Questions change everything in community engagement | Max Hardy | TEDxStKilda
Summary
TLDRIn this insightful talk, the speaker humorously recounts his experience as a community engagement practitioner, a role often misunderstood. He emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions in community engagement to foster meaningful dialogue and innovative solutions. Through engaging stories, he illustrates how poorly thought-out questions can polarize, while well-crafted ones can unite communities and lead to effective outcomes, highlighting the transformative power of genuine curiosity and high expectations in public consultations.
Takeaways
- 😀 The speaker has worked for 20 years as a community engagement practitioner, a role that many people are unfamiliar with.
- 🗣️ Community engagement is often misunderstood and can be referred to by various terms such as community consultation, public participation, and citizen engagement.
- 🏛️ It is generally initiated by governments and is seen as a process for involving communities in decisions that affect them.
- 🌐 The speaker believes community engagement has the potential to strengthen democracy and build community connections beyond just influencing decisions.
- 🚫 A concern raised is that the practice of community engagement has not reached its full potential due to government entities asking ordinary questions and expecting little from communities.
- 🔍 The story of a pipeline in Glen Davis illustrates the importance of genuine community engagement and the risks of making assumptions without proper investigation.
- 🌳 A Victorian council's approach to dealing with large trees and pavers highlights the negative impact of poorly thought-out questions and the benefits of involving the community in creative problem-solving.
- 🤝 The importance of asking better questions in community engagement is emphasized, as they can lead to smarter, more enduring solutions.
- 💡 Einstein's quote about spending time generating the right question before finding the solution is used to stress the importance of questioning in community engagement.
- 🌟 The speaker suggests a formula for successful community engagement involving a great question, genuine curiosity, high expectations, and a diverse community.
- 🤔 The script concludes with a call to action, prompting the audience to consider the thoughtful questions they could ask and the world they are creating with their current questions.
Q & A
What is a community engagement practitioner?
-A community engagement practitioner is a professional who facilitates conversations between communities and decision-makers, often initiated by governments, to involve the community in decisions that affect them. It may also be known as community consultation, public participation, citizen engagement, or public involvement.
Why did the parent call Mr. Hardy?
-The parent called Mr. Hardy because she was worried that her daughter, who attended a birthday party at Mr. Hardy's daughter's house, didn't know what her father did for a living, unlike the other children at the party.
What did Mr. Hardy learn from the phone call with the concerned parent?
-Mr. Hardy learned that his daughter was unable to explain his job as a community engagement practitioner, which led to the realization that even he struggled to succinctly describe what he did for a living.
What is the potential impact of community engagement beyond influencing decisions?
-Beyond influencing decisions, community engagement has the potential to strengthen democracy, build community connections, and contribute to a range of positive outcomes beyond just providing input to decisions.
Why were government entities asking ordinary questions of their community?
-Government entities often ask ordinary questions because they expect very little of their community, which may be due to a lack of belief in the community's ability to contribute meaningfully to decision-making.
What was the issue with the pipeline in the Cape Verde Valley?
-The issue with the pipeline was that thousands of liters of water were being lost, which was financially unviable to replace, especially considering the small population of the town it served.
Why did the government plan to disconnect the water supply in Glen Davis?
-The government planned to disconnect the water supply in Glen Davis due to the high cost of replacing the pipeline and the belief that it was not financially viable for such a small community.
What was the outcome of the community engagement in Glen Davis regarding the water pipeline?
-The outcome was that the community and government officials discovered that the pipeline was in better condition than expected, and the actual issue was an illegal tap being used for growing crops to make whiskey. A memorandum of understanding was developed, and the problem was resolved without replacing the pipeline.
What did the speaker learn from the experience in Glen Davis about the importance of asking the right questions?
-The speaker learned that asking the right questions is crucial for identifying the actual problem and avoiding unnecessary solutions. It also highlighted the importance of genuinely engaging with the community and expecting more from them.
What advice does the speaker give about the questions we ask in community engagement?
-The speaker advises that we should ask thoughtful questions that expect more of people, show genuine curiosity, and have high expectations for the community's ability to come together and find solutions.
What impact can the questions we ask have on the world we create?
-The questions we ask can shape the world we create by influencing the perspectives, actions, and outcomes of community engagement. Thoughtful questions can lead to more positive and transformative results.
