Future Here Now: Crowdsourced wisdom is the best way to find a real solution
Signals and What Do I Do With This
Signals
A cross-discipline Why
https://thoughtexchange.com/blog/5-reasons-to-include-community-in-decision-making/
This article is one of few I have seen that hits both public sector definitions (see the Arnstein ladder reference) and private sector team building. If you think about how the uses that the author describes might apply to your work, you might take away some interesting insights. For example, how might you reformat your public sector community engagement to increase your residents’ civic engagement capacity, or strengthen your department’s social capital with community members? How might greater transparency enable your team members to particpate more actively and help you find innovative solutions?
The AfroHack
https://www.opportunitiesforafricans.com/undp-fcmb-agrohack-challenge-2022-for-agritech-startups/
“Hacks” are a strategy for fast innovation and product development that came out of the software world, but the hack approach gives one of the most direct means of engaging people in solution development that we have. To be sure, most officially-named “Hack” things are presented as high tech-focused, which means that far too many of the people we might need for truly inclusive innovation don’t see themselves in the invitation (My tech friends tell me that non-tech people are welcome at hacks). But as a method, a well-structured Hack event might be a way to get a broad amount of reasonably well-developed insights - and even potential solutions - faster and more inclusively than our usual Star Chamber approach.
What to obsess over: not just “engagement”
https://rosie.land/posts/dont-obsess-over-community-engagement/
Community engagement means something a little different in the business world and in the public policy world, but in both cases it has a tendency to transactional-ness, which increasingly comes off as fake and off-putting to the very people we were trying to reach. This article’s style isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s a good summary of alternative, and probably more useful, ways to define meaningful engagement than simply counting heads.
What do I do with this?
The first article in the section above gives you the bones of a useful way to not only do better crowdsourcing wisdom, but to apply a tool that I (and lots of people) use to find solutions that didn’t occur to us naturally.
To do this, you need a piece of paper (preferably gridded, but plain can work) or a spreadsheet on your computer.
Down the left hand side of the page, write the major functions of your office, team, program, etc. If you have specific organizational or product or other problems that you are trying to solve, maybe add those to the list.
Across the top of the page, write the five reasons for doing public engagement that the author identified in that article. If you’re not using grid paper or a spreadsheet, draw columns between those words. This will leave you with a matrix, like a multiplication table, with one cell at the intersection of each item down the side and each reason across the top.
For each cell, ask yourself how you might be able to use an engagement strategy that did the thing across the top to help address the issue or challenge in the thing on teh side.
If you can’t come up with anything for a specific cell, that’s OK. Just leave it blank. If the idea seems dumb or unrealistic, write it down anyways. This isn’t Bingo. The point is to systematically push things that you had not previously connected before right up against each other, and see if that sparks any new idea. Not everything will spark, and some things might spark a lot later.
I’d leave the matrix and come back to it occasionally over a few days. When you do, don’t just look at the squares you haven’t looked at yet. Look at all of them.
The mind is a weird thing. Let me know what you get out of this.