AuthentiCity FM | Real Stories. Bold Ideas. Better Communities.

Coherence was the note the summer kept building toward, the thread that holds when everything else is pulling apart. This is the conversation about what that thread is actually for.
We close the season with Bob O'Neill, former executive director of ICMA and one of the most respected thinkers this profession has produced, for an hour that keeps returning to a single idea, that the power that matters most in local government is the power to convene.
Bob makes the case that local government is the last fully functioning level of government we have, which means the work of rebuilding civic life is going to bubble up from communities rather than arrive from anywhere else. That puts the manager in an unfamiliar seat. Writing a check used to solve most problems, and it rarely does anymore. What the moment asks for instead is someone who can bring a room together, hold a hard conversation inside a set of shared values, and keep it grounded when the forces nobody controls start to pull.
Along the way we get into the traits that carry a leader through disruptive change, from anchoring an organization around mission and values to becoming what Bob calls the chief meaning officer, the person who keeps reminding everyone why the work matters at all. We talk about working across the lines on the map, the boundaries drawn long ago for taxation that no longer match how communities actually live. We talk about reverse mentorship and the handoff already underway, because the next generation is watching how we carry the work far more closely than they are reading any job description.
There is a night at the White House and a conga line, because Bob tells a story as well as anyone in the business. And underneath all of it runs a steady, hard-won optimism, the belief that this profession has met moments like this before and found its way back toward the middle.
Chapters
00:00 Closing the summer and what coherence is for
01:40 Welcoming Bob O'Neill
07:35 The last fully functioning level of government
09:19 When facts get treated as partisan
18:03 We have been through disruptive change before
20:38 The chief meaning officer
27:22 The social network that keeps you steady
35:50 The biggest power is the power to convene
41:15 The four traits that matter most
45:30 Putting meaning back into the work
47:59 Three reasons for optimism
53:10 Reverse mentorship and blending the generations
56:24 A night at the White House
1:03:14 ICMA, and why the network is the whole point
1:10:18 What better looks like for the profession
1:21:31 Welcoming people in and generational work
1:29:44 Closing thoughts
GUEST
Bob O’Neill
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-o-neill-5206a010/
HOSTS
Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/
Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/
Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic
Website: www.aretestrategic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/
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Some conversations wander. This one converges. After a summer spent working through truth and trust and the discipline of holding more than one version of what's real, we follow those threads to where they lead, which is coherence, and the clarity and curiosity that keep it alive.
Coherence is the thread that holds when the forces you do not control try to pull everything apart. Clarity is what it brings, the center of gravity that lets you keep moving on ground that will not sit still. Curiosity is what keeps both sharp, because the moment we decide we have all the answers is the moment we stop asking the questions.
None of this stays abstract for long. It lives in the hard conversation a supervisor keeps postponing, in respect offered freely and the harder truth that respect is not infinite, in what the 140-character world has quietly trained out of us. And it lives in the small acts of presence that cut through the noise. Ten days without devices. A cooler of ice cream carried through a public works garage after the storm. The conversations that only arrive when you finally slow down and sit with someone.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
06:16 The road into coherence, and where Phil planted the flag
11:11 Coherence as the thread, and a community becoming capital C Community
13:39 Clarity, the pogo ball, and the center of gravity
18:23 Living it, or seeing it only in hindsight
21:39 Curiosity as the skill you sharpen
31:28 Curiosity, humility, and the joy that keeps you going
34:39 Getting selective about the noise
38:51 Good faith, bad faith, and the lost guideposts
41:16 Respect given, and whether it's infinite
49:10 Analog by choice, and ten days without devices
59:15 The recipient of coherence, and a look ahead

HOSTS
Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/
Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/
Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic
Website: www.aretestrategic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/

