Government Follows Thatcham's Lead

It's good to see central government catching-up with the Thatcham Vision Project. It has just launched it's very own 'wiki' - click here to take a look at it and here to look at ours which we set-up two months ago. A great idea, obviously, and there are some interesting links on the home page including one to the excellent IDeA website, which is about innovation in local government.

I'd like to offer a small suggestion to the Whitehall wikiers. Try to wean yourself off the jargon guys. This is a personal thing – I’ve written about it on this blog before - but I really do have a pathological dislike of management jargon. For instance, the following leaped off the home page and tried to strangle me:

'key competency' - translation: something really important we need to be good at

'embed innovative thinking within local government' - translation: ensure councils get better at improving things

‘joined-up working’ – translation: well that one needs a whole new blog entry of its own, but I guess that it’s a more 'muscular' (ugh!) version of ‘joined-up thinking’, another phrase which has been bandied about a lot over the last few years.

The quote from the usually lucid Peter Drucker is particularly impenetrable: if anyone can work out what it means do drop me a line via this email address.

But hey, it’s easy to criticise. Innovation is a subject which fascinates me and I’ll try to find some (of my own) time to explore and add-to the ‘e-innovations’ (oh dear!) wiki. You might like to do that as well because the whole point of a wiki is that it’s a two way thing: wikis are websites you can both read and write yourself.

Incidentally, the world's most famous wiki was in the news yesterday.

Thatcham Speaks

As you'll have noticed if you've visited the main website, we've started adding short interviews with people in Thatcham to the site. Just click the link on the home page - or on the interviews page - and you'll be able to hear what our first 'aural' contributors have to say.

The flow of responses to our 'Wishes' consultation exercise is increasing by the day - both via the online survey (also accessible via our home page) and the paper version, which are available from the library and Thatcham Vision Supreme Headquarters at the Town Council offices - see contact details on the main website.

Over the next few weeks (with a break over Christmas, of course) we'll be holding the first meetings of our 'Hot Topic Teams' which are looking at issues like the town centre, youth provision and transport. A full list of teams is available at the Hot Topics page, also on the main website.

Lastly we're going to post some of the comments and ideas we've been receiving at our 'wiki'. See the link in the right hand column of this page to visit the wiki.

It's all go, to say the least!

Wishes to date

We’re beginning to get lots of responses to our ‘Wishes’ consultation campaign, which you can take part in by clicking here.

Here are some examples of the wishes that people are sending to us.

I wish…

… ‘for a larger, better equipped library. Thatcham’s population continues to increase – this amenity needs to follow suit. It is important to many people for multiple reasons.’

… that there was a bridge over the level-crossing.’

…for an improved shopping are with ample free parking – this would be to include some ‘High Street’ names desperately needed would be a clothes shop for adults as well as children.’

…there was a wider range of shops, even smaller versions of big brand shops, or independent ones. A small Burger King, Pizza Hut, clothes shop for children and adults and a proper coffee shop.’

When are you going to be sending us your wish?

Three (plus or minus) wishes for Thatcham

There are two versions of our Wishes for Thatcham exercise. We're distributing a paper based version via schools, Thatcham library and other public places. We launched our web based version today - you'll find the link on our home page which you can visit by clicking here. The link is just below our online poll.

The aim of the wishes exercise is not to produce a wish list (as in 'that's just a wish list'). We're using the idea of wishes to tap into people's aims and aspirations. Asking people 'If you could make one wish related to a change in Thatcham what would it be?' - which is something I started doing shortly after I started working on the project - produced some interesting, and revealing, results.

You'll find out about the way that we are collecting wishes when you visit the survey. As you'll see we've taken the idea a little further and are asking people to think about ways that their wish could be turned into something real. The online survey talks about 'bridges and barriers'. Bridges are factors which exist now which could enable the change to happen and barriers are things that could prevent it. This is a plain English (well, almost) version of a widely used technique which you can find out all about by clicking here.

