But do you have vision?

    A tourism czar? Wow.
    Visionary.
    That begs for a story.
    I was born and raised on a farm. It’s what’s truly inside of me. We were pretty much experts at everything—livestock, crops, water, drainage, road-building, electrical, building construction, engine and machinery repair, concrete—almost everything.
At least we had opinions on everything.
    But when you’re in a situation where you are exposed to a lot of concepts and your livelihood depends on your ability to get the job done, it’s not difficult really being to classify yourself as an "expert." Or you consider yourself someone who has a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things.
    Perhaps it’s a part of our whole rural landscape. There are a lot of things we do in rural and small-town America that our urban cousins don’t do. We tend to worry about the substrate under a concrete or asphalt roadway before many of our urban friends can say "sub-what?". I really didn’t understand why they kept relying on "experts."
    The rural care and concern we have is genuine. It’s what keeps us involved. Really involved. We usually have a room full of us "experts" show up when it comes to arguing dirt versus asphalt, a turn-lane versus just a turn-light, the depth of a community well, its location or water quality.
    It took me years to realize that although my head was stuffed with a little knowledge about a lot of things, all I really had was a knack for was basic understanding of what was going on. Oh, maybe I had an ability to maybe replace a part or get something working again without too much of a fuss.
    In spending years in business and different work situations, I finally learned something really useful—I wasn’t a professional engineer, a contractor, a mathematician or a researcher. And it took me a few more patient years to learn how to listen, digest and understand the new information that I was picking up—from the people who did it for a living.
    More importantly, learning how to use that information became an important part of the process. At some point, I realized that I could listen and learn from all the professionals around me and draw a different conclusion than I first considered.
    In discussing this with one of those mentors, one day, he said, "Congratulations. You may be truly having a "vision" of how things could work."
    It was at that point that I realized I really didn’t have "visions"—I had personal opinions based on personal experiences. But I really hadn’t understood or used the collective knowledge of those around me to create a more constructive conclusion.
To have a "vision" I had to depend on others and come to a consensus.
    Sure, it may already be "something I already knew." But since I’m a research sample of one, it was great to learn that statistics supported or refuted a certain concept. After all, a definition of research is "confirming things you already knew." But research makes it more of a fact. It confirms what we believe as a collective vision.
    And by vision, I don’t mean details. Visions don’t worry about the location of something, the color of paint or if the right words were used. Visions don’t predict success or failure. Visions don’t say no. Visions could care less about our personal opinions or feelings.
    Visions are just that—visions.
    One definition of a vision is ". . . the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom."
    Regarding tourism, I, for one, plan to listen, learn and dream right along with the rest of the community. I plan to keep an open mind and really think about what we truly can do with the future of tourism in Dodge City and Ford County.
    Downtown redevelopment. Tourism redevelopment. Tourism czar.
    Cool. I can keep an open mind.
    And I was born an expert.