<div dir="ltr"><div><div>I recently became a member of the <a href="http://ncdd.org/">National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation</a>. I believe that many in our OS community are also active in this group. <br><br>
</div><div>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. <br>
<br></div><div>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. <br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">"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:</span></p>
<p class="" style><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"><span style>1.<span style="font:7pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">Time
pressures and the tension between public “sorting out” and the need to get
things done</span></p>
<p class="" style><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"><span style>2.<span style="font:7pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">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)</span></p>
<p class="" style><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"><span style>3.<span style="font:7pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">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.”)</span></p>
<p class="" style><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"><span style>4.<span style="font:7pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">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)</span></p>
<p class="" style><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"><span style>5.<span style="font:7pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">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</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">Good discussion!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:rgb(31,73,125)">Mike Wood"</span></p>
<br></div><div><br><br><br><br></div></div><div><div><div><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr">Suzanne Daigle<br>Open Space Facilitator<br>NuFocus Strategic Group<br><br>FL 941-359-8877 <br>Cell: 203-722-2009<br><a href="http://www.nufocusgroup.com" target="_blank">www.nufocusgroup.com</a><br>
<a href="mailto:s.daigle@nufocusgroup.com" target="_blank">s.daigle@nufocusgroup.com</a><br>twitter @suzannedaigle<br></div>
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