Originally published 4 September 2006. This article is retained from the tCI archive. Law, policy or practice may have changed since publication.
One of the most obvious trends in public participation is the movement away from the traditional form of written consultation.
Time was when the consultative process meant one of two things – a committee or a big fact document. There were good reasons for this. Joint Standing Committees meant what they said; they were Joint in that they represented different interests; they were Standing in that they were there on a continuing basis – available as a means of dialogue to consider a range of issues that could be predicted to require consultation. Other types of committees perform similar functions. A Liaison Committee is often code for consultation. Advisory Committees likewise.
Machinery of this kind is often perceived as remote and bureaucratic; the old joke that they spend hours and take minutes is not too wide of the mark. In practice they often become just another phase of a documentary consultation process. A big fat paper is tabled, discussed, endorsed or amended and then goes somewhere else …… An adverse reaction to the big fat document is hardly surprising. At their worst, they are jargon-infested, impenetrable tomes wherein it is difficult to distinguish between matters of high principle and the kind of legalistic nicety that leaves most of us reaching for a paracetemol! Now, maybe it’s our fault for opening the pages of something that was never intended for us in the first place, but few consultations can nowadays plead the specialist audience defence, and the Freedom of Information Act encourages us all to feel empowered to access – and respond to virtually everything.
There has also been another force at work. Making consultation more inclusive is a serious and honourable objective and it is patently obvious that the tired old tome is inappropriate for vast swathes of the community; it is simply not a viable mode of communication. Hence the justifiable popularity of more touchy-feely dialogue methods, and the growth of innovative methods including e-consultation and other quicker, zippier, less fuddy-duddy techniques. Welcome to the age of hi-touch!
The trouble is that whilst these talking-to-people-in-person methods are great at finding out peoples’ problems, preferences and priorities, they are somewhat less suitable for assessing complex proposals. It is very inconsiderate of the devil, but unfortunately he (or she?) is most often found in the detail! Someone, somewhere has to write down – or find another method of communicating precisely what is proposed.
It is not impossible. When the Conservative Party published their James Report – an attempt to trump the Government’s Gershon Report on public service efficiency, it did so not through paper but by publishing a 150-slide PowerPoint presentation on their website! No doubt some readers may think that’s worse still!
Again, good copywriting skills can produce a popular version of a complex paper without dumbing down, but it is difficult. Andrew Acland, of Dialogue by Design recently showed Institute members how it is possible to make highly technical subjects accessible for mass dialogue (His case study was based on the Committee on Radioactive Waste Disposal – and you can’t easily get more technical than that!), but examples are few and far between.
Inclusive dialogues, Plain English, Meetings rather than Minutes are all fine and need support, but beware inadvertently dumbing down the debate – even in a good cause. To hold significant dialogue on the implications of detailed proposals probably needs a clear unambiguous statement of what’s proposed; somewhere in the back office there has to be a document. How important it therefore becomes to prepare these with skill, to present the facts clearly and formulate the questions with care….and then, the more informal methods have space and an opportunity to flourish.
Trigger points
- Check the balance of your consultation dialogues? Are you following the general trend?
- Are you using good quality Text to support and leverage the Hi-Touch mechanisms?
- Investigate ways of making complex issues intelligible to a wider audience.
This is the 64th 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