Help frame the conversation about water

Grady Gammage Jr.

Last week’s discussion was great, and we’d like to thank everyone for such terrific participation.  Obviously, this is difficult stuff.  Our goal at MI has just been to try and find a way to identify the major water issues facing Arizona, and then give those issues some sense of priority.  Figuring out the order in which we should face challenges is, however, not simple.  As we learned last week, it isn’t even easy to decide what an “issue” is, and how to separate issues from one another.

Several people in the meeting had framework ideas that might help all of us think about the structure of our conversation.  We talked about the need to separate “issues to be resolved” from “potential solutions to be explored.”  Steve Seleznow, for example, offered the suggestion that we think about separating our conversation into:  Guiding principles; Adjacent (to guiding) goals; aspirational ideas; out of bounds stuff.  Tom McCann had a different, and potentially useful framework (which I now don’t remember:  TOM—write up your concept for everyone!).

We’ll push out a summary of the meeting, and as we discussed, we’ll try to get everyone to weigh in digitally on potential prioritization of issues so that we can discuss it in the next meeting.  But we’d like all of you to suggest other ways in which we might seek to give some structure to our conversation.  So if you have ideas on how to bring order out of chaos, please submit your framework for everyone to think about.