Keeping it Real in Dakota County

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Back I was a newly-minted college graduate, I did what many young men and women do and tried to become a star.  I went to New York City, worked freelance, took theater classes and went to auditions.   I did summer theater.  I did low-budget TV commercials.  I did small parts in soap operas. 

It was very educational.  Among other things, it taught me that I wasn't going to have a career in the performing arts.  I was particularly grateful to a man named Michael Shurtleff, who wrote a book called Audition.  In its preface, he wrote that, if there is anything else you can do besides being in the theater and still be happy, please do it.  Good advice, which I finally took three years later.  But the real point of the book was to tell you how to audition.  Among his rules was this: When doing an audition, always look for conflict.  Conflict is the heart of theater, whether comedy or drama.  Always find a way to create a conflict in a scene, and your chances of getting the part will rise.

Last week in Minnesota, I learned that, however exciting conflict may be on stage or screen, the real excitement is in collaboration.  At least it is in Dakota County.  I was there presenting the results of the Community Accelerator analysis we performed for Dakota Future, the nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a new economy in the county.  The Community Accelerator uses the same methods we use to select the Intelligent Community of the Year.  It compared the county's performance to an average of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the past four years.  (See my post on October 4 for details.)

Dakota Future is chaired by LaDonna Boyd (economic development director of the Dakota Electric Association) and run day-to-day by consultant Bill Coleman of Community Technology Advisors.  The organization has set a striking goal for the county: to be named one of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of 2012.  And the way they are going about it is a lesson in itself. 

A lot of individual, personal effort by Dakota Future's board brought about 70 people to attend a half-day meeting at a local community college.  In the room were mayors, city administrators and economic development officers, state legislators, county commissioners, university presidents and business executives.  They were there, as Ms. Boyd put it, because somebody asked them to be.  Keeping them involved - that would be the real challenge.

I kicked off the day with a presentation on how Intelligent Communities deal with the challenges of the broadband economy and seize its opportunities.  I finished with an overview of the Community Accelerator analysis of the county's performance. 

When I was finished, Ms. Boyd made her pitch.  Give us 10 hours of your time over the next 8 months, she said - just four two-hour meetings - and we will determine how to score a 5 out of 5 in every category of ICF's Awards program. 

Then the audience broke into six groups: one each for the five Intelligent Community Indicators and one for overall leadership and coordination.  Their goal: to digest the analysis I had provided and to decide on their group's objective, which would guide work for the next 8 months.  I went from group to group, listening, answering questions, offering suggestions.  Go ahead and call me a geek, but I found it thrilling.  People from many different backgrounds and organizations quickly coming to grips with complex issues...exchanging facts, fears and hopes...writing and debating and rewriting their goals.  All in collaboration.  And all in about forty-five minutes.   

I met with Dakota Future's board afterward.  The conversation was all about continuing the momentum, keeping everybody in the loop, and widening the circle of those involved.  Will they succeed?  I don't know - but I believe they will.  And here's why: because they asked well-meaning people to contribute 10 hours of their time.  No more, no less.  They kept it real.  They signaled that this is not going to be a talking shop but a doing shop.  A place for people who want to make a difference.  It was anthropologist Margaret Mead who said, "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."