Agenda - Planning Commission - 03/06/2014

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Accountability Results matter. Milton Friedman remarked, "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results." For the Council, accountability represents a commitment to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of our policies and practices toward achieving shared outcomes and a willingness to adjust course to improve performance. Thrive MSP 2040 aspires to be the foundation for regional policy that is accountable to the hopes, dreams, and vision expressed by the region's residents, local governments, and the Council's regional partners throughout the development of this document. Acting accountably means: • Adopting a data -driven approach to measure progress toward the outcomes; • Learning from the results of measures and indicators to guide future refinements of our policies; • Providing clear, easily accessible information about our progress; • Deploying the Council's authority when necessary. Adopting a data -driven approach to measure progress8 Accountability focuses on managing to outcomes — how our region is better — not tasks or outputs. An outcome -oriented approach measures how effectively and efficiently our regional transportation system delivers people to their destinations — not the miles of highway built. Outputs and tasks are the day-to-day work that moves toward outcomes, but outputs without outcomes are a waste of public resources. With Thrive, the Council is adopting an outcomes - orientation to its regional policy and is challenging itself, local governments and its regional partners and stakeholders to describe how their work advances the five Thrive outcomes. Outcomes describe how our investments and our policies are improving the region for our residents and businesses, not how much money we are investing or how many miles of interceptor pipe we are building. Outcomes create the why and the rationale for tasks and outputs. Managing to outcomes helps us ask not only, "Are we effectively implementing our policies?" but also "Are we implementing the most effective policies, the policies that will help our region and our residents thrive today and tomorrow?" Learning from indicators The Council will create a set of indicators, parallel to Thrive but adopted separately to allow for flexibility in refining the indicators over the lifetime of Thrive. The Council will use the indicators to assess and monitor regional progress toward the five outcomes. Rather than using the 8 Special thanks to Performance Accountability: The Five Building Blocks and Six Essential Practices by Shelley H. Metzenbaum, published by the IBM Center for The Business of Government in 2006, available at http://www.businessofgovernment.org/report/performance-accountability-five-building-blocks-and-six- essential-practices, for defining some of the key concepts in this section. DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENT Last revised: February 21, 2014 41