I have been struggling with answering the question of what I can do to help build new patterns in society that address current issues, as our old expectations of how people and nations relate to each other and the structures and systems that support our lives shift rapidly. 

As a group process facilitator, I believe that when we have ways of really listening to each other and together building what we need to thrive, we can create structures that serve us well. This is difficult, especially at a high level of society, but participation in decision-making can bring unexpected wisdom to decisions and is worth the effort. 

Here are two stories of how a large city with several thousand people used participatory process to involve the community in building consensus. ToP methodologies can adapt for large groups to gather very diverse perspectives and find common ground.

One of my clients a number of years ago was a major city who needed a strategic plan.  A colleague asked me to design a community consultation process that gathered perspectives from people all over the city and brought these together.  I designed a ToP transformational strategy process that was used in neighbourhoods across the city, facilitated by my colleagues. The results were documented and shared with participants.

Another part of the process was to facilitate the city council itself to think through its vision, obstacles, and strategies, which I facilitated.  These results were also documented. Then in another meeting we needed the council to hear what the people had said – this was more challenging. Some council members were dragging their feet.  So we put the strategies of the council back up on the wall so they could see them themselves, and also put up the results from the community.  When we had a conversation on the two different results, there was a unanimous response from the council that there was generally a real overlap, but that the community results had one insight that the council results had lacked. They decided to add that insight to their own results! 

This strategic plan was posted online and used as the foundation for council decisions for more than five years. The process led to a desire to engage citizens more fully. 

Several years later, the council decided to ask the public about how they wanted to be engaged in city decisions, and they asked me to come back to design and lead the process.

This was not a strategic plan, so the design was quite different.  We invited residents to community focus groups across the city, each with a similar process.  There was a reflective conversation on their previous experiences with consultation, another on why public engagement is important, and then a consensus workshop on “What are elements of effective public engagement in our city?”  There were 11 sessions across the city with residents, and 2 sessions with city administration.  A plenary was held with representatives from each of the individual sessions to draw together the broad consensus on the elements of effective public engagement, using the consensus workshop method at a higher level to incorporate the cluster insights on the column title cards and also more than a thousand individual cards!  A high level report was made to a special city council meeting, and another focus group was done with the council itself as well.

The whole process culminated in a public event to report the results in a large venue and to spark future actions.

A vignette that illustrates the power of using participatory process from the bottom up:

In the first public community focus group, a colleague was facilitating.  One person/small group sent up a wild card in answer to “What are elements of effective public engagement in our city?” that said “more chocolate”.  Everyone laughed, and the facilitator started to say that this silly card didn’t fit anywhere.  But I spoke up from the back of the room to say “There is wisdom behind every card – where does this one illuminate an emerging insight the best?’  The card went up on the wall. 

When the plenary was held to bring together the results from all the focus groups, “more chocolate” clustered with “child care” and “transportation to the meeting” and many other cards that came from other groups, that created the larger insight that engagement sessions should be comfortable to encourage participation.  The person who had written the original card came up to me and said, “Now I understand why you did not throw my ‘silly’ card out, and how my idea helps create a larger insight.  I feel my perspective was respected and contributed to the whole.”

My facilitation work has always been done through the Institute of Cultural Affairs and ICA Associates, Inc. You can learn more about these processes here: http://ica-associates.ca