Consultation Tools

This pace can impact on how we communicate with each other.

We usually half listen, can be easily distracted, or select a random piece of information that is being articulated and go off on a tangent and start thinking about something else which is unrelated to what is being conveyed. Does this sound familiar?

With communication being such an important part of our lives, we generally don’t do it very well.

We unconsciously impose our own values and judgments on the information provided and reinterpret it. Remember the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’?

Chinese Whispers
To play Chinese Whispers your group sits in a circle. The first person writes some information on a piece of paper, which they whisper to the next person so that no-one else can hear.

This person whispers this information to the next and so on until the information goes around full circle. The last person tells the group what the information is and the first person reads the actual information from the piece of paper. It is usually very different.

An important part of communicating and consulting with others is learning to listen, stay alert, and be curious. Your curiosity, or interest in exploring what is being said, will allow real engagement to take place and create a space where genuine dialogue can happen.  Real engagement is an acquired skill, which may require ongoing work.

Creating this ‘dialogic space’, a phrase coined by the American planners Schneekloth and Schibley, is important for building relationships and developing good qualitative consultation processes. Therefore, your communication skills should be well developed prior to embarking on a consultation process.

Consultation as a planning process
Regardless of whether you are consulting people to research a funding proposal for your organisation, or as part of a large project for Local Government, many of the considerations will be the same:

• who are the stakeholders?
• what is the required outcome?
• how will you get there?
   

You will only know your stakeholders if you have done the research.  For an extensive consultation, as discussed in previous sections, a Stakeholder committee is usually formed to assist in the process, these are the key community stakeholders, people who have identified skills and knowledge that is pertinent to what you are trying to achieve.

If you are consulting to develop a Cultural Policy, your stakeholders will be the residents of the area that the Cultural Policy targets, whether it is a town, city, region, State or country. Once consultations start to cover a large demographic, a random sample of the community is consulted, otherwise it would be too unwieldy.

In the early stages you will spend a lot of time researching and planning to form a consultation framework.  How much time is spent on the process will depend on financial and human resources, the scope of the activity and how much has already been achieved.

This Section will explore some considerations if you are planning to conduct a community event or a consultation for the development of a cultural policy in a Local Government area.

Consultation strategies
The consultation tools you use will depend on the target group and the outcome required.  Do you need quantitative and/or qualitative data to support your proposal? Funders may prefer to see quantitative data, as statistics are easier to analyse.  However, qualitative data illustrates a contextualised, multi layered portrait of the community; therefore, having a blend of both is highly recommended.

Preparation and Planning

• Don’t accept the job if it conflicts with your values
• Do your research and plan well
• Consider budget and timeline
• Have a clear purpose and realistic expectations
• It is respectful if going into a new location  that you connect with the local Indigenous elders and custodians to let them know what you are doing and inquire about how they might be involved.

Consulting

• Spend the time to build trust and gain credibility
• Be empathetic to the concerns of others
• Think how to reach different groups (i.e. young people, people with disabilities, people from culturally diverse communities)
• Use appropriate and diverse consultation strategies
• Link your consultation strategies to the desired outcome
• Be transparent about your processes and why you are there
• Don’t promise what you can’t deliver
• Learn from others – use experts if necessary
• Publicise your consultation so that all who want to can participate, and people will realise that you are committed to listening to them
   

Reporting

• Take into account the views of all the stakeholders
• Report back on the community input and what action you have taken as a result
   

Evaluating

• Evaluate your processes throughout the consultation and learn lessons for next time
• Follow through with any agreements and promises made.
   

Conducting a consultation
There is an abundant supply of excellent online resources about conducting consultations.  Larger councils will even publish their own guidelines, which can be downloaded from their website.

One process called the Five Step Engagement Planning Cycle goes through a series of steps. There are many similar versions of this process. It covers:

• Design and Plan
• Prepare and organise
• Implement
• Feedback and follow up
• Evaluate
   

Just Google 'Five Step Engagement Planning Cycle' and you will find Toolbox 7 – techniques for community engagement NSW.

Action Research
Action Research is a useful collaborative tool requiring continuous engagement over a period of time. The process comprises: planning, acting, observing reflecting,…then planning and so on recursively until the issue has progressed to a point of conclusion, usually when the project outcomes have been reached.

Action research information
www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/arphome.html
www.ccd.net/projects/search.html?projectID=1015131201

Action research as an evaluation tool, Bob Dick - www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/rigour2.html#a_r2_ar

Resources
- The Deliberative Democracy Consortium website, with tools and resources - www.deliberative-democracy.net
- National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation - http://ncdd.org
- Active Democracy website providing access to information on citizen participation in decision-making. Maintained by Lyn Carson, University of Sydney - www.activedemocracy.net
- A portal linking to tools to assist in the development and enhancement of stakeholder participation in decision-making. Community Builders NSW www.communitybuilders.nsw.gov.au/