An Exploration of Applying Business Concepts to Community Engagement and more

This blog post is going to be on yet another Kumu map diagraming another set of interconnected relationships between concepts, resources and organizations involved in a Living Cities’ approach, as defined by their online course, to Collective Impact. This is the tenth such post on these approaches by this blog which continues to wrestle with the best means of taking what is for many new and unfamiliar concepts while presenting them in a new and unfamiliar way.

Three Kumu maps, with this being the fourth, of the five modules making up the Living Cities online Collective Impact course have been covered so far with each dealing with a different area of concern but all related to the larger enterprise. All blog posts, maps and foundational websites can be found under the Collective Impact wiki-page.

While the majority of comments received so far, through LinkedIn mainly, have been positive and helpful, it can be understood if some don't quite take to it as one LinkedIn commenter who of the last post said, "What ?? Is this available in English??".

Each Kumu Module map has a legend in the lower left corner showing the different types of elements that can be found on the maps. If these maps were seen as analogous to geographical maps of islands scattered across a sea, the islands would not necessarily make up a system but merely be a collection. It is the connections between the elements or islands that define the relationships. What could make them a system is the connection through ocean currents with some islands included in the system of currents and others outside it. The currents could make possible a system of trade in which bananas found on only one island trades for the exclusive coconuts of another island. Islands previously unreachable could be with a system of treaties covering safe passage. Finally, a system of government could be created encompassing a certain set of islands based on common interests. The point is that connections are not merely arbitrary but meaningful.

The connections on the module maps are primarily based on the narrative structure of the Living Cities course. With the Kumu map, it is possible to move beyond this largely linear approach and discover other types of relationships. Once one lands on a particular island or element it is then a matter of studying the specific territory through the associated url in the narrative section. Moving back from territory to map then allows one to chart new paths to carve and new territories to explore.

Using map sectors introduced in the last post with this current map, we will start at the outer edges and move inwards to cover both larger territory and any conceptual chasms that likely may appear when taking the approach of Applying Business Concepts to Community Engagement.

Such an approach may strike some as problematic if having had a long time antagonistic relationship with business, particularly large corporations. This blog supports the use of business discipline in government services but that is definitely not the same as running a democratic form of government as a business.

The first map sector to be looked at is how to Build Lean and Iterate Fast through the Lean Startup Movement. Again, there seems to be a disconnect between created-in-a-garage entrepreneurial endeavors and established institutions of government. The lessons to be learned though from the Lean Startup movement, whether used by start-up entrepreneurs or established managers, is designed to do one important thing: make better, faster business decisions. As has been discussed before, this blog's approach to the article Deliberation, Democracy and the Systemic Turn co-authored by David Owen and Graham Smith placed the relevant interrelated elements along two different planes. One of which, while incorporating a philosophy of 'Citizens at the Heart' of the enterprise, is a system designed to produce desired goods and necessary functions as opposed to the other that seeks a more ideal approach to a system of deliberative democracy based on the full inclusion of citizens.

Lean Startup is a principled approach to new product development, providing a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and getting a desired product to customers' hands faster. It teaches how to drive a startup, how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere and grow a business or community program with maximum acceleration.

“Product” in this case means a program, a service, a process, whatever one is designing and is not limited to a physical item. “Customer” refers to whomever is intended to benefit from using the “product” being designed, and from a community perspective, not only who is paying for it.

A great first step to applying Lean Startup methods is launching a product before building it by creating an MVP or Minimum Viable Product, a “… version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of learning about customers with the least effort".

It is part of an even more expansive idea of Community Engagement as Business which adds both ‘Engagement is Marketing’ and ‘Infrastructure Must Support Change’ elements as well as a relevant organization defining social enterprise, NESsT.

There are significant challenges to establishing cross-sector partnerships, with related elements mapped into their own sector. As described by the narrative of the original Living Cities course, they are linked to Community Engagement as Business sector and, with the addition of Design Thinking sector, have Week 4: Applying Business Concepts to Community Engagement as their foundation.

There is a difference though with the Design Thinking sector map. The majority of elements are listed under ‘additional resources’ in the original Living Cities course and it does not have a central element helping to define it.

It could be pointed out that the inclusion of the Design Thinking portion of the Business Concepts Applied to Community Engagement sector map was forced. Visually though it made sense, especially since Living Cities also included some additional Lean Startup resources designed to impact for social good. While the potential relations are apparent with the Kumu map they are arguably less so if depending upon a more linear written narrative. Having moved on a couple of chapters or clicked through a few web pages it becomes harder to envision connections and relationships if they are not made explicit and straightforward.

Taking this more at first strenuous path though is seen as worthwhile nonetheless because creating new community paradigms requires not only changing what we think but how we think. It is also still a work in progress subject, even anticipating, continuing revisions.

In keeping with this notion of continuous improvements, Modules 1 and 2 have been revisited and have had map sectors added to them. Most of the newly added sector maps seem readily obvious, following the format of a focused sector map, a central element within that focused sector map if available, a means of directly clearing the focused sector map, and a way of returning to the associated module either cleared or to combine with other sector maps.

