An agent of change?

Had a fun day today in a future-thinking, strategic planning exercise held in a beautiful space with clerestory windows and internal glass half-walls that flooded a totally internal 2nd story conference room with glorious sunlight!

The day was an open, flexible, unstructured approach with points of thoughtful discussion, reinforcement and confirmation of previous planning, and threads & new strands worth following and exploring...

Some concepts that resonated with me and were a nice addition to my consciousness were:

1) When building for the future there are 2 different ( and sometimes opposing!) spaces you need to stay/play in...

• the current operational space (the day-to-day bricks and mortar place of keeping the daily operations functional and running)
• the visionary space of where you want to get to... (what should it look like in 5 years)

2) You will never achieve the changes to move the vision into the operational reality if you don't dream the vision FIRST..

3) You already HAVE the resources today to bring that vision to life... there is no magical pot of money, no staffing saviour.... it is a matter of having a vision with enough attractiveness the there is the broad buy-in to see it come to fruition... the emerging group-mindset to follow down the road toward achieving a vision everyone has personalized and bought into...

The current resources you have on-hand (with all the current limitations) can be;

• changed
• adapted
• re-purposed

... into the strategies needed to move toward the vision of what should be within the next 3 -5 years.

4) The strategic plan is just the first step... the beginning point. Next come the practical steps to implement, the intuitive leaps of faith to keep the process moving forward, and the willingness to learn the lessons along the way that dictate flexible changes in the vision goals, given changes in reality and advances in technology.

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Words and concepts gleamed from today's think-tank session to add to my mind space?

• CROWD-SOURCING - as in... a real strength of web 2.0 is the ability to use "crowd-sourcing"... the power of tapping into the collective knowledge base of the crowd as a broad demographic source of expertise and information in a J-I-T delivery system!
• LOCKSS - an nifty acronym for "lots of copies keep stuff safe" .. a nice archiving approach! (also the brilliant branding of an international community initiative based at based at Stanford University Libraries that plays in this space)