Future Here Now: Future Ready Communities Part 1

Last week I wrote about the practices necessary for future readiness in individuals and businesses/organzations. This week we’re examining the hardest — and also the easiest — arenas for future readiness: communities.

Communities are the hardest to move toward future readiness because they’re much more complex — more people, more points of view, more politics, etc. But they can also be easier, in some respects, because it’s more likely that someone, somewhere in the community is already working on — and modelling — future readiness. So the biggest challenge might be bringing that work to the surface, and engaging others in it.

But what are the characteristics of a future ready community?

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• Transparent. As we’ve noted, keeping secrets is more likely to backfire than to work in an era where anyone can find any information if they want it enough. A government or nonprofit that addresses a problem through traditional legal double-speak is probably going to find itself in a firestorm — and an unnecessary firestorm at that. In most cases, a simple but honest admission of a mistake or an oversight will defuse the citizen sleuths, and allow the whole community to move toward constructive next steps.
• Complete transparency might not be possible because of privacy…