2016
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mining the Future was made possible because of the coming together of the following essential elements:
- A far better than average client: in this case the Mayor Ron Casey
- A better than average team: aproject manager who knows the work and the town, is known and trusted and who has good intuition, the sense to trust it and the capacity to act on it, working with several team members who bring diverse gifts, including some reflective capacity.
- Team members to be thanked included Carol Stark, Ruben Nelson, Arden Brummel, Bart Robinson and Julia Lynx.
- Time for the team to be together: who get to know each other, build confidence and surface and align unspoken assumptions and differences of views. This group also needs to be flexible and able toimprovise as the project goes along.
PROLOGUE
THE VIEW FROM HERE
Sitting at my desk in Canmore I wonder about the future of the community in which I have lived for more than 30 years. Feelings of community discontent which emerged in the early 2000’s have emerged again. The cause this time revolves around uncertainty and a feeling of the community today that does not have a say in its own destiny. It is as if Mining the Future had never happened. Eleven years ago the community created a vision for Canmore, Mining the Future and now wonder to what extent (if any) the process that helped create the vision or its legacy still influences activities today.
Since the creation of the Vision, two major challenges have faced the town:
- how to remain viable economically during a downturn (felt as a “softening” of house prices and a bankruptcy for one of the developers); and
- how to sustain the intentions of the vision, given these changes. Indeed for the first five years after Mining the Future came into being, many of the plans for implementation were carried out, however its impact has receded.
Immediately following the creation of the Vision in 2006, the Mayor and others in the Town’s Administration upheld the vision’s intentions. The consequences of a major developer’s bankruptcy gave more time to attend to matters other than land use and building quotas. This perhaps helped to raise and meet the expectations and capacity of the citizenry of Canmore to participate in more robust engagement.
Immediate implementation of Mining the Future included the School District’s future strategy “Inspiring Hearts and Minds” (an idea adopted with a reworked name by the Provincial government), the Town’s introduction of the Natural Step as a means for business to participate in an integrated conversation about their operations, the building of additional paths and trails to connect the far flung parts of the town and more information has been forthcoming from the Town to its citizens.
Over time, things have changed and the consistent implementation of the principles underlying Mining the Future has been interrupted. Change in Town’s government and its sense of the pressing need to rebuild the economic base has created an alternative set of conditions. This has manifested itself in a more perfunctory sense of engagement with the citizenry on many issues, the re-creation of a gulf between weekenders and full time residents, and the relatively high cost of and high price of housing for staff and middle income families. Implementation has changed especially in the engagement of the community’s citizenry, focus on economic development, the management of issues such as wildlife corridors the pressure by the newly solvent developers on the planning process and the role of Council in decision making of overall planning of the community.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue2
Summary – Creating a Vision4
The Context6
Conceptual Framework9
I Wouldn’t Start From Here . . .11
Mining the Future Project - Introduction12
Project Design Principles13
Project Narrative19
Project Description22
Critique of the Project – outcomes and process27
Analysis and Conclusions31
References37
Appendix 1: The Vision for Canmore38
SUMMARY
CREATING A VISION FOR CANMORE
It happens to us all. We peer out into the future, trying to make wise decisions, only to find ourselves staring into the teeth of ferocious uncertainties. If only everything didn't depend on, everything else! How do we decide what kind of career to pursue when it's not clear what industries will exist in 10 or 15 years? How do we plan our children’s’ education when we don't know what sort of society they'll live in? How do we decide if Canmore is the place for us to live and raise our families when we don’t know what sort of community it is going to be? As we face each of these problems, we confront a deeper dilemma: how do we strike a balance between prediction – trying to see past the uncertainties in an era of constant change - and paralysis - letting the uncertainties freeze us into inactivity?
The answer, in part, lies in having a strong vision of what we want our lives to be and of the communities we want to live in. A good vision, based on an assessment of what is driving the changes we see in town, wraps up our economic, social, and environmental aspirations in a collectively-defined package that allows us to see the gaps between what we want and what we have. While it’s true that being part of a globalized, urbanized society means dealing with circumstances over which we have little control, it is equally true we can make local decisions, develop local tools, and take local actions that will have a huge influence on the sort of community Canmore will become. In 2005, Canmore’s visioning process, entitled Mining the Future, provided the opportunity for all residents to work together to develop a direction for the future – a direction to provide the basis for Municipal decision-making for years to come.
