by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
Big Visions are the heart of a community growing and prospering. But there is nothing inevitable about a community embracing a Big Vision. History is filled with many more failures to do so than successes.
Two ways of thinking that poison a Big Vision happening are NIMBY and acrimony.
NIMBY is an acronym for Not In My Backyard!. It refers to the feeling that community members get when they oppose change that will affect their neighborhood. The strongest objections are usually phrased as something like. "Nope. Don't do it here. It will kill property values."
NIMBY feelings are strongly associated with property. And this feeling can become a surprising twist for those who feel that widespread property ownership is always beneficial for a community. An example of a surprise would be someone saying, "A Walmart? That's nice... but not on my street. It will kill the value of my home." This feeling is why Walmart, and other large-store retailers, spread rapidly through the suburbs during the last half of the 20th century, but very slowly through long-established urban areas.
The Big Vision those big stores represented was not something the urban neighborhoods wanted to embrace.
Acrimony is bitterness and ill feeling between two or more groups. It impedes progress when the feeling gets strong enough that the groups won't cooperate even when doing so would be mutually beneficial.
When people are disagreeing, but not acrimonious, they will argue vigorously for a short while, then come to an agreement on a plan -- a compromise of some sort. When acrimony is running high, coming to an agreement takes a long time, and even after the agreement is reached support for it remains half-hearted. This is a fine recipe for slow, poor progress.
An example of large-scale acrimony was America trying to solve the problem of the Great Depression. There was a lot of arguing about the right way to bring back the boom times, and the solutions that were finally agree to -- the New Deal packages -- didn't solve the problem. The Great Depression ended up lasting a full decade.
When a community is enjoying an Industrial Age lifestyle, there have to be constant changes made in how things are done and where they are done for the community to keep up with the times and prosper. These changes are called disruptive changes. When the changes are large ones, such as building new roads, ports and factories, a lot of cooperation is required. This large scale cooperation is implementing a Big Vision.
But the disruptive part means that in the short term some community members are going to be inconvenienced. If the community members are property owners and they don't want to see changes happening around their properties, they pick up the acronym NIMBY. If the community argues long and hard over whether or not to make the changes, and has a hard time reaching compromises that allow cooperation to happen, then it is being acrimonious.
In both cases progress slows for the community, and a Big Vision becomes impossible to implement.
There will be some people who don't mind that the progress is slow. The more those who don't mind control the fate of the community, the slower the progress will be, and the more the community will transform into a backwater instead of a ground breaker.
--The End--