The receptive municipality

Why picking up signals is not the same as collecting signals, and what that demands of mid-sized and large municipalities

A white paper by Jeroen Toet and Michiel de Roo, Jester Strategy

What had been visible for months

It is a pattern we see too often in mid-sized and large municipalities. An issue that suddenly lands on the executive board's plate. A neighbourhood that comes to protest against a building plan, a business association writing to the alderman for economic affairs about an emptying town centre, a group of parents asking through the local newspaper for attention to a school problem. The reaction is almost always the same: "this comes as a surprise to us".

And almost always it was not. Anyone who reconstructs afterwards finds the signals back. A rejected subsidy application a year earlier. A passage in a neighbourhood survey that was not linked with other data. A tweet from a council member that no one clicked on. A remark from an enforcement officer to their supervisor that ended in a meeting note no one read any more. The information was there. What was missing was the mechanism to bring all those fragments together, interpret them and put them into a conversation.

This is not a story about underperforming civil servants or executives who look away. It is a story about an organisation designed for something other than what it now faces. A municipality is built to make and implement policy. It is much less built to keep continuously in tune with its external environment and let itself be adjusted by it. That second capacity, which we call receptiveness, is barely organised in most municipalities. And that takes its toll in a time when the outside world is changing faster than the municipal policy cycle can keep up.

Receptive is not the same as reactive or proactive

In conversations with executive boards and management teams, we use three modes to look at the relationship between a municipality and the outside world.

Reactive is the mode in which a municipality is good at resolving what comes in. A report of a fallen tree, a building application, a complaint about noise nuisance. The system is built for this. Quick, reliable, lawful. Most municipalities have this in order.
Proactive is the mode in which the municipality makes and implements its own plans. A housing vision, an environmental vision, a mobility plan, a social accord. A lot has been invested in this over the past two decades. The policy cycle is more professional than ever. Plans are often well substantiated and broadly supported at the moment they are adopted.
Receptive is a third mode and it is missing in most municipalities. Receptive means: continuously keeping in tune with what is happening outside the organisation and doing something with it as an organisation. Not only with what comes in loudly or only with what fits the organisation's own plans. Not by jumping into action immediately, but by taking signals seriously, interpreting them and adjusting plans and routines accordingly.

The difference lies in where the information comes from and where the initiative sits. Reactive: the outside world comes in through formal reports and the municipality solves the problem. Proactive: the municipality thinks something up and sends it outwards. Receptive: the municipality actively looks for signals that are not yet loud enough to come in and weighs what they mean for its own action. A municipality that is only reactive and proactive can deliver good work. At least, until the outside world needs something different from what was envisaged three years ago when the plan was adopted. And that outside world is changing faster than ever.

Three reasons why municipalities lose touch

Receptiveness has not disappeared by itself. It has been systematically designed out over the past decades, and not out of bad will. Three developments explain what we see today.

The professionalisation of the policy cycle. Since the 1990s, much has been invested in better planning, better consultation, better risk management. That has raised the quality of policy. But it has also led to an organisation that thinks in long cycles: a ten-year environmental vision, a four-year coalition agreement, an annual budget. Between those reference points, little formal room has been built in to pick up signals that do not fit existing frameworks. The system is built for implementing, not for reorienting.
The fragmentation of external communication. Twenty years ago the local newspaper, neighbourhood councils and organised interest groups together mapped reasonably well what was going on in a municipality. Today that is fragmented across thousands of channels: Facebook groups per neighbourhood, local Instagram accounts, WhatsApp neighbourhood groups, online petition platforms, X, TikTok. No communications adviser can still follow that manually. Anyone who does not invest in it loses sight of what is really at play. And then only the loudest voices remain: those who take the trouble to come in formally via the council, the newspaper or a targeted lobby.
The shrinking of soft capacity. In rounds of budget cuts, the positions whose value is difficult to quantify predictably fall away. Neighbourhood managers, area coordinators, policy advisers with an exploratory role, the strategy unit not tied to a single dossier. Those are precisely the people who pick up signals that are not yet in a formal process. Their absence is not visible in a KPI, but it is in the blind spot that grows year after year.

The result is a municipality that can respond excellently to what comes in formally and execute excellently what it has thought up itself, but which is weak at picking up and interpreting what is developing in the background. Anyone who wants to do something about this has to understand what actually happens when signals are picked up.

