No go? So let's go!!

I have now tried twice to get broad based citizen groups to support a community visioning process in Oak Ridge - without success. In both cases, the members of the groups were interested or supportive but the groups, themselves, had other priorities.

Well, if the members are supportive, I guess we need a new group that takes this cause to heart and invite all interested people to join as they see fit... To that end, I have created a Facebook group named EnvisionOR to gather supporters of community visioning and community input into local strategic planning.

If you are supportive of these goals in Oak Ridge, please join us and discuss the possibilities of making these processes happen!

Go, no go

Here we are, in need of the benefits of visioning, but not able to reach them. How do we go from here to there? What do we need to get started? What makes visioning go?

I don't think there is a single answer to these questions. Chattanooga had a desperate situation and was large and industrial enough to find the seed money. Their situation brought them together and their internal wealth provided the capital. Other communities seem to try visioning out much like a intellectual exercise, with a large sponsor like the city or an important local corporation.

Oak Ridge is not desperate enough nor wealthy enough to easily move from no go to go. But we do have a lot of human capital. The questions in my mind include, "What will it take to organize volunteers to substitute for monetary costs?" and "Can we count on that local talent to substitute for an experienced consultant to lead such a project?" Sure, we can get some organizations to support and sponsor the project and even kick in some cash or at least do some fund raising, but the concept has to be sold. People in the city have to turn out and participate. What they find when they do turn out has to be satisfying, because we would need their participation all the way through to the end.

So if we are to try a D.I.Y. visioning in order to reduce costs and make it more palatable politically, we need a workable plan like the National Civic League's Community Visioning and Strategic Planning Handbook, some capital to plan the process and kick it off, and about 15 people, representing the community, committed to initiating visioning. The rest will come from the work of those 15. This seems doable.

For completeness, let me outline what the rest of the work involves. The initiating committee must define our process using the National Civil League's guide. They must recruit and train a facilitation team to support the visioning process. They must arrange the logistics of the visioning meetings. They must recruit 100-120 people, committed to visioning, to conduct the bulk of the process. They must be accountable for any remaining fund raising to match the plan they develop. And through these steps, engage the community.

Right now we don't have the kind of support to fund those kinds of decisions up front. I think we do have enough support to get started and we will just have to trust that the rest will be figured out.

What good is visioning?

If you concur that Oak Ridge is a divided community on most items of public discussion then I think I can describe the benefits of a broad based community visioning process. If you don't think that we are divided, then I would like to remind you of a few recent events.

• The development of Centennial Golf Course


• The bond referendum for the City Center Plan


• The bond referendum for the Crestpointe shopping center


• The Charter Commission referendum to revert to electing City Council members by district


• New facilities for our Senior Center

Each of these acts and the public reaction to them points to deep differences of opinion, sure. But they are also unresolved differences, even today. Some are ongoing but those that are not even likely to be revisited are often described as the basis of distrust or generalized bungling by city authority. They are the foundations of popular myths that have little factual relation to historical events.

Contrast that description with what a visioning process offers.

• Visioning finds common ground


• Visioning builds trust


• Visioning accentuates the positive possibilities


• Visioning finds future goals by consensus


• Visioning develops plans to reach our envisioned future

If people are talking about the next steps toward reaching our goals that we have defined for our community, there is little room for the negative, divisive remembrance of a distorted past. The City Council and the city administration will be able to plan actions that follow the vision statement and implement steps toward reaching our future without the worry of being second-guessed or delayed by the next referendum. If we are moving toward our desired future, those who oppose are not representative of the community and its agreements with itself.

These differences are like night and day.

But there is more...

The visioning process itself produces agreements but it also changes the community. We will learn through visioning that people with differences can still agree on a positive future. We will learn that people with whom we have had conflict can be trusted within our agreements. We will find that negotiations with people holding opposing views can yield the proverbial common ground. We will find that our city government can be trusted to implement those goals that the community has agreed are important.

And finally, perhaps the most important change is that the people most involved in the visioning process itself, those who spend months listening, compromising, and discovering the paths to agreement will be our city's foundation of the public leadership that will carry this new way of interacting forward. They are the ones who will know first hand how it all works and the pay off that we are missing today.

