You still talking ‘digital exclusion’ or are you DOING digital INCLUSION?!
First, a challenging analysis of ‘the problem’, then solutions to the ‘problem’ — in this case (as in many, if not most, cases) — the ‘problem’ being largely in the heads of those who are ‘problem focused’ rather than ‘solution focused’.
Please read on (right to the end, and help support our bold goal for 100% digital access!), and please, please, please focus on all possible ACTION rather than just talking about ‘the problem of digital exclusion’!
I’ll finish by telling you about an initiative in one City to give ‘digital access’ to every resident but, first, it’s important to understand why some embrace such an initiative — and make it happen — whilst others don’t even consider such action for community engagement and empowerment.
This piece includes extracts from my forthcoming book “The Engagement & Empowerment Project: Case Studies in Transformational Change” and additional commentary on two transformations, happening right now, (which will make two more exciting chapters to add for the 2nd edition!).
One of the biggest irritations over the past couple of years has been attending events and conferences and having negative thinking people in the audience (usually claiming to be concerned about democratic citizen involvement) saying things like “what about those who are digitally excluded?”, “not everyone has access to a computer”, “not everyone has access to the internet”, “not everyone can take part in research/community engagement/deliberative democracy online”, “lots of older people/elderly people/disadvantaged people don’t have digital access”.
Of course not everyone has access to everything. Not everyone can take part in a face-to-face Citizens’ Assembly in Birmingham! But my stock response to those who constantly raise ‘the problem of digital exclusion’ is to say “so what are you doing about it?…what are you doing to give these ‘excluded’ people digital access?…what are you doing to try and give everyone digital access?”.
The responses to this continuous challenge have been fascinating.
Pre-COVID19, common responses were “we’ll stick to our face-to-face methods because we think they’re more inclusive” (in reality, with many Citizens’ Assemblies and Citizens’ Juries, they were simply including a privileged few — the new randomly-selected elites! — and excluding everyone else!)…
…“what we do face-to-face in terms of depth of discussion and deliberation, we don’t think can be done online” (in fact it can, and has been for more than 10 years, but if you don’t try you don’t find out, do you? — thankfully, more are trying now, post-COVID19)…
…“we’ll wait until the population has a higher level of digital access and digital literacy” (wait until when exactly? and wait for who to do what?!)…
…“it’s not our role to give people digital access, we’re just researchers or deliberative democracy practitioners working within whatever context we find ourselves” (so you don’t think of yourselves as ‘change agents’ then?)…
…and — thankfully, a very common response — “we’d like there to be greater (quantity and quality of) digital access, but what can we do?”.
Post-COVID19, the responses have been very different.
Still a lot of resistance to online approaches from people like the ‘Deliberative Wave Club’ (after 18 months of referring to #DelibWave as a cult, I’ve started referring to it as a Club as it does seem to have a small group of Members to the exclusion of anyone who doesn’t sign up to the strict entry rules!), who seem to have largely shifted from a bias against digital democracy to now having a Zoom bias (we should say ‘other channels and platforms available’!)…
…but more people and organisations are ‘going online’, even ‘embracing online’, although many still using terms which display a continued bias, such as “experimenting online” (er, no, many of these approaches are established, it’s just that you’re discovering them now!) and, sadly, “we’re using online approaches while we’re unable to meet face-to-face” (please use both in future!).
It’s instructive to study those who seamlessly ‘went online’ (in some cases, they were ‘already online’ of course); those who tentatively-but-quickly moved online (taking the leap fast, and learning fast as a result, being open to learning); those who slowly went online with a negative mindset (eg. “we’re going to try online but we don’t think it will work or be anywhere near as good as face-to-face…and now we’ve tried it — reluctantly — we told you it wouldn't work”); those who were dragged-kicking-and-screaming online after considerable delay; and those who took their time, learned from others’ experiences, and took positive steps (with a mentality of ‘we’re going to make this work online’).
