Permanence

Post-it notes on a whiteboard.  Can there be anything less permanent?  Bubbles.  Clouds.  Pizza delivered to teenage boys.  Confidence in a Bears quarterback.  We did use permanent ink rather than pencil on the post-it notes.  So that’s a start.   

The nine pages of notes from the Strategic Planning session on December 20 are morphing their way toward a follow-up session on January 10.  Staff’s job was to consider three big picture questions and bring prospective answers to Mayor Gluba and the City Council for consideration.  How can the city be more welcoming of investment?  How can the city be more supportive of talent?  How can the city enhance quality of life through innovation and collaboration? 

Pose three such questions to as experienced and fearless a team as Davenport presently fields and you’ll get dozens of answers.  Six dozen, to start.  Six dozen answers to three questions is more than a little unwieldy, so we’ve been working to edit and otherwise stitch together a cohesive, presentable plan.  The large conference room on City Hall’s second floor has thus become the killing floor of incomplete ideas and not quite right language. 

Corri flicks back and forth between Excel formatting and an on-line thesaurus on one screen faster than some of us can keep up with, while Brandon commits the ideas at their essence to post-it notes that get stuck to the whiteboard.   Thank goodness there are two walls in the room that are not in play.  People stop by and ask questions, add comments and smile – goodheartedly – at the cheekiness of the enterprise.  There’s much talk about the duality of the word “city”.  Are we here to focus on the city as the municipal corporation, or the city as the Davenport community? 

Both.

That we’re doing so as the holiday season passes may have an impact.  Is there a better time to look forward, with hope, goodwill and enthusiasm?  In theory, each new day brings a new opportunity to make a new future.  Let’s not waste one with anything less than our best efforts.