The leadership approach that can help mayors tackle complexity

Mayors are powerful. They hold the legitimacy of a popular mandate and wield the muscle of an entire city government. And their leadership matters now more than ever given the seemingly relentless uncertainty and pressure facing cities.

At the same time, my experience running a public innovation lab and training leaders across many governments has convinced me that the complexity of the challenges confronting cities requires that mayors do more to reach beyond traditional systems in their pursuit of solutions. That means taking new steps to marshal actors inside and outside city hall around shared goals, as well as a mindset shift that positions their cities less as machines to manage and more as one part of a larger network they can steer toward lasting change. 

Ultimately, the strongest mayors today are both executives and orchestrators. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Recognizing the need for a different approach to governing.

In Oslo, the Norwegian capital city with roughly 725,000 inhabitants, the municipality pulls no punches when it comes to ambition. Its official vision states that it aims to be “the world’s best city to be born in, grow up in, move to, live in, and grow old in—regardless of who you are or what your background is.” But as Oslo Governing Mayor Eirik Lae Solberg told me recently, even in a well-funded Nordic city, “Issues such as excluded youth, at-risk communities, and public safety are really complex and persistent, and require a different way of working.”

For example, as part of its participation in the Bloomberg LSE European City Leadership Initiative, the city recently began exploring what it takes to make dramatic progress on youth exclusion, and who needed to be part of that work. “This process underlined a key organizational challenge,” Solberg recalled. “The different divisions in the city relate mainly to their own mandate, not the big picture. The one hand does not necessarily know what the other does, and that is a weakness.”

To address that gap inside city hall, Mayor Solberg created a cross-divisional steering committee, which is helping ensure a wider commitment of the municipal divisions and their expertise in shaping a new youth policy. 

At the same time, as the city team recognized, better internal coordination, on its own, isn’t enough to address the most complex problems facing cities. That’s why one way I sometimes encourage mayors like Solberg to tackle their toughest challenges is to view the city less like a machine and more like a living, breathing organism. 

Looked at this way, the real challenge of leading a city government today is not just managing departments, but orchestrating a larger ecosystem of government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, community organizations, and residents, and steering them toward a unified approach at overlapping goals.

It’s still early, but Mayor Solberg is already starting to put his own version of this model into action. That means building more systematic partnerships with local employment centers, schools, and NGOs around a broader set of supports for young people, from sports and other extracurricular activities to better parks and new places to gather. To get it done, the mayor isn't just pursuing one-off collaborations with these actors, but more sustained engagement. And he’s determined to do so by serving more as a convener than an administrator.

Oslo isn’t yet where it needs to be. But the city is much closer to making progress young people can see and feel because Mayor Solberg is looking at his role in a new way—and raising the bar for what ambitious collaboration looks like in his city.

Taking on the role of orchestrator.

Most mayors have experience with fostering stronger collaboration inside city hall and partnering with key players on the outside. But to take a more systematic approach to steering every relevant actor toward a unified vision for change, they can begin with a few key steps.

It starts with determining which problems require this kind of robust orchestration in the first place, and then mapping the key actors in play. In Oslo’s 2024-2027 strategy, six such problems are identified: the climate and nature crisis; the demographic challenge; poverty and rising inequality; a challenging housing market and sustainable city development; youth exclusion; and threats to safety and societal security. What unites them is a heightened level of complexity on one hand and a clear sense in the mayor’s eyes that too many disparate actors are involved for a top-down approach to be effective on the other.

Charting that landscape and opening up new pathways for collaboration will be key to putting the city on a course toward delivering new solutions.

Second, cities may need to create new structures to sustain collaboration over time. In Oslo, Mayor Solberg has begun by using the cross-divisional steering committee to align municipal departments internally. The next step may be to develop a dedicated mechanism for bringing external partners, from schools and employment centers to NGOs and community organizations, into the work in a more systematic way.

Finally, mayors can create the conditions for greater risk-taking by encouraging both the civil service and partners outside city hall to experiment more boldly. After all, it is not enough to build a citywide approach to a complex challenge if the solutions being explored remain too incremental to move the needle on key outcomes in a meaningful way. 

“What I really find is most challenging is empowering people to ask, ‘Why not?’ instead of just, ‘Why?’” Mayor Solberg says. 

Cities across the world are under intense pressure to create the results that citizens expect, while navigating national and global turbulence. To meet the moment, my experience suggests they must carve out the space for new ways of working, and specifically collaborate across the local landscape in a new way. That is not easy. Everyday operations and problems large and small can quickly pull the attention away from innovation. Even as we speak, Mayor Solberg points to the large oak door flanking one side of his large office: “No good news ever comes through that door.” 

Managing a city is hard and daunting work. But Oslo’s efforts under Mayor Solberg show that orchestration is not just another metaphor. It can be a practical leadership approach for mayors who must deliver public value in a world where no single actor is in control.