Eventually we're also going to help ensure that our wishes are rooted in reality by introducing the brand new concept of SMART Wishes (a first, I think, for the Thatcham Vision project). Click on this link and follow some of the references to find out what SMART is all about. If you've ever been involved in planning in organisations, you'll probably know already.

The benefits of talking to each other

You don't need to be a sociologist to know that people don't talk to each other as much, or know each other as well, as they used to. I remember my Grandmother's house in South East London in the early 1960s. It was a hub of activity for the extended family, many of whom lived in the surrounding streets. For a child Christmases were magical: a knees-up around the piano, not a TV is sight, dozens of people in the house.

Ten years later that had all changed. The family had dispersed not only to different parts of London but also to other parts of the country (and other countries). We never got together in quite the same way again.

This sense of separation and isolation in our communities is almost tangible: look at the 9' fences which are built between the tiny gardens in new housing estates, for example.

Perhaps people want to keep themselves to themselves: maybe that's partly why the (and my) extended family broke down. But it seems that there are real benefits to getting people engaged in thinking about their community. See this interesting speech, by 'Minister of Communities’ (you all knew that we had one of those, didn’t you?) David Milliband for more on that subject. If you agree – or disagree – with what he had to say, feel free to post a comment below. (One of my goals for this week is to see if we can persuade Mr Milliband to come down and have a chat with us, down here in deepest Berkshire.)

Scenarios, processes and that sort of thing

In spite of my dislike of management jargon (see below), there are useful ideas available from the wonderful world of business planning which we're going to be using during our project.

One of them is called 'scenario planning'. It's a very simple idea which has been used to good effect by organisations like Shell - in fact this particular idea was invented by someone from Shell.

Scenarios are often described as 'stories' about possible plausible futures. They aren't intended to be predictions, not least because it's pretty much impossible to predict what will happen in the future (if you know any differently, do drop us a line!). Instead they are used in two ways - to help people to think about things and to test the specific plans they come up with. If you'd like to know more about this, there's a very good website on the subject here.

If you'd like to join in with the work we're doing on this kind of thing, we'd be delighted to hear from you! Click the link to our main website (on the right of this page) to find our contact details.

Good news for premature evaluation sufferers

I met someone yesterday who was deeply sceptical about the Thatcham Vision. That’s fine, of course: people should be sceptical about everything. Being sceptical means not accepting things at face value, digging beneath the surface, asking questions, thinking hard, testing ideas and so on. Sceptical is good.

But this person was also deeply negative about the Vision. In my view negative is bad. Very bad. Being negative certainly isn’t the same thing as being sceptical, although they often get confused. Negative is when your first response to an idea is to find everything that’s wrong with it. I can understand why people are negative – we live in trying and stressful times: I’d be concerned if I met someone who wasn’t a bit negative from time to time.

But to be honest, negativity – particularly as the very first reaction to a new idea – really winds me up. If you want to kill an idea the best way to do so is to be negative. Trot out the usual excuses: ‘we tried that before and it didn’t work’, ‘it might work there, but it won’t here’, ‘we’ve never been any good at doing that sort of thing’ and so on. There are dozens of variations on that theme. (The ‘we tried that before’ line is particularly weak I’m afraid: won’t bore you with the details here – drop me an email by clicking here and’ll tell you what I think is wrong with it.)

In a nutshell, I hate negativity because it stops useful things from being done. This is a subject on which I could bore for England: it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Some years ago I came up with a name for the condition suffered by people who exhibit a severe negative response to everything: I call this Premature Evaluation. Premature Evaluation can be very unpleasant, but luckily there are cures available these days. Of which more in later posts.

And I shouldn't leave you with the impression that everyone is negative about the project. That, I'm pleased to say, is very far from the case.

