High blood pressure - Have we the means to detect important changes to the body politic?

You can now enter a pharmacy and, over the counter, buy machines that measure your blood pressure. Gone are the days when you have to go to your doctor’s surgery and have it tested by the professionals; welcome to the world of self-assessment. Well measurement anyway....

Some of this is due to smarter technology, but it’s mostly the realisation that blood pressure is the ‘silent killer’. Apparently there are few symptoms until one’s condition is already serious. And measurement has to be intensive and over a long period, as there are many variables and readings can go up and down significantly.

As we all know, stress and tension can play havoc with our bodies – and also with communities. And with public institutions! Who can deny that the crisis that has now engulfed the Westminster Parliament is the product of gradual disease quietly and unobserved, weakening public confidence in the institution over many years? The whole point of regular monitoring ... call it ‘taking the pulse’ or maybe ‘taking the temperature’ is to provide early warning that, under the surface, something is changing and that action should be taken.

National Indicators on community participation were probably intended as such a diagnostic, but the Place Survey and the Citizenship surveys (which revealed contradictory results!) have scarcely given us useable data. Local surveys – especially tracking surveys, can provide better information.

But there is another way – and in the straightened economic times that lie ahead, this will become an important element in the engagement strategies of public bodies of all kinds. Let’s call it informal consultation – though the label is not particularly significant. We could as easily call it gathering citizen intelligence. It means equipping staff – yes ALL staff - who come into contact with the public ... with the skills and processes to absorb messages and pass it on to those who can use it.

The world’s best commercial firms have done it for years. If a salesman lost an order to a competitor, chances are that the prospect’s explanation will be logged and chewed over by Marketing Managers to ensure it does not happen too often. In process terms, competitive intelligence is not very different from citizen intelligence. You train the staff to know what’s likely to be important, you provide the means to gather it, and create a central repository where a skilled analyst assesses it and points it in the right direction. Much of it just goes towards re-inforcing existing analyses, but occasionally something vital comes up and can lead to action right away. Any police force knows all about this kind of process.

Belatedly, we are realising that the ‘health’ of communities involves characteristics that need regular monitoring, and among those that work in the front-line are thousands of excellent staff who have a far better insight of what happens to people on the ground and become conscious of changes long before Managers pick up the signals. Empowering the teacher, the policeman, the nurse or the social worker to relay the views and opinions of those they contact informally on a day-to-day basis could be far more useful than the formal consultations we organise, critical as these are from time to time. If public trust in your organisation is imperceptibly eroding away (the ‘silent killer’) these are the people who will find out first.

There is of course one more category that operates at the front-line. Elected members, from Parish Councillors through to MPs – are also exposed to a range of voices and need better mechanisms to distil these into meaningful messages for decision-makers. The best among them are already brilliant at listening, but much can be done to make the formal mechanisms (Select committees, Overview & Scrutiny committees etc) better at consolidating the informally-gathered intelligence and using it to influence what happens. These exercises in packaging the views of stakeholders make a difference

A bit like blood pressure really; the exercise regime can work wonders! Trigger points

• What training or guidance have front-line staff in your organisation received about absorbing key messages from those they meet in the community?
• The Institute is looking for best practice examples of well-organised informal consultation. If you have information to share, please contact us.
• Informal consultation is a key part of the Institute’s new masterclass – Managing Public Engagement.

This is the 147th 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