The worst example was ClimateAssemblyUK, which had already decided — despite a £520,000 budget — to be face-to-face only (with no opportunity for any type of involvement for anyone other than Assembly Members, not even those who’d responded to the random invites saying they wanted to participate but weren’t selected for this NetZeroAssembly, despite the fact it would’ve been so easy, and inexpensive, to invite them in to online forums).
ClimateAssemblyUK announced on 16 March that it would not be going ahead with its final weekend of deliberations because it wasn’t going to be possible to meet face-to-face (in Birmingham):
and said it would make an announcement “soon”.
After several enquiries, from myself and others interested, and several more messages about updates coming ‘soon’, ‘shortly’, ‘imminently’, we finally had confirmation of the obvious course of action — ‘going online’ — on 17 April:
By this point, the Victorian Government in Australia had commissioned a new Online Citizens’ Jury to review its Emergency Planning & Crisis Management policies and practices (well done VicGov, showing good practice leadership there), and the RACQ Citizens’ Jury had already ‘gone online’ and was reporting back on its (largely positive) experience, reflected on in this excellent podcast with Emily Jenke (great work Emily, especially providing digital access for any Juror who didn’t have access from home, or who might have been distracted from home, by paying for them to stay in a local hotel with appropriate facilities and wi-fi — good positive solution!):
In the past few weeks, I’ve attended several (online) events where presenters have said “ClimateAssemblyUK moved quickly to shift its process online”. Different people will have different views on what ‘quickly’ means, of course, but in the fast-moving crisis context of COVID19, more than 4 weeks doesn’t sound ‘quick’ to me.
I suppose it might to those previously locked in to a ‘face-to-face-thinking-and-doing model’?!; and we should perhaps allow for the fact that the ‘Deliberative Wave Club’ tends to resemble a political party or lobby group these days in the way it spins the narrative (or self-deludes?)!
Also, the language used in the announcements from ClimateAssemblyUK sounded defensive, reluctant and hesitant, ‘going in online’ but with a mentality of ‘this probably isn’t going to work’ and ‘this is never going to come close to face-to-face’, thus being in danger of ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’.
And there was a further barrier from the ‘face-to-face mental model’ which was (and still is) thinking in terms of ‘how do we take our face-to-face process and put it online?’.
This limited thinking (not ‘digital thinking’) has led most of the #DelibWave Clubbers to simply shift from a one-tool bag with the face-to-face Citizens’ Assembly brand (so narrowly-defined in the OECD Report published on 10 June — which actually had a minimum criterion to qualify as a ‘Deliberative Democracy’ case study of “at least one day of face-to-face meetings” — which would mean we’ve not had any Deliberative Democracy since Lockdown?!)…to another one-tool bag, with Zoom being the sole tool now.
Last week, I had the simultaneously sad and beautiful experience of attending my first online funeral, for my friend and former colleague, John Aitchison, with the ‘digital funeral’ a bitter-sweet irony as John was a pioneer in online healthcare research! The BHBIA showed its class by naming its annual Outstanding Achievement Award in John’s honour:
Pre-COVID19, most funeral directors did not offer an online option as standard because the entire sector was locked into a ‘face-to-face mental model’ and ‘customers’ were rarely asking for an online option, so they didn’t offer it.
We were starting to get more weddings being streamed online (my wife and I had hooked in to a couple of online weddings taking place in the UK when we were in Australia) but not many online funerals. Now, post-COVID19, all funeral directors are offering online funerals because they have to, because face-to-face is not an option at the moment.
So what will happen after Lockdown? Do we revert back to face-to-face only funerals? Doesn’t make sense does it? It makes much more sense to offer both face-to-face and online, to maximise the opportunity for participation.
And this, of course, has transferable lessons for all those designing and delivering research, community engagement, deliberative & participative democracy, and all public services. If you were previously operating face-to-face only (one of the dinosaurs!) and are now operating online, surely the future is offering (independently or integrated) face-to-face and online? Why ‘return to face-to-face only’ (ie ‘return to dinosaur?’!)?
I recently joined the Board of Age UK York as a Trustee, and was thrown straight into ‘crisis planning’ as Lockdown meant losing our income from the shops with costs increasing, eg. PPE, whilst there was peak need for services. We put together a short-term plan to ‘survive’ and then started looking at what medium-to-long-term plan would enable the organisation to ‘thrive’, including through 2021 which is our 50th Anniversary Year.