Outlines
😀 The Misunderstandings of Community Engagement
The speaker begins by humorously highlighting the obscurity of the term 'community engagement practitioner' and shares an anecdote about a parent's confusion regarding their profession. They explain community engagement as a process involving the community in decisions that affect them, often initiated by governments. The speaker expresses concern about the underutilization of community engagement's potential to strengthen democracy and build connections. They recount a story from 1996 involving a pipeline issue in a small town, where government officials were reluctant to engage with the community due to fear of backlash, leading to a four-year delay in addressing the problem.
🤔 The Power of Questions in Community Engagement
This paragraph delves into the importance of asking the right questions in community engagement. The speaker criticizes the tendency to ask ordinary questions that lead to ineffective engagement processes. They reference David Cooper Oda's view that the world we live in is shaped by our questions, which can either damage or transform communities. The speaker shares examples of how poorly thought-out questions led to negative outcomes, such as a council's plan to remove old trees causing public outrage and a divisive question about the primary purpose of national parks. They emphasize the need for better questions that invite community participation in creative problem-solving, as demonstrated by a successful case where a community collaboratively found a cost-effective solution to street accessibility.
💡 The Formula for Effective Community Engagement
The speaker concludes by discussing the formula for effective community engagement, which includes a great question, genuine curiosity, high expectations, and a diverse community. They argue that these elements lead to healthier conversations and smarter, more enduring solutions. The speaker uses Einstein's quote about the importance of asking the right question as a metaphor for the significance of questioning in community engagement. They also reflect on the story of Glenn Davis, where initial assumptions about a failing pipeline were proven wrong through community engagement, leading to a more accurate understanding of the issue and a successful resolution. The speaker encourages the audience to consider the thoughtful questions they could ask and the world they are creating with their current questions.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Community Engagement
💡Citizen Participation
💡Public Involvement
💡Government Initiatives
💡Community Consultation
💡Questions
💡Polarization
💡Creative Solutions
💡Genuine Curiosity
💡High Expectations
💡Diverse Community
Highlights
Community engagement is often misunderstood and can be defined in various ways such as community consultation, public participation, and citizen engagement.
The potential of community engagement extends beyond decision-making to strengthening democracy and building community connections.
Government entities typically ask ordinary questions of communities and expect little in return, which may limit the effectiveness of community engagement.
A story about a parent's concern over a child's inability to explain their father's job highlights the complexity and importance of community engagement.
In a case study from 1996, community engagement was used to address water loss in a pipeline, revealing the importance of genuine dialogue with community members.
The fear of engaging communities due to potential backlash or misunderstanding can lead to delays in decision-making and missed opportunities for collaboration.
The importance of asking the right questions in community engagement was emphasized, as they can either damage or transform and connect communities.
An example of a poorly asked question leading to public outrage and hate mail towards a disability access committee illustrates the power of questions in community engagement.
A better approach to community engagement involves inviting the community to be part of a creative process to solve problems, as demonstrated by a Victorian council's solution to tree roots damaging pavers.
The process of finding the right question is crucial and can lead to smarter and more enduring solutions, as suggested by Einstein's quote about the importance of question formulation.
A formula for effective community engagement includes a great question, genuine curiosity, high expectations, and a diverse community.
The story of Glen Davis and the pipeline issue shows how community mistrust and incorrect assumptions can lead to proposed solutions for non-existent problems.
The discovery of an illegal tap on the pipeline in Glen Davis demonstrates the importance of accurate problem identification before proposing solutions.
The Glen Davis case study also highlights the value of community knowledge and the potential for community members to be assets rather than problems.
The presentation concludes with a call to action for attendees to consider the thoughtful questions they ask and the world they are creating with those questions.
The importance of believing in people's ability to rise to the occasion and contribute to solutions is emphasized as a key aspect of successful community engagement.
