Has your rural community settled into compliance?

March 5th, 2010 by

Seth Godin wrote an interesting post last week that I’ve been mulling over since I read it.  His post, titled “It’s easier to teach compliance than initiative,” highlights how schools have perpetuated compliance (instead of initiative) because it is easier to teach and easier to test for.  In other words, compliance is the easy way out.

I think the same is true for our rural communities.  Many of our small towns have laxidasically watched as economies have faltered, people have moved, and Main Streets have emptied.  That’s what the road of compliance looks like. 

My analogy of how this plays out in rural communities looks something like this:

Small town economies are like a large boulder rolling down a hill.  It doesn’t take anyone’s time or effort for the boulder to continue rolling down the hill.  But, if you recognize that rolling down the hill isn’t the right path for the boulder and you want to change its course, it takes a ton of effort.  First, you have to stop the boulder.  Then, you have to push the boulder up the hill.  It takes time, effort, strategy, people. And initiative. 

The goal of initiative is changing the momentum; whether it’s a boulder rolling down a hill or changing the economy of your community.  Compliance, or looking the other way, is the easy path, but it is probably not the path of success.

So, what path do you choose: the path of compliance or the path of initiative?  As Godin points out, today’s economy rewards those with initiative. 

Photo Credit:  Rita Willaert, Flickr

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Posted in Community Development, Economic Development, Rural | Comments ( 1 )

One Response to “Has your rural community settled into compliance?”

  1. Mike Knutson Says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 1:52 pm

    I think a more recent Seth Godin post also connects with what you wrote. In a post titled “Try different”, Godin alerts people to the problems associated with trying to put more and more effort into activities when the results are not improving significantly. Sometimes the only way to get better at something is to do it in a completely different way.

    It’s that same line of thinking that causes us to us to believe rural communities need to look at transformational strategies. Trying to work harder at solving our problems won’t be enough to produce the results we need. We’ve got to do things differently.

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