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Last Tuesday in our Management Update Section, we announced the publication of a study titled “2025 State and Local Workforce Survey Results,’ from MissionSquare Research Institute in partnership with the National Association of State Chief Executive Officers (NASPE) and PSHRA (The Public Sector HR Association). Though we described the report as “one of the best ongoing sources of information on state and local government HR policies and practices,” we didn’t mention the number of surprises we found in this new data. Over recent months in many interviews with people in state and local HR departments, we’ve heard about a number of workforce trends, including many that target improved recruiting, hiring and retention of public sector employees. We’ve written about trends based on the impressions we garnered from those conversations. But, for the world of HR at large, the survey indicated that there’s been somewhat more talk than action.   Following are a series of anticipated shifts in HR practice, followed by the data that gives a real-world understanding of how they’re progressing. This survey, in which 79 percent of respondents are local, is released on an annual basis and next year at around this time, we’ll revisit it and report again on what public sector workforce practices have gained wide traction and which haven’t. OUR IMPRESSION: Many HR leaders and experts have emphasized the importance of HR data tracking. FINDING: “IN HR tracking there was a decrease in those tracking the effectiveness of onboarding and mentorship (by 5 percentage points) and the cost effectiveness of hiring bonuses (by 7 percentage points.)” OUR IMPRESSION: Give the expectation of a growing number of retirements, there’s been a great deal of discussion about the importance of succession planning. FINDING: “Even given a list of likely components to a succession planning program, 61 percent reported not having any such elements in place.” OUR IMPRESSION: In the last year, we’ve repeatedly seen an emphasis on paid family leave and its allure in attracting and retaining employees. FINDING: 52 percent do not provide paid family leave. OUR IMPRESSION: In an effort to more effectively recruit new staff, K-12 outreach “can be  an effective way to plant the seeds for interest in public sector employment down the road,” according to the report. FINDING: Only 5 percent of respondents indicated that they were involved in K-12 outreach/civics curriculum. OUR IMPRESSION: With an ongoing emphasis on recruitment, one might anticipate that state and local governments would be making every effort to get the word out in every way possible about the benefits of the kind of work they offer. FINDING: “Building a campaign around public service was reported by 12 percent of this year’s respondents.” OUR IMPRESSION: Given the expense and potential downsides of hiring bonuses (in terms of current worker morale and compression issues), you might think that there’d be evidence about their effectiveness. FINDING: “Only 9 percent say they are analyzing the cost effectiveness of hiring bonuses.” OUR IMPRESSION: With artificial intelligence the hot topic of the day (and a centerpiece of the agenda at the recent National Association of State Personnel Executives conference) it would follow that AI tools were already more widely employed. FINDING: “The demand for AI tools in public sector HR is still low with only 4 percent of respondents indicating it was being significantly used for recruitment.”  (It’s worth noting that the report indicates that “As job candidates themselves use AI tools to generate large numbers of bot-written and distributed applications, the need to use technology tools to manage that volume may increase.”)  OUR IMPRESSION: We’ve been concerned, sometimes publicly, that there’s been a sharp decline in data collection about DEI, due to political shifts. FINDING: Although there’s no question that many states and localities are backing away from their DEI initiatives, when it comes to data collection, the report found that when it came to data collection on turnover that included gender, race or other characteristics there was almost no falloff, with 51 percent saying they collected that data in the 2025 survey, compared to 52 percent in 2023. OUR IMPRESSION: Cities and states have been widely implementing mentorship programs. FINDING: “In 2018 mentoring was much more common with 25 percent of organizations sponsoring such programs. With the pandemic, that total dropped to 7 percent in 2022 and 2023 and while it has increased since, to 10 percent in 2025, mentoring has not yet reached that prior peak.  #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #CityHumanResources #CountyHumanResources #StateandLocalHRTrends #MissionSquareResearchInstitute #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalDataCollection #StateandLocalHumanResourcesDataUse #StateandlocalDEI #CityGovernmentManagement #CityHRManagement #CountyHRManagement #PublicSectorMentoring #StateandLocalRecruitment #StateandLocalRetention #StateandLocalHiring #ArtificialIntelligenceUseInStateLocalHR #StateLocalHiringBonus #CityHiringBonus #StateandLocalUseAI #StateLocalHumanResourceK12Outreach #NationalAssociationStatePersonnelExecutives #PublicSectorHRAssociation #NASPE #PSHRA #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

Every government makes mistakes from time to time. Sometimes, leaders acknowledge that a decision made in the past has gone awry and other times this news comes out through a performance audit or a press report. But as Robert Half, the late founder of the eponymous giant recruiting firm once said, “Not admitting a mistake is a bigger mistake.” We agree and yet we frequently see state and local governments and their leaders take that unfortunate path. Consider citizen surveys. They can be used to detect places where a mayor, governor or city council has taken a wrong turn and left frustrated residents behind. But we can’t recall ever seeing a press release from a governmental entity in which a leader is quoted as saying “We see that our citizens were outraged by the growing number of potholes in town.” Why would any leader want to do that? We’d argue it’s because everyone makes mistakes, and admitting to them, and explaining what is to be done to fix things could be a wonderful way to build up trust in government (a commodity, which we’ve repeatedly reported, is in increasingly short supply). What’s more, conceding a failure is a sign of courage, which can lead to greater respect on the part of voters. We’ve seen repeated cases in which politicians have denied personal wrongdoings and that’s worked to their detriment. Then, when they own up, the public can be relatively quick to forgive (and if not forgive, then at least forget). Sometimes, of course, public leaders can be forced to confront a problem head on. In some instances, they’ll take responsibility and offer up solutions for fixing things in the future. But all too often, many are inclined to reach into a grab-bag of excuses. How many times have you read variations on the following: “It wasn’t my fault. It was the fault of the previous administration” “My department was only responsible for a tiny part of the problem, and so shouldn’t be held accountable for any of it.” “The other political party mucked things up so badly that there was nothing I could do.” “You’re only accusing me of a problem because you really don’t understand how complicated the situation was.” Then of course, there can be an inclination to avoid admitting a problem because people can wait things out until small issues balloon into larger ones and can be entirely blamed on successors. This is a real hazard in the world of project management, in which one official may only be in charge of a project for a limited period of time. When little problems crop up that aren’t obvious to others around the effort, it’s often relatively easy to just ignore the issues (and not admit them to the bosses) and then by the time the seeds of unsavory outcomes blossom into weeds, it’s in somebody else’s lap. This is