Newsletter Winter 2025

This month, our associate, Amy Rose offers some questions that can help your organisation to prepare for successful public engagement. 

Play:Disrupt often serve as the conduit between those seeking the insights of communities and those whose lives and work are shaped by the decisions being made. We gather information, make sense of it, and return it to the client as both raw data and clear recommendations. Sometimes, however, critical decisions relating to how this information is applied, happen before or after our involvement. From this vantage point, we’ve observed several patterns in the organisational conditions that either help or hinder whether consultation leads to meaningful change.

Many challenges arise from a misalignment of culture and processes of the commissioning organisation with that of the people it seeks to engage. By culture and process, we mean the everyday realities of how things are done: communication norms, power structures, values, attitudes to risk, timelines, and resource allocation. Meanwhile, “the community” is rarely a single, coherent body. It is constellation of groups, individuals, and stakeholders with a wide range of values, ways of communicating, doing things and making meaning, and crucially, dispersed responsibility. In short: those being consulted are about as far from a unified, formally governed entity as you can get — and therein lies the rub.

Still, there are concrete steps organisations can take to support success. Here are six questions to ask before embarking on any consultation. Addressing these can significantly reduce typical pitfalls, bring out the strengths of both the organisation and the people involved, and maximise the likelihood that consultation leads to real impact.

1. Power

What decisions can be influenced? 
A common point of frustration arises when participants are unclear about what is genuinely up for discussion. Clarifying the limits and possibilities of influence from the start helps build trust.

2. Expertise

Do you value lived experience as much as professional expertise?
People will bring forms of knowledge that will not look like yours. They may communicate through personal stories, actions (as in children’s play) or informal conversations, rather than clear position statements, reports or formal evidence. Organisations that allow for different modes of stakeholder input and respect those as genuine expressions of expertise, tend to produce designs and services that work better and cost less to revise later.

3. Curiosity

Is your organisation genuinely curious about what might emerge?
Curiosity shows up in how well, and in what ways you listen, your willingness to go to new places, hear difficult truths, and your belief that dialogue (however clunky) will strengthen the outcome. Without curiosity, engagement can be tokenistic. With it, consultation leads to generative solutions that have impact. 

4. Time

Is consultation happening at the right stages of the project?
Engagement squeezed into the final stages of a project can only validate decisions already made. Early dialogue, by contrast, reduces conflict, aligns plans with real needs, and helps avoid costly revisions.
Additionally, integrating regular feedback loops throughout the process, helps to check and refine, builds trust, maintains momentum and in some cases, builds a community of future champions of the place or service. 

5. Resources

Have you resourced the relationship-building side of the work?
Consultation is not just a technical exercise; it is relational. The time, care, and skill required to build and maintain relationships with participants should be resourced as seriously as any other major project expense. While the economic evidence base in the UK is still evolving, participation research consistently shows that early, well-supported engagement can save time, reduce friction, and improve outcomes.  Relatedly, consider the tension between paid and unpaid labour: what expectations are placed on community members, and how is their labour valued? As an employee, you are paid for your work on the consultation, but those being consulted are usually there voluntarily. How could you be great hosts? 

6. Ambiguity Tolerance

How comfortable is your organisation with ambiguity?
Done well, a consultation will bring a wide range of perspectives to the project. With this can come unexpected insights, uncomfortable encounters, messy iterations, and sometimes outright disagreement. Effective organisations treat these not as threats but as the necessary raw material of a better solution. The higher your tolerance for ambiguity and emergence, ie. letting something evolve through discussion and deliberation, rather than needing a fast answer or outcome, the more capable you are of navigating the unruly, but ultimately productive, terrain of public input.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive into the specific practices and behaviours that can help organisations and communities to get the best value from engagement, please get in touch. In the meantime, let’s take some solace in the fact that we live in a country where consultation, however imperfect, remains part of our wider civic discourse.