Purpose

The purpose of the ToolKit is to provide you with a range of useful tools so that you can widen your impact as a citizen and learn how to place your energies to the best possi­ble effect.

The ToolKit uses certain consistent themes that open useful means of improving our control over our situation. These themes include:

• problems are usually best addressed by removing their causes
• increasing quality by removing problem causes reduces overall costs and times
• citizens can benefit from learning more choices to help them to improve
• it is possible to act now and create a different future than might oth­erwise exist
• most choices involve a balance between extreme positions.

The ideas in here are suggestions. You are in your situation and you are therefore the only person who can determine exactly how to apply these ideas usefully in your environment. This is particularly true in the sections about the use of language. You will want to tailor your phrasing to suit yourself - the phrases that I have included are guides to clarify each point. Add your own unique flavours to personalise the ideas.

The scientific and information revolutions have delivered some very valuable lessons and have enabled us to access diverse sources of material for the ToolKit including:

• experiences of our others [lessons and examples]
• decision and control sciences [structures and information systems]
• behavioural studies and linguistics [working with people]
• process management and customer service [increased income secu­rity]
• personal improvement [learning and skill development]
• systems thinking and techniques [handling complexity and inter-rela­tionships].

Active citizens must engage in many activities. There is no one thing that they need to know. Rather they need a complementary suite of skills that work together to produce the results that they want or need.

I recently saw a book about handling workplace conflict which offered useful advice to man­agers on dealing with inter-personal conflict. In our experience, most conflict is stimulated by organisational practices and processes - e.g. competitive budgeting, internal transfer pricing and individual-based reward schemes. Learning to dampen down conflict when the organisa­tional systems and management processes are stimulating competitive behaviour won’t reduce conflict much at all - the fundamental cause of the problem will still be there. The best long and short term solution is to find and remove the causes that are creating the conditions for conflict. For this reason, the ToolKit offers a wide range of options and approaches for dealing with problems and organisational development issues

More on purpose

Defining purpose is an important step for an organistion. Purpose statements explain why the organisation exists and also deliver the starting point for a chain of organisational logic.

If we know why we're doing this, then we must have an idea of how we'll know if we're going in the right direction (evidence).

The production of evidence then gives us information about our progress.

In nearly all cases, the purpose is to produce the evidence of success.

From that point we can begin to design how we'll use our resources to achieve that evidence (strategies)

Evidence

Evidence is information that can be confirmed by others at a later time. It therefore must have some physical reality that can be confirmed.

The purpose of focussing on evidence is to avoid errors (we've finished the rail line, only to find that the line is too steep for trains...don't laugh the Iemma government has done that in Sydney's rail system).

Evidence can be clearly defined in advance, a rail link between X & Y that is useable by our existing trains.

Specifying evidence is best done briefly and simply so that other people can easily understand what's required.