Pre-COVID19, Age UK York was very much a face-to-face organisation (‘face-to-face thinking’ then face-to-face communications and face-to-face service delivery) with almost nothing online; most Board Members having never experienced Zoom, and some never even a videoconference of any kind.
Now, we have regular meetings online, are shifting (more) services online, and have online, drop-in Day Clubs every day!
Post-COVID19, we won’t ‘go back to face-to-face’ — the genie’s out of the bottle! — we’ll find the optimal mix of face-to-face, online, telephone, postal, etc, based around what mix is ‘fit-for-purpose’.
The pre-COVID19 resistance to online approaches, and narrow use of just a small number of models and methods, with reluctance to move away from the core approaches, despite concerns about how inclusive they are, and claimed concern about broader issues of inclusion in society and our democracy, has parallels in what was happening in the pre-digital world.
It’s not really a new phenomenon and, as often happens, those practising today in fields like research, community engagement, and deliberative & participative democracy, are not always good at studying the past and learning from the past.
One of the main lessons from studying effective inclusive participation and engagement in the past, leading to greatest impact, is that ‘methods’ were secondary, servants not masters.
In contrast to the methodology-led approach of the #DelibWave Club (“you can either have a Citizens’ Assembly or a Citizens Jury”, a bit like the line from The Blues Brothers: “we have both types of music here — Country and Western!”, or “we should legislate for 4 Citizens’ Assemblies per year and then find issues for these Assemblies to cover”), innovation in inclusion is driven by a clear focus on objectives and desired outcomes with total flexibility and creativity in ‘fit-for-purpose’ designs. Being method-led means exclusive not inclusive!
Drawing from relevant history, here’s an extract from my forthcoming book:
‘Hard-to-reach’/’Hard-to-engage’?
One of the reasons our work was regularly called ‘innovative’, and I was in demand as a speaker at events and conferences, was because of our reputation for ‘reaching the parts other agencies don’t reach’. I’d learned from my York experience, 1989–91, that all it needed was a creative approach, totally focused on the end goal whilst totally flexible in the means to the end, with a ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ mentality, and then no-one was ‘hard-to-reach’ or ‘hard-to-engage’ — which were commonly used terms at that time.
I used to regularly say in my talks “no-one is hard-to-reach, some are just more expensive to reach…so are you truly committed to reaching them?”. Indeed, today, a Google Search will often throw up these quotes from me (or quoted in publications written since) making this very point.
It’s particularly relevant to the contemporary discussions, debates, and deliberations, because I regularly hear or see comments, articles, papers, events, conferences, webinars, etc today raising the issue of ‘inclusion’ and many people, often defensive, even destructive, in their comments, or despairing, saying ‘but how can we include people in our process’ or ‘the problem with online engagement is not everyone has internet access’.
As I was writing this piece, I broke off for an XR Citizens Assembly Working Group (the title makes it clear this is a ‘single-issue, single method’ pressure group, a strange development!) on ‘how to make your Citizens’ Assembly more inclusive’. I tried to inject a bit of healthy challenge with my questions, including whether you are ‘principle-led’ or ‘methodology-led’.
If your start point is ‘we’ve already decided to do a Citizens’ Assembly — how can we make it (more) inclusive?’, you’ll find ways to make it more inclusive but it will always be limited as you’re being methodology-driven and the Citizens’ Assembly model, when rigidly applied with 100–150 citizens meeting and no other opportunity for participation, is by definition an exclusive method.
If your start point, as a Government, Council, commissioning client, or practitioner is ‘How do we make sure our process is inclusive, participatory democracy, with deliberation?’, then you might not include a Citizens’ Assembly in your design, or it would be just ‘one piece in the jigsaw picture’ with complementary approaches, eg more than one deliberative forum, online forums for those invited to the Citizens’ Assembly but not selected, open opportunity for any citizen to comment on your website or a dedicated website, outreach research or community engagement with disadvantaged communities, research among the 95% of households that didn’t reply to your random invitations, engagement with specific groups such as those with mobility issues or communications disabilities. All can be integrated.
