Future Here Now: Demanding better public engagement, Part 3
Coming soon
As I mentioned last week, I am heading to Denver next week to lead a Learning Lab on Digital Public Engagement at the National Planning Conference, and in conjunction with that I’m releasing my next book, Online Public Engagement. So this week I’m going to share a few selections from that book.
The key message of my public engagement work, over the last 20 + years, has been that no one should be settling for the antiquated, elitist, useless public engagement that we have been getting for generations. Given our technology, our information access and our expectation that our opinions matter, it’s unreasonable to think that anyone should be satisfied with a three-minute screed at a mic in a council chamber.
If you’re a planner or a city government official, your bad public engagement is making your job harder and more miserable. If you’re an economic developer, your lack of public engagement is setting you up for disaster. If you’re a business owner, nonprofit manager, or a Person Who Gives a Damn of any types, your community’s bad public engagement is undermining every element of your community, and making it all the harder to build the kind of future you want. And if you’re not getting good public engagement opportunities, online and in person, you should fight for it, now more than ever.
This selection from Online Public Engagement introduces two of the least used, but most potentially powerful, types of public engagement — those that include us in problem solving, either by Discussing or by Deciding. We don’t do anywhere near enough of this, in part because it used to be almost impossible. With the right tools and technology, and the right mindset, they’re not nearly as hard anymore.
Discussing
Discussing activities create a two-way exchange of information and ideas between members of the public and officials, staff or others who have some official capacity (such as developers or nonprofit staff). Discussing is often conducted using smaller groups of participants than the typical Telling or Asking event. One of the primary goals of the Discussing is to build a more comprehensive and more nuanced understanding of the perspectives and priorities that different people in the community may hold. Mutual understanding and respect for different perspectives often ranks as one of the highest priorities of these initiatives. A number of the strategies used by public dialogue and deliberation professionals, including World Cafe, Fishbowl and others, are designed to foster Discussing-style public engagement.
While Discussing can certainly lead to greater understanding among differing perspectives, these strategies can present some challenges. One crucial issue is that Discussing efforts may require more time, and the number of persons who can logistically participate is often limited to a small subset of all potential participants.
Perhaps more importantly, from the perspective of professionals and officials who are trying to inform a plan or public policy decision, Discussing can generate a wide variety of insights and ideas, but not necessarily a strong sense of direction or priorities. Without a concerted effort to identify a shared direction among participants, planners and other officials may find that Discussing has left them swamped in information and nuance, with no clearer sense of public direction than before.
Deciding
Deciding public engagement extends the two-way dialogue to collaborative decision-making that involves both the public and officials. Deciding engagement may include priority-setting, establishing guiding principles, choice of specific projects to be included in the program or budget, development of strategies for collaboration, etc.
The key difference between Discussing and Deciding is that the Deciding work generates a clear, well-informed and defensible guide to next steps, allocation of resources or other public decisions – decisions that have been directed, and to a great extent generated, by members of the public.
Deciding public engagement clearly has some advantages, both in terms of political defensibility and in making use of the insights and knowledge of the public. Deciding tactics do, however, present some significant challenges, especially if leaders cut corners in the name of time or money.
Like Discussing, this more intensive strategy means that participation has to be limited to a manageable number, and participants have to be willing to invest more time and effort than Telling or Asking would require. If the Deciding participants are anything less than fully inclusive and representative of the community, the results can be attacked as skewed toward certain special interests. If the participants are not fully informed about the pertinent issues, the decisions they make could be off-base in terms of what the community actually needs.
Effective Deciding will require sophisticated process planning and facilitation, both to maintain fairly distributed involvement and to manage common collaborative decision-making pitfalls, such as groupthink.