Three types of signal, three types of response

Not every signal is of the same nature, and it is a common mistake to throw them all in the same bin. We distinguish three types.

Weak signals are fragmentary indications that something may be about to change. A new form of small entrepreneurship that emerges in one neighbourhood and could affect the structure of the town centre. A group of newcomers with a very different expectation of public services than earlier generations. A technological development (such as charging infrastructure, shared mobility, neighbourhood batteries) whose consequences for the public space are still unclear. Weak signals call for deepening: what are we seeing here, what could this mean, what additional information do we still need?
Strong signals are clear events or developments that call for action. A neighbourhood that organises itself in opposition to a plan. A supplier on the verge of bankruptcy. A court ruling with immediate consequences. Strong signals call for action, but the pitfall here is that they absorb scarce attention so completely that the weak signals remain unattended. A municipality that only steers on strong signals structurally runs behind the facts.
Patterns emerge when weak signals coincide or take on a direction over time. Three neighbourhoods independently voicing the same concern. An upward trend in a type of report that previously seemed anecdotal. A recurring theme in citizen panels, in council questions and in the local media. Patterns call for something more complicated than action or deepening: they may call for a strategy revision. And precisely that last response is the least firmly anchored in municipal routines.

A signal without a framework is noise. It only takes on meaning if you can lay it against a story about what your future could look like.

Why a framework is indispensable

The problem with signals is not that there are too few. The problem is that there are too many, and that in their raw form they rarely mean anything. Anyone who receives a list every morning of a hundred things that have been said on social media or in local media knows no more at the end of the day than at the beginning.

What distinguishes a signal from noise is that it says something about a development that is strategically relevant for the municipality. And you can only make that judgement if you have an idea of which developments could be relevant for your municipality. In our experience, two kinds of framework are the most powerful for this.

The first are future scenarios. Not as prediction (no one knows what a mid-sized municipality will look like in 2040) but as an exploration of the fundamentally different futures the municipality must be prepared for. A scenario in which the population strongly ages and care demand dominates. A scenario in which the municipality attracts young families and services fall short for them. A scenario in which economic shrinkage and administrative mergers are on the agenda. Scenarios give the organisation a common language to talk about futures, and just as crucially a list of indicators that help recognise which scenario is unfolding.

The second are change drivers: the fundamental forces heading towards the municipality, regardless of which scenario plays out. Demographic shifts, climate adaptation, energy transition, digitalisation, trust in institutions, changing relations between national and local government. Change drivers form the categories under which signals are organised. A report about a WhatsApp group organising against an asylum seekers' centre is not classified as "complaints" but under the driver "trust in institutions", and so gains strategic meaning.

Whoever collects signals without a framework gets a dashboard. Whoever works with a framework gets a conversation. And that is a difference that matters.

What AI can and cannot do

AI is a tool in this story, not a solution. That comes with an honest distinction between what the technology can and cannot handle.

What AI can do well is collect and order on a large scale. Local media, public social media, council documents, neighbourhood surveys, complaint systems. An AI system can search these continuously, classify them under your own change drivers and make patterns visible that a human would never notice because they are spread over weeks or months. It can detect weak signals, remove duplicates and give a first interpretation. We call that "signalling". For a municipality with limited soft capacity, that is a substantial reinforcement.

What AI cannot do is understand what a signal means in a specific local context. Whether a group of concerned parents is a chance impulse or the harbinger of a wider pattern. Whether a tweet from a council member is political game-playing or a serious signal. Whether a recurring theme in a neighbourhood is connected to a concrete event or to something deeper. That interpretation calls for people who know the municipality, who know the history, who know the players. AI delivers raw material. The interpretation is and remains human work.

There is moreover a serious risk that AI-driven signalling can actually reinforce the very problem it sets out to solve. AI models find patterns in the data they have, and that data is by definition skewed. Online active groups are over-represented. Those who do not write in Dutch are under-represented. Those who do not speak out do not count. A municipality that lets its receptiveness run entirely through AI dashboards hears the loud voices even better, but the silent majority even less. This is no reason not to use AI. It is a reason to combine it deliberately with other sources of information that do reach the quiet groups: neighbourhood visits, structured conversations with partners and stakeholders in the field, qualitative research.

The work AI cannot do: interpretation with stakeholders

What ultimately distinguishes a receptive municipality is not the possession of a signalling system. It is the routine to discuss the signals. First internally and then with the outside world. That is the step that is missing in most municipalities, even when collection is in order.

