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Winter Institute Recap -
Becoming an Implementation Genius
By
Joyce Shanahan, City Manager,
Ormond Beach
Hans and Annemarie Bleiker conducted a two-day seminar for FCCMA's
Winter Institute on the topic of
Systematic Development of
Informed Consent/Citizen Participation by Objective: A Management
Strategy.
This husband-and-wife
team has dedicated their professional lives to making organizations
with important missions—especially public agencies—better at
accomplishing their missions.
Did you know there is a legitimate cure for political gridlock?
Well, Hans and Annemarie shared with participants
how to become implementation geniuses by providing steps to
building informed consent (not consensus) when dealing with
difficult issues that impact our citizenry. Over the course
of a few days, they taught us how to
get legitimate and important work implemented, regardless of how
controversial the issues related to our projects may be.
We didn’t learn how to do MORE public involvement, but rather
how to do it differently
and effectively.
Of particular helpfulness were 1) Citizen Participation Techniques and
Objectives that showed each CP technique’s strengths and weaknesses
when dealing with specific types of issues and potentially affected
parties and 2) Potentially Affected Interest/Issues Matrix.
We utilized real life examples where these tools were
effective in identifying the parties, the types of public
participation that would be helpful and how to clearly identify all
the issues involved.
As usual, the Winter Institute was considered a
great success by those that attended.
Everyone stated that they came away with something they can
use at their city/county.
Over 75% of survey respondents rated the overall quality of
the Winter Institute as good to excellent; and 81% of survey
respondents rated the value and usefulness of information received
as good to excellent.
A big part of the Winter Institute was the
Prayer Breakfast, originally started by Mike Roberto, Randy Reid,
Ken Parker and Mike Abels.
This year Randy Reid, Alachua County Manager, shared with
us the fascinating topic of sustainability and its moral
imperatives.
Not only was the Winter Institute a great
learning experience, it was also a wonderful time to network with
colleagues and share issues and problems in our communities and get
real life advice on how to best handle them.
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