Cross Collaborate

The collaborative approach to water resource planning has been growing over the past 15 years, especially where urban, agricultural and environmental needs are straining the local supplies. Like many other public water managers, the Sonoma County (California) Water Agency faced a decline in groundwater supply throughout the Sonoma Valley as pumping steadily increased because of growth.

To come up with a plan to manage the problem, the Agency convened a 20-member collaborative Basin Advisory Panel that reflected the diversity of water interests in the region. A professional facilitator from the Center for Collaborative Policy worked with these stakeholders as they shared ideas and negotiated the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Management Plan. The group adopted the plan 2007 and now helps oversee its implementation.

It’s a good example of collaboration, but such efforts take a lot of planning before any meetings are held. The convening agency needs to consult the stakeholders directly to figure out whether they’d be willing to take part, how they thought about the major issues and how they’d like to see the process work.

In ensure objectivity, the Agency put the independent facilitator in charge of a wide-ranging assessment. She met with 30 leaders of the water-related interests for in-depth interviews and then based a series of process recommendations on this rich source of ideas. The report summarized the key stakeholder concerns, supported the use of a collaborative approach and dealt with the overall structure and product of the meetings, communication with the wider public and many other issues.

Once the group itself came together, the members adopted groundrules and reached procedural agreements to ensure that everyone knew what to expect and what their responsibilities were. In this way, the participating water interests became co-creators of the planning effort rather than members passively responding to an invitation to a government-defined process.

This up-front investment of time and resources seems to have been worth it. After producing the plan, the Basin Advisory Panel has kept on meeting to review ongoing implementation. You can find extensive information, including the assessment report and other key documents at the project website.

Anyone who’s worked at building consensus on public policy knows the frustration of trying to reason with someone who just won’t change a position or even consider alternative possibilities. They may refuse to accept any evidence that seems to disprove their positions and become aggressive and disruptive in the face of challenges. Sometimes, it’s possible to write off this unshakable dissenter as an oddball individual, well-known to the rest of the group as such. But in a collaborative process each person represents a specific interest and has an important role to play in reaching agreement. A careful response is needed to move dialogue in a productive direction.

A number of recent studies and explanations are helping to clarify some of the possible reasons for intransigence of this type. In doing so, they’re also bringing out the fact that such behavior is not so unusual. We’re living in a time of increasing polarization of views on politics and public policy, and it’s especially important to understand the tenacity of extreme opinion and its impacts on consensus building and other forms of collaborative work.

In this and the next few posts, I want to explore ideas about why people can hold so firmly to existing beliefs no matter what contradicting information they may have, and also about practical steps that facilitators and collaborative leaders can take in response. This post provides brief overviews of the ideas of Elizabeth Bader, drawn from psychoanalytic theories of human personality, and the recent work of Williams Eggers and John O’Leary (If We Can Put a Man on the Moon) that draws on neuroscience research for some of their conclusions about obstacles to problem-solving in government.

These ideas address different levels of group interaction and, taken together, offer extremely helpful guidance for finding effective strategies. They do this by focusing on the non-rational elements that pervade consensus building groups. As Robert Benjamin has pointed out, the interest-based, joint gains negotiation model assumes that rational analysis will be decisive in formulating agreements. The dynamism of group interactions, however, is much more complicated, and requires understanding of very human but quite non-rational behavior.

Personal Identity Issues

Elizabeth Bader, an attorney, mediator and psychologist, has recently offered a model of the mediation dynamic that draws on psychoanalytic theories. The essay at Mediate.com, The Psychology of Mediation: The Mediator’s Issues Of Self And Identity, summarizes the first part of her longer academic paper of the same name. It places the tendency to cling to pre-established positions and demands in the context of human personality while also offering specific strategies for managing the problem during mediation. Read more »