Originally published 20 December 2004. This article is retained from the tCI archive. Law, policy or practice may have changed since publication.
With talk of referendums in the air, we will all hear the old adage that the answer will of course depend upon the way the question is formulated. The suggestion is that clever people can always contrive to get the answer they want - just by being smart with the syntax.
No doubt there are consultors who think they can steer those whom they consult to provide an acceptable answer with a terminological slight of hand. But in practice, such subterfuge seldom works. Consultation is a little like letting the genie out of the bottle. Once opened, it's rather difficult to control the situation, and virtually impossible to put the stopper back in again!
This is because consultees have a habit of telling us exactly what they think, and are not always disposed to do so using the nice tidy questions we've set out in our discussion paper. Stakeholders behave like politicians going on television. No matter how the question is phrased, they have a message they want to put across, and wild horses won't prevent them from doing so.
So is there any point in lavishing great care to get these questions right?
The answer is yes, because the best consultations capture the essence of the exercise so well that consultees find the questions absolutely spot-on, and the obvious place to elaborate upon their views. When the questions strike the right chord in the mind of consultees, the answers are much more likely to be useful. There is less of a flavour of Here are the questions you should have asked me! about some of the responses.
But there is another reason to take care in drafting the questions. Spare a thought for the analysts whose role is to read consultation submissions and distil an honest summary for input to the decision-makers. Despite the theory that open-ended questions are best, in public policy consultations, vagueness must be avoided. Ask a precise question, and you may get answers that lend themselves to reasonable analysis.
The Labour Party's Big Conversation - in many ways an admirable consultation - has one big drawback. It sets out 206 questions, many of them wide-ranging and profound. Analysis cannot fail to be a nightmare. But then, we have to go back to the original objectives of each consultation. Is Labour's exercise really intended to provide answers to questions? Or is it designed primarily to give previously-unheard members a small voice in policy-making?
Fundamentally, the purpose and scope of each consultation will affect the nature of the dialogue. If we want clear answers, we have to ask clear questions. If we don't really want answers, we'd be better off not asking questions in the first place!
Trigger points
- Before initiating a consultation, ask yourselves what is the single most important thing you want to learn from the exercise ….. and work from there…
- If using previous tried-and-tested questions, examine previous answers to see if and how the questions worked in practice
- Prepare a trial coding structure for intended answers before finalising the text of a question
- Assemble a Focus Group of potential consultees and test a consultation paper by asking their views on the questions
This is the 11th Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement