Tag: Strategic Doing

Strategic Doing in Yamhill County

Posted on by Robert Parker

By Bob Parker

For the past 18 months, we’ve partnered with the Chehalem Valley Innovation Accelerator (CVIA) to bring the Strategic Doing framework to Yamhill County.  The intent is to train a core group of Strategic Doing practitioners who are then available to help communities and organizations work on pressing issues.  We’ve run many workshops to date: the Yamhill County Arts Alliance, rebooting tourism marketing, homelessness in McMinnville to name a few. The ultimate objective is to develop “The Collaborative” a group of dedicated volunteers that are making things happen in Yamhill County.  The effort is funded through a grant from The Ford Family Foundation.

Last March we trained the Yamhill County Seven with assistance from our colleagues at Purdue University’s Agile Strategies Lab.  The team at Purdue developed the Strategic Doing framework.  We’ve latched onto it and are now an affiliate campus that can provide trainings.

Carr Biggerstaff, Chief Wrangler at CVIA did the lions share of recruiting participants to the training.  We ultimately had 16 participants in our first Strategic Doing practitioner training.  By our measures, the training went quite well.  We’ll follow up in the near future by running the group through practice workshops.  We’re very excited about the direction the collaboration is taking and the promise of the Strategic Doing framework to move people from conversation to action.

 

 

 

 

 

The Trust Agreement

Posted on by Titus Tomlinson

By Titus Tomlinson and Aniko Drlik-Muehleck

History and relationships in rural communities run deep. This creates a rich web of networks and shared wisdom that can support a community through tough times.

The flip-side of longstanding relationships, however, can be paralysis. As humans, we remember the past and in particular, we remember the wrongs of the past. If someone snubs or undermines me, I’m not likely to want to work with them again. I might even go so far as to tell all my friends and colleagues not to work with them again. Word spreads quickly, and factions start to develop; we dig in and don’t cooperate with people or groups we don’t respect.

Sometimes, it’s perfectly legitimate to cut off relationships. You don’t, for example, want to keep working with someone who is stealing from you. In the context of community development, however, holding grudges does not pay off. If you’re serious about getting things done in your community, you can’t let the past get in your way.

Here at the Community Service Center, we’ve been experimenting with the Strategic Doing framework as a way to move community conversations beyond the usual sticking points of tense relationships and power struggles. It is never easy to change the direction and mood of a community conversation, but here’s something we’ve tried that you might be interested in bringing to your own community work: The Trust Agreement.

The Trust Agreement is simple, but powerful:

We believe in behaving in ways that build trust and mutual respect. That means:

  • Leave your ego at the door.
  • The past is the past.
  • Treat others with the respect you hope to receive in return.
  • We are a coalition of the willing…
  • …ALWAYS focus on the positive. We’re here to talk about what we CAN do, not what we can’t.

When you’re coming in to a particularly difficult meeting where you know egos and historical grudges might be at play, consider beginning your discussion by laying out these concepts. Then courteously yet firmly let meeting participants know that if they can’t embrace the Trust Agreement, this meeting probably isn’t for them.