From possibilities and potential to plans, projects and pivots
Mind your Ps and Qs (20)
An introductory task:
Select one of your bucket-list destinations.
How did it achieve its status and renown?
In your mind, what effort, insights, and effort have gone into making and ensuring it remains distinctive and memorable?
Now think of a community (regardless of size and location) with which you are familiar. What holds the community together?
What permits or allows it to become a locally renowned and livable destination? A place that does or can generate enthusiasm for truly being a community that encourages visitation, enables viable entrepreneurial opportunities, and enhances peoples’ overall well-being…though not necessarily compatible with what`s known as community-based tourism.
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Lately I`ve been intrigued with aspirational communities and how tourism and its management help fulfill the promise. Or, as the case might be, how they vacillate between aspirations that are self-serving (performance and profit-centric) and those that are self-transcendent (in service to, and demonstrating concern for, the well-being of others and places – visitors, guests, customers, residents and hosts of our communities).
Whether as individuals, businesses or organizations, we all dream, have hopes, ambitions, and goals to achieve. But, to what degree are they similar?
Dreams inevitably involve contradictions, particularly when we want this or that but cannot have both.
Goals, on the other hand, provide a sense of purpose and direction, but they tend to be centered on the short-term or near future,
In comparison, aspirations that precede goals are more long-term, future-focused, and general. As times and conditions evolve, and jolts to the survival of organizations and communities occur, aspirations (a search for the future e.g. Emergent City) inevitably get revised or altered.
With adjustments made (often times by identifying the adjacent possible), it’s essential to determine if, how, and when they can be enabled within what’s been called, ‘deliberately developmental growth cultures’ as well as the steps to gaining insight that ensure transformational success.
In regard to building communities-as-destinations, we know goals have to be set, but we should be asking whether government agencies/community and industry associations/DMOs have linked them to well-articulated and realizable aspirations – the Paris Olympics, for example?
And, especially in regard to the development of civic infrastructure and the creation of Community Shared Value, whether the aspirations and goals are self-transcendent rather than merely being self-serving?
Now, with reference back to the community you have been considering, and the agencies that represent it, determine whether and how they…
· Have what it takes to be community builders?
· Have the rocket fuel that blasts people and organizations into action?
· Aspire to civic well-being?
· Engender a sense of community pride?
· Provide leadership and inspiration?
· Promote a sense of shared responsibility to and among residents?
In essence, these are the queries that my e-book Astonish! Smarter Tourism by design (free for all who choose to be Prime Mover or Partner subscribers) hopes to answer. As explained, the processes associated with creating compelling communities, inspired hospitality, comprehensive sustainability, shared value and collaborative innovation are value-creating journeys in which insightful and aspirational ascent can be steep.
Whether pursued by individual enterprises, government agencies or DMOs, the challenge is to achieve status and renown for communities-as-destinations by eradicating misery and mediocrity. After all, creating net positive value only occurs when the typical stall point of least astonishment is shunned and overcome.
Breakthroughs only occur when full-scale attempts are made to counter complacency and a myriad of other forces that negate, compromise or ignore the 30+ elements of value that hosts and guests deem important. Value that becomes more meaningful for all when it delights and reaches the upper echelons of the life-affirming value hierarchy.
As we know from our own personal experiences, however, the effort required to reach `magnificence` can be a demanding climb with complications along the way as value migrates or can inadvertently or deliberately be negated, compromised, or ignored. Though this need not be the case if we set our sights on acting in future forward ways.
It’s easy to say, but if we are to build more vibrant and flourishing communities, certainly we must do so by getting strategic about sustainability and shared value. But this will only happen when we as leaders and managers are enabled to reinvent our organizations, as disruptions and megatrends reshape our businesses and communities.
How? By being attentive to five leadership differentiators that have proven to be effective for others. The ability to (1) make sense of the world, (2) set a radical ambition, (3) achieve promised outcomes, (4) act as a catalyst and (5) power the engines.
To get started on this aspirational ascent towards magnificence we must recognize that it starts with me… It better be me.
¨Magnificence that is not an alternative to results but rather the practice of managerial rigor, curiosity and innovation applied towards success with attentiveness and commitment to what is also good and right. It is the call to create worth, with its attendant risks, challenges, skills and rewards, while also respecting the criteria of worthiness, with its moral, human and aesthetic dimensions¨. (Magnificence at Work, John Dalla Costa)
While the pursuit of magnificence is largely aspirational, numerous options or adjacent possibilities need to be evaluated. It helps when we, as decision makers, deliberate on and choose only those aspirations and possibilities that are `good and right`…aspirations that `create worth while respecting the criteria of worthiness`.
As a decision-making process that’s guided by the desired purpose of tourism (determined by the community or destination in question); the principles to be followed and upheld; and the promises that are made and have to be kept by stakeholders in the community; leaders and managers will have to become far more astute in how they lead, manage and market, as well as design and develop their communities-as-destinations.
Clearly we must be better attuned to whether touristic activities are straining resources, causing disruptions or anti-growth fervor, thereby resulting in the need to prioritize ecosystem management; deliver needed innovation with speed and urgency; learn how to make decisions based on difficult choices (particularly when faced with conflicting but equally defensible courses of action); and improve the allocation of capital.
Whereas it can be hard for individual organizations to build corporate cultures that work, the problems associated with building vibrant and virtuous community-as-destination cultures can be even more complex:
· Communities that excel at communicating their aspirations, purpose, principles and values.
· Communities that help their destination cultures take root, develop and influence the behavior of all through fostering civic identity.
· Communities that strengthen the power of their destination networks by focusing on generosity that’s self-transcendent.
· Communities that align on mutual aspirations for tourism across all industry sectors.
· Communities that create harmonious strategies and plans that create value for all and increase the odds of transformational success.
With aspirations clarified and possibilities fine-tuned, tourism’s potential can be tested against its economic viability and worthiness, with all its moral, human and aesthetic dimensions. At this stage plans can be determined…plans that should embrace shifting boundaries and realities and be able to thrive on scarcity and constraints. After all, plans are always subject to alteration or pivots as circumstances change.
Most tourism plans that I have reviewed seek to articulate preferable or more desirable futures 5 to 10 years out but rarely is there any follow-up or examination of what happens subsequently, even as to the effectiveness of the plans themselves. Effectiveness that includes the involvement of, and collaboration with, stakeholders; the completeness and unity of the proposed policy directions and actions; the adaptability of policies and recommended actions to contextual and evolving crises, events and trends; and the degree to which the plans have been implemented; and the rationale for not doing so.
A more serious problem with most plans is that too many leaders and managers don`t appreciate the difference between plans and strategies, especially in regard to specifying particular outcomes, such as climate adaptation, that communities-as-destinations hope to achieve. Outcomes that require adaptations to evolving circumstances; shifts in priorities; and more complete appreciation for what residents, business enterprises, DMOs and governments expect tourism activities to deliver, particularly in reference to a community`s aspirations.
Because of all the things beyond our control, pivots are almost certainly necessary (a topic that deserves coverage at a later point). They don’t signal failure, but represent strategic moves designed to ‘break the chain’ and capitalize on new opportunities.
…Opportunities that require on-going adjustments to plans based on rich data about customers, citizens, trends, and crises; determination as to what`s working and what isn`t, goals not realized, the identification of better options and possibilities and the development and assessment of hypotheses that will identify the potential for directing communities-as-destinations to nurture and navigate their aspirations and destinies toward magnificence.
Magnificence that exists far beyond the Yellow Brick Road.