What Can We Learn From Other Processes?

Seasoned practitioners of public engagement and facilitators understand that careful planning and preparation are integral to their work. Without dedicated time spent on process design, our work cannot succeed. This due diligence is a mandatory requirement of a professional. 

A multitude of wonderful aspects drove me to this field, but one of the most fundamental draws of this work was designing tailored processes for unique, complex issues affecting our community. It creates in me a sense of awe when I am able to design a session for an issue that really has no exact, algorithmic way to address it. If it did, it would not need our expertise in unique process design. 

Because of the varied nature of our work, I love to learn as much as I can in regards to process design. It’s riveting to apply different fields of study to our work. That being said, I don’t understand why our field doesn’t spend more time trying to look for unique ways to improve our processes. I always ask professionals how they design their processes, and I have been getting the same answers for five years. Don’t get me wrong, they are doing amazing work, but with how much new information is available, I sincerely believe that we need to analyze and apply new methods to our work. Really, not only should we be absorbing new information, but we should also be absorbing other disciplines that we as a group have not yet looked at. 

As professionals, we need to explore and ask the questions: What can we learn from different fields of expertise to improve our public processes? What can systems engineering, political engineering, and economics teach us about how our participants react to the processes that we create? What about literary theory or education pedagogy? These are all fields that consistently study how to interact and present information to their participants, or how they function in relation to their participants. By applying a systems mindset to other fields of study, what new conversations can we bring forth in ours?

For example, I am finding that studying fields such as game theory and game design in relation to my work has opened so many new doors that I can apply when designing my processes. If we start to think of a participant as a rational player in a process, we can anticipate how they might respond. A participant will behave differently in a linear process versus a process where multiple outcomes can occur.

Creek Consulting LLC takes pride in studying different fields to better our process design, and we encourage other facilitators to do the same. The issues in our organizations, communities, and groups are getting more complex by the day. We owe it to the public to continuously expand our knowledge base from both our field and from valuable aspects of other fields. 

The Definition of Community Engagement

Community engagement is a hot topic with society today. With so many people talking about this subject, it’s important to fully understand what it means.

Though a number of initial thoughts may come to mind, a quick search on the definition for community engagement states that,

“community engagement refers to the process by which community benefit organizations and individuals build ongoing, permanent relationships for the purpose of applying a collective vision for the benefit of a community.”

Basically, we are left with an incredibly broad and vague definition; the process can be anything! And while the initial question posed was “what is community engagement”, not why or how, we may not be reaching the level of full comprehension desired. Let us, then, revise the question in order to really get to the heart of the matter: why do we seek community engagement?

Thinking about why you are seeking community engagement completely changes the dynamic of the question. While the definition above regarding community engagement specifically refers to the process, it does not refer to any specific goal or outcome.  When we only focus on what it is, we may limit our understanding and consequently the benefits that community engagement can provide.  Ultimately, how we use the process stems from the reasons we desire to do community engagement.

When designing a process pertaining to community engagement, it is integral to know why it is being done. Is the community addressing a problem currently, or is it prepping for the future? Perhaps there isn’t even a problem. Do you want to figure out what the community is doing well? One of the community’s biggest values may include the desire to hear what others have to say on an issue. There are an infinite amount of reasons why organizations seek community engagement. In order to design the best processes possible, we have to start with the initial why. How we address the issue at hand depends on the why.

A deliberative process specifically designs how we address your reasons for community engagement--AKA the why--because your desire for community engagement is a unique situation. Not only are the reasons for an organization to seek community engagement unique, but what we do for each case is unique as well.  This depends on who is present, because each community is different. Each process must be its own system, because whatever goal you do have in mind ultimately depends on who you’re engaging with.

These three components—what, why and who-- are all a part of the process design. Creek Consulting is distinct in nature because we find it necessary to go beyond the what and consider the why and the who. Communities deserve a process that caters to the situation at hand, but is also broad enough that it meet the unique needs that every community has. So, instead of just asking about what happens in the process, we start with why we are designing an event, and for who are we designing this event for. After we know why we are doing community engagement, we then figure out how we will address the issue. When we know how to do address the issue, we then design what we will do.

We started out by offering you a standard definition of community engagement, and we realized that we didn’t offer our definition of it. It would be unfair of us to not tell you, and leave you to try and figure out how we define community engagement. We offer a more concise definition for community engagement: What community engagement is, is a process to learn more.