Moving Beyond the Day To Day

On October 2, The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities will be hosting its thirteenth annual national conference: “The Rights of People with Cognitive Disabilities to Technology and Information Access.” Imagine! will be a major participant in this conference. Speakers at the conference from Imagine! will include our Chief Operating Officer Greg Wellems, our Director of Information Technology Kevin Harding, our Director of Public Relations Fred Hobbs, and our Technology Architect Alex Andrews.

I am honored and pleased that so many Imagine! folks will be participating in the conference, and not just because of the prestige of the event. I feel that our extensive participation in this conference is a reflection of something we do very well – take the time to look at our world from the “30,000 foot view.” In other words, the big picture.

It is easy for all of us, no matter what our job titles or pay scales are, to get mired in the day-to-day activities of our jobs and lose sight of the bigger picture. Unfortunately, losing that focus on the big picture can have unintended negative consequences and often leads to poor decision making.

At Imagine!, we have made it part of our culture to occasionally take the time to step away from the day to day and look at the 30,000 foot view. We hold strategic planning meetings and attend retreats. We create distributed innovation groups to tackle complex challenges facing our organization.

This isn’t always easy. It can be a challenge to find the time to attend these meetings, and to re-adjust thinking processes to move away from focusing solely on the here and now. But we do it because it makes a difference. It puts us in the position to have so many different Imagine! leaders speaking at national conferences such as the Colman Institute’s conference.

I occasionally hear the lament from other organizations that they are just too busy or they don’t have the resources to engage in any serious long term planning or discussions at the 30,000 foot level. I would argue that that is the most important time to engage in such discussions. When resources aren’t enough to keep up with the need, that is when it is absolutely necessary to look at the bigger picture to see where changes can be made. You can’t keep going cheaper and weaker, especially when it comes to providing human services.

Is it possible that the overall infrastructure for delivering services to individuals in our state with intellectual disabilities is weakening, and going cheaper? It is time for us to all rally and move beyond a myopic view of temporary and short sighted solutions to the many challenges we face, and instead look for solutions at the 30,000 foot level. If we keep a broad view, solutions may come into being that otherwise wouldn’t be visible. The time is upon us to take that broad, 30,000 foot view..

Then again, what do I know?