Some sector maps are more constructed through intentional selection; most notable is A Design for Community Engagement that results from bridging two of Module 1's other sector maps, Harwood Institute & Collective Impact and Continuum of Engagement Goals, with Designing Public Participation Processes as the central element. Designing Public Participation Processes was also purposely selected for the Modules 1 to 2 Bridge and was the foundational element for the Systemic Design of Public Participation blog post series, as well as the inspiration for the Designing Public Participation Processes Map and subsequently the Public Participation Designed for Entrenched Incumbents Map. An element that Living Cities relegated to ‘additional resources’ was therefore made the basis for extensive exploration.

Those choices and all the others were individual in nature with the conflicting outcome that they are both restrictive in having certain pathways selected while initially obscure as the way to be taken has to be described at each step. However, this is only because this is the initial exploration to get a sense of the layout. Although there is a great deal more work and undoubtedly numerous revisions to be done, the hope is that this Kumu project can be developed fully enough that it can be adapted for use by different groups to do their own joint explorations. As was pointed out in the Systems Thinking Certification course, people, groups will have more ownership for something if they have a part in building it, even if it is something that has been built before. Still, it could not merely be a matter of copying the steps out of a book. It would have to involve having a fresh look and new thinking about the overall design and implementation.

Applying Disruptive Innovation within the Public Sector and Community Governance

In this post an argument for applying lessons learned from Professor Clayton Christensen’s Theory of Disruptive Innovation to the public sector and in particular community governance will begin to be developed. This has been on the back-burner for a good while and most of the work that resulted in this has come from discussions and readings provided through colleagues in the Disruptive Innovation group and more recently Disruption by Design group on LinkedIn.

In the previous Innovation Through Community; Innovation By Community post, the difficulty in generating more meaningful innovation within the public sector due to structural system problems with our current form of local institutions of government was raised. A means needs to be found that not only implements the change being sought but that also disrupts the elements of the system working to stop that change. Unlike past politically based forms of disruption which were usually disrupt first then innovate after, a way needs to be found by which the innovation and disruption occur simultaneously, that shifts the balance of influence through a process of innovation that entrenched institutions of government have minimal means to stop. The post following after made the case against Entrenched City Halls and why they can fail communities despite having the appearance of being democratic.

Developing a theory of disruptive innovation within the public sector will be difficult because disruptive innovation has become such a misused term, especially within the public sector. Most examples of disruptive innovation cited by the public sector are mislabeled either purposely or inadvertently, usually to make a more persuasive sounding argument for something. We are not looking for the next disruptive product or disruptive service or disruptive technological advancement but a continual means of innovation (which could include technical or management processes) by some form of disruptor, be it an entrepreneur or other change agent, that drastically bends the growth curve up, substantially shifting the value inherent within the system from one of scarcity to abundance and thereby disrupts the current system.

So it needs to be made clear that we are endeavoring to utilize the concepts of disruptive innovation as developed by Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard University. A section of the New Community Paradigms wiki has been set aside to gather additional resources related to disruptive innovation. This will not be a comprehensive examination though. The stories of companies such as Apple, as a disruptor or Kodak, as the disrupted, are known and this post will leave telling the specifics of such stories to others. The intricate details of the theory will also be left to others. This post will focus on laying a foundation how disruptive innovation can be applied to the public sector by describing elements of the process and how and why it can disrupt certain components of a system in question and at the same time transform the relationship between scarcity and abundance for other components of the system in question.

Once that is established, we will then need to later determine boundaries as to where the theory can identify applicable factors that can be applied across different systems. As Professor Clayton devised his theory based on the workings of private free-market economics, its application to the public sector will be done by finding the most robust analogies between the two systems. Even if the application of disruptive innovation to the public sector is primarily figurative, it should still have the potential to have an impact upon the system and therefore able to cause meaningful change.

Another problem with explaining the concept of disruptive innovation as a process which could be purposely applied is that on the surface it is not intuitive and how it gets one from point A to point B is not readily apparent until one digs deeper. This is in part why it is effective because the industries or the companies within them being disrupted do not realize the threat and the resulting disruption seems to come out of nowhere. It is all the more effective though because after a certain point, along the path of innovation discerned by Christensen, little can be done to prevent the disruption and its inevitability becomes clearer in hindsight. This is also one of the ways the public sector misses the essential aspects of disruptive innovation. It is not just a matter of creating a brand new mousetrap for the world and everyone beating a path to your door. Someone or something finds itself being prone to being disrupted in the process putting organizations of all types in the position of being the guy at the poker table who does not know who the sucker is.

