Last week Toni Shope (Alliance's Strategic Initiatives Director) and I engaged with the city of Charlotte, NC for a 3-hour Next Big Things workshop. Attendees were eager to collaborate and see what the next 20 years may bring for their city; more importantly, how to prepare and manage situations and scenarios.

We saw a lot of the same trends unfold under High Impact/High Certainty: Education Reform, Population Increase, Traffic/Transit, Sharing Economy, Housing, Tribalism and Identity Politics, Elder Expense, and Upward Mobility. With these trends, scenarios were diagramed with various plot lines and players for unique stories with titles such as, Throw Mama from the Train, Airplane, or Truck, Netflix Original: House of Cars, and Blue Sky.

Comments from some of the attendees about how the workshop was beneficial to them were:
 - Thinking about the diversity of impacts & perspectives of other participants.
 - Hearing group scenarios, it provided good ideas on how we need to move forward as a city.
 - The exercises were really thought-provoking.

In the East, more workshops are scheduled for Florida in May.