somewhat understandable in organizations in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on getting projects completed on time and on budget, and that can create pressure from external forces to make things look like all is going well, even when it’s not. This is particularly true when overly optimistic project managers hope that they can fix the small problems before they turn into larger ones. As author Cecelia Ahern wrote in “The Time of My Life”, the mantra can go like this: ‘ It's nobody's fault. It's not my fault. I didn't do anything wrong. I know that now. It's just the way it is. Sometimes things just don't work out. You and me, we worked for the amount of time that we worked, then we didn't anymore. . . “ Actually, that’s why so many documents make use of the passive voice, in which the subject is the recipient of an action as opposed to a sentence in which the subject actually performs one. (Compare for example the active voice: “We made mistakes,” to the passive voice “Mistakes were made.” Sometimes this may be legitimate. This is the case when pointing a finger directly at the culprit behind a governmental boondoggle can cause more harm than it does good. But more generally it’s just an excellent way to hide fault behind a curtain of infelicitous prose. Not only is avoidance of blame unfortunate for the government and the people who it serves, it can have a boomerang effect which hurts the obfuscator. We came across the following quote from Vanessa Denha Garmo, who is a professional leadership coach, on LinkedIn: “A state of denial can be deadly for your career,” she wrote. “I coached an executive who was losing talented team members at a rapid rate and all because he always had to be right and when he was wrong, he quickly pointed the finger at someone else and wondered why a finger-pointing culture was created within the organization.” #StateandLocalManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateLocalHumanResources #StateandLocalEmployeeCulture #StateandLocalTransparency #StateandLocalGovernmentLeadership #CityLeadership #CountyLeadership #TrustInStateLocalGovernment #AdmittingStateandLocalManagementMistakes #AdmittingProjectManagementMistakes #NegativeConsequenceOfProblemDenial #ConfrontingStateandLocalGovernmentMistakes #StateandLocalHazardOfDenial #StateandLocalProjectManagementMistakes #PoliticalAvoidanceOfBlame #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

A couple of months ago at a large social gathering we had the opportunity to spend some time with a person who has dedicated his life to developing and advocating for laws intended to alleviate a variety of social ills. The conversation was fun for us (it’s rare that we can get anyone at a party to talk about government policy and not politics). Then there came a point when our new acquaintance made it clear how much trouble he had with the influence that performance measurement and an overwhelming data focus had on the direction of policies. His sense was that a myopic statistical focus – like the attention paid to standardized tests in education – was problematic, particularly given cultural biases. We fully understand the point our acquaintance made, but worry about what we see as a growing inclination to distrust or dismiss data when it potentially disrupts policy or political plans.  If data doesn’t conform with expectations, further analysis is always welcome to determine why. But to ignore the message, bury it out of public view or reject it out of hand only undermines the effort to see what’s really working in government and what’s not. Recently, we – like many others –were appalled at the decision of President Trump to reject the latest jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) – going so far as to fire the BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the BLS had rigged the numbers for political purposes. The data showed that the country had only added 73,000 jobs in July, a surprisingly low number. In addition, the BLS had revised May and June numbers to reflect 258,000 fewer jobs than had originally been reported.   Alarmingly, we’re picking up vibes that this kind of thinking is not constrained to the current administration in Washington DC but may be symptomatic of an alarming trend; If you don’t like the data, then deny it or destroy it. One example that springs to mind was the decision a couple of years ago, on the part of a number of states, including Louisiana, Texas and Florida, to drop out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).  This Center is a nonpartisan system which was designed to help states keep their voter roles as accurate as possible. Part of the way it did this was to catch people who had moved between states who had retained registrations in more than one. The logic of the states that dropped out is that (without any evidence we can find) ERIC was designed to somehow benefit blue states over red. As the National Conference of State Legislatures  reported then, “ States need to share data because there is no other way to tell if people are voting in multiple states; and that is happening, it is not a black swan event,” says J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Fund. “Unless you’re talking across state lines, there will be undetected violations of federal law that prohibit double voting in the same election.” Meanwhile, although we can’t demonstrate causality here, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the city of Denver, which like many places has been beset by a homelessness problem,  has released a new dashboard which “offers a broader scope but has less specific information, eliminating details about how long people were staying in shelters, and how many of them died or returned to homelessness afterward,” according to an article in Denverite .  As the article explains, “Critics used the data to hold the administration to account.  But city officials say the old dashboard was confusing and hard to maintain.” Perhaps. But it’s troublesome to us to read that the city’s new dashboard has also been altered to gather information about a larger number of city-funded efforts. This, in and of itself, is probably a good thing, but it’s also true that it will allow the city to proclaim that more people are getting help than the previous dashboard showed. Back to President Trump. It’s our fear that when he blasts his own agency’s data he opens the door to a greater mistrust of data at all levels. This kind of faith had already ebbed during the pandemic, when it felt like the numbers being offered up by the feds, states and local health departments were at odds with one another, leaving many to infer that you simply couldn’t trust any of it. What’s more, back then there were ample accusations that false data was being set forth by governments in order to support decisions about mask mandates. With so many numbers being tossed around without any backing, it’s no wonder that there’s some good reasons to doubt every data point you come across. But the more the very notion grows, that much of the data used by the states and localities is invalid, the less likely it is that residents will trust their work at all. And that’s clearly not good. #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalDataGovernance #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #FederalGovernmentData #FederalJobsData #CityDataGovernance #CityDataUse #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalPerformance #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #PublicSectorData #ElectronicRegistrationInformationCenter #DenverDashboardAlteration #Dataphobia #BLSCommissionerErikaMcEntarfer #GovernmentDataDenial #BureauLaborStatisticsJobsData #FederaDataMistrust #StateandLocalDataMistrust #DenverHomelessnessDashboard #DataandPolitics #BarrettandGreeneInc

