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: