Principles

Mind your Ps and Qs (7)

Purpose without principles or probity fails all tests for leading with a noble heart.  Unless organizations or communities embody the core values and aspirations of the community, and can identify and clarify the boundaries for what is proper and deserves priority, they will be subjected to ridicule and guilty of purpose-washing and inseminating distrust.  

Instilling principles, however, can be difficult.  Not only does decision-making require the making of trade-offs or compromises, but it’s always insufficient to act in a restrained manner, to simply deliver what’s promised without impropriety.  More pointedly, morality has to be practiced with empathy. If not, moral progress can be annoying, especially when social and normative change aggravate affective friction.

To ensure principles communicate integrity, they must be known.  Communities-as-destinations must determine what matters, as in these community development principles of good practice.  Principles and purpose that speak to a wholeness, a fusion of heart, mind and soul that wrestles with the practicalities and dilemmas of life to achieve the most human, humane, and hopeful of outcomes for all concerned. To this end, leaders and managers must  think through, employ, work and live through well-formulated principles, such as social inclusion, shared prosperity, and organizational health, particularly when faced with making difficult decisions.

Decisions that inevitably reflect the challenges of the day and acknowledge the difficulties managers and leaders in private enterprises face when obliged to create favorable financial or economic returns and assume responsibility solely for investing capital and focusing activities and innovations on those opportunities to secure their success. 

Responsibilities that should, but do not always, proceed with the intent to protect or enhance a community’s identity, sense of place, and distinctiveness, including the well-being of citizens, stakeholders, employees, and natural ecosystems.

Performance-based priorities also apply to public institutions, non-profits and NGOs…their mandates and best intentions can be easily undermined if they fail to avoid starvation cycles; fail to recognize the merits of developing not-for-loss mentalities; and fail to avoid the pathologies often associated with social innovation. 

To this end, activation of ‘principled purpose’ for communities-as-destinations - in their quest to achieve sustainable economic development, for example – requires acknowledging the tension between principles and profits (in its broadest of interpretations), and the need to achieve a balance whereby returns from organizational activities proffer win-win outcomes for all, which in essence supports their social license to operate and earn acceptable profits…a view that seems to be shared by Destinations International’s Community Shared Value that embraces community alignment, as Copenhagen is attempting to do.

When purpose/principles/profits are well integrated and aligned, communities-as-destinations are bound to create wiser and more collaborative connections, new competencies, and the discipline to:

·       Be fastidious but not necessarily obsessive about moving from distrust to trust.

·       Bring diverse groups together in efforts to foster cooperative alliances in order to achieve unanimity, inclusivity, consistency, solidarity, and sustainability.

·       Encourage and invest in people’s moral imaginations and relational development.

·       Create community shared value, for example, through community partnerships, services agreements and reciprocity.

·       Ensure that a destination’s purpose and strategies will adhere and be implemented.

·       Transform the transactional into being sincerely transformational, even transcendent.

·       Prioritize equitable development principles.

·       Create new value through innovations well-infused with values.

·       Focus marketing on fulfilling social responsibilities, not just its economic ones.

·       Emphasize human rights, not simply shareholder and stakeholder rights; and,

·       Protect and regenerate a community’s economic, social, cultural, and natural eco-systems.