Develop a positive vision

Broaden Your Community

Sustainable Development

Taking steps forward

Community Stories

Online Resources

 


Develop a Positive Shared Vision

Some believe an ill wind blows across the prairie. It carries low commodity prices and high production costs. It sweeps away our way of life, leaving abandoned farms and ghost towns.

Others see opportunity, not only for survival -- but for growth. Not for failure, but for prosperity. You and your community can embrace this positive vision of North Dakota in the next century. Through creativity, courage, leadership and hard work, communities can uncover the strengths that will guide them to their own survival and prosperity through a rebirth a Prairie Renaissance. The path is difficult, but worth the trip.

What good do you want to create in your community? If you focus on that positive vision, rather than on reasons why it can't happen, your town can become that vision.

Shared Vision is an idea promoted by Peter M. Senge in his book, "The Fifth Discipline." Senge writes, "At its simplest level a shared vision is the answer to the question, 'What do we want to create?'" According to Senge, a shared vision connects people and binds them with a common aspiration.

Conversely, a negative vision can be amazingly powerful. A study done by SRI in 1989 for the Vision 2000 project showed North Dakotans to have the strongest negative vision the researchers had ever found in any state.

Bill Patrie of the North Dakota Association of Rural Cooperatives says that negative vision was choking us. Patrie says Robert Fritz, a creative consultant, gives only two limits to a community creating the positive vision it wants: a sense of unworthiness and a sense of limitations. Both are false according to Fritz.

Patrie works with communities across the state on developing a positive, shared vision. He advises communities to get together to discuss negative assumptions they have about their city. The community can then no longer discuss those assumptions when talking about the future. He says people get bogged down in their current reality. Instead, Bill suggests, cities need to create a vision for themselves and then pull the current reality toward the vision.

A negative vision can be amazingly powerful. A study done by SRI in 1989 showed North Dakotans to have the strongest negative vision the researchers had ever found in a state. It was choking us. Prairie Renaissance participants talked about the similar power of a positive vision and how you can foster that in your community.

It generally involves surveying residents, talking things out in town hall meetings and reaching a popular consensus of how the majority of citizens "see" your community in 10, 20, even 50 years. To help you, the state offers the BUILD (Better Utilization of Investments for Local Development) Program. This self-help program takes communities through a community inventory, public input, and business retention and recruiting.

Television That MattersFunding for Prairie Renaissance is provided by a grant from USDA Rural Development and by the Members of Prairie Public Television.