When was the last time you heard anyone say, “Gee what an excellent bureaucracy we have in the Department of Motor Vehicles. It only took me five minutes to get a new driver’s license”?   Probably never.   In fact, the word bureaucracy is most frequently used as a pejorative.   As author Franz Kafka once said, “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”   President Donald Trump clearly agrees that the bureaucracy is somewhat slimy, insisting that   "The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over."   The list goes on and on. But this kind of context for bureaucracy is a sad and frustrating fallacy. Without the bureaucrats, we’d be left with a bunch of policies and programs that would have no one left to implement them.   There are, of course, stifling bureaucracies as well as efficient ones. But we take umbrage at the idea that the thousands of men and women who labor at getting the real work of government done are in league with the Devil of Small Details.   With that in mind, we decided to reach out to some smart people to help us assemble this column. Here’s what they had to say:   William Hatcher,  Chair and Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Augusta University: “Few words invoke such negative mental images as ‘bureaucracy.’ When the public hears the word, they envision overly complex processes that lack empathy. They envision careless bureaucrats, more concerned about procedures than public service. As we in public administration know, these images are distorted and not reality. Bureaucracies and the bureaucrats occupying them are needed to ensure that our communities have the public goods to survive and prosper. Only through organizing into bureaucracies can we try to solve the problems facing our communities. Thus, bureaucracies are beyond a necessary evil, and we in public administration need to, as Charles Goodsell so soundly argued, make the case for bureaucracies.”     Michael Jacobson, deputy director for performance and strategy in King County 's   Office of Performance , Strategy and Budget: “I am a proud bureaucrat. But not in the popularized sense of a mindless and faceless paper-pushing, behind-the-scenes employee of government that doesn’t care about residents or customers. I mean in the sense of someone whose role was codified to counter the overly politicized, corrupt personal favoritism of the Tammany Hall period – someone who is there to, at least in principle, ensure that fair, and more recently equitable, treatment is foremost, and (that) the effective administration of my job is not subject to the personal whim of an individual behind a desk or computer screen. I am using bureaucrat in the sense of a highly competent professional who has organizational savvy to get things done in a large and complex organization; someone with technical skills, management wherewithal, and personal knowledge of the organization who is able to follow procedures, and at times, question those same procedures. Without these kinds of bureaucrats, things don’t get done; or we go back to corruption and personal power alone as the way to get the organization to produce.”   William Brantley , author of “The Persuasive Project Manager: Communicating For Understanding”: “Bureaucracies, though often seen as rigid, can be agile with adaptive structures and a culture of improvement. Agility comes from decentralizing decisions, investing in workforce training, and integrating feedback loops for real-time learning. Lean management, digital transformation, and cross-functional teams can streamline processes and reduce delays while maintaining stability and accountability. When leadership prioritizes responsiveness and innovation, alongside transparency and equity, bureaucracies can adapt to new challenges and societal needs."   Don Kettl,  professor emeritus, University of Maryland: “It’s become truly unfortunate that 'bureaucracy' has become a pejorative—or, even worse, a curse word to attack government, with critics almost spitting it as a form of criticism. It doesn’t make much sense to remind everyone that “bureaucracy” is simply a word used to describe a way of structuring complex organizations—or that private organizations are “bureaucracies” as well. By extension, a “bureaucrat” ought to be a simple, clear, and neutral way of describing someone who works for a large and complex organization. Alas, that’s not the case.    “So, we seem to face a choice. We probably can’t talk people out of using 'bureaucracy' as a pejorative, or to characterize 'bureaucracy' as anything but a pejorative, no matter how hard we try. We can just swallow the problem and try to move on, or we can choose a word that has not built up such animosity around us.”   Andrew Kleine , Senior Director, Government & Public Sector at EY. “Without bureaucracy, there’s no democracy.  Bureaucrats carry out the will of the people by running police departments, processing food stamp applications, inspecting restaurant kitchens, fixing broken water pipes, and so much more.  It is hard to imagine a world with no people and organizations employed to implement and enforce laws, ordinances and codes.  Even the Wild West had sheriffs!   #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernance #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformnace #CityGovernmentManagement #CityGovernance #CityPerformance #InDefenseOfBureaucracy #NecessityOfBureaucrats #CountyGovernmentManagement #CountyGovernance #CountyPerformance #StateandLocalPublicAdministration #ExcellentBureaucracies #StateandLocalPolicyImplementation #PraiseForGovernmentBureaucrats #StateandLocalGovernmentAccountability #StateandLocalGovernmentTransparency #StateandLocalDigitalTransformation #InDefenseOfBureaucrats #StateandLocalGovernmentResources #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #PublicServiceAndPublicBureaucrats #StateandLocalGovernmentFairness #StateandLocalGovernmentSocialEquity #CityPublicAdministration #CountyAdministration #BureaucratsAndOrganizationalSavvy #DonKettl #AndrewKleine #MichaelJacobson #WilliamHatcher #WilliamBrantley #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

For some time, the complexity of dealing with scores of rules set forth by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has become a hefty weight for often-understaffed finance offices to carry. As a result, many state and local financial reports take many months after the end of the fiscal year to come out. The most extreme current example has been Illinois, which has yet to release its report for Fiscal 2023, which ended more than two years ago, requiring the state’s comptroller to issue an interim report in the meantime. Though Illinois is a wildly extreme example, late reports aren’t uncommon. Since they serve as an important planning document for state leaders, including agency heads, this isn’t a trivial matter. If government leaders don’t know for sure how the books look until many months after they’ve been closed, they can find themselves operating in darkness. There are a number of reasons for these delays, including the absence of up-to-date technology. There are still a surprising number of smaller entities that continue to rely on manual bookkeeping practices, which can delay the completion of an auditable report. Then, too, finance offices continue to have difficulty in finding skilled personnel for many of the positions that are involved in this process. But over the course of time, we’ve heard that complex financial reporting requirements are perhaps the biggest challenge here. And on that front, we have some good news to deliver. First of all, the technological challenges are slowly but surely being relieved. In fact, the GASB has been working on a project that will help to standardize language in financial reports, and that in turn will make advances in technology easier to utilize. Perhaps the most cutting edge of the technological advances is the use of artificial intelligence to help crank out financial reports. As Chase Smith told us several months ago, “One of the things that AI does so fantastically is to summarize complicated information.” Smith is vice president of products at ClearGov, which provides technological solutions for financial planning, budgeting and reporting for local governments. With artificial intelligence, and other technologies, “we can provide the information that people want in the way they want it, when they want it,” Shayne Kavanagh, senior manager of research for the GFOA, told us.   