Transcripts
the last 20 years I've worked as a
community engagement practitioner you
probably don't know what that is most of
you don't don't worry you're not alone I
remember many years ago getting a phone
call a very worried parent and I
answered the phone she said mr. Hardy I
said yes she said your Lenore's father I
said yes
she said I'm very worried your daughter
came to our place she came to my
daughter's birthday party yesterday and
all the kids knew what their parents did
except your daughter struggled so at
this point I was thinking that she
reckoned I was a drug dealer so I said
would you like me to try and explain
what I do she said yes I said right okay
doesn't notice so the next five minutes
or so it really did my best to explain
what I did for a living and there was
just silence on the other end of the
phone and I said has that helped at all
she said yes it has helped a great deal
thank you I said great so you know what
I'm doing she said no but now I know why
your daughter couldn't explain it so
community engagement is known by a
number of terms that may be familiar or
not familiar to like community
consultation public participation
citizen engagement public involvement
any of those terms and generally it's
understood or defined as the process for
involving the community in conversations
about decisions that interest them or
affect them often community engagement
is initiated by government I believe the
community engagement can do a lot more
than just influence decisions it has the
potential to strengthen democracy it has
the ability to also build community
build connections and do a whole lot
more than just provide some input to
decisions and one of the things that's
really concerned me for many years about
the practice is that hasn't for fear
that promise and one of the reasons for
that is that government entities usually
ask really ordinary questions of their
community and they expect very little of
their community
I do remember on one occasion 1996 this
is a long time ago now but engineers
were really concerned about a problem
with the pipeline it was a pipeline that
ran a hundred kilometres from over on
them near the Blue Mountains all the way
to a reservoir in Glen Davis it's sort
of a long way from anywhere but it's in
the middle of the Cape Verde Valley
which is just about as big as the Grand
Canyon anyway in the 1930s they built a
shale oil refinery there and in order to
have that shale oil refinery operate
they need a border so they'd built this
massive pipeline from oberon Dam to Glen
Davis it was decommissioned in the 1950s
because it wasn't financially viable so
the town then that was quite vibrant
shrunk and become a ghost town but
unusual for a ghost town it had running
town water but I very concerned when
when they measured the water flowing
from the top of the escarpment down to
the bottom that thousands and thousands
of litres of water were being lost it
was going to cost about five million
dollars to replace that pipeline and
that didn't stack up commercially when
you only had 40 permanent residents in
the town so government came up with a
plan and the plan was to disconnect the
water supply the pipeline and to give
people water tanks they knew they had to
engage the community in a conversation
about it but engage them about what the
officers of this government authority
was so nervous about going there they
would find a way of delaying taking any
action in the hope that they could get
transferred into another job and this
happened for about four years until
someone had this great idea of getting a
consultant to do the job for them
anyway they found luckily for them they
found a naive young consultant who was
pretty desperate to get some work done
luckily for me I was that consultant so
that was that was interesting and I
thought well okay the first thing I need
to do is I need to I need to approach
the progress Association and ask them
whether it'd be okay if we use their
halt for a few meetings so I'm going to
rang up and ask him he said it might be
possible but he asked me a much more
powerful question and the question he
asked me was will you be bringing your
bulletproof vests at that point I knew
why they delayed so long to actually go
and talk to this community and also why
they referred to it as deliverance
country and I want to return to a story
a bit later on to tell you what actually
happened there
our questions for community engagement
are often very very ordinary and for
that reason the processes are fairly
bumpy and communities are often marketed
to solutions are marketed and I was
really impressed by the work of David
Cooper Oda and some things that he said
and he said our questions are faithful
we live in the world that our questions
create and I think that's quite
significant and quite profound because
in my experience the questions we ask
around community engagement are faithful
they have the power to damage and
polarize and I also have the ability
potentially to transform and connect and
deliver really smart outcomes one was
there was actually a Victorian council
had an issue with large trees that were
jacking up pavers in the main street and
a lot of people had difficulty getting
around in that street but especially
people in wheelchairs and who had
mobility challenges so the disability
access committee had been lobbying
council for years to get this fixed
in their wisdom counsel flicked it to
their public work section and asked them
to come with a solution which they did
they're going to pull out these trees
that were over a hundred years old they
were going to relay the pavers flatten
them out beautifully and replace those
trees with other trees with less
aggressive rootstocks and the question
they went to the community was do you
reckon this will help you get around the
street okay so not only was there public
reaction and outrage most troubling of
all is that people with disabilities on
that access committee started getting
hate mail and people were blaming them
for wanting to pull the trees out it
took them a while to take stock and to
realize that this wasn't going to work
terribly well it was actually doing
damage eventually they came up with a
much better question with a bit of help
and that was how can everybody get
around and enjoy this street how simple
instead of trying to sell a solution
they invited the community to be part of
a creative process to solve the puzzle
how can we do this and they did it they
work together beautifully they come up
with a solution with the help of some
technical experts and they sort of had a
nice pathway on the other side of the
road they kept the trees actually made
