Barcelona Metropolis

When the pandemic broke out, the municipal government administration became mindful of the complexity of the emergency and took on a two-fold challenge: keep all services running and protect the health of the permanent staff at the same time. In a short time, the government was digitised to facilitate teleworking, and vertical structures were replaced by new forms of governance based on cooperation and empathy, with multi-disciplinary teams close to the citizens.

Being at the helm of a large organisation is no easy feat, especially in the case of a centuries-old government administration such as Barcelona City Council, and the outbreak of a terrifying pandemic like COVID-19. I think it won’t come as a surprise to anyone if I declare that it has been the biggest challenge we have come up against in our lives.

With a workforce of almost 16,000 people, including municipal bodies, the City Council was making slower progress than desired when it came to digitisation. As Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economists Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler assert, the road was full of sludge. This is the concept they use to denote the series of obstacles related to bureaucracy, administration, logistics and lack of political will that encumber agile and transformative decision-making.

Only 200 people in the total number of staff had remote access to the central systems and the lockdown had to quickly fast-track digitisation. As a result, in just three weeks, over 5,000 people could connect remotely and, in eight weeks, that number had risen to 10,000.

Versatile teams and less hierarchy

We decided to work in numerous and multi-disciplinary teams, reducing hierarchies, making a flatter and more cross-cutting organisation. More than thirty teams were put together to build hospital pavilions, programmes for neighbourhoods particularly affected by the pandemic crisis, a nursing home support network, a data office, a taskforce against violence towards women on lockdown, shelters for the homeless, support in death…

Despite our doubts and concerns over whether we were applying the proper methodology, we enjoyed working with flexible and versatile teams who also had vast knowledge of the territory, since districts and neighbourhoods were key in implementing the different programmes and measures.

We were very much taken aback when, after the first months of the pandemic, the Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies of Barcelona provided us with the most recent scientific literature on dealing with complex emergencies. They spoke of emergencies that are not concrete or specific but uncertain, long and widespread, such as the viral pandemic and climate change. And different authors showed that in times of crisis and emergencies particular skills are needed, which differ from classic or traditional skills. They highlighted aspects such as communication, resilience and shared or collective leadership (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing, 2020; Dirani et al., 2020). They also talked about the need to know the territory, the politics of proximity as a key to deal with these global crises.

They even stressed that vertical structures based on authority and control must be replaced by “empathetic governance” to ensure collaboration, co-creation, and care as an intrinsic part of emergency responses (what we have called the “3 C’s” of the management model).