Cities, counties and states are also rethinking questions of what information is significant enough to an entity to be necessary or even useful. The accountants refer to this issue as one of “materiality.” Though the decision of what is material and what is not hasn’t been well defined, many entities feel obliged to report numbers that are so small that they don’t have any real significance to financial outlooks.     As GFOA’s Kavanagh explained to us, “Lowering materiality thresholds can save lots of time and energy. We went through the list of GFOA ACFR award winners, and pulled out a whole bunch of them from 2023, and looked at the thresholds for reporting capitalized assets. It turned out that 72 percent of them had not changed their capitalization thresholds in 10 years. Adjusted for inflation, the real value of those thresholds has decreased substantially. And that means that governments are tracking assets that are less and less costly, which causes them to do more and more work.”   Another impetus to eliminating disclosures that aren’t of consequence is that in the scope of a long annual report, they can serve to reduce focus on information that is truly important.   A third approach to helping local governments that are struggling to complete their annual comprehensive financial reports is the use of Six Sigma techniques. The three major themes to this approach according to a GFOA paper  are:   ·       “Avoid batch processing and achieve a continuous flow for work through the process. . . Both continuous flow and rhythm contribute to avoiding backlogs and bottle necks.” ·       “Making the process visual clarifies roles of all parties, including external auditors. It also identifies points where work is handed from one party to the next in a process. Hand-offs are a major point of potential process failure and delay.”   ·       “Develop standard operating procedures to minimize the variation in the process, which helps reduce errors. You can go a step further by creating dedicated error proofing tools, based on the standard operating procedures.” Meanwhile, although the proliferation of new standards by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board has led to some of the difficulties mentioned above, the GASB is taking a relatively new approach, which has the potential for making the future of financial reporting somewhat less onerous than the past. “We understand that when we add to generally accepted accounting principles, we’re asking governments to use scarce resources in their finance departments on something they otherwise wouldn't have to," says Joel Black chair of the GASB. “So, the board has set a very high bar for us to undertake new projects.” #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalFinancialManagement #StateandLocalFinancialReporting #PublicSectorFinancialReporting #StateandLocalFinancialReportingDelays #CityFinancialReportingDelay #LateGovernmentFinancialReport #LateAnnualComprehensiveFinancialReports #StateandLocalACFRDelays #ProblemOfLateACFR #ProblemOfLateFinancialReports #SimplifyingStateLocalFinancialReporting #CityFinancialReporting #CountyFinancialReporting #SolutionsForGovernmentFinancialReportingDelay #GovernmentalAccountingStandardsBoard #LateIllinoisACFR #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #GASB #GovernmentFinanceOfficersAssociation #GFOA #StateandLocalArtificialIntelligence #StateandLocalArtificialIntelligenceUse #ArtificialIntelligenceForGovernmentFinancialReporting #StateandLocalManagementNews #StateandLocalFinancialManagementNews #StateandLocalTransparency #BarrettandGreeneInc

For some time, we’ve been fascinated by the relationship between executive branch managers and their legislatures or city councils. Not long ago, in fact, we featured a Guest Column by a former Georgia legislator who provides advice aimed at helping agency and department managers to get their messages through to legislatures in hopes of influencing their decisions when it comes to forming a balanced budget.   For about fourteen years, ending in 2010, we helped create and devoted ourselves to something called the Government Performance Project,  funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and published in Governing magazine. The goal was to evaluate the management capacity of states. One of the topics we covered regularly was “human resources.” We asked all sorts of questions about the quality of training, hiring practices, recruitment and so on. In most cases in which we were going to have to give a state a lower-than-desirable evaluation, our sources were not surprised that their states, cities or counties were going to be given a low grade in that category (which didn’t necessarily mean that they were thrilled to hear that these grades would be made public).   In fact, in many conversations, they acknowledged that they needed more training for employees, just as they knew they needed more up-to-date recruitment practices and more flexibility. So, why weren’t they forging ahead full-tilt on what they thought they should be doing? The exceedingly commonplace answer was that they simply didn’t have the resources. They complained then – and have continued telling us in the years that followed – that the legislative branch didn’t understand the value of investing in HR. And that word “investing,” is critical here, as differentiated from a cost, in that there’s reason to believe there will be a tangible return to taxpayers in years to come when their government has the best personnel possible. (And by the way, we’re just completing a study that will demonstrate that fact. It will be released in the coming weeks and we’ll keep you posted when it’s out). We’re aware of a similar issue when it comes to performance management. Many states and cities have embarked on laudable performance management systems. And a fair number have used performance measures to improve the management of individual agencies. But does that mean that the people who oversee performance management have the resources they need? You already knew the answer. They’re frequently small offices and the men and women who run them are hungry for more staff. And just as in HR, many believe that running a more performance-oriented organization will lead to more efficient use of tax dollars down the road. Consider Houston Texas, which did a citywide efficiency study in 2024-2025, reviewing performance organization, financial spending and forensic accounting. As a result, the city discovered that its procurement functions were ready for an overhaul. Eliminating duplicative contracts and inconsistent vendor practices, it found, could turn into significant savings over time,    But while Houston and other places have put money into this kind of invisible work, it’s likely that the underfunding of management functions by legislatures is just going to get worse in the next several years. Across the country, a growing number of cities, as well as states and counties, have begun reporting budget shortfalls. Some are instituting hiring freezes to help keep the books in balance, and others are reducing non-essential programs like community maintenance and still more are scaling back on capital projects. Maybe not immediately, but going forward taxpayers will see the effect. When potholes are blossoming like daffodils in the spring, they’re generally going to be unaware that behind-the-scenes work that keeps government running smoothly is being reduced. All of this is highly frustrating to the motivated people who believe that their functions are genuinely important. We won’t quote anyone here, but it’s startling to us how many of the executive branch managers with whom we speak use outright epithets when they’re talking about the legislative branch. Our sympathies lie on both sides of the fence. We regret the underestimation of the value of managerial functions. But we also know that, especially in tough economic times, many legislators are forced to make next-to-impossible decisions. By the same token, we’d be disingenuous were we not to acknowledge a tendency among some who sit in state legislatures to aim their votes squarely at the ballot box. They may well know that reductions in training budgets are a short-term solution that will cost productivity in the future. But they also know that nobody tends to win an election based on the “Make Training Great Again” platform. #StatandLocalGovernmenManagement #StateGovernmentHumanResources #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityGovernmentManagement  #StateandLocalGovernmentBudgeting #CityGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #LegislativeAttentionToGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalInfrastructureManagement #CityTechnologyManagement #CityWorkforceTraining #CountyWorkforceTraining #StateWorkforceTraining #UnderfundedStateLocalManagement #UnderfundingStateLocalPerformance #StateandLocalPublicAdministration #StateandLocalTechnologyManagement #CityInfrastructureManagement #StateManagementBudgetCuts #CityManagementBudgetCuts #StateandLocalPerformanceOutcomes #StateandLocalTraining #StateandLocalHiringFreeze #GovernmentPerformanceProject #PewCharitableTrusts #GoverningMagazine #CityGovernmentProcurement #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