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Some leaders spend an entire career learning to stay out of the way. This conversation is with one who chose the opposite. Booker Hodges, police chief in Bloomington, joins us for an hour that circles back again and again to the thing holding all of it together, which is trust, and how little of the job works without it.
We start where he started, with the mentors who shaped him and a coffee-stained Dartmouth degree that taught him something about wearing accomplishment lightly. From there we get into the values underneath the department. He built the whole thing on a single word, respect, and he means it as something every person is owed rather than something they have to win. It shows up in how his officers talk to the community, in who makes it through hiring, and in why he interviews everyone who meets the bar instead of trusting a test to sort them.
The middle of the conversation turns to the pressures reshaping the work. We talk about hiring for character and training for competence, about building an organization around the generation that will soon be most of it, and about why a century-old civil service model keeps producing good test takers instead of good officers. We get into the technology arriving faster than the guardrails, the privacy we surrender with a single unread click, and the harder question of who is actually overseeing any of it.
Near the end, he names the threat he thinks too few people are willing to discuss out loud, and what political violence does to the quality of the people willing to serve. And he brings it home to the one relationship a city cannot afford to get wrong. Trust between a manager and a chief is the whole job, and everything good a community gets from its government tends to grow from there.
00:00 Introduction
02:19 The profession chose me
04:12 Mentors and the coffee-stained Dartmouth degree
07:49 Bringing a new generation into the work
11:28 Beards, tattoos, and a changed profession
13:27 The one value that runs the department
16:38 Why young people choose the badge
18:41 Building the organization around the next generation
22:43 Technology, privacy, and who oversees it
26:15 Surveillance and the data we give away
31:15 Proactive or reactive, and why staffing decides it
35:16 Hiring for character, training for competence
38:50 Why he doesn't trust civil service
42:46 Life outside the badge and being hood famous
44:56 Telling the story before Hollywood does
55:36 Clear expectations and backing your people
57:34 The threat nobody's naming, political violence
1:02:00 The question Booker has for city managers
1:12:21 The one relationship a city can't get wrong
1:14:05 Trust is the whole job
GUEST
Booker Hodgers, Police Chief, Bloomington, Minnesota
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BPD_MN
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BloomingtonPD.MN
HOSTS
Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/
Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/
Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic
Website: www.aretestrategic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/
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This week we welcome Brent Messer, who spent eight years as chief information officer for the city of Chattanooga before moving to Info-Tech Research Group, and we welcome back Jerry Driessen, our first returning guest, whose career runs through some of the largest technology operations in local government. Together we spend an hour asking what the role of technology in a community actually is now that AI has arrived, and what it asks of the people who lead.
Much of the conversation circles the person in the room whose job everyone assumes they understand. The old picture of the technologist keeping the lights on and answering the call when the printer breaks has very little to do with what the work has become. We talk about the vernacular that separates a partner from a vendor, about the seat where strategy actually gets decided, and about why the first call regarding the future so rarely reaches the person who will have to make that future work.
From there we get into failure, and the strange comfort of a system that performs poorly without ever quite breaking. We look at why the public sector learned to move slowly, what shifts when a community starts thinking more like a startup, and where the partnerships hiding in plain sight actually live. There is a running argument about whether to buy technology or build it, and a metaphor about a tiger that nobody in the room can shake.
Underneath all of it sits a question about trust and whether it was ever as solid as we remember. We work through public safety as a living laboratory, from the calls we answer to the systems we have never thought to question, and we sit with how expansive the change ahead might be. What it asks of us is a willingness to let go of how things have always been done, at a moment that may not come around again.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introductions
02:15 Brent's thirty years in and around public sector tech
07:10 What to look for in the next technology leader
09:50 The printer call, the first call, and partners not clients
13:22 Buy before build becomes build before buy
16:18 Risk aversion and the case for failure
22:22 The vanilla ERP problem
25:20 What keeps a CIO up at night, and advice for small communities
31:01 Staying ahead, and being sold a bill of goods
36:36 Thinking like a startup and the fake structures we built
41:47 Data governance without the fear
47:47 Public safety as a living lab
57:00 Skepticism, broken trust, and why trust keeps cycling
1:01:09 When transparency gets weaponized
1:03:54 Collisions and who's doing something worth watching
1:09:06 Talking to the people who hold the purse
1:13:02 Storytelling and leaping before you're left behind
1:18:50 The last word and the systems worth keeping
GUESTS
Brent Messer, Info-Tech Research Group
Website: https://brentmesser.com/
Website: https://www.infotech.com/profiles/brent-messer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbmesser/
Book: Value-Driven: The CIOs Handbook for Digital Transformation and Innovation in the Public Sector (https://a.co/d/0cZpLsgI)
Jerry Driessen, Celonis
Website: https://www.celonis.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-driessen-6997222/
HOSTS
Phil Kiraly, Village Manager, Glencoe, Illinois
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkiraly/
Mike Sable, City Manager, Maplewood, Minnesota
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-sable-b7994a14/
Corri Spiegel, President & CEO, Arete Strategic
Website: www.aretestrategic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corrispiegel/
Book: ordinary: Harnessing the Power of Or in Everyday Moments (https://a.co/d/0cGQsoZV)
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Trust keeps moving. Across the last several generations, it lived first with the people we knew, then with the institutions we built, and now it is settling somewhere new again. In this episode, the three of us are back around the table together to follow that movement and ask what it means for the people who serve communities every day.
We start with the numbers. The institutions Americans once leaned on now sit near the bottom of the confidence rankings, and local government has watched its own standing slide from the high marks it held for decades. That is where the conversation begins. We look at how the information environment fractured from a handful of trusted voices into millions, how credentials and ratings and the letters behind a name carry less weight than they once did, and why transparency so often creates visibility when what we were hoping for was trust.
From there we get practical. We work through the technology that now sits between local government and the public, from license plate readers to facial recognition to the apps parents use to track their teenagers. Each one raises the same quiet question about the line between serving people and watching them. We talk about the pull to use data to prove a point rather than to do the work better, and what it costs a community when we try to build trust the way we did in 1996 and expect it to land in 2026.
We close on the part that holds through all of it. Trust has become personal, earned in the ordinary work of showing up and following through. The question we leave with you is a working one. What are we actually doing to help people trust us, and what would it take to become the institution our neighbors count on when they need it most?

00:00 — Introduction: What Trust Means Today
03:22 — The State of Institutional Trust
08:12 — Media, Information, and Credibility
14:50 — From Institutions to Networks
18:06 — AI, Public Information, and Old Models
24:44 — Credentials and the Cost of Trust
42:16 — Trust, Transparency, and Progress
48:30 — Public Safety Technology and Surveillance
58:08 — Life 360, Leadership, and Employee Trust

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