Bright Ideas!

Creatively co-creating a community (c)plan
(really wanted to carry through that alliteration)
By Stewart McDonough, Advisor of Strategy and Innovation at the City of Guelph

When you plan WITH (sorry for yelling) a community to co-create your city’s vision, values and strategic directions good things happen. When you focus on “with” and relationship building, even giving up control when you can, you are able to add community building to your community planning.
 
That’s how we built Guelph’s Community Plan.
 
That approach is also more fun, leads to better work, in better language(s)—we translated material into Tigrignia, Arabic, Vietnamese and Nepali—and it leads to more people moving in the same direction.

Here are some of our relationship-built products:

- Plan scan: we network mapped 25 City plans and 13 community collaborative plans in a way we haven’t seen before. And in one place we can see the community’s existing direction broken out into eight domains. Super cool for government geeks.

- Guelph as a Village of 100: we showed the relationship between community data points—the result of a collaborative community research round table

- Video that shows the process and Community Plan themes

- Spoken word version of the Plan: we built a relationship with Guelph Spoken Word to show the Plan in a hankie-required and hugely impactful way

- Whiteboard fun: a local company approached us with an extra whiteboard and one thing led to another and dry erase markers were all over the city

- Cards for community: we borrowed from community foundations and created a unique community planning card game. We also used our Guelph Community Foundation’s Vital Signs for the start of our conversation.

                                                  
                                

A type of innovation often overlooked is governance innovation. We workshopped, whiteboarded and iterated with community and staff round tables, which we eventually merged.
 
The community-engaged process opened doors, broadened our engagement, kept it authentic and ended up with a Community Plan presented by the community to a standing ovation and unanimous City Council support.
 
There are lots of great examples of communities innovating in their planning and governance. We learned from a bunch of them. This is how we did it and had fun along the way.

What We're Reading!

How to make innovation capacity stick around for the long haul
Dozens of cities across the U.S. and around the world now have "chief innovation officers" and, often, teams of people who work with them. As momentum grows for these kinds of investments, a key question is: How can cities make it stick? Stephanie Wade, head of the innovation teams (i-teams) program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, has five lessons for cities to build innovation capacity that lasts. Read more at https://medium.com/@BloombergCities/how-to-make-innovation-capacity-stick-for-the-long-haul-ca35a3d19ec2

Designing Better Services
Here are seven ways cities can use behavioural insights to design better services. Making small, low-cost tweaks to letters, emails and texts can change how citizens respond to government. From learning the value of testing to accepting failure, this is how to get started. Read more at  https://apolitical.co/solution_article/seven-behavioural-insights-tips-from-pioneering-cities