Selecting goals is often the easy part

By Dan Linehan
The Free Press

MANKATO February 19, 2006 11:32 pm

— Broad agreement and hopeful language prevailed among the crowd of about 150 Envision 2020 participants when they chose a vision statement with flowery, nonspecific language during the most recent meeting, last Thursday.
Communities tend to agree more on where they want to go than on how they want to get there, says Derek Okubo, who is facilitating the process as vice president of the National Civic League.
After all, who can argue that a downtown shouldn’t be vital or that the environment isn’t worth preserving?
But difficult issues loom on the horizon, and, while Okubo is confident that they can be addressed, the way these issues get resolved will be key to the success of Envision 2020.
Cat herder
Part of Okubo’s role is to lead groups of widely diverse people to come together and trust each other. And for that he was given the metaphor of “cat herder” — sort of like a sheep dog, but with animals that would just as soon stare at walls all day as interact with each other.
Humans may be somewhat more sociable than cats, but Okubo says participants in other cities tend to react to adversity by fragmenting and claiming turf.
He expects one of the biggest gains from this project to be the formation of new, stronger relationships. Okubo calls them “soft outcomes” and their goal is to “change the culture of how business is done.”
He’s seen it in all of the roughly 50 cities he’s guided through this community planning process.
Scott Wingerson has seen it, too. He’s the assistant city manager in Gladstone, Mo., a city of about 27,000 that completed Gladstone On the Move about 18 months ago.
“We didn’t anticipate the soft outcomes,” he says, “the positive feelings generated.”
Elephants, gorillas
Wingerson also remembers the “knock-down, drag-out arguments” during which everyone had to air their grievances.
“If it’s this big gorilla in the room that nobody talks about, it’s hard to get past,” he said.
It’s not yet clear what this area’s most contentious issues will be, but the issue of a merger between Mankato and North Mankato arose during the second Envision 2020 meeting, as did the level of cooperation between the two governments.
Tony Filipovitch, an urban studies professor at Minnesota State University, called the merger issue an “elephant in the middle of this region’s table” in a Free Press column on Feb. 11.
The key, he said, in resolving this issue and others is to convince everyone that they’ve been heard and that the solutions are agreeable to everyone.
Put another way, it’s about “trying to find what is common that underlies what appear to be our differences,” Filipovitch says. “Some circles you can’t square, but when it comes to that I think you find a way to keep the circle and the square, but most of the time it turns into a polygon.”
So far
Most participants in the first three Envision 2020 have been sincerely participating in the process, said Mary Lou Kudela, who was on the committee that drafted the vision statement. She says there’s some skepticism, though, a sense of “who’s going to pay for it” and “it’s nice for them, but what about me.”
As for that vision statement, Kudela said there was a “fuzzy, but a general sense of where the community should be.” The vision statement was written with the help of about 700 Post-it notes after the first meeting.
Okubo says communities tend to have less trouble at this stage of the process, though that wasn’t the case in Sioux Falls, where participants in Sioux Fall Tomorrow II reported that they never found a consensus on a vision statement.
The stumbling block there was a definition of Sioux Falls: Was it just the city or did it include outlying towns?
But that city, which was undergoing its second planning process with Okubo, said there were very few problems, the vision issue notwithstanding.
“There was very little disagreement when it came to final consensus,” said Candy Hanson, who was on the steering committee for the Sioux Falls effort.
Envision’s future
Divided into three parts, Envision 2020 is about initiation, planning and implementation. The process is now moving into its second stage, when five or six groups will meet, each with a “key performance area.”
It’s not yet clear what the areas will be, though several have emerged as having the most traction among attendees.
They include downtown revitalization, development of an arts center, transportation, government collaboration, economic development, retaining youth and involving seniors.
The project’s progress can be tracked at www.envision-2020.com, where updates are posted, along with presentations and a calendar of events.

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