Strategic Planning: Session Four

Planning session four was held at the museum on June 16 at 9:00am and it was our best attended session to date. The session followed planning session two in that participants were asked to make two lists. The first list were things that you could “SEE” in the Imperial Valley Desert Museum. The second list was things you could “DO” at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum. 

Large sheets of paper were prepared and participants were asked to say ideas out loud. All ideas of both what you could see and what you could do were written down. After we filled the first sheet with ideas that you could “see,” we moved on to ideas that you could “do.” Many of the ideas that were listed on the second sheet, however, were still ideas that you could see. 

At the end of the session, participants were each given six (6) orange sticky dots. Each person was asked to place dots on the words, or ideas, that they felt to be the most important. If an idea was exceptionally important, it could receive more than one dot. The dots were a way to weight the ideas we had talked about. In this way, we hoped to get at the most important ideas that were discussed. A common comment at this point was that people did not have enough dots for all the good ideas we discussed.

The top ideas that had the most dots at the end of the session were as follows: 

1.  Creation of cultural things/traditional craft production (tie for first)

1.  History Off Roading (tie for first)

2.  Work in Lab

3.  Pots and Puzzles (Hands-on Lab activity of reconstructing pots from shards)