A vision is a rich, clear and inspiring picture of the state of some aspect of the world – one’s self, family, company, town or country – at a time in the future. It expresses our present imagination of what the future could be for us.Well-formed people ask “In what conditions might we find ourselves in the future – conditions that our vision of the future must take into account, overcome and capitalize on?”A vision, therefore, is neither a wish list nor someone else’s responsibility to bring into being. Visions require that we put ourselves irrevocably in the picture; that we consciously acknowledge that we must be deeply involved in bringing the vision to life. We must not merely hold a vision; we must live it.
THE CONTEXT
Today, problems cannot be reduced to manageable sizes because we are actually dealing with systems of problems(Ackoff, 1999), the complexity of which, if we truly grasped it, would be far too overwhelming and daunting. This though is the space of leading, where actions must be taken in spite of being in awe of the enormous complexity. Today's challenge for leaders is on re-imagining (re-mapping and/or re-narrating) complex problems and issues and on re-envisioning how to approach them. The demand placed on leaders is to make sense of complex and ambiguous situations so that action can be taken even in circumstances of extreme uncertainty - this is the primary challenge for today's leaders...and the challenge facing those of us in leader development! This challenge requires something new, a capacity to move into the unknown, to find new ways to work with emergence, to develop practices that invent and innovate. The challenge then for leaders is to learn to develop new narratives and ways to use them with sufficient truth, accuracy and interpretive imagination to create the basis for effective action.
A dozen years ago, the Town of Canmore in Alberta, Canada faced a major league problem. It needed to develop a new Municipal Development Plan that would accommodate the needs and desires of a population that was dealing with a host of troublesome challenges. In brief, a small mountain community in a narrow mountain valley was trying to oblige multiple demands for increased urban development, tourism, recreational space and room for wildlife. Economic diversification, affordable housing, the “dark neighbourhoods” associated with a growing “semi-permanent” population, and week-end congestion were hot buttons in bars and on street corners. Each issue had its own noisy group of champions, and while the future of the community seemed uncertain, it definitely was shaping up to be conflict-ridden.
Canmore needed the capacity to self-organize in diverse, coordinated, successful and sensible ways locally on the ground. Society also needs the capacity to generate wise coherence in the form of whole-community, whole-society, and whole-world policies, programs, agreements and resource allocation.
Factors affecting Uncertainty
Uncertainty can appear in many forms: about the current situation, about the nature of the problem, about the reasons for events, about who to help change things, about what to change to, and how to bring about change. While there is no single idea or action that can ensure certainty there are some ways to increase the chances of success. The first is being sure you understand the full context of the issue.
Human systems are founded on processes or beliefs that either actively or passively reinforces behaviours. Active agencies include governments, religious organizations, groups, corporations, or clubs that create a set of rules of behaviour that are reinforced thru laws, enforcement agencies such as police or other enforcement agencies. Passive agencies are deeper in the society and may be historical custom, practices, or unconscious -‘the way we do things”
Issues are viewed as being components of larger systems and to contain components that operate as a system.This work requires attention to context, to the reading of the larger contextual dynamics: the historical conditions, the current drivers and the future trends and possibilities. Context work provides perspective, difference and a means to ‘situate’ the problem or issue at hand. This work requires a systemic sensibility to conceptualize the issue or problem at hand in all its richness and ambiguity and to seek simplicity not by reducing it to a list of items to do but by seeking and identifying the underlying dynamics that account for the problem at hand. A systems view provides a platform for a more complete understanding of how any action taken can have anticipated as well as unanticipated results.
This work requires:
- Holding ambiguity while still acting. A willingness and fortitude to experiment, to test and to learn, all in order to know. Often the larger, messier issues we are dealing with have little precedent in our histories and even if similar issues are faced by others in the world, their contexts are often quite different so the only course is to become our own experts on our issues.
- A self-reflective stance. This is the ability and willingness to reflect on our own thinking and to critique it just as rigorously and completely as if we would another’s. The challenge is to remove ourselves from our own thinking enough to reduce our blind-spots, reveal and challenge our assumptions and open ourselves to new ideas and perspectives; and
- Patience. A willingness to commit to the long view and to crafting with care and thoughtfulness the actions taken to resolve or dissolve the problem or issue. Fortunately methods are available to help with these complex, sticky, messy problems. There are also those with the capacity, ability, skills and confidence to undertake the role of helping and guiding groups of people as they tackle these remarkably complex issues. What is essential on the part of those responsible for making decision and taking action is the will to engage and the commitment to the long view; and
- As broad a variety of participants as possible. A process open to exploration will help to minimize uncertainty. By not limiting the scope prematurely allows a greater understanding of the nature of the issue thereby creating a broader understanding of the situation before focussing on solutions.
