If vision you must, please do it outside your own bo

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© St. Petersburg Times
published July 5, 2002

It is impossible not to notice that many of our Tampa Bay area communities are engaged in visioning. This is a synonym for "paying a consultant."

Visioning must not be confused with mere seeing. One might possess vision, even 20/20 vision, yet not be visioning. To be visioning, one must hold many meetings.

"Visioning is the hot thing on the beaches," this newspaper reported to its readers on May 19, "as town after town considers hiring a professional planner to plot appearance and character."

St. Pete (not Petersburg!) Beach has visioned. Madeira Beach has visioned. So have Clearwater and Largo. The visioning that occurred in the latter city caused it to envision a 93,000-square-foot new library, which now is giving some taxpayers pause. They in turn envision pitchforks and torches.

Those Pinellas County beach communities with "Redington" in their name are thinking about it. So is Indian Shores, not to be confused with any other Indian-named cities.

Zephyrhills in Pasco County has visioned (more hills, more zephyrs). A Hernando County commissioner regrets that her county has not yet visioned. Visioning is occurring in the Land O'Lakes area of central Pasco.

"I generally get irritated," my colleague Jean Heller tells me slyly, "with the verbing of nouns."

There is a name for the kind of joke she made, but it escapes me. (Go Westie, young man.) I can only counter with my own complaint about the unnecessary noun-ing of nouns, e.g., "signage," which is superfluous in a way that "verbiage" can never be.

But, I digest. Let us hope that this wave of visioning in our bay area communities will result, as most grand plans usually do, in the installation of yet more traffic calming devices. (One thinks, somewhat surrealistically, of traffic cones humming Brahms.)

By making fun of visioning I doubtless am guilty of failing to think outside the box. It is understood in our modern business and consultant culture that one must not think inside the box. The box is a bad place to think. It is not clear what activities are permissible inside the box, but thinking certainly is not one of them.

"We like thinking outside the box, a clean slate," a homebuilder promises in a June 22 article. A schoolteacher complains that the FCAT test forces students to "go in the box." A U.S. senator from Kansas wants the new homeland security department to think -- well, you know where.

One might well ask: How big, exactly, is this box? Why is it not big enough? Do different people have individual boxes, or are we are all inside the same box? If one person has a really spacious box, then could that person be thinking inside the box and yet still be doing better thinking than a person thinking outside a considerably smaller box?

It is possible that I am failing to connect the dots. That is generally understood to be the nature of the failure of the FBI, CIA and all those smart guys last summer. On June 21, national domestic security chief Tom Ridge told Congress that the new homeland security department will, in fact, connect dots.

"The attorney general can't seem to connect the dots," read a critical headline on a June 2 opinion column in this newspaper. A little later in June, as various big-business scandals broke, Democrats were described as eager to connect the dots back to the White House.

(Speaking of the current business scandals, we have published articles variously labeling Martha Stewart as uber-hausfrau, maven, style arbiter and cultural icon. To this list I would add distraction from the real crooks. I also protest the substitution of the sanitizing phrase accounting fraud for the more useful lying like a gutless dog.)

The recent spate of dot connecting was too much for astute reader C. Wiley Gilstrap of Palm Harbor, who wrote a letter to the editor that was published June 26.

"From now on, any journalist who lectures officials to "connect the dots' or "think outside the box,"' Gilstrap fumed, "should be tied to a tree and be forced to listen to tapes of Diane Roberts or Robyn Blumner columns until the culprit goes stark, raving mad." As I admire these writers and am jealous at being omitted, I must try harder, maybe even 24/7.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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