The $7M Mistake
That Built Trust

Ask an Implementation Genius how they knew exactly what to say in that town hall, email, or budget hearing, and you’ll usually get the same answer. A shrug. Then something like, “I just felt it.”

That’s what the Utilities Director told us, right after he’d stood before his Board to admit a $7 million mistake he and his staff had made.

“I just felt it” is a bewildering answer if you’re trying to learn Consent-Building, especially if your goal is to become one of these Implementation Geniuses: the kind who can turn public wrath into trust and respect.

New students can’t help but want to know what to do?… Invariably, they ask “what should we do to get more people to trust our team and expertise?” And are naturally frustrated to hear our non-answer answer: It’s hard to say…

SDIC (the Systematic Development of Informed Consent) is the step-by-step process we teach for exactly that reason.

But here’s the catch –

Practicing SDIC, not just understanding it, turns students into agents of change. Once that shift happens, something strange occurs… Explaining how they prevent or defuse conflict becomes much harder, even for Implementation Geniuses themselves.

Take Phil, the Utilities Director behind that $7 million blunder…

Only he and a few members of his IT department knew about it, and that fixing it would cost several million more ratepayer dollars on top of the original loss.

A fumble of a few hundred thousand dollars would already make headlines statewide. What would mismanaging millions cost him and his team? In respect. In credibility. In their jobs…?

Certain the Board and ratepayers would want his head once word got out, Phil worried about something else: the loss of trust his team and the utility would take in this staunchly anti-government Colorado community.

Before you read on: what would you do in Phil’s situation?

And what did this Consent-Building student, turned Implementation Genius, actually do?

How did he not only save his job, but leave the utility more trusted than before?

What might be more instructive is what he didn’t do.

Phil didn’t:

• Bury the $7 million blunder in accounting gibberish.
• Describe the mess in jargon City Council and the public would struggle to follow.
• Defend the mistake, then impress everyone with a detailed fix.
• Sell himself as the only one who could get things back on track.
• Sandwich the bad news between a list of other wins.
• Spin it, PR-style, into someone else’s fault.

Instead, Phil and his team did something simpler.

He and his team followed the systematic steps we taught them, working through what made this situation so threatening to their credibility and effectiveness.

Somewhere in that process, they developed a gut-sense of exactly what needed to be said. In that room. To that Council. At that moment.

Did Phil get fired? Publicly vilified? Admonished by Council?

None of the above.

What would’ve been disastrous for most of us, Phil and his team turned into an achievement.

He didn’t just demonstrate his understanding of Consent-Building in that meeting. He embodied it, using the disaster to build more trust, legitimacy, and respect than he’d had walking in.

Phil and his team only needed Consent-Building, not a specific technique, to turn a disaster into a means for earning trust. 

There was no magic script. No technical data buried in his slides. No sidebar conversations to manage the story beforehand. No time for any other outreach tactics.

He simply told the Board about the mistake he’d made and took responsibility himself rather than fingerpointing his staff.

And how did the elected officials react?

Instead of calling for Phil’s head, City Council praised and thanked him.

That reaction wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t a misunderstanding. It came from Phil’s deep sense of precisely what Council needed to hear; something no formal presentation could have delivered.

That’s where Phil crossed over: from an average Consent-Building student to a bona fide Implementation Genius.

As with other students, somewhere between understanding the theory and actually living it, something shifted for Phil. The concept turned into a kind of sixth-sense, one that only comes from practicing SDIC.

Having that gut-sense is a tremendous asset for those who’ve developed it, and a source of real frustration for those who haven’t.

What we find most fascinating is this: practicing the systematic steps seems to produce a skill that can’t be taught directly. And it’s that skill that turns even the biggest blunders into something more powerful than Informed Consent: credibility and trust, even when things have gone terribly wrong.

Beware of the
Double-Standard

 In this edition of Will This Project Survive?, we’ll look at how a team’s textbook response to an Interest’s tactic backfired – and triggered a double-standard that set the whole project back…

Imagine spending 15 years doing everything right.

Your team is working on a massive, complex project – one that will literally land in a community’s backyard.

A key Interest group has been at the table the whole time, raising “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) concerns, and you’ve addressed every single one to their satisfaction. 

Policymakers are on board. Progress is being made. (No small feat!!!)

Then, without warning, the group goes silent. 

No responses to emails. No replies to meeting requests. Just silence – month after month.

Your team keeps trying. You document everything. You follow the process. You assume good faith and plod along with your work.

Then the Interest suddenly resurfaces – at the 11th hour – claiming they were “left out” of your process.

Now what do you do???

The game being played isn’t new, yet most are bewildered of how to sidestep it

That’s a snapshot of what happened on a highly technical project with a very complex public. 

This game isn’t new, but few understand how multidimensional and tricky responding becomes… 

If you’ve had our training, you might recall our advice about how to react when an Interest uses this tactic, what it suggests, and how not to fall prey to it. 

