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.