Way back in 2015, we wrote a cover story for Governing  about bad data. (And by the way, we’re delighted to report that after a few absent years, we have re-established our connection with Governing, which we will be writing for and which will be periodically reprinting articles from this website). At the time we wrote that “d ata is the lifeblood of state government. It's the crucial commodity that's necessary to manage projects, avoid fraud, assess program performance, keep the books in balance and deliver services efficiently. But even as the trend toward greater reliance on data has accelerated over the past decades, the information itself has fallen dangerously short of the mark. Sometimes it doesn't exist at all. But worse than that, all too often it's just wrong.” Sadly, based on our careful reading of a number of performance audits and press reports, it turns out that even though the public sector has become even more obsessed with using data to make decisions, the quality of the data is still in serious question. Consider, for example, a discovery near the end of last year that Florida and Texas had been sending the EPA inaccurate data about the status of their lead pipes, which the federal agency didn’t bother to check. Ultimately EPA’s Office of Inspector General discovered the flaws, but “the errors mean some states with the biggest needs may have to wait longer for funds — or will get less than they should have,” according to an article by Scripps , which wrote, “For example, a single data entry error by Houston caused the EPA to allocate nearly $120 million more to Texas than it probably should have in fiscal year 2023.” In fact, some experts are concerned that the quality of public sector data may even be getting worse. Some months ago, we quoted Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics who said this in a podcast called “On the Evidence” from Mathematica: O ne of his greatest concerns is that “the quality of the data we’re using is starting to erode because a lot of it is based on surveys and survey response rates are way down across the board.” He added that “There are concerns around privacy, cyber issues, but for whatever reason, the response rates are way down and that’s beginning to affect the data to a significant degree.”   Zandi takes this matter very seriously, and said, ““If I were king for the day and I could devote resources to one thing, that would be it. Let’s go make our data sources more resilient, better, more comprehensive, more timely.”   Sadly, many people throw statistics around without the context that truly makes them useful. Just a few weeks ago we attended a conference where one of the keynote speakers was justifiably complaining about the problem of gun violence in the United States. She told the audience that guns were the leading cause of violence in the United State, but she missed out on one important wrinkle that put that number into important perspective.   According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, “t hough they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders,  suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths . In 2023, 58% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (27,300), while 38% were murders (17,927). The remaining gun deaths that year involved law enforcement (604), were accidental (463) or had undetermined circumstances (434), according to CDC data.”   Sometimes numbers that are accepted without question simply don’t make sense at all. Many, many years ago, the newspapers were full of stories that claimed that there were one million missing children each year. Milk cartons were full of warnings about the threat that children were disappearing on a regular basis.   At the time – and long before we started to write about state and local government -- It struck us that one million seemed like an extraordinarily high figure, particularly since in our experience, we barely read about scores of missing children in the New York papers, with the exception of a six-year old named Etan Patz who disappeared on route to his Manhattan school bus. We looked behind the “millions” figure and discovered that it had originated with a politician who picked that number out of a hat when speaking to the press. It was picked up from him, and used and reused, and this piece of fiction was widely felt to be fact.   We wondered about this, but never wrote an article about the greatly exaggerated number. Then the Denver Post discovered that  “ estimates of stranger abductions circulated at the time glossed over the reality that about 95 percent of missing-child reports were about runaways, while most of the rest involved custody disputes.” In fact the reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for this coverage in 1986. Footnote: We’ve always regretted not having done that story ourselves, which may be a subconscious part of the reason we’re so intent on reporting about bad data every chance we get. #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalDataManagement #CityGovernmentData #CityDataManagement #StateandLocalDataQuality #StateandLocalBadData #StateandLocalDataCaution #StateandLocalDataGovernance #CityDataGovernance #StateandLocalDataUse #ErroneousDataReporting #MisleadingData #ExaggeratedData #PublicSectorDataQuality #DenverPostMissingChildrenPulitzerPrize #InaccurateMissingChildrenData #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #CityGovernmentManagement #BarrettandGreeneBadData #StateandLocalPerformanceAudit #InaccurateLeadPipeData #GoverningMagazineBadData #SurveyDataQualityErosion #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

We’ve never really understood the way horoscopes work. How can it be that if someone is born a minute after midnight on October 24th, they’re suddenly destined to be a strong-willed Scorpio instead of a pacific Libra (or at least that’s the way the newspaper horoscopes make it sound)? We’ve been thinking along similar terms as the world of human resources seems increasingly intent on differentiating the way they treat millennials as opposed to Gen Z or Baby Boomers. We can certainly see that there are reasonable generational differences in the way people act, and respond, and we’ve written about that ourselves. But we also wonder if the focus on generations has gone too far. As Dave Costanza wrote in Slate  a while back, “  there is a commonly held perception that people growing up around the same time and in the same place must have some sort of universally shared set of experiences and characteristics. It helps that the idea of generations intuitively makes sense. But the science does not support it. In fact, most of the research findings showing distinct generations are explained by other causes, have serious scientific flaws, or both.” For one thing the attributes ascribed to each of the generations differ depending on who you talk to. Take Generation Z. There’s a commonly held belief that these young adults, just entering the workforce, feel entitled and believe the world circulates around them. We’ve heard plenty of people talk about this generation that way. But wait. According to Stanford Scholar Roberta Katz , “ Gen Z are typically self-driven, collaborative, and diverse-minded. They value flexibility, authenticity, and a pragmatic approach to addressing problems. Gen Z are misunderstood. Contrary to stereotypes of being “lazy” or “coddled,” Gen Z is entrepreneurial and adaptive.”   