Pragmatism
Mind your Ps and Qs - Postscript to Quintessential Queries
As a follow-up to my discussion on the Tourism Area Life Cycle and the queries it raises, we cannot help but wonder and worry about our communities as flourishing destinations:
· The evolving if not conflicting aspirations, interests and desires of our residents, hosts and guests that seem now caught up in the complexity of the moral maze of foreign tourism (BBC program – start at 2.15 minute mark).
· Questionable improvement to everyone’s well-being and the quality-of-life in our communities and need to achieve a greater degree of shared prosperity from tourism.
· The nature of partnerships, the interrelationships and interactions (or inaction) among all stakeholders…their concerns, actions, defiance or compliance.
· The myths of scaling or growing new businesses during seasonal highs and lows.
· Startups competing for investors, attention, visitors, and labor, with incumbents that are better known and well-established.
· How effectively we respond to disruption, trends, emerging technologies, and all the internal and external triggers that spur or spurn product-market cycles, the ebbs and flows of change, and choice of different (non-linear) paths and strategies, whether for the good or the bad.
· Our desire and ability to seek opportunities through creating and developing more meaningful, better designed, innovative and resonant products, services or experiences.
· Development of, and enhancements to, our travel and tourism-related infrastructures.
· Efforts to advance our distinctive capacities and capabilities to grow and Astonish!
· Travel and tourism that purposefully integrates with, and complements rather than complicates, community life.
· Operating within constraints, wondering how to take governance and our responsibilities far more seriously, especially long-term sustainability.
· Conceiving and crafting more intimate, image and identity-focused marketing and branding activities that appeal to and attract ideally suited visitors.
· Avoiding setbacks through pragmatic approaches to reorientation, restructuring, revisions, and revival…all dependent on how industry leaders undertake transformation.
· How to improve our credibility and reputation as destinations and the ideals of inclusivity and togetherness, excellence and respect, for example through equitable development principles.
· Developing futurist mindsets and managing the pressures for more prosperous and profitable futures for our visitor-serving enterprises and community involving, value-creating partners…learning to lead from the inside out.
Each of these and related issues require intense question storming and awareness. As communities-as-destinations seek to improve how they have and should progress during different periods of growth and development, it’s essential that they thoroughly study how well they are evolving as destinations and whether they are prepared for uncertain futures that might inhibit growth or threaten their stability.
“To understand the present, we must clearly see the past.”
Such an undertaking can be accomplished through quintessential queries or in-depth assessments (detailed in my book, Astonish! Smarter Tourism by design). Assessments that aren’t luxuries but necessities helping improve decision-making, especially if industry leaders and managers hope to avoid and plan for likely disruptions and seek future-forward ambitions built on a spirit of do-ability and positivity…a call to wake up, return, balance, align.
In doing so, a more pragmatic (can do) approach to operationalizing the Tourism Area Life Cycle is essential…using it as a guide to determine why what, when and where, especially what matters most. Pragmatism defined as the view of practical considerations and consequences that should guide decisions without compromising principles, the pursuit of purpose and pulchritude of place, based on rational, reasonable and realizable goals. Pragmatism that challenges the notion that “customers (visitors) are always tight” especially when questions of truth - moral or factual - are involved.
Pragmatic leaders cautious about adhering strictly to theoretical frameworks or dogmatic ideologies; adapting to change; willing to learn new skills and methods; flexible in understanding the needs of others; working well in teams; delegating responsibilities; communicating effectively; motivating and inspiring confidence while being open to criticism.
In navigating the realities of dynamic marketplaces, pragmatic leaders have co choice but to experiment, learn from experience, and adapt strategies based on real-world feedback; balance visionary thinking with the practical realities of the marketplace especially through the triple play associated with creativity, analytics and purpose; and pursuit of innovation with realistic assessments as to feasibility and impact.
But that isn`t the half of it. In considering how communities-as-destinations are managed or governed, it`s evident that the evolution of TALC is determined in large part through a combination of independent decision-makers (operators of private and public enterprises in coopetition), policy makers, interdependent network or cluster effects, and involvement from a wide range of other stakeholder or community actors at home or abroad.
As Philippe Lorino in his book, Pragmatism and Organization Studies, notes:
Firstly, “the pragmatist approach to management favors a vision of organizations centered on collective activity rather than rational decision-making based on information processing. In this perspective, activity is collective and should be principally managed by actors themselves, working as a concerned community. The pragmatist approach radically challenges rationalist dualisms, that separate thought and action, permanence and change, value and fact.”
Secondly, “the pragmatist approach to governance is pluralist, dialogical and emergent. It questions the "government of experts", a conception according to which the truth of situations would be accessible to knowledgeable and overlooking actors (leaders, managers, controllers), capable of founding standards of action on rational representations. Pragmatism favors a vision of stakeholders’ governance -and of democratic government at the political level- whose key words are pluralism, dialogue and emergence.”
Thirdly, “the pragmatist approach views management techniques and instruments (accounting, finance, indicators, budgets and plans, human resources tools...) as signs, meaning-making semiotic mediations, rather than mimetic representations of reality. Pragmatism rejects the classical rationalist vision of instruments as exact (Taylorism) or partially but sufficiently exact (cognitivism) representations of action and thought, information processing procedures that would reproduce reality and specify action.”
From travel and tourism points of view, such insights reinforce the need for mixed methods and collaboration to achieve better research outcomes. Pragmaticism considered as an essential problem solving philosophy, leading Lorino to conclude: “We need to consider situated action as a central object of study, taking seriously the disruptive power of situations and the complexity of collective meaning-making.”
Given these momentous times, the call for a higher degree of wisdom couldn’t be more profound. Consider the stressors, for example, facing startups, entrepreneurs, and SMEs. Consider the importance of understanding tourism’s workforce and the implications for them as destinations move through their TALC. Surely, everyone could do with more assistance from the worlds of education (e.g. ICHRIE), government, finance, marketing and NGOs, with DMOs facilitating their initiation into innovative destination clusters and networks.
If the worries and concerns of all participants in these clusters and networks are to be addressed and resolved, further studies and operationalization of Tourism Area Life Cycles demand a pragmatic turn coupled with application of stoic principles.
If communities-as-destinations expect to progress, they will have to determine where their superpower resides. A superpower that could lead to helping tourism to become an astute value-laden supercluster that collaboratively can re-define the shape of their TALC S-curve particularly by becoming super-communicators and super decision-makers