Visioning is not a one time event. Once our desired future is reached, there will always be another future that needs definition. It is truly a better way of conducting our city's business.

How could visioning work?

In 2008, Oak Ridge Mayor Tom Beehan supported a broad based visioning process that involved a thousand or more people in this town of 27,000. That was a tall order. The National Civic League outlines a process that has a slightly different approach and is based on the same principles that make polls results representative of a larger population.

In polls, you interview a random sample and if the selection is truly random, the expected accuracy of the result is defined mathematically. The National Civic League proposes selecting a representative group of people to conduct the creative and negotiative process of visioning. However, rather than selecting them randomly, the people are chosen based on demographics. The criteria is that the group as a whole closely represents the community and that each individual in that group has committed to months of meetings that make up the process.

The result is that you start with 100-150 people who are in for the duration and as a whole represent the town. This is in opposition to the earlier concept of wider participation and the accompanying issues of keeping them involved during the subsequent give and take where goals are reduced, compared and contrasted, ordered and prioritized into a consensus vision statement. I think that having these individual commitments is the key success factor to getting through the hard work of refining all the good contributed ideas into a workable set of goals that embody the best future for our community.

This is not to say that wider participation is not desirable. In fact, it is necessary. It is very important to have the widest possible number of people involved when the visioning process is introduced, when good ideas are being requested, when progress is reported, and when the final vision statement is released. This involvement could be described as gaining wide buy in from the public and keeping them informed throughout, which is far easier than having a large segment of our city carving out time over the course of several months to move visioning forward.

So how do these approaches compare?

The earlier format emphasized the act of bringing people together and reaching consensus since that is what this town needs. However the process outlined by the National Civic League looks more to assuring success by identifying representative people who are committed to the realities of intensity and duration required for real visioning. Both stand in contrast with top down processes which work by starting with the power brokers and ultimately presenting to the citizens the plan that is "right for them". Top down approaches get into trouble here in Oak Ridge.

I like the National Civic League's approach since it captures the public involvement in a bottom up, grass roots orientation with a practicality that emphasizes success.

Next, I would like to talk about if visioning is so great, what do we do with it?

Visioning, Revisited

I mentioned that visioning currently has wide spread support among the City Council members. The last version (~18 months ago) failed to garner sufficient support to even be considered publicly. Reasons tended to include perceived lack of need, high costs, and questionable goals. I think I could deal the need and goals objections, but the price was a turn off that I did not know how to address.

I have also mentioned that the National Civic League has a "Do It Yourself" guide to visioning and strategic planning that includes a cost estimate for the visioning process. Here is their data from page 17:

• staffing ($15,000-$25,000)


• facilitation costs ($30,000-$75,000)


• food ($7,500-$15,000)


• printing, copying and office/administrative costs ($4,000-$7,500)


• travel ($1,500-$7,500)


• community meeting-related costs ($4,000-$7,500)


• outreach-related costs ($3,000-$10,000)


• research-related costs ($1,000-$10,000)


• equipment and meeting materials ($2,500-$7,500)


• the final report ($3,500-$15,000)


• the community celebration ($3,500- $10,000)


• Total Cost ($75,500-$190,000)

These costs are based on experience so we ought to pay attention to them. And since costs were one of the reasons that visioning did not get traction in early 2008, then we really ought to pay attention to them.

The good news? Since we are pretty small, the lower cost is probably more realistic for Oak Ridge. The bad news? These figures are pretty much in line with the estimates we got back then, and if it was too much then...

So what are we going to do about this? The Nation Civic League has Fund Raising as one of the key success factors. They are not putting all of these costs onto the backs of taxpayers as long as there are groups interested in supporting the project.

Another source could be volunteers. We are an active community with talented people. Why not recruit and train a pool of facilitators who would support this process, for example? That would attack the largest single cost and there are other categories that local organizations and companies would be willing to support.

The danger in this "DIY" approach is that we are not paying for experience so we would be likely to have more miscues along the way.

Next, I will talk about the 2008 approach versus one based on the National Civic League's model.