by Michael Sable, Assistant City Manager, Brooklyn Park, MN
2 JULY 2013
The Alliance for Innovation is all about pushing the leading edge of innovation. Our community is honored to be a member and a conference partner at the Transforming Local Government (TLG). We receive such great value from our membership and the exposure to new and different ways to approach common problems. The Alliance is important, because, quite frankly, innovation is hard. It’s a challenge to unlearn decades of standard practice. But here’s one innovative example -- we recently asked our community volunteers to help write our job descriptions.
When we first floated the idea of giving up some control we heard gasps of “what”, “how” and “why”? Human Resource professionals everywhere cringed at the thought. But, if it’s the community members we serve, why not give them a larger say in how they’d like to be served? They understand the issues of our community at the street level and know what needs to be done.
So, like any good student of Jim Collins’ latest book, Great by Choice, and under the leadership of City Manager Jamie Verbrugge, we began by firing bullets to test if this concept would work. We started with our Community Engagement Coordinator position description.
Utilizing ToP® (Technology of Participation) Facilitation Methods from the Institute of Cultural Affairs, we invited 16 people (7 community members and 9 staff from across the organization) to answer the question “What are the roles, activities and practices needed for successful community engagement?”
ToP® Facilitation Methods are an important tool in engaging our residents and employees. The aptly named Consensus Workshop is just that -- a structured process in developing group consensus. By tapping rational and intuitive thinking, integrating diverse ideas and generating practical and creative solutions, we were able to get shared ownership and generate excitement for the job. And, by using meeting facilitators with no stake in the outcome we were able to truly explore what success would look like. By the end, we’d identified the framework that would propel our Community Engagement Initiative (CEI) to the next level.
In fact, after our Community Engagement Coordinator was hired, she said she would have never applied for the job had it been written by traditional government staff. It was written in a way that that was reflective of her experience working in the community and utilized language that she actually could comprehend, rather than the typical technical government verbiage.
We’ve successfully tested this model twice more since and are looking to expand it more broadly – cannonballs are coming!
Over the past three years, the City of Brooklyn Park has been actively engaging its residents in building a sense of community. This commitment to engagement has shifted our mind-set in how we interact with the public. We’ve begun to understand and embrace the fact that the people of a community can do more than “the city”. Our former Mayor Steve Lampi helped solidify this shift when he said, “Government has to stop doing things to people and start doing things with people.”
Our community engagement initiative, and all of our innovations we test and pilot, is geared toward rebuilding the foundation of a strong community. A strong community is built on connectedness and the sense that we all share responsibility for making Brooklyn Park a thriving community, inspiring pride, where opportunities exist for all.
Learn more about Brooklyn Park at www.brooklynpark.org.
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Прийняття рішень і фокусована бесіда
Володимир САЛАМАТОВ, Віче №7, 2013
Однією з якостей справжнього лідера є здатність до прийняття рішень. Добре, коли ці рішення відповідають реальності й орієнтовані на тривалу перспективу. Однак, якщо вони цілковито ситуативні або просто зручні, люди опиняються в ситуації «маємо те, що маємо» або «за що боролися, на те й наразилися». Тобто ситуація на краще не змінюється, проблеми не розв’язуються, плани й завдання не виконуються, розвитку не відбувається. Довіра до лідера стрімко зникає. Вочевидь, рішення приймають не тільки визнані суспільством лідери, а й усі люди, часто навіть не усвідомлюючи цього. У разі невдалого прийняття рішень наслідки такі: тупцювання на місці, відсутність змін або навіть розпалювання конфлікту...______________________________________________________________
ТОР У РІЗНИХ СФЕРАХ ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ 1994 - 2012
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