When an organisation has to make a decision, when is the best time to engage stakeholders about the best option?
If you only ask people what they think when you’ve already made up your mind, you’re taking a big risk. Here’s a quick introduction to Decide-Announce-Defend (Abandon), and its more enlightened cousin Engage-Deliberate-Decide.
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 / EDD 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.
