What now?

During a March 2000 speech at the University of Ozarks in Clarksville, popular English author, science historian and television producer James Burke told the crowd that in matters big and small facing groups as large as nations or as small as the individual, past and current success can be a trap in that it creates a box of accepted rules in which to operate. Which is to say, if using XYZ approach to successfully overcome Problems #1-#5, then we commonly presume XYZ will work for subsequent problems, and woe be to the cad who suggests otherwise.

Such linear thinking is responsible for the phrases, “Because we’ve always done it like this,” “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and “After we get this rebuilding year behind us, we’ll have a helluva football team next year.”

Let’s now jump more than nine years forward to this recent attempt to be recognized as an All-American City by the Tampa, Fla.-based National Civic League. The city of Fort Smith was notified in March that it was one of 32 cities selected among hundreds of applicants to compete for the 10 All-American City designations handed out each year.

According to the NCL, an All-America City has “a proven capacity for community-based problem solving, grassroots civic engagement and cooperation between sectors (public, private and nonprofit).” Tracy Winchell, who admirably served as the point person for the city of Fort Smith in seeking the award, said the application focused on how the community came together to keep the 188th Fighter Wing based in Fort Smith, successfully recruit the U.S. Marshals Museum, and how it supports the Community Services Clearinghouse.

Despite the hard work of Winchell and others and the truly compelling stories they told, Fort Smith was not named an All-American City at the June 16-19 competition. Such rejection in no way diminishes the remarkable accomplishments encapsulated within the salvation of the 188th, the capture of the Marshals Museum and the compassion-driven action of the Clearinghouse.

Instead of wondering why we didn’t win or finding fault with the effort to tell such wonderful stories, our energies are better served in recognizing that communities smaller and larger than ours have recorded accomplishments equal to or greater than ours and do so on an annual basis. To analogize using our common ground of sports, the baseball Razorbacks didn’t lose at the World Series because they were a bad team with bad coaches, they lost as a strong team in stiff competition with other strong teams.

Let’s keep with the sports analogy. The football coach during my high school days had the philosophy that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose (although he was not much fun to talk to after a loss), it matters how you take the lessons from the win or the loss and improve the chances to win the next game.

And therein lies the real value of the All American City competition. No, this is not a suggestion that we somehow practice better for the 2010 competition. It would seem inappropriate, if not desperate in a tired sense, to compete again with the same stories. Instead, this is a written wondering about what stories we might use to compete in 2012 or 2013 or 2015. (Although the Mayan calendar says the Big Show ends Dec. 21, 2012.)

Which is really a larger question of, “What now?” As a region, as a people and as a collection of cities, What-Fricking-Now? What are the collective goals of the region? What do we all want to be when 2020 rolls around? What!?

Burke told the Clarksville crowd on that chilly March night that Rule #1 in a standard operating procedure should be that having a standard operating procedure is “no longer a good idea.” What worked yesterday may not work today. The leadership skills required last year may fail in future years. Failure is a matter of when, not if, for leadership stuck within a standard operating procedure, Burke suggested.

In his book, “The Axemaker’s Gift,” Burke (and co-author Robert Ornstein), provided numerous examples of “the double-edged history of human culture” in which innovation forced a change in human interaction that resulted in more innovation spurring more interaction and then more innovation and now here we stand with our iPhones and our Twitter and our GPS and our YouTube and our Facebook and we don’t know the family that lives across the street.

Burke argued in “The Axemaker” and other literary efforts that adaptation and the ability to figure out “What now?” is the key to success, whether on a grand evolutionary scale or within minute generational changes of sparsely-populated cultures.

“In this kind of constantly changing environment, an organism only survives if it can take energy where it can get it. So the successful types evolve to take advantage of the form of food available where they happen to be. The others go the way of anything in nature that stands still or doesn’t adapt: they die,” Burke and Ornstein noted in the book.

Replace “The others” in the above with “Communities” and this gets interesting — “Communities go the way of anything in nature that stands still or doesn’t adapt: they die.”

And so that we don’t get too high falutin’ with the science and philosophy of a learned Englishman, the point of all this Riff Raff boils down to the age-old question asked by Janet (Ms. Jackson, if you’re nasty) in 1986: “What have you done for me lately?”

Pardon the incivility of agreeing with myself, but this is all a damn fine point to ponder. And ponder we will. Beginning next Sunday evening. Same place. Same channel. (Hints on pondering points: Obstacles v. Opportunities; Counterintuitive approaches at leadership.)