Or consider the millennials (who are increasingly dominating the workforce). They are allegedly overly emotional and have difficulty bouncing back from hard times; they are risks adverse, lack persistence and tend to live beyond their means.   Based on a tiny sample of two – our son and our daughter – we’ve seen that neither of them exhibit any of these traits. And neither do most of their friends. In fact, both of them are (modestly) highly resilient and have remarkable work ethics.   We came across an article by the BBC  that helps to explain why labels attached to  younger generations are often critical. “ Evidence shows newer generations do, indeed, measure highly on traits that their older counterparts might consider as a sign of weakness. Yet experts also believe that Baby Boomers (born roughly between 1946 and 1964) and Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980) might be judging the generations that succeed them much too harshly, and measuring them against standards that have long ceased to be the norm.   “Generational context could be key to narrowing divides between decades – yet looking down on young adults is such a long-established and innate instinct that it might be impossible to undo.”   It’s our entirely unscientific theory that a big part of the reason there appear to be differences between members of Gen Z and their predecessors among the millennials, is that they’re at different stages of life. The Gen Zers who are often described as self-serving and even selfish could conceivably alter these traits when they have children of their own who – in turn – are going to believe they are the center of the universe. Part of the problem, we believe is that every generation seems to want to look down on the one that follows. This has been going on for thousands of years. Consider Aristotle’s quote: “Young people are high minded because they have not yet been humbled by life nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.   We bring this up because of a concern that many public sector workplaces seem to be set on attracting new recruits based on generational stereotypes. Want a millennial? Treat the applicant like a millennial. Want a Gen Zer? Treat the person like a Gen Zer. In very general circumstances, this could be a starting point from which to understand the nature of an individual based on the most circumstantial of evidence. But we’re pretty sure that long term this attitude runs the risks of oversimplifying things in a way that could conceivably offend. All of this makes us think of one of our favorite books, “Cats Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut, who used the term “granfalloon,” for people who are lumped together, arbitrarily based on a false premise  – like Hoosiers, the commonly used phrase for residents of Indiana, who may have geography in common but not necessarily that much else. "I don't know what it is about Hoosiers,” he wrote, “but wherever you go there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there." #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #StateandLocalHiring #StateandLocalGenerationalStereotyping #CityGovernmentHumanResources #CountyGovernmentHumanResources #GenerationalDifferences #GenerationalStereotyping #OverSimplifyingGenerationalDifferences #StateandLocalGovernmentWorkforce #StateandLocalGovernmentRecruitment #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

A few months ago, at the American Society for Public Administration conference in Washington D.C., the Center for Accountability and Performance had a panel discussion for the recipients of its Emerging Leaders Award. We’ve been to lots of sessions similar to this one, but the moderator here, Cheriene Floyd, the chief data officer of Miami, asked the panelists a question that was particularly intriguing and that has set us to thinking ever since. She asked (and we’re paraphrasing slightly here): “What did you believe when you started your career, but you don’t believe now?” We thought about how we would answer the question ourselves. One of the first things that came to our mind was the evolution of our thinking about performance management. Decades ago, based on a zealotry born out of naivete we believed that when states, counties, and cities began to measure results and not just outputs, a new age of well-informed, effective and efficient government was about to dawn. We have fond memories of a series of “Managing for Results” conferences in Austin, led by one of the pioneers in this field, Terrell Blodgett, in which there seemed to be a general consensus that this great new advance in public administration was going to change the world. But, while we’re still enthusiastic advocates of performance management, it’s become increasingly clear that political expediencies tend to overrule even the best thought out systems of performance management and measurement. We’ve seen a regular procession of instances in which the evidence based on results points to one conclusion, but if that’s not the answer that will garner votes at election time, it’s not the conclusion that ultimately is utilized. Similarly, it appeared to us in the 1990s that human resource departments were really beginning to buy into the idea of workforce planning. And certainly, some have. But once again, it turns out that planning for the future falls off rapidly when time is extinguished by understaffing, and the crises that are brought about by daily pressures, budget angst, political shifts and the external events that make workforce planning all the more necessary. Here's another one. Back in 2001 we wrote a book called "Powering Up" with the exuberant subtitle, “How Public Managers Can Take Control of Information Technology.” At the time, we wrote, that “There’s still a hefty cadre of government employees (including even some governors and mayors) who may give lip service to the benefits of IT, but on the whole, would just as soon steer clear of any machine that beeps back at you anytime you make a mistake.” That was true then, but now the world has moved in the opposite direction. Today, we believe that there’s a widespread notion – shared by elected and appointed officials – that technology is the answer to whatever problem comes up. This kind of thinking has accelerated, just in the last couple of years as artificial intelligence yields the promise of a brave new world, in which people fear lest their jobs be replaced by AI. Early on in our careers, we proudly told our friends that one of the glories of state and local government was that it was distinctly non-partisan. In fact, when we were evaluating the management capacity of the states, and would be asked in newspaper or radio interview what the party of the governor was, we often had no idea. Today, of course, with the parties battling for the hearts and minds of Americans, many people first identification for a state and its leadership is in terms of red or blue (or sometimes purple). This is a sad turn of events. Obviously, many if not all of the above answers to Cheriene Floyd’s question have had more to do with the changes in the world than a misunderstanding about the way it ever worked. The lesson here is that it’s important to keep track of the way things are advancing – or receding – in any of the functions performed by state or local government so that reality continues to coincide with beliefs. In short, the danger of sticking to your guns is that you can wind up shooting yourself in the foot.  #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalPerformanceMeasurement #CityPerformanceMeasurement #CityPerformanceManagement #AmericanSocietyForPublicAdministration #ASPA #CenterForAccountabilityAndPerformance #EvidenceBasedResults #AustinManagingForResultsConferences #TerrellBlodget #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #CityGovernmentManagement #CityGovernmentHumanResources #StateandLocalGovernmentWorkforcePlanning #CityGovernmentWorkforcePlanning #CountyGovernmentPerformanceManagement #CountyGovernmentHumanResources #StateandLocalTechnologyManagement #ChangingBeliefs #StateandLocalGovernmentArtificialIntelligence #CherieneFloyd #PartisanshipAndStateLocalGovernmentManagement #CAPEmergingLeaders #StateandLocalGovernmentManagementAndPolitics #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

