This is a federal Department of Energy training film designed for DOE project managers. Because its purpose is real-world training, it avoids sugarcoating most dimensions of a difficult process. As a result, it’s one of the best introductions to the overall principles of community involvement that I’ve found online.

Its main subject is the citizen planning process for the cleanup of a major nuclear site. From my own experience working with advisory groups of this sort, I’m sure that the process can’t have been quite so smooth as portrayed. For purposes of an introduction, however, it is refreshingly frank in presenting the problem of building trust between DOE and the community.

Related posts:

1. Who’s the Public in Public Involvement?

As in any other field, public sector consensus building always gets to the critical moment when choices have to be made. In my experience, how a group accomplishes this reveals more about motives behind decisions than any other step in the process.

Several years ago, I worked with a large group to build consensus on a regional water plan. The stakeholders had agreed that they would need a well-designed process for identifying alternative scenarios and then narrowing them down to the one everyone could accept.

They rejected the idea of a formal decision support method, which usually has to be managed by a technical expert. Instead, they wanted a more transparent procedure that could be publicly documented and understandable without a lot of technical background.

Working with the engineering consultant, we came up with a fairly common approach. The group agreed on a set of ten criteria reflecting the key values the stakeholders as well as legal requirements. Each of the criteria was broken out into specific, measurable components.

These would be used to establish a numerical score, and each of the criteria weighted in related to the rest. An average of the weighted scores could then provide an overall rating number as a rough basis for comparing the alternatives. The scoring may have satisfied the group’s desire to document what they were doing, but it had relatively little impact on their actual choices.

Putting the alternatives together was tricky. Many participants were used to a typical environmental review process in which three alternatives are constructed in a fairly arbitrary way. Two of them lean so heavily to one side or another (e.g. environmental vs. economic interests) that they clearly won’t be acceptable. The third tries to strike a balance between the others and is invariably the one adopted. That approach is a way of channeling thinking into predetermined forms and stifling creativity.

For this water planning process to work, each alternative, while giving some extra weight to the values of a particular constituency, needed to be a viable basis for negotiating a final plan. To do that, the group drew on 100 water project and policy options to define six alternatives, each of which could achieve the plan’s goals.

Everything went according to plan, though there were naturally many difficult meetings to get common understanding and agreement about the options, criteria and alternatives. Each alternative was scored – although that too was tough to get through, especially when it came to the weighting of the criteria. After a lot of negotiating, the alternatives were whittled down to three.

All this followed the logic of meeting interests and satisfying state planning requirements. A well-documented and transparent process was unfolding, and negotiations seemed to be making progress. But I knew that the group hadn’t yet come to the moment of truth.

There’s nothing like the final commitment, complete with name on the dotted line, to put each negotiator under the gun with their own organizations. Although they may have been passively following the process to this point, now they look at every detail and put the whole package through a worst case analysis. Every interest group finds elements it likes and others that could put some of their goals at risk. Usually the decision to accept a complex agreement boils down to the level of risk the interest group is willing to live with.

The representative who is negotiating at the table is caught in the middle between the pressure of the folks back home to hold the line and the collaborative expectations of the other participants to find common ground.

The driving force behind the final negotiations was this constant pressure and the personal calculation of political risk. Feasibility had been the final criterion added to the evaluation process – and that had many dimensions, financial, engineering and political. But it was political feasibility that determined almost every choice in the increasingly frantic pace as the group closed in on a final decision.

While the interests of each group represented at the table might be crystal clear, the political influences of the moment can easily distort a constituency’s perception of what would best meet its needs. A technically sound water project option, in this case, appeared to meet the interests of three major groups that had been at odds for years over water supply. However, the fears of one community forced its representative to push the project completely off the table. Even to talk about it or support further study of the option would mean political suicide.

The project had been a lightening rod for conflict for so long, it was now a symbol of contending values. None of the key interests could let go of that conviction in spite of evidence that the technical concept could be made to work in a mutually advantageous way. A water district manager could lose his job for suggesting its adoption, a city council member could be voted out of office, an environmental leader could lose the confidence of her organization’s large membership.

The impact of such pressures and established ways of perceiving the issues is just one of the many ways in which the concept of interest-based negotiation needs to be adapted to complex realities. I haven’t yet found a single model that captures the intricate interplay of all the influences that affect the work of a collaborative group.

Awareness of these multiple forces and the willingness to adjust methods to respond to them is essential. The regional water planning committee reached consensus on a final plan, though this agreement may have looked as much like a political balancing act as the outcome of interest-based negotiations. Nevertheless, it worked.

