Why (and How) You Need to Think Long and Hard Before You Engage the Public

A well thought-out, responsible and responsive approach is vital to get your important but controversial projects implemented

We close out our series on Listening with a look at what you need to do BEFORE you engage the public.

You need to listen to yourself first. Why? Because you need to be asking yourself lots of tough, maybe even pointed, questions about your project, your team, your organization and your recent history of handling controversial projects.

Before going any further about the kinds of questions to pepper yourself with, I need to cite my source for this topic. I've mentioned Bleiker Training almost as much as I’ve mentioned my former employer here in the early days of GGF. Learning the Bleiker approach and philosophy to citizen participation (CP) has been foundational to any success I enjoyed in nearly 24 years in local government communications. As mentioned in the third post of the Listening series, no one knows this work better than Hans, Annemarie and Jennifer Bleiker. And here they are!

The holy trinity of citizen participation training: Hans, Jennifer and Annemarie Bleiker.

Funny thing is, they got into the field almost by accident. Hans was working on his doctorate at MIT in hopes of becoming a federal transportation bigwig. He studied big transportation projects and discovered, to his surprise, that many of them failed to get implemented. And it wasn't because they weren’t technically sound. They were. So, he studied those managers who got their big highway projects built, i.e., implemented. He found out they did fewer public meetings, were low-key in their approach to public input, and never sugarcoated any potential downsides to their projects, to mention but three insights.

The Bleikers call these people “Implementation Geniuses,” and that they do the political equivalent of walking on water.

You, too, can become an Implementation Genius. From the Bleikers:

“We have systematized their methods into a straight-forward citizen participation process that we call SDIC. It's a Consent-Building strategy that anyone can learn to use in a matter of a few days ... so that — when their missions require them to propose a controversial action — they can also get that proposal implemented.”

So today I shine some light — without giving away the store — on that process, the Systematic Development of Informed Consent (SDIC). I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and it bears repeating: If you want to get incredibly effective at public engagement, take their basic course. Sign up now. And then take any of their other offerings. Become an Implementation Genius. Because their goal isn't just getting you trained up to become a CP badass, it's to make governments better at accomplishing their missions. That's their mission. That's what they do.

Our work in local government is too important to screw up because we get the citizen participation piece wrong. But be forewarned. What the Bleikers teach may seem counterintuitive. It may feel like you’re leading with your chin, at times. Why? Because their approach focuses on dealing with your project’s fiercest opponents. But it flat out works. As I’ve noted before, we used their approach for every big, hairy, controversial project we undertook in Round Rock. And it led to implementation. Every. Single. Time.

Just as important is the fact, that over the long term, it built our credibility with the public. Citizens learned they could trust us. They may not always like our answers, but they knew we would treat them with respect and tell them the truth.

The goal is Informed Consent

Astute readers will be asking themselves, “What’s Informed Consent?” Great question. That’s why you’re astute. Here’s the Bleikers’ definition.

The grudging willingness of opponents to (grudgingly) “go along” with a course of action that they — actually — are opposed to.

Sounds nigh impossible, right? It's not. But it does take a thoughtful, deliberate approach and, frankly, some political courage. Hence the need to do lots of hard thinking before you engage opponents, as well as the general public, on your project.

Step 1 in the process of thinking hard before you go public is the need to get your project team together to identify your stakeholders, or what the Bleikers call “potentially affected interests” (PAIs). Who will your project be impacting? Who thinks they'll be impacted but actually won’t? Who might be tangentially interested in your project? It’s amazing what comes out of this discussion. You’ll immediately start gaining insights into potential problem areas as you talk through your PAIs and their issues.

Of course, you’ll want the usual suspects on the list. By usual suspects I mean the gadflies and the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) types who are always opposed to whatever it is you’re proposing. On capital projects, you’ll also need to list those folks to whom you will say, “Yes, in your backyard.”

Dealing with fiercest opponents directly will also show the news media that covers you the following:

If it sounds like you're scared — or if there’s some pain point on the project you don’t want to talk about — reporters will assume you must be hiding something. Seasoned media relations pros know that’s not good. But if you’re up front about those pain points, i.e., willing to lead with your chin, then reporters — and the public — are more likely to believe you when you talk about the positive impacts your project will bring about.

You’ll also want your elected leaders on the list. What are their issues? What will they be worried about? They’re the ultimate PAIs.

Step 2 in the Bleiker’s thinking hard process is asking yourself 230 or so questions about your project, your decision-making process, your credibility with stakeholders, and much, much more. They have put together 15 worksheets that are a key element of what they call a CP Needs Assessment. It's essentially a management exercise. Make sure your City Manager is there (not the Mayor). The worksheets help you diagnose the patient, as it were. What’s likely to lead to a stubbed toe? Don’t sweat that one too much. What’s likely to lead to a bleeding aneurysm? That one you need to deal with ASAP. The worksheets get you to identify and prioritize what specific things need fixing on your project.