Stories of disruptive innovation can start off as the David and Goliath sort. Disruptors, entrepreneurs or startup firms, play the role of David with seemingly meager weapons and the incumbent, as in the well established, undisputedly in power, market leader, sometimes even iconic business with a long history of financial success and domination over the market assumes the role of Goliath. In some ways disruptive innovation may be more like stories of Popeye and Bluto when Popeye finds the spinach but what the spinach is changes with each new and different innovation. (I am a Baby Boomer, Google it if it’s not familiar)

The incumbent market leaders or the Goliaths and Blutos, once they are established, appear to remain unbeatable because they are the ones coming up with sustaining innovations, the ones proclaimed as new and improved in the advertising. This is when one most often hears empty claims of disruptive innovation being made as in not only new and improved but super new and improved. This means that their customers and especially high-end users continually get better service through features with better quality and improved reliability making them the safe bet. These improvements can be small and incremental or significant but they are targeted to the already defined customer base with the intention of making the base population larger at the price point set by the business or to raise the price point high enough so that even if less customers are added in numbers the overall profit for the company goes up. Customers that show loyalty by being able and willing to pay the price for the standard offering or better yet move up to the premium offering are rewarded. Those not included within this relationship are left behind to no obvious detriment to either the chosen customers or incumbent business. People get use to Goliath or Bluto being the biggest badass in town and assume it will remain that way.

Disruptive innovations or DIs, led by the Davids and Popeyes, are seen as overall inferior or underperforming solutions compared to those being provided by the market or sector leaders. Where DI agents are able to begin to compete is on a different set of benefits, such as simplicity, convenience, accessibility, significantly lower price, or ease of use that satisfy a need either not met or underserved by the incumbent market leaders. By doing so, they create what Clayton Christensen termed “asymmetries of motivation” and a new dimension of value.

This new dimension of value can be created in two ways, first through low-end disruption which means offering lower quality or performance, perhaps missing features, though at substantially lower costs making it appealing to users who can’t afford or can’t access, or new users, along with others, that don't need the full features of the incumbent market solution.

The new dimension of value can also be created through new market disruptions that provide the means to accomplish a new category of previously unrealized objectives or goals with which the incumbent has decided or defaulted to not compete. It is good enough though to meet the particular customer’s goal or what has been termed in disruptive innovation literature as the Job-To-Be-Done or JTBD. A DI directly addresses some JTBD of the customer at an acceptable price making them willing to put up with the lack of features or quality as compared to the incumbent offering.

The incumbents ability to offer sustaining innovations to its defined customer base only cements its position as long as it offers them at a pace that keeps it ahead of whatever competition it may have. Incumbents create the products or services to be bought and the market reacts within the confines of this solution choosing between better or worse alternatives. Customers adjust themselves to optimize their use of the solution offered, not the other way around. Incumbents over time mold customers expectations and train them to become dependent upon the incumbents offerings and stop seeing the possibility of alternative solutions. At some point though these sustaining innovations stop making a difference and buying decisions become based solely on price, the one providing the best offering at the lowest price becomes king of the hill.

There is, however, still those who are not being served, or are being underserved and sometime even over-served by the incumbent business. If the DI agent goes after these customers then the incumbent sees no reason to compete. Initial offerings to these customers can be seen as mere toys flying below the radar of the incumbent market leaders.

When David or Popeye start off, they and their customers may have no idea of the full potential of the innovation that they are offering. This is where the DI agent finds his sling or spinach. What it does is provide a track for continual, while still sustaining, innovation has the very important difference that it is within a noncompetitive arena with the incumbent business allowing Popeye to pop open the can of spinach unhampered.

This is where disruptive innovation has its greatest impact because this new dimension of value is what moves the value inherent in the system from a state of scarcity to abundance. It is at this point that truly meaningful change could start to be implemented.

Connecting Complexity with Community

So far the overall approach in the exploration of complexity by this blog has been from more of a business perspective. Complexity is seen as one of the major challenges for business in the twenty-first century by, among others, both the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and the Economist Intelligence Unit. Three posts coming from very different perspectives, and while none gave a full picture of complexity, together they form something that begins to look like an elephant.

The first of the three separate perspectives on complexity was from a global, systems approach. The second examined the industrial approach of the twentieth century, now seen as being inadequate to the challenge of addressing complexity. (One note before moving beyond management based on complicated, mechanistic processes as opposed to complex processes. A substantial part of the world is still based on algorithmic processes that can be managed through a command and control approach. The argument is not that this management approach is no longer relevant. It is that it should not be applied over the long term to complex challenges.) The third perspective began moving towards a twenty-first-century approach by demonstrating some of the weaknesses in the industrial models of the last century.

More still needs to be said though about the twenty-first-century approach set forth in part by the HBR articles Embracing Complexity An Interview with Michael J. Mauboussin by Tim Sullivan and Learning to Live with Complexity by Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath. These HBR articles from 2011 require us to understand that complexity is largely unpredictable and therefore unmanageable using a traditional management framework and methodologies based on reductionist approaches and "machine" analogies. The twenty-first-century approach requires managers to instead set clear limits and goals than to a large extent "let go" while still providing support systems to the people implementing solutions to assist them to 'self-organize' toward that well-defined end. It requires respecting that those closest to the problem understand the required actions. What is more important is recognizing that this isn't a straight line process. It is a process that requires establishing more trust as opposed to greater control.

We are reaching the point that almost every issue in business is by its nature complex with numerous 'actors' and an ever-changing internal and external environment resulting in the creation of an adaptive system. The same is true for communities as well. Complexity for both businesses and communities is in large part complexity created by adaptive systems as studied by the UCLA Adaptive Systems Laboratory or by Scott Page, Professor of Complexity, Political Science and Economics at University of Michigan and external Santa Fe Institute faculty, who has been cited previously in the posts Systems Thinking as a disciplined process for Community Governance and New Community Paradigms Thinking Requires Systems Thinking. There is still the need though to connect in a meaningful way to the community. Complexity, although it may not be perceived as an apparent direct threat, is still a significant problem for communities.

The biggest problems facing communities today are seen as complex and difficult enough to earn the label ‘wicked’. Complexity can have even greater negative effects without the community realizing that it exists by hiding the true sources of problems while at the same time obscuring avenues to possible solutions. It becomes worse if the institutions responsible for addressing complex problems are unable to correctly ascertain the nature of those problems and are inadequate to addressing them continuing with the same failed approaches and false assurances. Complexity is a problem for communities when local conditions appearing or made to appear simple or if complicated under control give a false sense of security while the larger environment is in truth complex creating unforeseen and detrimental effects. Complexity is a problem for communities if fear and misunderstanding, sometimes propagated by government institutions, whether implicitly or explicitly, keeps the community from realizing that the source of creativity and innovation within their community is connected to complexity. That while their active involvement can increase complexity overall, it will at the same time make complexity far more coherent (see Complexity Addressed From On High).

Organizations dealing with large populations have difficulty managing or even understanding complexity because they are not able to see the myriad of interrelationships within the environment or ecosystem that makes complexity a reality. The most complex aspect of the world facing both businesses and governments today is the necessity of dealing with multiple free agents or what are more commonly known as customers and constituents. Over time, more and more people are moving from being passive recipients of directed by market desires to having an impact on their world by being engaged creators of community. This may be actually more true of the economic realm than it is in the political realm where so many merely serve as paying cheerleaders for a particular political party or candidate or remain effectively disempowered or disenfranchised or merely disinterested because no actions result in meaningful change.

One can imagine an individual in a community with little involvement in the community’s civic matters, perhaps due to the difficulty of working through the politics or bureaucracy of city hall, sitting in a traffic jam with no idea of what is occurring ahead of him. He might fume about the price of gasoline and wish for more roads to be built to solve his traffic problems or about climate change but likely if one asked about the role of complexity the response would be a blank stare. In the mind of this community, member traffic is not complex, it is merely tedious forcing one to wait for apparently no reason. The price of gasoline is not complex, it just goes up. Climate change is not complex either, just big businesses polluting too much but what can you do? None of it is worth bothering about since nothing can be done, at least not by members of the community like him. It is not even particularly apparent how it is all interrelated, so where do you start? Dealing with City Hall and trying to get anything done through it and their experts. who we supposedly hire or elect to solve these problems, now that is complex.

Individuals alone, regardless of the level of authority, cannot address a high degree of complexity within a system, whether that system is one that arose naturally or one that was created, only another system can through a natural or an organizational interface. Individuals though are at the heart of such a system which often means working collaboratively through a network.

The point that needs to be stressed is that complexity should not and cannot be ignored or deferred. That it should not be seen as an ominous dark cloud sucking creativity and life out of everything. It should not even be seen as a problem but as an opportunity. Even though the perspective provided by the systematic, global approach may be in isolation impractical, it is still true as the post Complexity as Cradle for Creativity and Innovation argues.

Taking a position on the matter is important because it will become a foundational stone for what will be proposed in the future. New Community Paradigms needs to deal with complexity as it is a fundamental factor in transportation infrastructure, community ecology, and urbanization, as a significant influence in the increasing economic consolidation or concentration in metropolitan areas in parallel with expanding economic globalization and other significant areas of concern.

Having a handle on complexity will also be essential in determining how to bridge an ever increasing chasm between government institutions and individual citizens or constituents left floundering to choose between what has been termed objectless protest by the Economist Intelligence Unit or acquiescing to offerings of commodified government services while in reality having a diminishing or no real say in the forming of their own communities.

Complexity provides an institution or community with other options or pathways that when properly addressed adds to its ability to be competitive and sustainable, and therefore should be embraced.

Run the technology; don't let the technology run you

In the last post of this blog which explored the EIU's look at complexity from a public organization perspective,  the question was asked as to whether technical solutions are really fostering inclusion effectively? How using technological solutions to tackle complexity works for community-based governance as opposed to businesses.  For many businesses focusing on technology in itself is not seen as one of the major sources of complexity.  This may not be as true for community governance.  The challenge is finding the proper role for technology and optimizing its use to the greatest extent.

