Consensus is killing your town

Everyone has their own view of your town. And that’s fine. 

You think your town should be promoted as an adventure base. Someone else wants to be old-timey hometown. 

You want your town to have a microbrewery. Someone else doesn’t condone drinking beer. 

You want a greenspace downtown. Someone else wants a farmers market to fill that space. 

These are all fine. Idea Friendly means you don’t decide for anyone else. You work towards your ideas, and you let everyone else explore their ideas.

There is no vote. There is no consensus. There is no decision. 

There are tests. There are failures to learn from. There are ideas no one gets excited enough to work on so they don’t happen. 

Instead of deciding for everyone which ideas are worth working on, you let everyone decide for themselves which ideas excite them enough to work on.  

You could help, in fact. You help other people learn the Idea Friendly framework. You Build Connections between people and resources. You encourage everyone to Take Small Steps, try and test out their ideas in small but meaningful ways. 

You’re used to taking great ideas that excite you and watering them down until they’re acceptable to enough people but not really very exciting any more. Then you try to make them happen.

With the Idea Friendly way, you’re taking your first exciting idea and acting on it, letting people who are also excited join in. You’re not worrying about those who don’t agree. Let them go do their thing their way. 

You might as well build the town you are excited to live in, because if you water down your ideas until you reach consensus, you’ll be building the town that no one is particularly excited to live in. 

Keep shaping the future of your town, 
Becky

PS –  There’s been a lot of talk about the future of retail, but not much about the future of small town retail. Deb and I will cover that in our next webinar called The Future of Retail