[OSList] Amazing conversations on NCDD listserv

[Suzanne Daigle]

I recently became a member of the National Coalition for Dialogue &
Deliberation <http://ncdd.org/>.  I believe that many in our OS community
are also active in this group.

This stream "Support for public engagement is absent/weak" started a few
days ago and I'm just loving the back and forth exchange -- has the spirit
and energy of our OS listserv on a very familiar topic.

Here one of the latest posts, this one by Mike Wood (copied here), who I do
not know and hopefully he'll forgive me for spreading his post without
asking for permission first. I just felt I wanted to give you a small
sampling of the dialogue. Much more where this came from.

"There have been a lot of great comments in this thread and I particularly
like Roger’s thoughts on the perceptions of people in official positions of
authority (elected officials but also people who work in major institutions
across sectors) toward the public. My experience and certainly what we’ve
seen at The Harwood Institute is that for the most part, public leaders and
people trying to improve communities have noble intentions and motives but
in fact there are cultural factors at play that get in the way of us
engaging people in the way that we need to. The list goes on and on and
many of you have touched on a lot of these:

1.       Time pressures and the tension between public “sorting out” and
the need to get things done

2.       Many of our formal institutional structures actually don’t
engender the kind of authentic engagement we all want to see (stand up for
two minutes at the microphone) – in fact several years ago we did a report
on public agencies that were doing good work in engaging communities and
the challenges they ran up against and this was a big one (they had to
think outside the box to get around it)

3.       The focus on expert knowledge often inadvertently crowds out
communities and leads to all sorts of behaviors that exacerbate this
problem, such as organizing “engagement” around metrics and data (“if we
just give people the right information they will make good choices.”)

4.       Our organizational cultures push us to overly orchestrate
engagement processes – so we spend less time talking and facilitating real
conversations and more time moving people through activities (the yellow
dot exercises and so forth, which are useful sometimes but sometimes
counterproductive)

5.       Again to Roger’s point, we conflate real engagement with public
opinion polling – which does produce a kind of thin “public knowledge” but
is not adequate for what we’re talking about in this thread



So I’m echoing a lot of what’s been said here and I think Ron’s insights
(which started us off) certainly track with our experiences. Not only has
the case for public engagement not been clearly made at the volume level
and consistency we need (although I know many groups in this network are at
the forefront of changing that), but even if people intellectually “get
it,” there are all of these factors that make it  hard to move from getting
it to practicing it.



Good discussion!



Mike Wood"






-- 
Suzanne Daigle
Open Space Facilitator
NuFocus Strategic Group

FL 941-359-8877
Cell: 203-722-2009
www.nufocusgroup.com
s.daigle at nufocusgroup.com
twitter @suzannedaigle
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