It would be a mistake to focus primarily on technological solutions. This usually means letting the technology do the work for you, similar to using the TV to indiscriminately babysit your two-year-old.

Technology as an end in itself is a wasted investment same as would be an economic development strategic plan being used as an end in itself. These are tools that should help in accomplishing other objectives or goals chosen by the community.

Part of this as to do with the citizen being considered only as a customer as seen by the so-called New Public Management. This sets, I believe, limits to participation in the democratic process. A basic premise of this blog is that people need to see themselves as both the consumer and producer of democracy, as well as the results of those efforts, in their lives.

Technology can help organizations to thrive in complex environments. It is the organization itself that must be prepared to seek opportunities for adaptation and creativity. For this to happen effectively, the social innovation and business process innovations of the organization are as important as the technological innovations, if not more so. Too great of a dependency on technology can distract from the internal changes needed for social innovation or business process innovations to be put in place.

This calls for a different type of relationship between citizens and their government. It is the interaction between the individual and the complex organization of a government institution within the complex system of a community. I am putting aside, for now, any questions regarding complications that may arise from the politics or bureaucracy of an organization.

It is the governmental organization that gives a structured though malleable framework within which integral parts of that organization work.

The individual citizens are not an integral part of that government organization. They do not have a structured framework and therefore must depend on what they are given.

Technology on its own does not necessarily help to open up complex systems for individuals, making them more understandable and clarifying avenues for success. It can sometimes do the opposite depending on the manner in which it is used.

For one, it does not always provide the constituent with optimal access. Second, if the constituent is able to use technology without being directly and openly integrated, it is often confrontational. The climate change debate is a good example, a complex problem with simple answers or denial coming from so many. The reality of complexity is that it can be varnished over and people can potentially be spoon-fed or become disenfranchised and go elsewhere to look for easy answers.

Now, this is not the case with the majority of public agencies employees and officials but even in the best of circumstances, there is often a unilateral control of information under government when it provides avenues for participation.

Addressing the needs of multiple organizations within a community with different goals adds to the challenge of complexity. Governmental institutions should not hand over their decision-making authority to any particular public group within a community outside of the democratic process. Engaging in dialogue with groups of citizens at critical junctures in the policy process does make a significant difference to decision-making is challenging and part of that challenge is recognizing the complexity faced by the individual citizen.

It is the people making up these organizational systems, both in government and within the larger community, that enable these changes to happen when they are provided the opportunity to vision or dream together about different ways of being or doing things with each other and the organization. In other words, they help redefine the organization and in so doing redefine their role in the organization.

The question is how we accomplish that and to what extent we can use technology to do so? It is a multilevel question. Is it possible to provide community groups the same leverage in dealing with complexity that the professionals who "sell" the programs and projects of city hall have? Exploring this further will be one of the goals of this blog.

Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK

The Economic Intelligence Unit, which did the research on Liveable cities | BUSINESS RESEARCH for the Philips Company, also did research on complexity in the business world (featured here at the Pathways to New Community Paradigms Wiki) focusing on the shift businesses are going through on a global basis, transitioning from the industrial age to the information age. This is seen as a change evolving from being formal structured bureaucratic rule bound organizations based on policies and processes to ones more based on a networks of collaboration among individuals. The key word is transformation in terms of cause but the key result is complexity.  It was the conclusion of the Economic Intelligence Unit that this is one of the major challenges for businesses in the twenty-first century.

Can the same be said of public institutions and if so are they up to the challenge? People are more likely to think of government as being more bureaucratic than business, but there may not be an internal recognition by government institutions for the need to change which means that without outside influence it will never come. With businesses it comes down to adapting to ensure a chance to survive, for local governments it may come down to maintaining the politically convenient status quo and an opportunity for needed change that is ignored.

This challenge can also apply to community-based governance by members of the community. This is the biggest challenge to an effort to create new community paradigms for a community.  The members of the community will either depend upon information which is feed to them by City Hall and interact through a process that is largely defined by City Hall or it will develop its own resources and uses its influence to guide City Hall.

There has been an unstated assumption throughout the posts of this blog that City Hall has failed to adequately address the need for an economically and environmentally sustainable and livable community. That is obviously not going to be true for all cities and the degree to which it is will be different from city to city.  In some cases the effort will find a willing partner and the collaboration will create a new more expansive form of community governance.  In other cases there will be push back from the incumbent institutional government.  The key issue is whether City Hall truly represents the community as a whole or only special interests or privileged key community members.  If it is the later, then there are pathways that can be taken to weaken and subsequently disrupt that control in a sustained and innovative manner.   These will be explored in the future.

In deciding to form one's own community paradigms, it is very important to keep in mind that complexity is different than complicated. Transversing government institutions themselves will be complicated but the issues they deal with are instead complex.  Embracing complexity as a pathway to new community paradigms can lead to an actual greater simplicity in dealing with the community challenges. This aspect of community paradigms will need to be revisited but for now here is a short TED video by Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity.