Today is “World Social Media Day,” a celebration of that form of communications that was first proclaimed in 2010 by Mashable, a media and entertainment company that delivers its content on a variety of platforms. Though we bet you weren’t sending greeting cards to celebrate the occasion, when we became aware of this event, we decided to think a bit about some of the pitfalls for cities, counties and states that increasingly rely on social media networks – like Facebook, LinkedIn, X or Instagram – to convey their messages to residents and even a national audience.   We fully understand that states and local governments can’t avoid using social media to communicate with residents. According to a September 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center , “overall just over half of U.S. adults say they at least sometimes get news from social media.” But our fear is that many governments enter this new territory without deliberating on its pros and cons. Consider this praise for using social media as a primary means of communication from the Florida League of Cities : “Today, people get their information online by engaging with trusted and relatable sources that speak to their specific interests. By its very design, social media has a degree of openness and transparency that provides excellent opportunities for local governments to build trust and a positive public perception of its work and services.” But the pitfalls are abundant. For one thing, social media by its nature is interactive and permits individuals to respond to a post. While the fair-minded exchange of opinions is certainly healthy, it’s almost a guarantee that some of the comments will be negative or even vicious. This puts public leaders in a pickle. If they respond to comments then they’re in the perilous position of giving credibility to the sometimes inaccurate or misleading comments of a crank. On the other hand, ignoring such comments lets them stand unchallenged and can easily allow readers to believe that they are accurate. You can, of course, moderate comments – deleting the ones you don’t like – but that runs the risk of accusations of censorship, a dirty word in anyone’ circles. This is, as the old saying goes, a situation in which “you can’t win, you can’t lose, and you can’t get out of the game.” More alarming than the fishbowl nature of social media by official government organizations, it can create a breeding ground for misinformation. In fact, “The majority of social media influencers share information with their followers without verifying its accuracy,  according to a new U.N. report  . . . “ reported The Hill  late last year.  “The new study, done by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), found that nearly two-thirds of surveyed digital content creators, 62 percent, said they did not verify the accuracy of information before sharing it with their followers online.”   But without any fact checking by authors of posts, there can emerge multiple versions of the truth. This has been the case in Wyoming in which the governor and the secretary of state have been throwing virtual rocks at one another for a while. Just last week, according to the Cowboy State Daily ,  “ Wyoming’s governor launched an incisive counterattack Friday in an ongoing feud with the secretary of state, accusing the secretary of lobbing dishonest social media attacks at the governor. “Gov. Mark Gordon and Secretary of State Chuck Gray have sparred on numerous topics from whether there’s a need for additional voter-integrity laws in Wyoming to whether the state should grant leases on state lands for wind turbine projects.”   As the Governor wrote, “Although our forefathers had their differences, they did not have to contend with the hit-and-run tactics some politicos and malcontents’ resort to using on social media.”   Of course, old-fashioned means of communication for states and localities had their flaws, too. Some newspapers were known to have a liberal or conservative bias. But at least, for most of them, they were able to cordon off the politically motivated coverage to the opinion pages.   #StateandLocalSocialMediaCaution #StateandLocalGovernmentSocialMediaUse #StateSocialMediaPitfalls #CitySocialMediaPitfalls #CountySocialMediaPitfalls #WorldSocialMediaDay #StateandLocalGovernmentCommunication #SocialMediaProsAndCons #WyomingSocialMediaBattle #CounteringSocialMediaInaccuracy #SocialMediaMisinformation #PublicSectorAndSocialMediaMisinformation #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityModerationSocialMediaComment #CountyModerationSocialMediaComment #CityGovernmentSocialMediaCommunication #UNESCOSocialMediaStudy #PewResearchSocialMedia #CountyGovernmentSocialMediaCommunication #StateGovernmentSocialMediaCommunication #CitySocialMediaUse #StateSocialMediaUse #CountySocialMediaUse #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

Many states, counties and city leaders are regularly raging against “fraud, waste and abuse.” This is hardly a new issue but inspired by the efforts in Washington D.C. – whatever you think of the administration’s approach – there’s been refreshed action at other levels of government to tackle this triad of governmental ills.   Here’s the problem. These three words are generally comingled as if they were one thing. But they’re not. And mixing them together as a single phenomenon can easily cause governments to lose a clear vision as to exactly what they’re trying to fix.  Fraud, at least, has a clear and specific meaning. When it comes to the other two, things get kind of mushy. As Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, told us the other day when we were talking about this column with him, “I’ve never seen a good definition of abuse” And waste – which we’ll carp about subsequently – is even more opaque.     Let’s start with fraud, which is simple to define, as it has a pretty straightforward, legalistic meaning. It is a white-collar crime, which victimizes the government, through deceitful practices in which people engage to enrich themselves. A whole variety of activities fit into this definition, including purposefully billing states or localities improperly for goods or services provided; lying about the quality of products or services provided; or using governmental funds for personal benefit. One big differentiator. Fraud is the only one of the three that, by necessity, is purposeful. (It’s probably worth noting here that the idea that there is ubiquitous fraud in government may well be an exaggeration. A few weeks ago, we wrote about  a report by KFF that pointed to a White House statement about fraud in the Medicaid and Medicare programs and made the point that many improper payment estimates, which are sometimes identified as fraud “ are not a measure of fraud or abuse and most improper payments are the result of missing documentation or missing administrative steps and are not necessarily payments made for ineligible enrollees or services.”)   Now let’s talk about abuse. The clearest definition we were able to find of this came from the Environmental Protection Agency, which defines it as “behavior that is deficient or improper when compared with behavior that a prudent person would consider reasonable and necessary business practices given the facts and circumstances.” The problem to us is that once you start talking about a “prudent” person there’s a lot of leeway for interpretation.  