This week we celebrated with our Communities of Excellence (COE) friends from NW Missouri & San Diego. One of our Big Hairy Awesome Goals was met (BHAG). Congress approved COE as the 7th category under the Baldrige Framework.
COE is all about improving our future. (Increasing life expectancy, educational achievements, health & wellness, income & employment, & housing). To plan a future state requires you to agree to work together & agree to a few ground rules on how you will complete your shared work plan. When planning a future state, it is not immediate. If you miss a few meetings, does it matter, I mean the future is some time later, we have deadlines to keep & more immediate things at hand. But, if you don't make it important to focus on the later, 150 years might pass without any significant progress, so it is too important to not be intentional about this.
- YOU KNOW HOW YOU & YOUR WORK FRIENDS SHARE A COMMON LANGUAGE, LAUGH AT THE SAME THINGS WITHOUT FULLY HAVING TO TELL THE STORY IN THAT KNOWING WAY.
- For me, it has been unusual to talk about organizational structures & systems with citizens in my community; it is more typical to have those discussion with other city leaders as we learn from each other & share those things we have in common; we even speak in the same language, it is quicker that way, because we just understand - as colleagues we provide each other mutual support, LESSONS LEARNED, BEST PRACTICES.
- But, our work with COE is a process that is based on bringing together the members of your community to sit & shape systems to produce outcomes mutually desired by the community WITHOUT STRAPPING THEM TO THE CHAIR. The process is teaching us a new shared language, & we find we don't necessarily understand it the same, we are from different backgrounds.
- As we digested the results from our citizen's survey to determine where our work would focus; it was determined that we needed to bring people together to solve the problems FROM DIFFERENT BACKGOUNDS, we wouldn't understand the problem without it & OUR SOLUTIONS WOULDN'T FULLY WORK UNLESS WE UNDERSTOOD THE ISSUE 360 DEGREES
- We found most people agreed to serve even with a vague description of the work that needed to be done. The selected people had common interest & a natural connections to the subject matter, but like me, didn't share their work or their common language outside of their work group. The groups struggled a bit until we added some structure to the group and a teaching moment to illustrate the why. OUR ORIENTATION INCLUDED SOME STATS FROM CENSUS ON EDUCATION, HEALTH, INCOME, & WE USED RUBY PAYNE TO TEACH US THE LANGUAGE OF DIFFERENT INCOME GROUPS. THIS WAS RELATABLE TO ALL OF OUR PEOPLE. NOW, The groups are teaching each other about what works FROM THEIR BACKGROUNDS OR INDUSTRY. It has been slow, but this will be an interesting year, as we are NOW ready to work on the solutions to the problems we have defined.
