produced food. With this demand, the Deputy Secretary captured an internal transformation mandate to reconstitute the institutional paradigm and begin “a dialogue within USDA to encourage larger, strategic thinking about how to coordinate our work.” A basic organizational question shared by the Deputy in an interview was, “How do you build structure not dependent on a particular person or a couple of people or structures?”

The dialogue began with the internal USDA incentive to adopt particularly progressive values, given the institution’s historic programmatic emphasis on big agriculture:

• Support the viability of small and medium-size farms, ranches, and agriculture facilities

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• Support sustainable agriculture practices

• Reduce energy consumption

• Promote locally produced and locally processed foods

• Ensure equitable access to fresh local food

• Promote healthy eating

In addition, the Secretary of Agriculture provided a descriptive media statement

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tms8ye8mw_k&list=PL4F1ACED0E6040 662&index=1).

The private industry responded to the publicly available announcement with attempts to gain perceived advantages in positioning to define why the locally grown movement is considered an economic opportunity. For example, one entity explained that members of the target audience might be labeled "locavores," that is, people “who strive to eat food produced within 100 miles.” Playing on the increased popularity of eating locally grown food, the importance of knowing about one’s dietary food chain became a key branding symbol. Examples of consumer justification for endorsing local and regional food systems included environmental

sustainability; food safety; variety; support of independent multi-cropping farmers, rather than agribusiness, and the local economy; reduced

processing; nutrition; freshness with fewer preservatives; and seasonal availability. “Shoppers are willing to pay a huge premium for local…

DOUBLE the price for a local product in a farmers' market versus the identical local product in a retail store” was another claim.

(http://www.harvestmark.com/resources/newsletter/know-your-farmer,-know-your-food.aspx).

The actual implementation of the KYF2 solution strategy assumed a subtle, almost clandestine undercurrent. For instance, what other senior USDA

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executives did not fully realize (and have not yet realized) is that this initiative is actually about internal transformation. Even the Deputy Secretary special assistant required the experience of an “Ah-ha moment, when [she] realized it was an entirely internal initiative”; regarding the criticality in the “overall goal of moving the Department forward,” she said, “I did not recognize it until half way through.” Most of us on the Management Team discovered this principle by accident; it was not explicit or an emphasized theme, nor reinforced in our many conversations. As one team member noted,

It’s important to have the perspective on how big a change this is in the Department…it really is highly subversive what this has done...

unthinkable 10 years ago. It’s hard to realize how deeply reinforced the imperative and paradigm of global production agriculture has been and how really radical the idea of promoting local and regional food systems is for USDA…. The coupling of local and regional with the KYF [congressional reporting requirement]… the national conversation of knowing agricultural better, blunted the subversiveness of it. – KYF2 Participant Interview

In the second of the two defining strategic management milestones, the multi-disciplined, eight-member Management Team were invited to

brainstorm about the potential for visualizing USDA local and regional food systems data with maps. These conversations produced a conceptual model, which in turn produced a rough pathway toward strategic

outcomes. Appendix F displays the KYF2 Guiding Framework. A key factor in the success of this path was its alignment with the congressional

requirement to produce a periodic written report about local and regional food systems in conjunction with the annual Farm Bill. Subsequently, the maps became a set of visual narratives linked to a diverse collection of report themes. The use of geographic information systems (GIS) and a

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geospatial presentation framework materialized as an initiative core

competency, previously untapped by senior executives. “[Our] strategy was to elevate all this… a way of institutionalizing it [that is, geospatial

information] in [the] Department…to ride the wave, as it were, that we were not directing or producing but was very clearly happening.”

The Management Team received the Deputy Secretary’s direction to

“include all of USDA, think outside of your box, not get bogged down by definitions, understand opportunities around local and regional fairly endless, bring your great ideas.” Our strategic management exercise avoided organizations’ natural tendency to pressure teams to reduce ideas immediately into categories and frames. We refabricated the problem to, as the Deputy Secretary directed, better “harness creative thinking inside the building, outside the building, in small communities, in local

government.” We also sought to follow this formative, yet bureaucratically divisive, principle: “[B]e encouraging…but [do] not control or lead.” The Deputy Secretary emphasized that, to survive, the KYF2 initiative must first and foremost prove itself to the people benefiting from it. She discouraged discussion of maturing KYF2 to official program status, versus initiative.