Research into Vision Projects

If you are interested in researching into vision projects in general http://www.sustainable.org/creating/vision.html
is worth a visit. It has loads of general information on the subject plus details of tools for analysis etc. It also contains links to a number of project sites.

A UK based Vision project

It is interesting to see how Vision projects are moving in America and our exchange of information with the city of Racine have proved to be most useful. In the UK, Weston Super Mare has been running a Vision project for some time now and their situation is in quite a mature condition. Their site - click here - makes interesting reading, have a look at:

Government housing plans questioned

The Thatcham Vision certainly isn't just about housing, but central government's plans to ramp-up the rate of house building in Southern England will - one way or another - have major consequences for many aspects of Thatcham's future. This is certainly a topic in which we're taking a close interest.

A new report from The Countryside Agency and English Nature raises fears about the environmental impact of the plans. See this story in today's Observer. A particular problem identified by the report relates to additional demands on already stretched water supplies. If the climate of Southern England becomes more and more like that of Southern Spain, this will cause some interesting problems.

No need to panic though. I'm sure that someone in central government has thought this all through very carefully.

Racine USA - online meeting

Following Tony's discovery of the Sustainable Racine website, we've been exchanging emails with Aaron Hertzberg the project manager, and Bonnie Prochaska, its Executive Director.

Aaron has very kindly offered to participate in an online meeting on Monday 31st at 8.00pm our time via Microsoft Messenger. Bonnie would like to have joined us as well but she’ll be away at a conference.

If you'd like to be involved - either to ask questions or to 'watch' the discussion live - please email me by clicking here and I'll explain how you can and provide you with some details that you need. If you aren't familiar with how to use Messenger either ask a passing teenager or go to Microsoft's MSN Messenger home page, where everything is explained very clearly. Drop me a line if you have any problems. Once you’re signed up on Messenger you can experiment with it before Monday by chatting briefly with me, if you like.

If you haven't used Messenger before, it's very useful for this kind of online meeting or conference. I often use it for three way 'meetings' between colleagues in Dar es Salaam, Grenada and Newbury! It's very easy to use and set up and has lots of benefits, not least the fact that it's free.

The Racine project does seem extremely interesting. Like Thatcham Vision, it's part of a country-wide initiative: see the 'about us' page here for more details and some very interesting ideas.

Do other towns have Vision Projects?

Vision projects are used all over the world, their success is based on good input from the town’s residents. Try searching on line for vision projects, I received 94 million responses when I tried it. I have a lot more to look at but I was particularly impressed to see how Racine, a town in America, had set about their Vision Project and, just as important, how they have used the results to ensure their wishes were turned into reality. Have a look at http://www.sustainable-racine.org/ and check out some of the newsletters.

New contributor

My name is Tony McDonald. Having enjoyed living in Thatcham for 18 years I am keen to input into how Thatcham develops, which is why I have volunteered to help with the Thatcham Vision project. I am currently researching how other locations around the world have set up and used Vision teams and will be posting some of my findings on this Blog.
Just a bit about who I am. I recently retired from a lifetime working in the telecommunications industry, enjoy walking, cycling, watercolour painting and am heavily into conservation in the area.

Binge selling?

Many of the comments we're receiving are from people who feel intimidated when they go into the town centre in the evening and after dark. We'll be publishing their comments on our Wiki very shortly.

This is a problem in many town centres, of course. Here's an item from today's Observer about how some pub chains are responding to the changes in licensing hours.

Comments

I've turned off the requirement to register before posting comments to this blog as I realise that the registration process seemed to require you to set up your own blog! (In fact it doesn't but it does look that way.) As you'll see when you click on the 'comment' link you need to type some letters displayed as 'warped' graphics into a verification box before you can post your message. This is to prevent automated 'spamming' of comments on the blog.

