City management decision making during times of leadership transition

Tomorrow's successful managers and organizations in every field are going to be the ones that are learning how to deal successfully with continual change today. City managers, in particular, function in a complex and chaotic arena, in which they must make decisions based on judgments of unreliable and/or incomplete information.; The experiences of eight current and former city managers were studied and analyzed. It was hypothesized that city managers, during a time of organizational transition, rely on more than just traditional, rational decision-making processes and utilize other ways of making decisions based on their own experiences and the history of their new organizations.; The research confirmed that city managers use more than rational decision-making processes. At the point of hiring they elect to “become visible” rather than make immediate decisions to resolve crises and thereby buy time. They begin with a rational decision-making model and build on it with participative management processes utilizing input from within and outside of their organization. They utilize input from both their organization and community to frame the decision issue or problem. This understanding of their community and the scope of decisions to be made is part of a larger effort by the managers to develop a “learning organization” to utilize past experience and bring it into the present decision process. They and their organizations learned from these experiences about how to work together during a time of leadership transition.; What emerged was a “building block model,” starting with the logical rational approach, coupled with the gathering of as much information as possible. Their understanding or reading of the political and organizational environment and of placing the issue or problem in its proper context, prior to starting on this process, is a key feature in developing a final acceptable decision product.