Although I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about this so far, the emergence of interactive tools for online citizen engagement poses interesting questions for the future of public policy consensus building. It’s still early days in the development of the web technology, and experiments so far have been spotty. Despite the high orbit of ideas about revolutionizing democracy, for example, the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative, seeking ideas about transparency and collaboration, has come under criticism for its choice of online tools, inadequate management of content and mixed results.

If you should, for example, have the impossible patience to read through the hundreds of pages of raw data from the first phase of that process, you might eventually find the relevant, substantive ideas buried among thousands of demands for immediate action on this or that favorite complaint as well as the now infamous extremist and crackpot rants.

Fortunately, the process worked well in pulling out those substantive ideas for further development in the next two phases. White House staff are now evaluating those methods while additional federal initiatives proceed for health care, homeland security, defense and other issues.

The immediate focus of these efforts is soliciting ideas from the public without any attempt to build consensus or initiate dialogue among groups or individuals of differing values. All the software systems used for these projects employ various methods for rating the ideas and proposals. Often touted by their developers as the key for letting the best ideas “rise to the top,” rating and voting systems have nothing to do with careful evaluation of competing proposals, let alone dialogue or deliberation.

It’s hard to imagine that this approach, while able to identify winners for further consideration, could possibly substitute for intensive face-to-face negotiation on high stakes issues. Given the current state of technology (remembering that the entire history of a widely accessible web platform covers only 15 years), that seems to be quite obvious.

But I’d like to take a closer look at these voting systems, crude as they are today. I think of most voting as the polar opposite of consensus building. As is true of online versions, it sets up a competition to see which proposals come out on top. Opposing interests do not communicate at all. Systems of this sort invite gaming to pump more and more votes into favored ideas by separate constituencies. During the Open Government Initiative, for example, every group concerned about online democracy alerted its members to this opportunity and urged them to register at the site and support specific proposals by commenting and voting. Organized groups of every political persuasion likely did the same thing.

The use of a simple up-or-down vote left no room for subtle distinctions. Each interest group had to wind up with enough votes for its favorite ideas to get to the next stage of the process. It’s essentially a numbers game. What could be worse from the point of view of a collaborative leader or practitioner who is trying to build agreement around policies that meet the needs of all affected interests?

But let’s turn this view around and look at online voting from the perspective of a public agency decision-maker. The process used by the California city of Santa Cruz is an interesting example. As explained in an earlier post, the city was faced with its worst budget crisis in memory and needed to make major changes. The Mayor and City Manager wanted to develop policies on the sensitive issues of how to spend and raise money that would be broadly supported by the residents. The typical public meetings tended to be dominated by the loudest voices, and city staff felt that approach would not give the results they needed.

So they turned to the idea of an online process for generating public proposals, but a much simpler one than that used by the Open Government Initiative. The public had the opportunity to offer proposals in a process of one phase instead of three and did so through a single user interface rather than three completely different ones. Each participant received 10 votes to distribute as desired, instead of a thumbs up or down indicator, and a high minimum threshold of votes was set for a proposal to merit possible consideration.

Materials about the budget were available on the site, and updates were regularly posted. The interface used a single series of tabs for viewing the proposals and indicating which had been accepted for implementation and which completed. (One of the interesting features of the software is its scalability for everything from a single organization to a small city to a national effort.)

What I find interesting about this process – apart from the fact that it provided a better user experience than the federal experiment did – is that the crisis facing the city was one that might also have been approached by using collaborative, face-to-face methods.

The city could have called on a consultant to develop a series of community-wide assemblies to develop a shared vision and from that derive action steps and priorities. Or they could have formed a consensus building group of stakeholders representing the city’s varied constituencies to negotiate policies. They could also have used a budget priority-setting process that focused on participation by agency staff and elected leaders while seeking public input as well.

They didn’t take that route, but from the viewpoint of city decision-makers, did they achieve a similar result? True, there was no deliberation among the citizens, no exchange of views, no negotiation to come to agreement. What they needed, however, was a set of proposals backed by an indication of broad support from the public, proposals the city could immediately use as a basis for developing solutions to the crisis. And they needed to identify those proposals in a short period of time so that the citizens of Santa Cruz could be assured that the budget crisis was being addressed in a timely manner.

Clearly, there is little basis for comparison between the two approaches. On the one hand, you have a live process that generates group cohesion and enthusiasm as well as specific proposals for action. If successful, that produces results that are far less likely to be challenged and therefore can be adopted and implemented on a tight schedule. On the other, you have online participation relying on contributions from individuals – though many of these are doubtless contributing proposals developed by organized interest groups.

