I almost missed a little byline on the last LRA Group mailing proclaiming: LRA Chairman: Rob Gillespie .
This is Rob Gillespie's pen picture presented at the AGM: 'Rob has lived in Lonehill for 2 years and is an electrical engineer by qualification. He previously acted as the chairperson for the Glenferness Residents Association and was actively involved in setting up their security initiative. He has been chairperson of the board of Welgevonden (the largest privately owned game reserve in South Africa) for 7 years. Rob has organisational strengths and would like to serve the community by providing management and control experience.'
Well, congrats on being voted in as Chairman, Rob... whilst I don't believe that we have met, I certainly hope that YOU can bring some fresh thinking and initiative to leading a massive change in the recent past order of things.
And, what is that past 'order' that needs to be changed? In my opinion, over the last +-18 months, it has been the seemingly confused order of... 'FIRE... er, Ready... er, Aim'.
An example of this was the strange approach to pre-investing in and preparing to foist Community Improvement District (CID) status on this community as the 'only' solution for our future. The 'only' solution - says who?
CID may well be only a small part (say 10 to 20%) of an overall solution to funding our community project. Meaning that we could well be missing a good 80% to 90% in alternative funding innovations and initiatives that could be the future backbone of this community.
Proposing a list of 'one' solution only and jumping to conclusions... leads to tunnel vision, and if combined with a 'FIRE'-first mentality can lead to one barking up the wrong tree.
Another example of 'FIRE... er, Ready... er, Aim' seems to have been the Ian Bell affair. Did he 'resign' as we were told or was he unceremoniously dumped? Did he take the LRA on and 'win' a settlement of some type as the Lonehill grapevine suggests? In an atmosphere of low trust where people close up shop on information, it is difficult to get to the truth. It just seems that someone or some group had a knack for shooting themselves in the foot. That's the problem with 'FIRE... er, Ready... er, Aim'.
I can point to a number of further such examples to highlight my point, but it is perhaps not conducive to building an atmosphere of NEW positive input should they be raked up again. I really am pinning my hopes for NEW positive developments on the NEW blood on the LRA board to become open, transparent and inclusive of stakeholders input on everything they do. Hopefully the lessons have been learnt.
So the first change of order is to get back to some simple basics of leadership strategy - getting to understand the lay of the land: i.e. 'Ready, Aim, FIRE'.
For example, if individual contributing householders have declined by +-18% in the last +-18% months to only +- 20% of the total number of individual households contributing (all while costs mushroomed), perhaps some house-to-house market research of the ENTIRE community is needed (it's only 5000 households, for goodness sake).
i.e. Find out what your Stakeholders want. Find out what their mass individual WIIFM (what's-in-it-for-me) needs are... and build an incredible WORLD-CLASS value proposition that makes it a no-brainer for them to get on board.
It's clear to me that there are many savvy successful business strategists and implementers living in this community who can contribute to Lonehill becoming a WORLD CLASS initiative... if they were just openly invited in to contribute into a consultative forum. So when do we get our FIRST open community forum meeting to contribute into..?
For those reading the POSITIVE article extracts and insights into quality Community Leadership that I refer to in each of my communications (and there is so much of this material available it's almost inexcusable to not consider applying it) you may be interested in reading the "7 C’s" of leadership development for social change (click on the link).
Regards
Trevor Nel - 705-2790
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