Community groups organized around a principle of community paradigms have some advantages over entrenched incumbent city governments.  The move to globally networked connections is easier for individuals working in community groups than for governments. This still leaves though a number of questions that will need to be addressed.

Do our existing political organizational structures bring an increased level of complexity for community members who have to navigate them to the same degree as what the report spoke to for businesses? According to the report, a majority of firms have an inherent organizational structure that may be adding to the complexity faced by the organization. If the same is true for our governmental institutions or the political processes supporting those institutions, how is this to be addressed?

Of particular significance, the report says that the challenges of complexity cannot be addressed from a top down approach for businesses, calling for the empowerment of employees. How much more applicable is this then to the empowerment of citizens centered on a common communal task or community principle through a process of direct deliberative democracy?

The report recognizes that the single biggest cause of business complexity is greater expectation by the customer. This also applies to the public sector as people often see themselves as consumers of government service rather than having any meaningful role in its planning or policy determination. This blog takes and encourages an alternative perspective.

So far this blog has had three posts to talk about community paradigms and creating livable cities and it has only touched the surface of these issues. Ok, we are talking about creating communities or more to the point finding ways of changing the paradigms that define our communities. We are talking about what we want our communities to provide us including a proactively healthy place to live and not one that just doesn't kill us too quickly. We also talked about how economics will play a significant role in defining how we bring this about.  All of this means talking about how we change our current form of local community governance.

We alluded to other components of creating new community paradigms though we didn't speak about them explicitly. One is the role of usually non-governmental or quasi-governmental organizations that work to redefine one aspect or another towards creating community paradigms. A number of these are currently listed in the right hand column of this blog under PARTICIPATION, PLANNING & POLICY. These will be replaced over time by the new Pathways to New Community Paradigms Wiki.

These are resources that can be utilized in creating new community paradigms. We have also featured online tools that can be used to create change. One example was Healthy City at www.healthycity.org, another was the Vimeo video which explained How to use Healthy City California. These components work together as these organizations are accessible online and are the ones who created the community based tools that can be used by anyone willing to put in the effort. A number of other online community-based tools are listed on the right hand column of this blog under TECHTOOLS FOR GOVERNANCE.

Another important question is whether these technical solutions are really fostering community inclusion effectively? Businesses are focusing on technological solutions to tackle complexity but for businesses though technology in itself is not seen as one of the major sources of complexity. How this works for community-based governance still needs to be explored more fully. This leaves us with the still pressing question that will be the continuing focus of this blog. In a complex world where and how do we find opportunities to create value as and for our communities?

Collaborating to Create Healthy Cities

This is the third of the first three posts of this new blog. Its mission as stated below the masthead is to help others in defining new community paradigms for themselves. "Paradigms" is one of those words not used much in everyday conversation. Here, the objective is to find means of expanding beyond everyday thinking and discovering new ways of creating our communities. That is going to take some time. It will not be accomplished in a few posts. In this post, we are still digging deeper and finding new avenues for creating new community paradigms.

In the first post, A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics | EIU BUSINESS RESEARCH I wrote about some government staff, consultants, and officials being able to quickly get to "no". It was a caution, not a guiding principle. Local government should be the focal point of inclusion in the process to achieve the best results. Sometimes local government needs help to get away from the "no" to find new solutions, sometimes it needs a kick in the pants. First, though try finding with whom you can work and ways of getting to "yes".

I do not write about any particular city for which I worked directly or had dealings with to avoid any conflicts, but I know from my own experience that if as a government worker you have a knowledgeable, dedicated, independent, and engaged community group which with to work it makes the job all the more meaningful.

I raise this point because, in the last post, Healthy Cities make for Livable Communities we began discussing what a Healthy City is and gave an example of one community-building tool that was not government based but created by an organization dedicated to civil rights. This type of outside influence will remain an important source of the creation of new community paradigms but far more can be done if the local government is on your side. To build a livable city through the use of Healthy Cities type programs is best done with local government playing a major role.

Better yet would be if you as the community members saw yourselves as an active component of the local government and fully understand that this means more than just being the consumers of government but its producers as well. Whatever approach is taken working from the inside or the outside, a guiding principle for making this work as a community is taking a collaborative approach to addressing important issues.

What are the collaborative methods governments can use to incorporate the concepts of Healthy Cities into their planning and decision-making process? This goes beyond the currently prevalent focus of city governments on environmental concerns. It requires recognizing that there is a definite need for action as the statistics on chronic disease become ever more alarming. It argues that both the planning and health professions need to come together in a substantive way to deal with creating healthier, age-friendly communities. This will be a challenge to both our planning systems and the health approach in fundamental ways. The objective of this effort is to pioneer a new interface between health and planning.

In the previous post, we talked about the World Health Organization's (WHO) definition of what is meant by a Healthy City. WHO also has a global healthy cities project.

The Healthy Cities movement promotes comprehensive and systematic policy and planning for health and emphasizes

• the need to address inequality in health and urban poverty
• the needs of vulnerable groups
• participatory governance
• the social, economic, and environmental determinants of health.

