Intentional Engagement
When your intention is clear, so is the way.
– Alan Cohen
One of the things I see as a key element of readiness is intention. In this Public Engagement Readiness Model, intention is described as establishing shared purpose to achieve cohesion.
According to Will Wise and Chad Littlefield, authors of Ask Powerful Questions: Creating Conversations That Matter, intention helps create clarity about why we are doing something, what we need, what we expect and what we can offer. This supports one of the key principles of engagement – transparency.
While transparency is well established as a principle to follow when engaging members of the public, it also has value as part of an internal readiness practice. Getting clear on the intent of engagement with a project team helps reveal choices for how the engagement could happen. It also fosters commitment amongst the team to act in a way that achieves the intention.
It is not always easy for project teams to get clear on intentions for engaging the public. Wise and Littlefield offer three lenses through which intention can be explored: outcomes-focused, commitment-focused and future-focused.
Outcomes-focused intention is about the results, what the project team needs to walk away with through the engagement work. For example, “At the end of this engagement we need to understand the challenges of these design options and the opportunities we have to address them.”
Commitment-focused intention is about promises. It’s about the obligations the project team will fulfill as part of the engagement. For example, “We will be clear and open about the engagement process and how the input will be considered by decision-makers.”
Future-focused intention is visionary. It’s about what the project team is aiming for the engagement to achieve. For example, “Through this engagement people will understand what we are trying to do with the design options and why and, feel the time they committed to sharing their input was valued.”
I’ve used these three lenses many times as a guide to support finding a project team’s intention. Rarely, do the intents fit nicely into each category and that’s okay. Overall, the goal is to limit the guessing games amongst the project team and, ultimately, amongst the public. Taking the time to develop clear, true and holistic intentions fosters transparency and can help mitigate uncertainty, supporting the project team’s readiness to engage the public and the public’s readiness to engage with them.