A licence to think...

In less than 3 weeks now I will start on my Winston Churchill fellowship to look at how other places plan for and put in place conditions that enable communities and cities to be "harmonious".  If nothing else, I am genuinely excited and thrilled at being given a licence to think. Now, I don't want in any way imply that the work I'm involved in in Leeds is "unthinking", but I don't suspect I'm giving away a state secret when I say that in any number of ways it has gotten harder to take time to think consciously and plan deliberately in the last year. The combined impact of cuts across the public and third sector, increased demand from the most vulnerable and a heightened sense of scrutiny of every penny spent, has in my opinion led to a retrenchment in thinking at precisely the time we needs to appeal to the finest creative and beautifully devious minds we can persuade to get involved.

I'll raise my hand and say I'm one of the worst offenders at putting off fighting for the big changes, in order to focus on what can realistically get done now. But I'm also convinced that they are not mutually exclusive concepts. I'm in the very lucky position of living in walking distance from work, and I have gotten into the habit of doing something of an inventory on the way to and from work. My walk to work involves conducting the wholly unscientific "harmony sniff test". As I walk through the city centre of Leeds, I watch and listen - and I count up the instances of generosity shown, courtesy between strangers or even the number of people looking out at the day and smiling and engaging with the city around them - and subtract from that incidences of casual rudeness, palpable tension or the lost and broken looks of people who don't see that the city has anything to offer them. It's a daily reminder that there is much to be done, but there's much to build upon. And it's that idea of the fabric of the city - where it's strong and where it's getting a little frayed - that gets me thinking about how we can be so much smarter in how we plan for and help support communities. If we could get under the skin of city - see where it's doing well and where it needs a helping hand - we'd be so much nearer to making the big changes happen. And that's my homeward journey. Did I chip away at the big changes, do I understand them more, or have I got others engaged in the thinking? Or did I spend my time fighting fires: small, large and imaginary - but not really making any headway. Do I even know what headway looks like in this climate? \

I love having this daily ritual time to think, imagine and reflect, but it's all to often too short, too shallow or I'm too shy with it to make the difference in my "real" job. I think that's what I'm looking forward to most with my fellowship: time to think, and time to plan what to do with the thinking.  In equal measures I'm excited, impatient and panic-stricken by the knowledge of everything I have to do here before I go. But on my "commute" this morning, as the first signs of autumn made the city start to look different, I remembered a phrase I used to use: "change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change". In just 3 weeks, I hope to be doing just that. And like the parking metres in Leeds sometimes say: "change is possible", but what the parking metres don't tell you is that you have to make it possible.