While these principles will deepen the shared understanding and expose areas to delve into deeper possibly including a wider set of participants they cannot eliminate uncertainty. However the community that is created through discussion and review will build a shared understanding.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Governments, corporations, clubs, religions are held in place by a set of practices, rules, and behaviours that may be explicitly stated or commonly understood. Explicit elements include charters, legislation, constitutions, or mandates. Explicit enforcement agencies include police, military forces, courts and prisons. Implicit elements may be beliefs, cultural customs, and shared values. Implicit enforcement is through peer pressure and a sense of ‘how we do things’. Often people are unaware of the forces holding their society together.
A further source of diagnostic information about systems is to identify unintended consequences. This includes unexpected distribution of services or outcomes or a degradation of outcomes over time. Generally unintended results indicate a significant deviation from the stated objectives.
Strategy is a much-used term to denote any intervention in the outcomes of a system. For the purposes of this discussion strategy is defined as a chosen course of action to achieve the desired results. There are basically three options that can be used individually or in combinations. They are:
- Make a radical break from the status quo;
- Occupy the empty spaces in the current strategy; or
- Align with other strategies that are moving in the desired direction but may not want allies.
The concepts of transformation address how people create organizations and shared models of understanding. They incorporate analysis of currents status, gaps and unintended consequences. From within, a system can be seen as all encompassing, with no sense of the boundaries either in domain or time. Often well-intentioned interventions fail to achieve their goals or result in apparently surprising results. Too often too little effort is spent understanding the full range of influencers and forces that drive a system.
Understanding and applying the range of factors influencing how things operate and failing to examine the full range of consequences from both the system in operation and attempted interventions invariably results in failure. By building shared awareness of the system and its history action can be designed to build on knowledge and avoid the pitfalls previous interventions stumbled over.
Crafting lens to work in transformation
This framework provides a model to understand systems, increase consciousness of factors driving the status quo, diagnose possible routes to alter the outcomes, and create comprehensive strategies to effect meaningful change.
I WOULDN’T START FROM HERE - - - -
There are a number of stories (particularly of Irish origin), which use the punch line “I wouldn’t start from here”. While often used in a humorous context it can also be used in the choosing a project statement or problem and therefore the subsequent action plan. Often we don’t have a choice when selecting a starting point for a new venture but we do have discretion on exploring the lay of the land and determining an appropriate starting strategy.
With initiatives involving a diverse group of people seeking meaningful change it is critical to invest some time and effort assessing the issue and its related components. By discussing and understanding the diverse interests, values, and meanings we can begin to understand the complexity of the issue. Peeling back the layers allows for a more complete understanding of the problems and ultimately allows for more complete consideration of alternative strategies. Or more simply put, choosing a better place to start.
There are two types of influencers to explore before choosing a starting point. The more apparent level includes those institutions, laws, guidelines, or protocols that participants use to guide their behaviours. These may include formal structures such as enforcement agencies, legislative bodies, corporate boards, or religious organizations. These both define the accepted practice and dictate punishment for those who wander off the directed path. The second level is less obvious. It is defined by those practices that are so ingrained into everyday life that participants may not be conscious either of doing it or that there are alternatives. These are often described as ‘the way we do things”.In either case the influencer plays a role in building the practice or contributing to the outcome under review.
THE MINING THE FUTURE PROJECT INTRODUCTION
Since 1988, the date of the Olympics, the eyes of the world rested on what was a sleepy and former coal mining town and has since been seen an idyllic place to take advantage of the beauty of the Rockies (without having to be in Banff). The influx of new development and residents has brought an ever-increasing diversity of interests and values to the town. As this change was at its height, its dynamics required the community to re-evaluate its sense of identity and sense of place, where it is are going and what it will become. Town leadership determined that a community driven visioning process would generate the ideas, values and needs to form Canmore’s future. By participating in their hundreds in Mining the Future and regardless of politics or philosophy, a common set of values was derived from the Mining the Future project to provide the glue that brings us together. A set of values (connectedness, sustainability, and diversity) emerged from the group conversations ranging from the need for a vibrant commercial base with stable jobs and families, to keeping natural landscapes healthy, to a balance between commerce and conservation and everything in between.