Posts tagged “Engagement”

It won’t have escaped your notice that not everyone in the UK loves wind turbines.  So if you’re planning to add to our renewable energy capacity, you might want to think about how to involve your neighbours early on.

In 2005 my article (pdf) in the environmentalist described some interesting initiatives specifically designed to help those promoting or planning wind energy developments, to engage their stakeholders.

Too often, I meet with people who see stakeholder engagement as a more sophisticated way of selling their messages to potential critics.

That’s not the game I’m in!

Don’t bother asking people what they think if you’re not willing to change your plans as a result.

This article explains why you need to act in good faith when you’re listening to your stakeholders.

Update: November 2010

I’ve been using a new categorisation recently with good effect, courtesy of Lindsey Colbourne and Sciencewise:

• transmit – “straight comms” – one way, putting out a message about something which has already been decided or already happened.
• collaborate – work together to co-create an understanding of the situation, problem, possible solutions, implementation plans and so on.
• receive – “extractive research” of the kind perfected by social researchers, market researchers etc.

There is absolutely a role for all three, and many processes or even single events will include ways of doing all three.

But if you want buy-in, and want those implementing the outcomes to want to do so, collaboration is the way.  And more fun, IMHO.

Facilitator and blogger Myriam Laberge has explored this a bit too.

There are quite a few courses on offer in the UK to help people speak in public more confidently, knowledgeably and effectively about climate change.

This article which I wrote for the environmentalist examines two of them, focusing on the key points that the trainers are trying to get across.

I spend quite a lot of my time working with clients to engage stakeholders around topics related to sustainable development.

This might be working with coastal communities to figure out how to respond to rising sea levels.  It might be chewing over new approaches to public transport.  Or it could be examining how the market for supplying domestic energy can be adjusted to reward companies for selling less energy or lower carbon energy.

I also run a lot of training courses for people who want to learn more about stakeholder engagement and to develop their facilitation skills.

DAD / ED is one of the most useful models I know for helping learners and clients understand the difference between traditional communications – Decide, Announce, Defend (Abandon) – and an approach which engages stakeholders: Engage, Deliberate, Decide.

This article I wrote for the environmentalist, published in February 2009,  explains a bit more.

Why should environmentalists (in all our various guises) get into stakeholder engagement?

Sometimes the problems are just too complex to be solved by one party acting alone.

If you can bring people together in an atmosphere of dialogue (a ‘conversation with a center, not sides’ as William Isaacs calls it), then the chances of finding that sweet spot where everyone’s interests coincide is so much higher.

Now this is a bit like an optical illusion even in principle – the concept slips in and out of focus.  It’s even harder in practice.  There are, though, some institutions and processes that get close, and have resulted in some interesting collaborative work.

Take, for example, the Marine Stewardship Council.  It’s built on the idea that lots of different people have an interest in the sustainability of fish stocks, even if those interests are driven by different motivations.  It’s an example of sustainable development happening because of people working together.

There’s more about this in my article for the environmentalist, here (pdf).