Our Services - Communities Matrix
“You cannot plan when people are throwing chairs at one another and bringing concealed firearms to community meetings. You have to figure out which stage you’re at and pick a tool appropriate for the stage. Like strategic planning, a hammer is a great tool. However, you need other tools to build a complete house!”
- Mike Stolte, Communities Matrix co-creator and co-author of “69 Tools, Resources and Techniques for Communities”
Assessing Readiness and Measuring a Community’s Progress
Is your community sinking, firmly anchored, or sailing merrily along?
How do you measure a community’s progress, really? A crucial part of planning and managing local change is to know where you are starting from, so you can figure out exactly where you want to go and how to get there. The Community Check-Up, combined with the Communities Matrix, offers a logical way of tackling this challenge.
- The Communities Matrix is a free one page graphic representation of four phases of community development. It has been used on every continent (except Antarctica) as a starting place in communities.
Click here to watch a video on the Matrix.
- The Community Check-up is a fee-based service that employs an online questionnaire that collects perceptions of community members about their community. CIEL analyzes and scores the results from the Check-up, helping place the community in one of the four developmental phases in the Communities Matrix. The Check-up reveals community strengths and weaknesses in seven key areas including leadership, community connections and the community’s infrastructure capacity. CIEL’s experienced team works with the community to make strategic recommendations about future directions.
"Mike and his tools and processes are wonderful to work with. He knows communities. The depth of CIEL’s tools bring credibility, rigour and confidence to the process.”
- Antoinette Danaher, Uncommon Solutions PL, Bendigo, Australia
The Communities Matrix
The Matrix is a result of CIEL’s research and experience in assisting communities to become more vibrant, entrepreneurial, and innovative.
We have noted that communities vary in their ability to make decisions about their future, and in their ability to carry through on identified courses of action. We have realized that there are developmental phases in communities, analogous to those in developmental psychology.
The Matrix divides the community development process into four phases: Chaos, Emergence, Vision, and Actualization.
Communities run the risk of creating goals that are unattainable, and undertaking economic development processes that are not appropriate to their phase of development. For example, it may be pointless to recommend a long-term strategic planning process to a community without first dealing with trust or communication issues. In fact, trying to carry out an action when the community is not ready for it may exacerbate underlying problems and make future advancement efforts even more difficult.
A community’s Matrix phase is determined by its score in the Check-Up. Based on the community’s Matrix standing, and using other information from the Check-Up process, CIEL then recommends courses of action to help the community advance to the next phase in its vitality, economic development, and entrepreneurship.
The Check-Up and the Matrix will not single-handedly solve a community’s problems, but they will start productive discussion about where the community is, where it wants to go, and what has to be done to get there.
(Also see CIEL's "69 Tools, Techniques & Resources for Communities" for solutions for your community. This helpful 30 page document links a community with resources appropriate for their stage/phase of readiness.
"The Matrix is a unique and valuable tool to assist smaller municipalities in understanding who they are, and what they can become."
- Michael Buda ,Senior Policy Analyst, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Advantages of the Check-Up and the Matrix
- Easily understood
- Quick and easy to administer—an efficient use of a community’s time
- Creates a common language for community dialogue
- An assessment of energy, willingness and capacity to change
- A readiness assessment tool
The Check-Up and the Matrix can be used for:
- Measuring the readiness of your community to take action
- Helping to focus limited community energy into some tangible tools and processes
- Setting a benchmark that can be revisited later to measure change
- Realizing how far you have come as a community
- Identifying what you need to pay attention to in order to foster a vital, thriving community
- Launching appropriate planning so the community doesn’t slide backward through inaction
- Engaging different sectors to enable a comparison of how they see the community
- Creating important dialogue and bridges between sectors in the community
- Measuring sub-communities (arts, business, sports sectors, etc.) within a community
The Check-Up and the Matrix are not:
- A “silver bullet” – they won’t “fix” your community – but they may motivate you to do so!
- An action tool. The Check-Up and the Matrix are a diagnostic instrument that will suggest an appropriate course of action.
" Having worked with communities around BC for a number of years, I feel that the Matrix is easily understandable, very relevant to communities, and a good catalyst to rally community stakeholders around the issue of building on strengths and addressing weaknesses."
- Brandon Hughes, Policy Advisor, Canadian Rural Partnership/Human Resources and Skills Development Canada