Just came from a community meeting on the future of Charleston, SC; with many politicians and constituent groups each with a particular agenda to promote.  The most commonly heard phrases in the meeting were “a fork in the road for Charleston” and “planning”.

Yes, we as Charleston citizens are facing a fork in the road, but so is each and every one of us every day of our lives, including our City.  Significant differences are less often made by monumental decisions, but more often by the collection of our daily decisions, just as a beautiful necklace is made by a collection of individual pearls.

If Charleston allows itself to be mired in endless requirements discussions and planning cycles, it will likely end up as a second tier, bureaucratically managed, declining city.

Instead, lets become the Google, Amazon, or Apple of cities.  Let’s harvest our best three to five ideas each year to make Charleston an even greater city and allot small budgets (relative to project magnitude) to prototype our ideas and, if productive, innovate the best ones into our future.  Those that don’t pan out are scrapped with relatively small losses compared to what could have been incurred with massive City-wide projects.  Prototypes help us all see the possibilities of the future.  How many of us knew that we needed the iPhone before we saw it as a product and understood the possibilities that it provided.

We can plan and discuss forever or we can prototype and innovate (often called agile development in the software world) around our most promising ideas.  Which would you prefer?  Can we make Charleston the first agile city?