What is a summit? Why a summit?

I've been suggesting for a couple of years that Westminster College and the Forum ought to host a Sugar House Summit.

What is a summit? A chance for campus and community members to come together for a wide-ranging, creative, unpredictable set of conversations about Sugar House--its culture, needs, assets, future, and past. The benefit of a summit is that it can be a host to all of these things. It can include a keynote speech from a respected community builder, the examination of plans, the airing of grievances, the generation of new ideas. It should include the spoken, the visual, the tactile, the musical. In short it takes all of the practices of a healthy community and compresses them into two intense days.

Why host a summit? Consider a metaphor. Communities are like streams. Streams are home to currents. Some move fast, others slow. Some circle back, or dive under the surface. Some are shallow, others deep. Currents play lots of roles--deep ones allow fish to shelter, shallow ones let insects live. Slow ones let plants take root. But there are points in every stream where the currents come together, compressed by a bend in the stream, or fallen logs, or stones that encroach on the stream bed. These narrower points compress the currents, mix them together, force them to move more quickly. At the other end of the pinch point the stream contains the same water, but it is an entirely different stream.

The summit is a pinch point--a place in the life of a community where the currents rub up against each other and in so doing create something new. And then the community moves on, but with newly arranged currents--new friendships, views, agreements, conflicts all built out of the old.

My hope is that we think of the summit this way, not as a one-time event, or merely a gathering (a pond to extend the metaphor). By thinking of it as a pinch point I hope we'll remember that its process is as important as any plans that come out of it. I expect we will come up with ideas, a toolkit, a vision for the future, a commitment to the past. But I am particularly hopeful that it will be the location where by bringing people together we help to create new leaders, new coalitions, new activities, new businesses.

Invention, Innovation, and Playing to Win

Wikpedia defines innovation this way: the term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

For me, the Sugar House Forum has been a place to gather ideas and inspire innovation. Ideas go out, are added to by a comment, strengthened by a suggestion, stretched by a question, and a conversation happens that changes not only the dialogue, but the way everyone participating thinks. The exercise makes the original thought uncommon.

Working to serve the Sugar House community, the Forum has been exceptionally useful in getting insightful, constructive feedback to my thoughts. The questions offered have made me think in different directions about what I’m saying. Having an educator on board to guide the conversation has been invaluable.

True, we’re all working in different ways to build community in Sugar House. But as we explore ideas, I believe we find common ground and will be inspired with innovative ways to realize success. I come away from the process feeling like I’m part of a team finding uncommon solutions to common concerns.