**Experienced Consent-Building students might already see how the team was headed for a trap by how they handled the silent Interest. (A topic we can get into in a future post!)

The Larger Trap

In this case, frustrated by the apparent insincere claim, the professionals’ response, while completely understandable, led them straight into a larger trap (a double-standard latent within the silent-treatment trap).

Caught off-guard and faced with a false accusation, this team did what most professionals (unfortunately) do: they showed policymakers documentation of their attempts to re-engage the Interest group. They picked apart the Interest’s claims with a detailed record of every ignored request for input.

What on the surface seems a reasonable response – backfired completely. 

Even though the organization didn’t outright accuse the Interest of being disingenuous, relying on their documentation of efforts to involve the Interest only made matters worse.  

The Double-Standard Nobody Warned Them About

By presenting their outreach record, the team didn’t just defend themselves. In the eyes of the public, they were effectively calling the Interest group “liars”.

Stakeholders can accuse an organization of bad faith, even if they know their accusations are untrue. Without proof, they can claim the professionals have ignored, misled, or excluded them. But the moment an organization applies that same language to an Interest – even implicitly, or with documentation – it’ll backfire.

Unlike a parent, referee, or even a judge who might need to “hear the other side”, when it comes to the public-sector, the playing field isn’t designed to be level. 

The Takeaway

Organizations have responsibilities that allow them to impose serious negative impacts on people’s lives. As a result, when it comes to issues of transparency and fairness – the professionals are held to a higher standard. 

Professionals who understand Consent-Building can appreciate the multiple ways a team’s messaging can be misconstrued, and how not to ignite even more troubling issues of transparency and fairness. 

Reacting in the typical way, this team triggered the double-standard and came under greater criticism for their “mistreatment of Interests” by the public at large.  

In this case, the professionals weren’t wrong about the facts. The Interest who suddenly disengaged was using a common tactic to slow the planning process.

But because the professionals were bewildered by the game being played against them, they didn’t know how not to play into it. 

The next time an Interest goes silent on your team, you’ll know how not to play into this game and the hidden double-standard!

The Crux of the Conflict

A small community erupted in conflict over a project, dividing residents, stakeholders, professionals and policymakers… 

“We expected there would be some opposition… We didn’t expect it was going to be as deep as it turned out to be, so that was a bit of a surprise.” – Board Chair of the project

(Sound familiar?)

What do you imagine was the “project” that tore the community apart…?

• Hazardous waste site?
• Zoning law change?
• Roundabout?

Nope! It was none of those…

It was a week-long nature camp for kids to get off their devices and learn (of all things!) how to better deal with conflict.

(The kids have gotten a lesson before the camp even gets built!)

As you might’ve guessed, opponents aren’t against the camp or its mission, just the location.

But don’t assume that’s the whole story!

Years ago, 37 acres of picturesque countryside were donated to create a permanent site to host fourth- and fifth-graders. Currently, the camp rents spaces far from its school districts, which creates a burden for staff and logistical complications for shuttling campers.

What sounds innocuous to those of us who aren’t inheriting the camp is distressing for residents of the rural area.

Most often, “NIMBY” (Not In My Back Yard) is used to dismiss such opposition… We encourage you to see it differently. NIMBY is a form of conflict, and as far as we can tell – no two conflicts are exactly alike, even when they look identical on the surface.

Getting to the crux of the conflict is critical.

Narrowing in on the nature of the objections comes with some categorization, but we have to be careful not to shortcut our understanding of what’s at the core of the conflict.

Using both the art and science of Consent-Building, we can listen for clues that take us from a generic term like “NIMBY” to a deep understanding of what belies the opposition… Often, what we discover are more nuanced layers of objections than opponents can even express.

That’s in part why all the recommendations by staff, private consultants, and official analyses of the impacts (issues related to wildland fires, evacuation routes, and water resources) tend to allay all but the opponents who raised them. I’m not suggesting those opposed to the camp don’t care about those issues, but there are signs that those concerns are probably only skin-deep and aren’t fueling their strong reactions to the plan. 

Most likely, the reasons they think they’re opposed are likely not the crux of their (own) opposition. From what I read, opponents never seemed to vocalize outright what I suspect concerns them the most about the summer camp. Yet those (unsayable) concerns weren’t hard to parse out from the concerns they did voice.

Not only did this lack of clarity cause staff and board members to be surprised by the potency of the opposition, but it also seems to have resulted in the opponents’ recent defeat when their concerns were reviewed by another governing body.

There are many more hurdles for the plan to be finalized and implemented, which gives opponents time to find other surrogate “issues” or to clarify those that (I suspect) are motivating their opposition.

Will this project survive?

It’s too early to tell for sure, but I suspect the acrimony and conflict will endure until those underlying issues are better addressed.

What we can learn from it in the meantime: unearthing and articulating other objections (especially those the “opponents” aren’t) could unlock the conflict from showing up at every next step in the process.