Before We Chop ...
It's an old logging saying -- Give me "x" amount of time to chop down a large tree and I will spend "y" amount of time sharpening my axe. Quotes vary from hours to minutes, but you get the idea.
Getting prepared for the task at hand is a large part of what constitutes successful economic development. But it requires forethought and planning, a prerequisite for informed action to take place.
And that informed action has to change people's lives, giving them additional opportunities. If an economic development organization is not doing that, it is just spinning its wheels.
Foundational to developing a strategic plan and/or a successful brand is a SWOT analysis. which is our specialty as consultants at BBA. A SWOT brings things down to earth, what I call "Salient Points," providing actionable solutions rather than pie-in-the-sky theory.
When we do a SWOT for economic development organization, we are asking questions about the community and the organization itself. We are looking to determine:
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It means rooting myself in a community, often with another BBA consultant, spending physical time there, and asking questions from a broad array of stakeholders in confidential, not-for-attribution interviews.
But our findings can only be effective if and when they produce action. Any and all recommendations have to be doable, or as I like to say, "practical and tactical." As Thomas Edison famously?noted, “vision without implementation is just hallucination.” Or my favorite from the late T. Boone Pickens: "A plan without action is just a speech."
The BBA Way is to involve our clients -- the EDOs, those charged with the doing -- in the planning process so as to come up with those practical and tactical solutions that work.?They will know, far better than us, what is doable. Together, we will come up with an operational model to pursue strategies that can be acted upon.
So informed action is the key. If something is not actionable, if it is not doable, then why would we recommend it? In fact, we would not. We are not faculty lounge smitten by theory. We are all about determining the doable and helping our clients take informed action that will change lives. Isn't that what economic development all about?
A variation of this article appeared in the latest version of The Rising Tide, our weekly newsletter for economic developers and business people which is published every Sunday. Subscribe here. Need a speaker? Dean can fill the bill.