Internally this means a fixed moment, for instance every six weeks, when the management team (and in some municipalities also the executive board) discusses the signals from the past period. Not to act on them immediately, but to give them meaning. What are we seeing here? What could this predict? Which scenario seems to be gaining force? Which existing plans could come under pressure as a result? Which assumptions we had three years ago might no longer hold?

That conversation has a different character from a regular management meeting. It is not about progress, not about decisions, not about dossiers. It is about what we are seeing. For many municipal organisations, that is an unusual type of conversation. It therefore calls for explicit design to make room for it: a separate agenda, a different chair, a different format.

Externally it means that the municipality structurally enters into conversation with stakeholders who otherwise only come into the picture ad hoc. Not the standard consultation around a specific plan, but structured exploratory conversations with entrepreneurs, care providers, schools, housing associations, sports clubs, experts by experience. What are they seeing that the municipality is not? Which signals from their work match the signals in the municipal data? And which data do they contradict? A receptive municipality builds these conversations in as routine, not as incident.

The most valuable thing such a conversation yields is rarely a new concrete fact. It is a shift in the interpretation of facts that were already there. And that is precisely what receptiveness is in practice: not gathering more information, but forming a richer picture by bringing what you know together with what others see.

Three design choices for the municipality that wants to be receptive

For anyone who wants to take the step from a reactive-proactive to a co-receptive municipality, three design choices are decisive in our experience.

The first is ownership at executive level. Receptiveness is not a communications task and not a policy adviser's task. It is a task that must sit at the highest official layer, because only there does the authority lie to put existing plans up for discussion on the basis of signals. In the municipalities where we see this working, the primary responsibility lies with the municipal secretary or a director of strategy, with clear agreements with the executive board about when signals are put on the political agenda.

The second is a framework that is actively maintained. A collection of scenarios or change drivers that was drawn up once and then disappeared into a drawer helps nothing. The framework must be reviewed annually, on a fixed rhythm, with the organisation and with external partners. Not to completely overturn it, but to test whether the drivers are still the right ones and whether the scenarios still describe the relevant futures. That maintenance is the proof that the instrument is alive.

The third is a rhythm of conversation with stakeholders that is separate from concrete dossiers. This is the most difficult, because it runs against municipal logic to invite people from society without a concrete plan to talk about. But precisely for that reason it is so valuable. A conversation without an agenda forces listening instead of broadcasting. And it builds the network you need at the moment a signal becomes acute. Then there is already a line, a basis of trust and a shared language.

Three questions for the executive board and the municipal secretary

For anyone who wants to put their own municipality's receptiveness under the microscope, there are three questions that quickly make the conversation concrete.

One: looking back at the three biggest surprises of the past year, what should not have surprised us? What signals were there, in what form, and why did we not bring them together? This is not a reproach, but a learning analysis. It rarely yields nothing.

Two: do we have a shared picture (as management team and as executive board) of the two or three developments that could change our municipality most strongly in the coming five years? Not as fact set in stone, but as a hypothesis we test against what we see happening. If that shared picture is not there, there is no framework against which to set signals and every discussion about signals becomes unproductive.

Three: when did we last have a conversation with external stakeholders without a concrete plan on the table? For most municipalities the answer is painful. It is also the answer that can most directly be changed: a first appointment in the diary is a first step.

Receptiveness is not a luxury. It is, in a time when the outside world changes faster than the policy cycle, a condition for good governance. A municipality that only reacts to what comes in loudly and executes what it has thought up itself is fighting a rearguard action. A municipality designed to pick up, interpret and discuss signals (with the organisation and with society) stays in touch with its environment, and thereby also retains its legitimacy. That design does not start with a tool or a dashboard. It starts with the choice to give receptiveness a place alongside reactivity and proactivity, and to build around it the routines, the framework and the rhythm of conversation that make the choice real.

About the authors

Jeroen Toet is a senior strategist at Jester Strategy and works extensively for decentralised governments on issues at the intersection of strategy, governance and administrative renewal.

Michiel de Roo is a strategist at Jester Strategy and works extensively for governments and companies in the areas of scenario planning, strategy formation, ESG and translating strategy into concrete plans.

This white paper has been written on the basis of practical experience with scenario planning, signalling and strategic advice at Dutch municipalities. The insights presented are observations of the authors and reflect the wider practice of Jester Strategy in this sector.

The receptive municipality.