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 [email protected] twitter @suzannedaigle
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