It is, perhaps, a good thing that despite my great interest in it, that I am not actually a planner. The reason being that I have a great deal of impatience with off-topic comments and vague wandering unfocused discussions.
Alan Mallach, the SDAT team leader, seemed to be doing quite fine at pulling useful themes out of the conversations at the charette today, and remarked unperturbedly when I mentioned the people who couldn't stick to a request to discuss strengths of the city that most people came to something like this with something particular to say and they were going to say it whether it matched the question or not.
He is, I'm sure, right, and there is value in using such conversations to get the gestalt and tease out what's on the top of people's minds.
But I'll admit that as a participant, I was hoping for conversations that were a bit more focused: specific questions to answer, visioning exercises, brainstorming sessions about feasible solutions, group prioritizing efforts, team members offering examples on the fly of how people's concerns are dealt with in other cities for people to react to (this did happen some). I would have liked to have more interaction and even to have been pushed
I very much respect the power and creativity of the public to step up and participate in crafting its own solutions, but sometimes we all need to be shaken off our own little hobby horses and work through a structure to make that happen. At least in my experience with strategic planning processes and such, more structure leads to more useful results.
I assume that part of why this didn't happen is they didn't want to limit the direction of conversation or range of topics, and I appreciate that. Perhaps I am asking too much.
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