Best and Worst of Thatcham

We're using lots of different methods to collect ideas and views about Thatcham during this phase of the project. For example, we're currently working on begging or borrowing a digital sound recorder so that we can record interviews and meetings (we'd be delighted to hear from you if you can help!). We also want pictures - lots of them - of the best and worst of Thatcham. You can either email them to us, if they are digital, by or post them to us if they aren't (see contact details at our main website, via the link on the right). We'll make the pictures available via the web, so it would be good if you could tell us where the pictures have been taken. If your pictures aren't self-explanator, please also send some brief comments about the aspect of living in Thatcham which they illustrate.

Fly tipping

Here's some news from DEFRA about further measures to deal with fly tipping.  It doesn't seem to be a massive problem in this area - at least not on the roads down which I drive, cycle and walk - but perhaps that's because West Berks Council are on top of it?

Electric cars

I mentioned the disappointingly slow progess towards shiny one-piece suits in the teleworking post below. I'm sure that we were also promised hovercars, but I haven't seen many of those in these parts recently either. However, I did listen to an interesting programme about electric cars on the BBC's excellent In Business programme this evening. Download or listen to the programme via this page.

Good though the programme is, I have the feeling that we'll still be driving vehicles which would be very familiar to Mr Benz in 15 years from now. Hybrids seem to be the way to go.

All this might have implications for what I've come to call the 'Thatcham Shuffle'. I.e. the stream of vehicles shuffling into Newbury from Thatcham as I drive into Thatcham in the morning and vice versa as I travel back to Newbury. I did the trip by bike on one day this week. Thankfully my route (by the canal and along mostly excellent cycleroutes for the whole four miles) was pretty much unimpeded by other cyclists.

Hot Topics

We're currently working on a series of parallel activities here at Supreme Headquarters Thatcham Vision (aka the Town Council offices in Brownsfield Road). Our main priority is applying for funding, from organisations like Awards for All, and recruiting volunteer helpers. We need both to do things like make videos, record interviews with people in Thatcham, develop our websites and (well, there's a very long list of interesting things that need to be done.)

We're also setting up a series of Hot Topic Teams. These will be small teams (no more than 4 or 5 at the most) which will look at specific and clearly defined - you guessed it - hot topics. Things like youth provision, health service access, personal and public transport. We're aiming to have up to 10 hot topic teams up and running by the end of November.

In parallel with that we're setting up various consultation exercises - we're starting with junior schools and pre-school groups to follow up the Kennet School consultation earlier in the year and we are busy setting-up meetings with other groups.

So if you'd like to help, or suggest a hot topic, or have an opinion you'd like to let everyone know about, or you have any questions about the project you'll find our contact details by clicking here to visit our main site.

By the way, it was a bit ambitious to suggest that we'd post something here every day, of course, but we'll soon have helpers on the team posting as well so make sure you keep track of the blog.

How much can you say in 150 characters?

Central government is saying that we need to build thousands of new homes in the South East to meet future demand. No decisions have been taken about how many of these homes will be in West Berkshire, but something called the Berkshire Joint Strategic Planning Unit is working on just that point. Deciding how to split numbers between counties in the South East is the job of the 'South East England Regional Assembly' which is, according to its web site, the 'representative voice of the region'.

Whatever they decide, and however our share is distributed within West Berkshire, the outcome of all this will have major implications for the Thatcham Vision.

If you'd like to give the Unit the benefit of your views you have until the 24th of October to do so. Visit the 'Have Your Say' website by clicking here.

As you'll see, their response page includes a few tick-box options and a box into which you can type your ideas about how all this should be tackled. You can type up to 150 characters in the box. 150 characters looks like this:

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax
Of cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings."

Well, that's 147 actually. To be fair, if you search around the main JSPU site you'll find email and postal addresses to which you can send your detailed proposals.

To find out how all this feeds into planning within West Berkshire visit this page which describes the 'Local Development Framework' which is currently being produced.

Slow Towns

Should Thatcham be a 'slow town'? Click here to read an article on the subject.