For example, unnecessary overtime is sometimes described as an abuse. But we’ve written enough about overtime to know that it’s a complicated issue and the decision of whether or not to use it is subject to a lot of variables. For example, fire departments sometime are attacked for abusing overtime expenses. But as we wrote in a white paper a few years  ago, “Although overtime may be expensive, it is critical to distinguish the instances where it is both necessary and useful from those where it is unnecessary and possibly even risky. Useful overtime allows departments to quickly deal with unexpected events and short‐term vacancies. Says Troy Valenzuela, (now retired) battalion chief for the East Fork Fire Protection District, located in the valley next to Lake Tahoe, “The reason overtime is unavoidable is that we have to fill those seats in the fire engines every day. The seats just can’t be empty. That’s the real reason why [most] fire agencies take heat for their overtime expenses.” Unnecessary travel is also sometimes considered an abuse. But, when we attend conferences, we see that frequently the best and highest benefit achieved by attendees is the opportunity to learn from others over lunch or in the hallways between sessions. We can’t think of any way to measure that, but it’s our opinion that if someone goes to a conference and comes back with three or four ideas that can help their entity run more effectively or efficiently, that may well have been money well spent – hardly an abuse of taxpayer dollars. Now we’ll come to the word that we find potentially pernicious: Waste. When we hear politicians use that word, it’s often tied more to their personal values – and the perceived beliefs of the voters – than to anything with clarity. To take an extreme example, let’s say that an elected official doesn’t believe in a particular expenditure, then it’s wasteful. Is it wasteful for states to expand their university systems? We’d say it’s a terrific investment, but we know others who think there’s little need for improved facilities. What they call waste, we’d call investment. Investments at the local level in affordable housing are sometimes described as wasteful. This description, naturally enough, comes from people who have easy access to a pleasant house or apartment. It’s the “I’ve got mine” syndrome. Money spent on something people themselves don’t need is labeled by them as wasteful. If we were asked to provide a definition of the word waste as it’s sometimes used in the public sector, it’d be this: Waste is money spent on something that benefits someone else, but doesn’t do you any good yourself. #StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentFraud #StateandLocalGovernmentWaste #DefiningGovernmentFraudWasteAndAbuse #StateandLocalGovernmentHumanResources #DefiningGovernmentAbuse #StateandLocalGovernmentOvertime #CityGovernmentFraud #CountyGovernmentFraud #CityGovernmentWaste #CountyGovernmentFraud  #StateandLocalGovernmentEfficiency #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityGovernmentPerformance #CityGovernmentEfficiency #CityGovernmentWaste #CountyGovernmentWaste #GovernmentEfficiencyAndEffectiveness #StateandLocalEfficiencyaAndEffectiveness #StateandLocalGovernmentTravelExpenses #CityGovernmentTravelExpenses #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc

We don’t have a degree in statistics. Nor are we data specialists. But after 30-plus years of using data as a basic tool in our quest to tell stories about cities, counties and states – all of which are carefully fact checked -- we’ve developed a kind of radar (not that it’s infallible by any means) for data which can be misleading, misplaced or downright wrong. The following is a distillation of some of the approaches we’ve developed over the years that have helped us to steer clear of prose that is gritty with numbers that stand in the way of an honest interpretation of the facts. Here are eight:     1)    Watch out for any information that compares present day data to that which was gathered during the pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, there was an upheaval in many sectors of society. Now, a little more than five years after the onset of the pandemic, any changes that use 2020 or 2021 as a baseline are nearly sure to be misleading. That’s why some institutions that are particularly careful about their use of data compare pre-pandemic to post-pandemic.  2)    Beware of huge ranges in costs for projects.  We frequently see data that purports to show how much a project will cost, or the number of people affected by a policy. When the range is huge, we suggest you ignore it entirely because with this little precision it’s pretty much meaningless. For example, a few years ago a Dallas based media outlet  reported that “researchers say it would cost anywhere between $5 billion and $20 billon to winterize all plants in Texas.”    3)    An additional cautionary note along the same lines. Sometimes ranges like this are translated into wording like “up to $16 billion,” in order to prove that it’s an enormous number or, for the same project, around $5 billion, when the author wants to minimize things. It’s hard to ferret out this kind of misrepresentation, but worth watching out for. 4)    Super precise numbers are rarely reliable, outside of budgets, where precision is necessary. But when a report or a study talks about something and goes out many decimal places, in most cases such precision doesn’t exist in real world activities. 5)    It’s amazing how many academic reports ground themselves in data that’s more than 25 years old. Very little that was true then is true now, and yet these ancient numbers seem to be stuck in time. For example in a 2024 paper about   “The effect of pay for performance on work attitudes,” it’s stated that “expectancy theory posits that individuals act to maximize expected satisfaction with outcomes.” This may still be true, but the source is footnoted to a paper written in 1964.  6)    Make sure the sample size for any kind of survey is reasonably large. While anecdotal evidence can be gathered in surveys that are answered by a couple of dozen respondents, when those numbers are converted into percentages, then the flaws creep in. If the sample group is really small, then the conclusions drawn from them can be totally worthless Say, for example, you read that an astonishing 25% of people believe something that, at first glimpse, seems unlikely. But if only 16 people responded to the survey, then the four of them that make up the 25% can’t be held to be representative of society at large.  7)    Beware of bar charts and similar comparative graphics. If data   is shown on a bar chart with a smaller range, then relatively small changes can appear to be quite huge. Let’s say, for example, that the chart shows a range from 1 to 100, and it’s moved by 3 units from 1-4 say. That movement may look relatively minimal.  But, instead, consider someone who decides to have the chart peak out at 10. The same exact change can appear to be cataclysmic. 8)    Try to find the time to read beyond the executive summaries that focus on the data in a report. For organizations that want to make a particular point, it’s a strong temptation to use the executive summary as an opportunity to boast about the positive and underplay the negative (or the other way around). With little time to read through every page in a report, it’s easy to be trapped by this phenomenon (and we suspect that occasionally that’s been true of us). But it’s worth the time to dig a little deeper before believing everything you read.   #StateandLocalGovernmentMangement #CityGovernmentManagement #CountyGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityPerformance #CountyPerformance #StateandLocalGovernmentData #StateandLocalDataVisualization #StateandLocalDataUse #CityDataCaution #CountyDataCaution #StateDataCaution #StateandLocalTransparency #StateandLocalPerformanceManagement #StateandLocalDataGovernance #CityDataUse #CityDataGovernance #CountyDataUse #CountyDataGovernance #MisleadingData #GovernmentData #InterpretingStateandLocalGovernmentData #BandGReport #BarrettandGreeneInc