This is not about the health sector only. It includes health considerations in economic, regeneration, and urban development efforts.

As stated before, these are factors that all communities can aspire to around the world. What is needed are tools to implement these goals. One tool is a Health Impact Assessment (HIA), which as defined by WHO is a means of assessing the health impacts of policies, plans, and projects in diverse economic sectors using quantitative, qualitative, and participatory techniques.

Health Impact Assessment is similarly defined by the United States CDC Health impact assessment (HIA) is commonly defined as “a combination of procedures, methods, and tools by which a policy, program, or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population” (1999 Gothenburg consensus statement, http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environmental-health/health-impact-assessment).

This definition of HIA is related directly to the WHO definition and demonstrates a global network of cooperation to which communities starting to build their own systems can tap into. Local issues for example transportation can use national studies such as CDC's policy statement on transportation and health.

In the State of Kansas, they used a Community Toolbox, a public service of the University of Kansas, to create HIAs as a way of connecting health impacts to the community from development projects.

Some communities' approach to establishing healthy living in the built environment goes beyond a Health Impact Assessment exercise which means being even more proactive than reactive. Some communities in California are now including Health and Wellness Elements in the General Plans required by California State law.

The city of Richmond, California was one of the first cities in the United States to develop a comprehensive general plan element that addressed the link between public health and community design. A full profile on this effort is available from the Prevention Institute of Oakland, CA and more information can be found at the Healthy Cities blog.

An initial step in the process is to form a community-based Health and Wellness Advisory Committee that helps scope and direct the nature of the element. It is important to conduct several community meetings to ensure the element is responding to the needs and concerns of each individual community.

The experience of many who have done this before demonstrates that these types of programs are more effective when worked through with both professionals and stakeholders who then understand the rationale of the underlying concepts and are better able to apply them.

The City of El Monte, California, with support and coordination with the PLACE Program out of Los Angeles County's Public Health Department, was able to create a thorough approach to achieving a healthy community.

The work does not stop there, though, there is a continuing need to measure and assess. The City of San Francisco has available the Healthy Development Measurement Tool, a tool to guide Health Impact Assessments for development projects. GP RED from Lafayette, Colorado is continuing to develop a "Healthy Communities Surveillance and Management Toolkit (pdf) that can help communities go through a process of convening and engaging the community, staff, and stakeholders to create a warrant for agency action, conduct an inventory and assessment (similar to an HIA but targeted), project outcomes, create an action plan, and again, continue conducting monitorings and evaluations.

These are only some examples out there that community groups interested in creating their own new community paradigms can tap into. Each can be studied more in-depth. While it is obvious that this is not something that one can do alone, it should also be obvious that one does not need to. There are help and resources available out there.  These resources and more are being made available on the Healthy Cities wiki page under Livable Communities of the New Community Paradigms Wiki.

A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics | EIU BUSINESS RESEARCH

In beginning to try to define new paradigms for our communities, we need some idea as to what it is that we are attempting to create.

On the surface that is not that hard. We all want the same basic things at a minimum - to have enough food to eat, to be free from disease, to be able to educate our children. There are other goals that many would add to this list as being as essential, such as ensuring a healthy environment in which to live, access to maternal care and other health providers. Markets that provide for the products we seek without exploiting others or the environment. Then we want to be able to improve our lives beyond that minimum standard.

It seems straight forward enough but what this basically comes down to is trying to create what are being called "livable communities". It is a term that calls for a new word in the English language. It would be the opposite of oxymoron which is two words that don't logically seem to go together like jumbo shrimp. Livable communities seems absurdly obvious and even redundant, of course all communities should be livable, all our communities are livable, we have lived here for decades.  Yet, in many ways our communities are not livable in the fullest sense.

For the professionals in the field this approach may seem naively simplistic, even paternalistic but this blog is not geared toward them. It is targeted toward someone without experience and only minimal knowledge of economic or community development. Someone who is just getting the notion that they could make make a better and more fully livable community and wants to start taking the necessary steps to do so.

To talk about creating livable communities from a grassroots level we need to go further in our definition. One online definition says that livable communities are:

Communities that provide and promote civic engagement and a sense of place through safe, sustainable choices for a variety of elements that include housing, transportation, education, cultural diversity and enrichment and recreation. www.walklive.org/

This definition includes a number of different aspects, housing, transportation, etc. It is not that different from the same list of basic minimum things we all want in life mentioned above. Clearly, creating something such as this is not something anyone can do by themselves. There will be a need for professionals in these fields. There will need to have government officials involved in some capacity as well. Most importantly, there will be a need for other people who are also willing to be educated and to work toward this.

It is the last group that is the most important. Professionals and politicians can sometimes be a hinderance in creating livable communities because it is far easier for them to get to the no as in 'no, we can't afford it' or 'no, we never did it that way'.