I doubt that public decision-makers would be overly concerned about how they got the result they were looking for. They’d look at cost and the end product. If the policies and action steps they wind up with pass the political test of public scrutiny, elected leadership has what it needs.

I’m not really expecting the demand for collaborative policy processes to disappear in favor of online activities. It’s time, though, for practitioners and leaders in this field to look closely at how they can make use of these tools as a regular part of their services. It will be much easier to work with them rather than against them, especially since the technologies will become much more sophisticated and adaptable to consensus building than they may now appear.

Related posts:

1. What Do You Do When Consensus Fails?
2. The City of Santa Cruz Goes Online for Public Ideas

What is mediator power and how does it operate in collaborative governance and public policy? I pose this question after reading the current issue of Conflict Resolution Quarterly (Vol. 26, No. 4). This collection of scholarly articles challenges basic concepts of mediation and calls for a searching reconsideration of its definition and practice.

The contributions differ greatly in methods and conclusions as to specifics, but I’d like to focus on one subject several of them explore: the power of the mediator to influence the outcome of a consensus building process.

The more radical criticisms in this collection claim that the practice of mediation sometimes turns the conventional concept of a mediator on its head. Instead of conforming to the ideal type of neutral servant of the parties, mediators may undermine stakeholder independence and facilitate outcomes primarily influenced by the most powerful interests in the room. Or they may follow more personal motives and use the tools at their disposal to direct and pressure parties into agreements that may not be in their best interests.

The essays raise key questions about the impact of mediators that do need attention, especially the clash between the theory and practice of mediation. With respect to the public policy field, however, the scenarios strike me as overstating the power of mediators and oversimplifying the considerable power of conveners and the parties themselves. (Rachel Goldberg’s essay is an exception, as it deals entirely with this field. I’ll explore her very helpful ideas in a separate post.)

In many cases, for example, it is the convener of a policy process who provides financial support, initially frames the issues, plays a major role in the selection of participants and organizes the process for selecting the mediator. The mediator’s influence comes more from a successful and adroit balancing of the power and interests of all the actors than from the possession of potentially coercive power. And that balancing would not be possible without the trust of the convener and stakeholders.

In my experience, then, trust of the parties, built up over time, is the most important source of mediator influence, but it is fragile and can be lost in a moment.

The participants in a collaborative policy project have usually experienced such a high level of conflict over the issues that they do not trust themselves to reach agreement without the help of independent guidance. They need someone without a hidden agenda or personal stake in the final decisions, someone who can be counted on to treat everyone fairly.

They expect and demand that the mediator will actively assist them in focusing on those areas where agreement may be possible, avoid detours into unresolvable past issues and check unproductive discussion. Being able to trust a mediator to do this is an important reason behind their participation. It’s a key sign that they can trust the process itself.

Without that trust, public policy mediators will not be effective. During a typical process, they have many opportunities to develop the relationships with stakeholders that are part of trust building. But the parties also need to see consistency in mediator performance and fairness throughout the meetings that are the heart of collaborative policy work.

Trust opens a door for mediator influence, but it does not create a power to coerce or control. What comes with trust is an openness on the part of stakeholders to mediator ideas for resolving especially difficult problems. They can accept these ideas as honest efforts to move the process forward that are free of hidden agendas. As soon as any participant senses that a mediator is, in fact, pushing an agenda or building pressure to force agreement more favorable to other parties, the trust is lost – not only in the mediator but very likely in the whole process.

The public policy mediator thus walks a fine line. One of my colleagues compares the situation to a high wire act without the net. The focus has to be on maintaining balance rather than on dominating the stakeholders.

I realize that the public policy field presents a very different situation for mediators than other types of practice. Two-party mediations in which individuals speak only for themselves and which take place in a very short timeframe give far more prominence to the mediator role than does the typical public policy process – with its large number of parties working over a long period of time in a highly dynamic political setting .

Hopefully, we’ll see more research and dialogue about the variations in the mediator role in each of the major fields of practice. The power and influence of the mediator should no longer be discussed as if research from one field of practice can be transferred to any of the other fields. The distinctive conditions in each one have to be considered carefully before reaching broad conclusions about the profession as a whole.

Related posts:

1. Mediating on Two Tracks: the Rational and the Rest of Human Nature
2. Bernard Mayer: Staying with Conflict
3. Peter Adler and The End of Mediation