Big Block of Cheese Day
There are a few famous West Wing Episodes (I know, I'm dating myself) featuring Big Block of Cheese Day, based loosely on a practice instituted by President Andrew Jackson. In those episodes, fictional White House staffers were subjected to seemingly inane meetings with interest groups that typically wouldn’t haunt the hallowed halls of the West Wing, much less prance on the parquet floors of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The team begins the day dripping with scorn and throwing shade on the crackpots they view as wasting their time, but end up moved by the passion, commitment and eloquence of groups, whose interests range from cartographic equity to the existence of UFOs, and become their champions.
I couldn’t help but recall these episodes during recent NRPA internal brainstorm on programmatic priorities for the upcoming year. After running through existing programs, identifying gaps and needs, and weighing resource constraints with opportunities, there was a chance for team members to pitch trends, topics and ideas that weren’t on the A-list. There were some cool outside-the-box ideas that came up, some ideas whose time may not yet have come, and others that come up every year in hopes of finally finding a fellow traveler (mine unfortunately).
Whether we’ll be able to run in a new direction or chase a lead this year, next year, or four years from now, time will tell. But, to me, the point is creating a big block of cheese culture that allows people to get together and draw out new thinking, respectfully challenge each other’s assumptions, proactively poke holes in each other’s logic models and create a space that allows for a random spark of an idea to ignite that will transform our organization or field.
'Big block of cheese' is about taking comfort in the fact that we don’t have all the answers, and that who is, and who is not, in the room has a lot to do with how and why we have arrived at the way things are done now. So, my fellow dairy aficionados, swing open the doors, put out the big block of cheese, invite some new voices in, and listen to what they have to say. What do you have to lose?
Kevin O'Hara
Vice President of Urban and Government Affairs
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