If you work for a regulatory agency, or even if you don’t — but you administer regulation — you must have these two key ingredients to establish Legitimacy among your public.
In the short video below, we’ll follow-up the discussion from Consent-Building Clinic (Brownbag session) #69: “Regulating a Public Not OK Being Dictated To.”
Listen closely, and you’ll hear how identifying yourself, your team, your agency as “regulators,” is only making matters worse.
Then you’ll hear precisely what you need to communicate to your public instead.
Time to Hear from You
In the comments, share with us:
Lessons you’ve learned on establishing your work’s Legitimacy,
How you maintain Legitimacy with your public (particularly your fiercest opponents — always where we put our Consent-Building focus), and
Other obstacles you face when it comes to issues of legitimacy.
*Help out your friends and colleagues by sharing this blog with them. Like you, they have important missions to accomplish, and need all the help they can get to establish their work’s legitimacy.
“No matter what we tell our stakeholders, they always assume a decision has already been made, and that – therefore – it would be a waste of their time to get involved in our planning process.”
Boy oh boy! . . . Are there ANY public officials who DON’T give voice to this complaint?
So, if your public again and again feels that you’re asking them to get involved in a process where the horse has already left the barn, when – in fact – it has NOT, stay tuned.
On the one hand, the perception that their involvement could not possibly make a difference – when it still CAN – is a very damaging misperception. It undermines your credibility. It is a very damaging misperception, one that hinders your team’s effectiveness!
On the other hand, stakeholders’ feeling that their involvement is not going to change anything isn’t always a misperception. Quite often, it’s the TRUTH! . . . Public agencies often inadvertently create – or aggravate – the perception that their stakeholders can have a greater influence on the outcome than is really possible. You’ve got to be careful that you don’t create unrealistic expectations.
“How do we convince the public that their input matters?”
Because this month’s topic is closely related to last month’s, we’ll try to complement – rather than repeat – the issues covered last month. Together, these two Brownbag sessions give pretty good coverage of this terribly important issue, the issue of getting people to realize that their involvement DOES have a chance of making a difference – without OVER-doing it and, thereby, creating unrealistic expectations.
Although there are many reasons people don’t get involved, THIS is probably the biggest one reason: Their conviction that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. So, to the degree that you manage to fix THIS particular problem – this particular misunderstanding — you’ll get another involvement monkey off your back.
Picture this: You’ll be working on a project where the relevant public UNDERSTANDS that their participation will not be a waste of time, that it CAN make a difference. We’ll help you get there!
“When our stakeholders don’t like how we do our work, they go straight to our policy-makers who – then – try to micro-manage our projects. It’s one thing to stand up to stakeholders, but how do we stand up to this?”
Several different dynamics are in play when a community – a community that’s made up of people who hold DIFFERENT values – decides to tackle problems as a community . . . be that “community” a town, a city, a state, a region, or a nation. In a quest to improve public-sector problem-solving and decision-making, there are those of us who forever pry deeper and deeper into examining those several dynamics..
We find it useful to organize the lessons we learn into topics, such as Values, Individual vs. Group Rights, Data Analysis and Modeling, Dealing with Uncertainty, Risk and Risk Communication, Communication and Involvement, Professional Ethics, Leadership, etc.
Today’s question cannot be addressed without invoking the topics of Professional Ethics and Leadership.
Your policy-makers ARE part of your “public,” and stakeholders ARE in the habit of end-running you by going straight to them. But, your policy-makers are a very special “public” . . . after all, “policy-makers” is synonymous with “decision-makers” . . . So, they CAN micro-manage – as well as macro-manage – can’t they?
As you’ll see, it’s not THAT simple; your ethical responsibilities as a professional, at times, includes LEADERSHIP.
“Our message tends to get lost in the media: When they don’t over-simplify, they tell a lop-sided, negative story.”
This is a well-justified complaint! . . . One reason this kind of thing is more than just a burr under the saddle is that the traditional media – in spite of the internet – is a terribly important communications vehicle.
As justified as the complaint may be, don’t bother . . . don’t bother wasting your breath on complaining. It doesn’t help.
We’ll focus on what you CAN do — OTHER than complaining – to start using the media as the fantastic communications tool they have the potential of being. On projects and programs where you’re affecting a very large public, you just about HAVE to use the traditional media as one of your tools, or you’ll never reach all the potentially affected interests that you need to reach.
Hans, Annemarie & Jennifer Bleiker
PO Box 1937, Monterey, CA 93942
Training & Coaching inquiries: 781-789-6500
Main Office: 831-373-4292
Jennifer@ConsentBuilding.com
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