beautiful gardens there they had these
access crossings they turned up two-way
street into a one-way street and guess
what the solution was less than half the
price of council's original solution so
I've got another question that I thought
was pretty ordinary one when we were
pulled in to work with a national parks
and Wildlife Service and they wanted to
go to the community with a question
because they were being lobbied by
conservationists and by recreation
enthusiasts and what they said to this
National Parks and Wildlife Service is
you need to resolve this what our
national parks are primarily for and
they wanted to go with the question of
what our national parks meant for
primarily is it for conservation or for
recreation that is an excellent question
if you want to start a brawl that is how
you polarize a community
and so fortunately it was intercepted
before it went public and they had had a
go and come up with a better question
the next one was slightly better it was
how do we balance the needs of
recreation and conservation in our
national parks that was a bit better the
problem being that it assumes that the
more you have of one the less you have
of the other which also makes it a
stupid question and so in the end a much
better question was arrived at how do we
maximize enjoyment of national parks and
improve its environmental value or
improve conservation how do we get both
now that was a question worth asking and
you'll know from a number of solutions
in national parks that boardwalks mean
you can actually enjoy the national park
much more and you do less damage to the
to the environment because you're not
walking on the earth so ask about a
question a community comes together
questions that we ask are often not
terribly well thought through and so
I've got this formula that I use and I
had this in the back of my head all the
time about what we need is a great
question genuine curiosity high
expectations and a diverse community and
that will lead to healthier
conversations and smarter more enduring
solutions for me that's what it's about
so we need to put more thought into
questions
Einstein said something that was
actually quite useful about questions
and that was he said if I had 60 minutes
to save the planet
I'd take 55 minutes trying to generate
the right question because once I worked
out the question I could find the
solution in five minutes
there's something about community
engagement that we kind of don't spend a
real lot of time wondering what is the
question we are asking people to resolve
this affects community engagement a
great deal but it also affects us in
every realm of life what are the
questions we're asking of people and
what impact will those questions have
and I think that if we don't believe
that people can rise to the occasion we
think that
people are so stuck in their point of
view that they're incredibly selfish
that they're opinionated that they're
stupid then why would you engage a
community you wouldn't the best you can
do is try and actually tell them what's
good for them and persuade them that you
know what's good for them it doesn't
work but if that's the attitude then
that's likely to be what happens that we
market the solution and of course that
is what happened at Glenn Davis so let's
return to the story of Glenn Davis
because people didn't believe that the
pipeline was falling to bits actually
said you know what we just think
government doesn't care about us anymore
hearing Glenn Davis and so they were so
mistrustful of the engineers report
about the loss of water that we had a
tour of the pipeline and we piled into
two Land Rovers Land Cruisers and that
group consisted of some community
members and some engineers and public
servants and me and the maintenance
fellow who actually looked after the
pipeline so we did the trip over the
terrain we checked out a number of
points along the pipeline and lo and
behold they said they discovered that
the pipeline was in pretty good
condition and they'll kind of really
confuse us in the pipeline seems to be
fine it seems like all this stuff the
community was saying about the pipeline
being okay was true but there was a
problem what was happening with all this
water loss and a woman looked at me and
she said whiskey I said what whiskey I
heard a rumor of a fellow who was
illegally tapping into the pipeline to
grow crops from which he made whiskey
and it was investigated and it was
absolutely true so here we were trying
to sell a solution to a problem that
didn't exist because we're trying to
work on the wrong problem so after a bit
of investigation we found out that was
true the government authority had
developed a memorandum of understanding
with the community the problem was
solved water is still running which is
kind of cool and at the end of that
field trip we ended up back in the
community hall where
we felt that our lives were under some
sort of threat and the president of the
association opened the fridge and
invited us to drink beer with him so
here's a picture of us at the end of our
trip feeling a lot happier then and it
was kind of a happy ending but of course
every time I share this story someone
will say oh yeah but what would happen
if the pipeline was falling to bits
wouldn't have been any happy ending then
true but I find that people are able to
move on and think creatively about
things or much it will easily accept
hard decisions if they know why they're
being made the other thing that happened
is when we had those meetings in the
hall is a heathered gentleman who's
about 85 who said do you know what I
might be the oldest person here in the
room and I was here before that shale
oil refinery was built and we used to
walk up into the foothills and we used
to get some spring water out of from the
foothills and there was enough water
there for our population of 30 or 40
roughly what we are now he said but I
bet your engineers check that out and
it's not viable for some reason the
engineers went bright-red didn't know
anything about it
so is it amazing we sort of think our
community sometimes is a problem to be
solved rather than an asset to utilize
so I want to leave you with some
questions one question is what would
happen if you asked questions that were
really thoughtful questions where you
expected more of people where you were
genuinely curious where you actually had
high expectations of the ability to
people to come together to arrive at a
solution and the last question for you
is what world are you creating with the
questions that you're currently asking
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
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