As was said, creating a livable community means bringing together a number of elements but all of them have an economic component to them in common. Despite my last statement concerning professionals and the word no, I will be emphasizing the economics component of my economic development background on these pages. In the world we face after the financial mess created in the first part of this century, it will be the economic challenges that will be the most daunting in trying to create livable communities.

This particular post examines the work done through a partnership between the Economic Intelligence Unit of the Economist Group (publishers of the Economist) and the Philips Company.

It provides a good survey of the challenges and means of overcoming those challenges when taking on this endeavor. Although it is from Europe with an English slant in accents (also explaining the different spellings) it still contains valuable lessons. There are two reports with links provided below that are rich in information. The first deals with what people want from livable communities, the second, titled "Liveanomics" explores more closely the economic aspects that need to be considered. I will be breaking this issues down into smaller components in the future.

Both reports offer key findings, case study and multimedia for further study. I am also making links to the videos and other resources provided under the Liveanomics report readily available at a new wiki appropriately named New Community Paradigms Wiki under Livable Communities at the "Liveanomics" EIU Livable Cities Studies wiki page.

Making cities work: Delivering results in a downturn A panel discussion at the Economist Conferences event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", which was held in London in January 2011.

Ideas to revolutionise urban living A panel discussion featuring Sir Jeremy Beecham, Former Chairman, LGA and Labour Member, House of Lords; Kate Henderson, chief executive of the Town and Country Planning Association; Rogier van der Heide, chief design officer at Philips Lighting; and Nancy Holman, director of planning studies at the London School of Economics.

Eric Pickles: A vision for the future of UK cities The keynote address at the Economist Conferences event,"Creating Tomorrow's Liveable Cities", held in London in January 2011, by Eric Pickles, Britain's Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

Jan Gehl: Cities for people (wiki page) The closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", presented by Professor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects, Copenhagen.

This video provides a good deal of information on the benefits bicycling and walking have on a livable community when integrated into the community landscape.

Urban liveability and economic growth Iain Scott, editor of the report, discusses the findings of the Economist Intelligence Unit's research with Mark Kleinman, assistant director of economic and business policy and Greater London Authority. The discussion took place at an Economist Conferences event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", in London in January 2011.

Ambiguous Collaboration

Still working on republishing the pre-posts to Pathways to New Community Paradigms which were lost.

Part of the motivation to start to blog again is to explore means of collaboration in public arenas, not only within specific focused public arenas but also across different public arenas and more importantly incorporating a policy of expanded inclusiveness while maintaining project or program effectiveness.

This interest arose from online discussions regarding John Kotter, change management guru and author of Leading Change, idea that 70% of change initiatives in organizations and businesses fail.

A 30% success rate sounds reasonable to me considering all the pieces that need to come together in a dynamic fashion to make any large scale endeavor a success. I am of the view that most transformations, e.g. evolution, our own aging, are taken for granted because we have seen them before. How an apple seed become an apple tree or a caterpillar becomes a butterfly would not seem possible otherwise, especially if we were made responsible for the task. When you are the caterpillar change might seem not only unlikely, it may also seem dangerous.

Lately I have had this concept bouncing around in my head of "ambiguous collaboration". A quick Googling of the term indicates that combining these two words is usually seen in a negative light, at least when viewing events in hindsight. I believe though that it could be a useful concept in creating collaboration networks. I am thinking along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's Weak Ties and how to make it an intended component of designing what may in reality be an ad hoc organizational system.

Originally I was thinking of separate organizations with different missions but having loose connections to the same potential resources, clientele (though different relations) and information but still having trouble working together on common missions because of internal demands.

The same though could be said of internal components of an organization that has become too silo'ed . Until the collaboration coalesces deep change is unlikely to occur. The relationship network is not only individual to individual requiring trust and expectation of return on investment and commitment from others but also with individuals and the collaborative process itself. There are is also the relationship with the old organization and the new organization - two different things if the change is meaningful. It is the devil you haven't met versus the devil you have been living with for so long.

Starting on another Roadmap to a Life that Matters

Because of a mishap, all my blog posts related to Pathways to New Community Paradigms were lost so I am publishing again.  This was one of the pre-posts in creating Pathways to New Community Paradigms.

[http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/07/a_roadmap_to_a_life_that.html]
In preparation to final start blogging again, this morning was spent continuing to reformat this blog and redefine its purpose, including giving it a new URL and feed. Now I have to wait for the feed to be "registered" on the web so it can be found by some of the other online tools that I use.

This afternoon will be spent watching the Harry Potter Deathly Hollows part 1 on video. This brings a usable segue into a recent article by Umair Haque.

The roadmap you need to follow is deeply, resonantly, profoundly, and irrevocably your own — the one that calls to you in every dreary meeting, every missed birthday, and every misplaced-but-not-quite-forgotten dream. It's the one that leads you to your better self. It says: "Follow my lead. Let's go somewhere that matters — not just somewhere that glitters." A Roadmap to a Life that Matters - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

Once I get the mechanics straightened out, I can start addressing the issues with which this blog has determined to be concerned.