Cooking up a vision

By HEINRICH STRAUCH

I like to cook—people who know me can see that. As with cooking, I believe that visioning requires proper tools and technique, quality ingredients, time, and passion to create a meal that can be enjoyed by everyone, even if it may not be your personal favorite.

Some cooks are just gifted. They throw five things together, shuffle the pan, and out comes something magnificent. For the rest of us, using good tools and solid technique is the way to go. Visioning should be a process that ensures that creative potentials are unlocked, ideas find their ways to the surface and all is considered fairly. Using a facilitator, going through clearly defined steps and stages, regrouping as a team along the way—all those are good ideas to ensure that the result is high quality.

Now, the ingredients: you need quantity and quality, freshness, diversity, contrast and balance—and I’m not talking about food any more. Two people don’t make a community vision; hidden agendas leave bitter tastes; recreating the past or freezing the present are not valid visions. It really requires careful consideration and lots of responsibility to put a visioning project together. If you’re the cook, if you are leading the effort, sit down and make a list before you start. And if you’re the ingredient, if you have been asked to take part in the process, give it all you’ve got and don’t hold back.

You cannot put together a scrumptious five-course dinner in 30 minutes. You cannot create a comprehensive vision for a community in one afternoon. It’s just not going to happen. But it probably is not the best use of time, either, to spend a year creating a vision for a small community park at the street corner.

Cooking without passion makes for bland food. You have to enjoy what you’re doing. Your heart has to be in it; you need to care about it. But all within reason: being passionate is different from being obsessed, and temper tantrums rarely make for good public display (although some chefs clearly think differently).

Cooking for cooking’s sake can be fun, but it’s ultimately futile. A vision without a plan, someone once said, is an illusion. A vision must be part of a process; it needs to lead somewhere; there has to be a blueprint for how to implement it and bridge the gap between reality and vision. A vision is today’s snapshot of a future ideal. It is not the final word. It is not written in stone. Things change, knowledge is gained and people have new ideas—and so a vision needs to evolve, too.

When we got together in Liberty to cook up our vision, I think we did well—and we’re getting better every day. See for yourself at liberty-cdc.org, or come to Liberty and enjoy.

(Heinrich Strauch lives in White Sulphur Springs and is the executive director of the Liberty Community Development Corporation.)