Here’s some guidance from the Bleikers on the worksheets.

Make sure you have folks on team playing devil's advocate. Mobilize the group's intelligence. Be 100 percent candid. If you can't, then don't bother doing a Needs Assessment. It would be a waste of time.

Questions are sorted into three buckets: Responsibility, Responsiveness and Effectiveness. Again, I don’t want to give away the recipe for the secret sauce here, so I’ll share a few example questions from each of the buckets.

Here’s a great one about your agency’s legitimacy.

• Is your organization’s mandate — statutory, administrative, fiscal, “gut-level,” etc. … — to work on the problem is as strong, and as clear, as is feasible?

I love the notion of “gut level” mandates. We’re usually not worried about statutory and fiscal mandates. Those are pretty straightforward. But gut level? That’s where the public may need some clarity from you.

Here’s one about your problem-solving and decision-making (PS/DM) process for the project.

• Do the PAIs have an adequate grasp of where … when … and how … they all fit into the project’s PS/DM process?

That’s one followed by this one.

• Do you have an adequate grasp of where … when … and how … they all fit into the project’s PS/DM process?

Having good answers to these two questions is critical, because making sure the public understands the process is fundamental to reaching Informed Consent, in my experience. You can often accomplish this with a simple graphic like the one below, which we used in Round Rock for the rezoning required for huge economic development project.

There are also lots of questions about credibility. Such as:

• Are you sure the way you deal with the media enhances your credibility with them?

• Are you absolutely sure that, the way you answer media questions … and the way you communicate with the media, doesn’t — actually — damage your credibility?

• Are you aggressively using the media to build your credibility with stakeholders?

• Are you absolutely sure that your media-policy does not damage your public credibility?

If your answers aren’t “Yes,” yer doing it wrong. Again, you need to be brutally honest in this assessment. And have some courage when it comes to answering reporter’s questions. Don’t be afraid to get up on your hind legs and defend your proposal!

I love this next one, also on credibility.

• Do stakeholders find that you consistently are the first and best source of information of project and impact information? … i.e. For information that’s unfavorable to your project, … as well as for information that’s favorable …?

But I really, truly, dearly love this one the most.

• When a sensitive issue comes up on your project, … and your team debates whether you should “go public” with it … and, if you “go public,” how you should go public, … how you should talk and write about it, … and with whom you can, and with whom you cannot talk about that sensitive issue, … does the “Cover Your Ass” argument ever prevail?

My fervent prayer is that everyone reading this newsletter can honestly answer that with an honest “No” at some point in their local government career.

You’re trying to find the areas where you don’t have a great answer to a legitimate question. It doesn’t mean the answer doesn’t exist. It’s just that you haven't articulated it yet.

When you’ve completed the worksheets, you separate the stubbed toes from the aneurysms. And for those questions where you don’t have great answers yet, you think hard and then write down what specific CP objective needs to be achieved for you to have a good answer.

What’s left is a list of prioritized objectives your team has identified that need to be accomplished to get to Informed Consent.

Step 3 in the process is to identify the citizen engagement tools and techniques (various types of committees, public meetings, project blog, Charrettes, focus groups, social media platforms, etc.) that are best suited to meet the specific kinds of objectives surfaced by the worksheets. I do not possess the writing skills to explain what Step 3 looks like, other than to say it involves tape, highlighters, and squinting your eyes to discern a “good bit of black.” Suffice it to say Hans and Annemarie immigrated from Switzerland and probably could have gone into the watchmaking business if the CP training gig didn’t work out.

Picking the right tools and techniques is just as important as figuring out the right objectives. Not doing so would be like a mechanic determining what tools to use before he looks under the hood of your car to figure out what’s wrong. Yet another immensely helpful tool the Bleikers have developed is a list of the pros and cons of each technique’s risk, difficulty, expense, time demands, etc.

Doing all this takes less anywhere from 5 to 8 hours. Yes, it’s a daylong meeting. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, you’ll need to order in lunch. And yes, it’s worth it.

Hans tells the story of a major bridge widening project where the engineering team — despite having been trained by the Bleikers — didn’t sit down and go through the worksheets at the beginning of the project. The design and planning process took at least a couple of years — and got highly politicized. In the end, the project was shot down. Hans recalled asking the project manager why she didn’t have her team do the full-blown needs assessment on such a high profile and expensive project.

“We didn’t have the time,” she said.

Make the time to do your hard thinking before you go public. You, and your constituents, will be glad you did.