Tick Tock

Easy is inversely correlated to distance.  Resisting ice-cream.  Making a putt.  Spelling on a whiteboard.  Terminating someone’s employment.  Peace in the Middle East.  On second thought, easy is inversely correlated to the cube of distance.

SAU professor Dan Ebener is facilitating a strategic planning session following up from the December 20 session at Modern Woodmen Park.  “Facilitate” derives from facilis and facile, which is interpreted from Latin and Italian as “easy”.  I’ve never had the comfort to watch it from the back of the room, but I suspect it looks easier from there.  Sitting around the conference table in the Council Chambers, Dan prefaces the three hours of discussion by noting a city’s strategic plan is rather complicated.

It is made easier by the goodwill in the room.  Everyone wants the best for Davenport, and while we’ll dissect words with intensity and discuss divergent philosophies with vigor, no one questions anyone’s commitment to the cause. 

After Dan gets the meeting off to a thoughtful start with a brief reflection on public service, he hands off to me to deliver a powerpoint presentation.  I’m about as much a fan of powerpoint presentations as I am woodticks.  They may serve some broader purpose in the natural selection of corporate communications, but they mostly just suck the blood out of any living, breathing idea.  I try to make them fun, but there is only so much you can do to make an ectoparasite the life of the party.    

For better and worse, the pdf version of the powerpoint as it was wordsmithed at the meeting, is here.  The last page includes the sixteen consensus strategies that are intended to guide the City forward in 2015.  We’ll draft a motion that incorporates the sixteen strategies under the heading of three strategic goals, and put in on the next Council cycle, starting at the January 21 Finance Committee meeting.

Easy is inversely correlated to distance, but the future is never as far away as you think it is.