In 2019, McChrystal Group, TIP Strategies and M. Hensley Consulting partnered for a joint project with the Midland Development Corporation. Midland’s Development Corporation asked McChrystal Group and TIP Strategies to help design, implement, and facilitate a community-wide transformation initiative to enable effective, long-lasting collaboration.
Midland’s economy had, for generations, been defined by the oil industry. Recent increases in this industry’s production in and around Midland had led to rapid local population growth, and the expansion, combined with years of a lack of investment, put Midland’s public infrastructure and various taxing entities (e.g. city, county, schools, utilities, and hospital district) under considerable strain. Their leadership realized that, in order to arrest the increasingly negative effects of a lack in development and improve the city’s declining livability, the leaders of Midland’s siloed institutions needed to better collaborate, communicate and align with one another to accomplish the community’s critical priorities.
Solutions
Over eleven months, McChrystal Group, TIP Strategies, and M. Hensley Consulting set the conditions for effective transformation in Midland through the following:
Align Community Priorities and Build a Strategic Framework
McChrystal Group, TIP Strategies, and Midland’s leaders assembled the city’s previously isolated top leaders—drawn from government, private sector, nonprofit, philanthropic, community, and educational organizations—to form a task force dedicated to collaborating on community priority initiatives.
McChrystal Group and TIP Strategies aligned Midland's leadership around a collective vision to drive solutions and prioritize resourcing for Midland’s growing community. To generate action around this vision, the McChrystal Group and TIP Strategies team validated the five main “objectives” that the task force would solve for: Education, Health & Wellness, Housing, Infrastructure, and Quality of Place. These objectives were the focus for the transformation across the city, community and stakeholders. The framework and objectives incorporated key metrics, accountable owners, and time horizons to ensure progress could be assessed.
Decentralize Action and Energize Collaboration
For each task force objective, McChrystal Group and TIP Strategies created a “working group” charged with generating solutions for each specific objective.
Each working group consisted of a cross-section of the task force’s membership. By driving collaboration among taxing entities and individuals with diverse experiences, expertise, and passions, the working groups could account for every stakeholder’s perspective and address complex community issues holistically.
Drive Cross-Functional Communication and Empower Change
McChrystal Group, TIP Strategies, and M. Hensley Consulting helped the task force create a governing “steering committee” composed of key stakeholders from across Midland’s institutions to transform strategic solutions created by its working groups into actionable change for the community.
McChrystal Group, TIP Strategies, and M. Hensley Consulting also designed and implemented a monthly communication forum for use by the task force. The forum served as a hub for information sharing across working groups and the steering committee, enabling Midland leaders to consistently integrate and support the activity around each objective.
Results
The work for the Midland Development Corporation transformed how previously siloed stakeholders in the city and county collaborated. Midland’s newfound alignment and collaborative behavior created opportunities to strategically impact the city’s future. Three examples of these opportunities include:
1. Enabling Better Education
Midland’s school district proactively collaborated with the city’s public engineering professionals for its planned purchase of land for new school facilities and coordinated with them on anticipatory infrastructure requirements.
2. Promoting Affordable Housing and Quality of Place
A Midland non-profit received buy-in, planned, and enabled the re-zoning of land for the creation of a modern yet affordable housing development prioritized for public servants from other critical community entities.
A public-private partnership emerged enabling the $55m renovation of a 120 acre multi-use park that will include 19 turf ball fields, batting cages, a splash pad, event space and 7 miles of walking paths.
3. Optimizing Resources
The health and wellness working group contributed to the Midland Hospital’s success in securing $5 million in private funding for 21 Medical Residents over a 3-year period. Additionally, Midland and its county officials collaborated on a $1.5 million road works project that spanned city and county property in the largest roadway cooperative work project in the community’s history.
McChrystal Group Case Study: Community-Wide Transformation to Empower Change