However, she stipulated that “harnessing capacity and expertise across the Department in a deliberate and dedicated way” was the objective rather than establishing another program to compete for scarce USDA resources.

The Deputy Secretary summarized KYF2’s purpose as follows: “The KYF initiative is the means of manifesting [USDA’s support] for the small farm, local foods constituencies ‘The KYF initiative is the means…’”

Participants on the Management Team had three previous years of

implementation information to feed their strategy management processes.

The initial phases of the KYF2 initiative, beginning in 2009, concentrated efforts and success measures on satisfying the traditional governmental report criteria. These criteria included point-for-point alignment with

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original USDA commitments, use of familiar language and style, limited graphic presentation of data, and content targeted primarily to

congressional oversight staff. As time passed, and completion of the report lagged, principal actors sensed the insufficiency of the approach. An

energetic, engaging story of local and regional food was needed.

The USDA local and regional foods system story line was stuck in a rut — described as generally hidden, nuanced, sometimes virtually lost, and certainly obstructed for outside stakeholders. Internal agency actors did not always comprehend and understand their role, network relationships, and contributions to a larger USDA mission or comprehend the place of local and regional in their work life. Therefore, the Management Team observed four rules for extracting the KYF2 report from the excess of bureaucratic language and narrating the local foods story.

First, information about constituent programs must be presented in simple ways. Often agency programs provide guidance that would help small beneficiaries acquire government resource assistance, but this content is buried in policy directives, memorandums, tens of thousands of webpages, and so forth. The average person may spend hours, if not days, trying to locate qualification information. Usually he or she gives up and contacts field agents directly for help navigating the chaotic bureaucratic

landscape, which consumes agent time and resources.

Second, this information, and its component data, should be made accessible to anyone interested in obtaining it. Content extracted from obsolete government content management practices and distribution channels must be equitably available to all stakeholders. This means contextualizing and categorizing program guidance, organizing information by customer segment and classification, and providing a simple process for downloading raw data for alternative uses by the stakeholder community.

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Improved access to data balances the power factor for smaller players and collectives in the agricultural marketplace, while encouraging local food policy.

Third, a graphic representation of the data should visualize and explain episodes, vignettes, and scenarios where USDA offered assistance. A geographically correct image lets users see where the Department has successfully provided resources, the types of uses and beneficiaries, and potential gaps in local and regional food system products and services. For individuals or organizations, such as minority farmers, agriculture

cooperatives, and organic supply chain services, these views enable market penetration and partnering at an entirely new level. This visual capability is particularly acute as rural and regional economic condition drive

producers to find viable markets and products.

Fourth, the visual narrative should be integrated with a textual set of themes, which relate to core local and regional food system policy agendas and values. This goal represented an innovation in content distribution.

Whereas maps were used in limited, static ways to project retrospective data, the Department had not previously, or deliberately, connected written content with geospatial mapping visualization techniques to tell a story about programs. The combination of textual descriptions organized around themes and place-based map views created a congruent message, which was easily validated with evidence at the local, state, regional, and national levels.

With respect to specific KYF2 map tool objectives, the Management Team envisioned three strategic directions. From the dimension of improving communication processes, the report and map were intended to situate data so as to create a point of departure for new conversations with and among stakeholders. The dialogue would occur and be sustained in a

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based orientation to USDA programs, from which agencies would learn about citizen-consumer demand and adoption of USDA products and services in relation to local and regional food systems.

Next, the tools and channels of social media were deployed to encourage virtual advocacy for USDA programs. Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, and other sources increased the viral nature of the Department’s efforts shaping a new brand message and enabled crowdsourcing of complex local issues with USDA data. Last, the principles of map building as an accepted, familiar, and egalitarian convention became the formal framework for conveying new content to constituencies. Maps offered bird’s-eye views of program impacts, were perceived as neutral displays of facts, and were devised as a primary interpretive tool to tell enterprise-wide and external results stories in the public domain. These three objectives opened a space of

possibilities for reshaping the USDA story and brand through the delivery of a nonstandard content report to an oversight institution.