It’s snowing on the runways of Chicago – and across much of the country – and the woman sitting next to me on our delayed flight home has a stack of Harvard Business Review articles on strategy, the sum of which advises that the key to a successful plan is clear direction and disciplined execution. Hmmm. Good thing the de-icers caught us before our scheduled departure or we wouldn’t be getting home at all.

 

Conventional planning assumes that the team creating a strategy has sufficient foresight to predict the future; that the world will hold still while a plan is developed and then stay on the predicted course while that plan is implemented; and that the many people called to execute the strategy will do so in an inspired, disciplined way that stays faithful to the design of the planning team – from which they are typically disconnected.

 

What if strategy was less like following a script and more like improvisational theatre? What if it was unbound by time and place, with a plot that unfolds like a great mystery, by an ever-expanding cast of players flowing in?

 

Communities of Health began not as a grand plan, but as a conversation in a conference room (a storage closet, really) about 5 years ago, by a few people asking a couple of simple questions: How do we create more meaningful work? And, what is health? And so began a conversation that continues today.

 

The amazing thing is not where this happened but how it has grown so incredibly broad and deep, with more and more people continually coming in. It seems that these questions tug at something basic. They call us to do what it is we most want to do, together.

 

Las Vegas is a good example. The dialogue began a year ago with about a dozen people. By summer, more than 50 had added their voice – and just last week, nearly 200 people spent the day thinking, learning and co-creating a new idea of what might be possible in coming together.

 

Every step of the way is an occasion for expanding participation. (In fact, by the time of last week’s forum, the number of people involved in planning the event grew from 4 to 40, which made for incredibly unwieldy and inefficient planning meetings…and a wonderfully inclusive process that produced something much larger and unanticipated and enduring as a result.)

 

So, here we are – in the midst of this latest expansion of the conversation. We don’t know what this website is, or what it will become.

 

We do know that we are better together, and that when every individual and collective voice is heard, we are all strengthened.

 

And that’s a great place to begin.

 

Welcome to all,

Rick