Incidentally, we need to do some fairly intensive creative thinking about the future of Thatcham during this project. The first rule of creative thinking is, of course, 'No Premature Evaluation!'. So maybe I shouldn't ask 'Should Thatcham be a slow town?' but instead 'What if Thatcham was a slow town?'

You can find out a lot more about slow towns in the UK by clicking here.

Living in Thatcham

Living in Thatcham was the subject of this article in Berkshire Life in 2002. Take a look at it and let us know whether you agree with the views which were expressed. How have things changed since then? If you're new to Thatcham what do you make of the town?

The Vision Thing

I have a thing about management jargon. Recently I received an email from someone which announced that his organisation was 'experiencing some issues around the telephone system'. Later that morning I received another email explaining that the 'issues' had been 'resolved'. He meant, of course, that the system had a fault (which had later been fixed) so I shouldn't try to phone him. I won't tell you how cross this sort of thing makes me. Imagine John Humphreys losing it while interviewing a particularly stubborn and taciturn Gordon Brown and you'll get a good idea.

The word 'Vision' is also bandied around a lot in organisations these days. Every organisation must have both a Vision and a Mission and must talk about 'their plans, moving forward' (tautology is compulsory in the world of management-speak) being 'driven' by one or both of them.

So why, if I get so cross about these terms, am I happy to work on the development of a Vision for Thatcham? Well, the fact is that whatever you call it, you need some kind of picture of where you want to be if you're trying to achieve something. Great innovators (the Wright Brothers are probably top of my list) are driven by a very clear idea of not only what it is that they are attempting to do, but also how the world would change if they achieve it.

Similarly, if a town is to develop and improve we need a very clear idea of what we'd like it to be like - and that's what we're calling a Vision.

There's more to be said about how, in my view, that picture of the future should be produced but for now returning to the world of management speak, click this link to view what could be the worst mission statement of all time (they don't appear to have a 'Vision'). Unless you know of any worse ones, that is.

Teleworking

As a child, in the 1960s, I was told that in the 21st Century we'd all be wearing those shiny one-piece suits and that going to the Moon for a short break would be pretty routine.

It hasn't turned out quite like that, has it?

Another more recent prediction was that large numbers of us would be teleworking, but judging from the large volume of traffic I pass heading towards Newbury (I live in Newbury) on my way to Thatcham in the morning, that isn't happening either. I can think of lots of good reasons for that, but it does strike me that if we could at least use technology to shift the times of our journeys slightly we could reduce the loads on our roads and public transport systems quite a lot.

Perhaps Thatcham needs one of these - What do you think? There are lots of possible variations on this theme, try Googling telework centre to find out more.

Supremo

This is my second week in post as 'Project Manager Thatcham Vision'. We've had lots of very useful coverage in the Newbury Weekly News and the Advertiser. An item in this week's Advertiser described me as 'Supremo' of the Thatcham vision, which would sound much more impressive on my business cards than project manager. Actually, if anyone is a Supremo it's Sue Everett who chairs the Steering Group which is overseeing the project. I hope we're not going to fall out over this!

These first two weeks (or to be more accurate half-weeks as I'm working on this for 20 hours a week), have been spent catching up with what has happened to date, meeting people and developing a project plan. We are keen to get out and start engaging the public in this work, but preparation is everything. One of my favourite quotes is 'always the beautiful answer who asks the more beautiful question'. We need to find some beautiful questions! If you can think of some, feel free to add a comment by clicking on 'comment' below.

Do we really need three websites?

Time will tell, but blogs are ideal for snippets of news, ideas and other bits and pieces. As a visitor you can add comments to the posts in the Blog by clicking on the comment link which follows each of them. You'll need to register in order to post comments - the first time you click a comment link a page will appear which enables you to do this.

If you're interested in finding out how to keep track of a number of different blogs and news websites, visit the excellent Bloglines.com and click on 'help' and then the 'What is Bloglines' link.