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.