I spent the first two hours of my morning today in St. Paul at an event sponsored by the Citizens League. The event was a planning meeting for the Citizens League’s Regional Policy Conference, which is scheduled for September 23 in Chaska.
The event today wasn’t billed as a focus group, but that’s sort of how it functioned. There were about twenty people there plus four or five staff members from the Citizens League. The participants included County Commissioners, City Council Members, leaders from non-profit organizations, State employees, a State representative, Chamber of Commerce representatives, leaders from professional organizations representing education & transportation, and…one city manager.
The intended outcome of the meeting was listed clearly on our meeting agenda: Identify critical issues and opportunities to address at the September 23 Regional Policy Conference. Our discussion was wrapped around three discussion questions:
1. Are we (i.e. – the Twin Cities region) stuck? (Stuck as in stalled, nothing happening, stuck in a rut.)
2. De we need a new definition of “leadership?” (We didn’t talk much about this one.)
3. Are the problems we face as a region caused by design flaws in our public systems or flaws in the way we are executing our performance within those systems. (The easy answer to this one is, of course, “a little bit of both”, but the staff would not let people crawl into that safe answer.)
We had a very interesting and enlightening discussion, because we did not have to solve anything today. We just had to identify issues and opportunities. We didn’t even have to justify why we identified some and not others. The staff will take everything they heard today, integrate it with the same sort of stuff they heard from a previous group and with the same sort of stuff (probably) they’ll hear from a subsequent group, and then produce a proposed agenda for their September 23 conference.
Then, they’ll shoot that agenda out to the participants in the planning groups and we’ll all get a chance to give some more feedback. I suppose, and I hope for the sake of the staff, that that’ll be about it for the planning process. By the time they get to that final stage they’re pretty much going to be at the “fish or cut bait” point. Go with what you got and plan, plan, plan away.
I have not participated in a Citizens League event before today. It was fun. I hope I get to do it again someday.
