Presenting the past and present to prescribe beneficial prospects
Mind your Ps and Qs (33, part 2)
Be sure to read Part 1 first
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When asked to re-imagine travel and tourism as a super-cluster within our communities – to protect as well as find value (hiding in plain sight), solve intractable problems, identify new opportunities, reveal how our organizations and communities could better serve or be served, and unlock future potential – we cannot help but feel overwhelmed, particularly when dealing with the blur of the “messy middle”. Too often, typified by GIGO, destinations assessments end up being politically motivated. While there are tips on how to navigate through political minefields, Destinations-in-Action will ensure that you ignore false limits so your community-as-a-destination can achieve experiential resonance, truly learn, and orchestrate its way to realizable possibilities.
As a means towards making an impact, becoming Smarter or Intelligent Communities and clusters, Destinations-in-Action demands adherence to truth and reason, preparation and doing, the building of common ground, encouraging involvement, and identifying steering processes, in order to navigate from the past and present to unknown futures.
As a process requiring deep listening, critical thinking and a deep dive into uncertain futures expect to journey through some mental models (e.g. the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). Despite a desire to seek simplicity, you will soon realize that simplicity has to meet complexity, requiring new methods, and a reframing of the language of success revealed through purpose-led missions, and cultural curiosity.
In any community, the breadth and depth of peoples’ concerns and the magic of their aspirations can be overwhelming, as will be the demands of encouraging purpose-led organizational or community-wide transformations – activities that should precede typical (pre-) feasibility studies.
Despite the inevitable disconnects associated with what people are working on, how their work is linked to tourism, or how to close the gaps between vision and value creation, ambition and execution, comes the necessity to develop waves of understanding how tourism’s evolution needs to be contextualized and managed, while aiming to achieve enviable results and outcomes important to entire communities. Fortunately, it sometimes takes disappointment and a crisis to break an impasse.
As will become increasingly evident, what’s being considered consequential is a state-of-affairs that cannot be addressed simply through turnarounds (often associated with achieving efficiencies and enhancing profitability). The significance and speed at which change is happening today calls for transitions and transformations (the hard part) that demand infusions of higher-order purpose into institutional cultures, visions and missions, value propositions, business and revenue models.
While there is an extensive literature available on corporate transformations, that which exists for communities or communities-as-destinations is sparse, to say the least. This is where Smarter Tourism steps in to help you answer key questions: “What matters?” “Where are we going?” “What and how should communities-as-destinations prioritize and take action especially as a means to realize cultural change and refresh tourism’s potential in activating or embellishing their economic, social, cultural, natural and intellectual capital”
As will be made clearer, such demands are likely to require a (radical) re-purposing of tourism, particularly in regard to the need to reframe travel and tourism within the context of community life and citizen futures. Clearly decision-making will need to be assessed and untangled as will the need to re-create real and sustainable value in a changing landscape. With communities on a quest for a values-based approach to business operations, strategy, and performance, you will discover that travel and tourism strategies have to be approached less as a recipe or “a-plan-to-be-executed”, but far more as “a frame-of-mind to be cultivated”.
The more it dawns on us that “what got us here, won’t get us there”, the more it becomes obvious that intense strategic reviews require “longpath” mindsets. As such, there will be an initial requirement to question successes, address grievances and resolve what’s called “plan continuation bias” so that focus can be (re-)directed to “what we could do and should do”…a focus that should align with insight, self-awareness and a better appreciation for living systems.
So long as there is intent to move beyond the “halo effect” and “sacred cows”, success will be forthcoming so long as efforts are made to move from purpose and aspirations to action…a process requiring finding evidence-based gaps, improving how to see and explain what’s occurring (the “art” in Smarter); listening to how our communities actually talk back to us; recognizing what we don’t want to change or is unlikely to change in the next five to ten years; and, then, meeting at the intersection where design meets the future.
As will become clear, these references reveal how important it is to understand how deeply communities-as-destinations are immersed within their respective civic economies and, thereby, give renewed hope that communities-as-destinations can realize and portray travel and tourism as a super-cluster.
In all domains of business today, pressure is being exerted to garner greater “respect for human dignity and pursuit of the common good”. As implied in the vocation of the business leader, an increasing number of businesses, public and private enterprises and institutions (including their corporate boards) are beginning to recognize that they need to earn and demonstrate their social license extending beyond their typical corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, if they are to prosper and operate without impunity.
In many settings, particularly in aboriginal communities and natural environments, this notion already exists – one that identifies positive impacts and broadens and deepens the notion of performance from that which is only or purely economic. All of which begs basic questions. Plus, if getting there from the here-and-now obliges communities to undertake transformations, how do we ensure they will be relevant, and that the feedback will be really profound, carefully evaluated, and understood?
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Divided over five chapters, and containing hundreds of detailed questions that go far beyond what a simplistic SWOT analysis could ever provide, Destinations-in-Action is intended to provide an extremely thorough analysis designed to trigger thoughts, challenge assumptions, and intended to help identify and prescribe beneficial prospects for enviable transformations based on “principled purpose”, a “passion for place”, “pragmatism”, “progress”, and “prosperity”. A resurgence of sunny days.
Such a demanding task, however, will require DMOs, community and regional officials, and CEOs of leading organizations to come together and apply some of the best behavioral practices for leading transformational change.
As Ayn Rand once said, “The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me.”
Sun shower, it’s a sign of your power.