Power and Community - Two Perspectives Martha Cox and Catherine Brys

We have been discussing how power plays out in our work in stakeholder engagement and have written a piece discussing this issue from our two different perspectives.

Martha

Real co-production with communities means shifting long held structures and ways of working. It means upending traditional ways of doing things. And it potentially can expose any gulf existing between those running services (Directors and senior management) and the experience of people on the ground at the receiving end. The language used, both written and verbal, can often be intimidating and exclusionary for those not used to sitting in formal committee meetings. Proper co-production means involving people at the outset and ensuring they have a seat at the table. But others in the room also need to change and accommodate newer voices to ensure that it is an equal and reciprocal partnership. They have to be prepared to give up their power and authority to share the decision-making. Running a quick survey at the end of designing a new service and using that data to bolster whatever decision has already been arrived at is not co-production and the power remains where it always has.

There is a lot of whitewash spoken about co-production and co-design, particularly from major companies and organisations. Everyone likes to talk about how they engage with their stakeholders but many are not committed to ensuring the resources and time necessary to do it properly, nor are they willing to give up the power necessary to have a wider range of voices engaged from the outset. Instead there is an epidemic of tick box exercises rather than properly thought out and planned co-production. 

Common objections from those in power

For example, you have a complex and/or controversial project with much uncertainty about the way forward. Common objections that may be heard from an organisation, influential stakeholders or senior management include:

• We shouldn’t go public until we have worked out a solution ourselves and have worked out an answer to any awkward questions that may come our way. Otherwise we’ll have to have endless lengthy discussions and it will all get complicated.

• The public can’t really add any value to this process - it’s too complex / high level. They won’t understand / it’s one for the experts.

• Every time we talk with the public we just hear from the usual suspects with an axe to grind who just give us a hard time.

• It’s too time consuming and costly to set up meetings  and design and distribute proper documents for everything. We’ll spend more time engaging than actually developing the project.

Response to objections

• Presenting an outcome to the public without involving them along the way will only build community mistrust. You’re not really asking them for their views but just to rubber stamp your decisions, a tick box exercise so you can say you talked to the community. Any new developments or services are less likely to be attended or looked after if the community don’t feel they have had an equal say in developing them and have a sense of ownership. 

• You will also miss out on what the community could bring to the process eg fresh ideas, new ways of looking at things, local knowledge.

• Group and power dynamics can be managed if you pay attention to them. Have seldom heard voices been involved? Maybe your processes have favoured the usual suspects and you need to accommodate a wider range of people? Designing everything alongside the community will help address this as they will know what works best for them. Maybe you need to look at which elements will work best as collaborative co-design processes and which won’t.

But it’s also not rocket science. Sure you have to adapt your venue, language and approach to enable different communities to take part but if you do that the pay-off can be massive with services and development that are truly owned and directed by the communities that use them. Investing in a collaborative process can mean the most cost effective way of developing a project and will also help you to work together more easily with those communities in future as you will have built trust and mutual relationships.

Catherine

Stakeholder engagement is fashionable – many organisations claim to use it. There are

many examples where stakeholders have been truly involved in defining and exploring the

issue and in creating solutions. Unfortunately, there are also many instances where only lip

service is paid.

The non-expert stakeholder barrier

In these “lip service” cases the perception can be that users or wider stakeholders are not

experts and thus unable to create solutions. True, they may not be experts in specific

technological solutions but they are experts in their own lives. With expert inquiry and

facilitation a rich seam of insights and ideas for potential solutions can be unearthed and

stakeholders can be guided to develop these solutions. The true expert will discover – while engaging with users/stakeholders – when people are able to develop their own solutions and when specific knowledge and expertise needs to be brought in. And in some cases people are more expert than the experts think!

I also believe that there is a trade-off: an objectively sub-optimal solution created by

users/stakeholders so they feel ownership of it is more likely to be adopted and thus be

successful than the “perfect” solution.

The power or role barrier

I have been been wondering if another reason to pay lip service to stakeholder engagement

is related to power. Expert power is one of the sources of individual power. Decision makers or designers may feel that truly engaging stakeholders would erode their sense of expert power. I wonder if this even comes into play with organisations, not just individuals.

Another way of looking at this reluctance to truly involve stakeholders is through the lens of

the Five Core Concerns, a concept introduced by Fisher and Shapiro in their book “Beyond

Reason”. They identify five 'core concerns' that motivate people. Having a meaningful role

is one of them. If experts consider it their role to design or decide on solutions, then

empowering stakeholders to create solutions erodes that role.

Changing the perspective

Whatever causes reluctance to truly engage stakeholders, I wonder if we need to change

the narrative about stakeholder engagement. Rather than focusing on the benefits it brings

to stakeholders – a message that has been tried and tested but is not always working –

should we emphasise a new, powerful role for experts? One that recognises the expertise

that is needed to use inquiry and facilitation and the power that comes from empowering people.