Engagement 101: It’s about trust

With engagement becoming more integrated within organisations and more expected by the community, there is a real risk of ‘death by consultation’!

More engagement is not always better! When people are asked to participate in everything, all the time, it drains organisational resources and community time.

This overload reduces participant turnout and in turn weakens confidence in the findings. Then organisations may be unable to see the value of their engagement, so they scale back consultation. This breeds community mistrust, which then prompts the organisation to push for more engagement.

The cycle ultimately doesn’t support anyone’s outcomes and creates mistrust in the process and people involved.

Trust enables decision-making

Unless you intend to rely on brute force, a critical ingredient for effective decision-making is trust. People are comfortable with others making decisions on their behalf when trust is present. We do this every day with trusted professionals such as GPs, mechanics or accountants. And anyone who has ever discussed an advance care directive knows how powerful trust is when delegating significant choices. That reality does not change when the topic is rates, roads or rubbish!

There is also a difference between what people say they want and what they actually need:

• When a community says it wants more consultation, it may be saying it does not trust the organisation. If this is the case, tokenistic engagement does not fix a trust problem.

• When organisations say we need to engage less and ‘get on with business’, the organisation could be saying HOW we engage is not working, but don’t know any other way.

Death by consultation is very real for both the community and the organisation. Yet halting engagement is as dangerous as using outdated or unfit-for-purpose models of engagement.

The trap: Decide, Announce, Defend

A fast way to erode trust is to default to the traditional D.A.D model: Decide, Announce, Defend. This looks like:

“We are elected or employed to make decisions. We know what is best, so we decide what is needed. We announce our decision (sometimes calling that engagement) and focus our effort on convincing people we are right.”

- If you have ever dealt with a pushy salesperson, you know that telling people what they need is an uphill battle.

- If you have been in a disagreement where the other person only explains why they are right, you'll know it's a minefield

What are more contemporary ways to build trust at scale?

Depth, not breadth

  - Focus on representation, not volume. Seeking community-wide consensus via a survey or a two-hour workshop is unrealistic. Engaging only the ‘already active’ will skew the data.

  - Invest in targeted processes with 40 to 100 people who are demographically representative, ideally randomly invited rather than self-selected. Give them the time and information needed to form informed, robust, consensus recommendations or decisions.

  - Research shows most people do not need to be personally involved if ‘people like me’ have been involved.

  - Welcome to deliberative engagement!

Consistency

  - Build shared agreement across the organisation and elected decision-makers on what quality looks like. In this way, everyone can have confidence in the process.

  - Then work to that standard. Forget your favourite method. What matters is a defensible, high-quality process.

Follow-through

  - Close the loop. Tell people what you heard and what will happen next.

 

The mindset shift

There is no magic wand. Humans are messy, and a set-and-forget approach to working with people is a fallacy.

Trust is active and precious. It often gets pushed behind self-imposed deadlines. Trust, which is fundamentally about relationships, does not operate like an organisation. The sooner organisations recognise that difference, the sooner they will start building trust, rather than simply debating which engagement method to use