I’ve had many people, intelligent people, coming to my conference sessions and workshops over-the-years wanting a ‘how-to-do-it manual’ (which often then becomes, effectively, a ‘how-to-not-use-your-own-brain manual’ and, indeed, the current #DelibWave movement is characterised by an obsession with models, methods, tools, and ‘manuals’.
In one way, I meet this need by talking through and documenting my case studies, as I’ve done here. However, the creativity, innovation, and sheer number of different approaches is the result of not being a slave to any one method, treating every tool as adaptable for the circumstances, creating new approaches to meet your purpose in context, and adopting the ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ mentality seeking tailored approaches.
If all those who say ‘what about those who don’t have internet access’ invested more of their time and energy in giving people internet access (with suitable training and support), the world would be a happier place! This is one of my goals as a Board Trustee for Age UK.
I was heartened to read about Emily Jenke and her team working on the RACQ Citizens’ Jury in Queensland which very effectively shifted online after COVID19 disrupted their face-to-face process. They had a few Jury Members without internet access at home, or felt they wouldn’t be able to give it their attention in their home environment, so they paid for them to go to a local hotel for the weekend with wi-fi and full digital access. That’s the spirit!
You can design this in to your engagement and empowerment process. Give people temporary digital access for the duration of the project. Even better, make it permanent. In return for their active participation in the process (which usually means them fitting in to your process for meeting your objectives and/or the client’s goals), give them a lap-top, iPad, smartphone, satellite ‘phone in remote areas, or mobile access device which they can use after your project is completed. Now there’s ‘engagement with empowerment’!
In the early 1990s in the UK, we’d regularly be asked to carry out highly structured research, engagement and deliberation exercises, and quantitative surveys, and “make it fully representative”. Of course, we’d strive to make our processes as inclusive as possible — eg random selection of start points for surveys with interviewers going door-to-door, postal surveys in multiple languages, assistance for people with disabilities — but those structured processes are always limited in their inclusiveness and representativeness…because of their structure and basis of the model.
A Citizens’ Jury of 20 people, by definition, can only include 20 people, so can never be ‘fully representative’ of the population or reliable in representing the population (even if the Jurors were a true random sample, which they won’t be, the 95% Confidence Interval around even any pre-conditioned initial views they give would be +/- 22 percentage points).
A Citizens’ Assembly with 100 citizens, again, cannot be ‘fully representative’ or, as advocates often claim ‘representing people from all walks of life’. No, it’s not. It can’t. It’s only 100 people! There are more than 100 ‘walks of life’!
Even a survey with a cross-sectional sample of 1000 (reliable in representing the views of the population to within +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% degree of confidence) is still not going to ‘represent people from all walks of life’ or even be ‘fully representative’ although it has a much greater claim to that than a Citizens’ Jury (of 20 people) or Citizens’ Assembly (of 100)!
No, the stark reality is that if you’re truly committed to involving ‘people from all walks of life’ or ‘empowering minority and disadvantaged groups’, then you have to tailor a design — not your rigid model, process, modus operandi, or way of seeing the world — to their specific needs with the explicit purpose of giving that group an opportunity to participate and deliberate.
I recall many events and presentations back then, when I was working with highly innovative ‘peer organisations’, working with disadvantaged and initially disillusioned young people, and achieving incredible levels of engagement and empowerment through our tailored designs.
However, the audience would often say ‘That was amazing”, then say “We have problems getting young people to fill out our surveys or come to our deliberative forums…what tips have you got for us?”. And the young people would say “Don’t do surveys or don’t do those types of forums”! Obvious innit?!
There are a few particular approaches that stick in the memory. One was carrying out comprehensive surveys on an employment and training initiative in the Manningham and Cornwall Road areas of Bradford, with more than half the population of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, including many older people who didn’t have English as their first language.
We worked intensively with the local community, including identifying all the places where residents felt comfortable and could meet, including where cultural and religious norms meant there had to be some form of segregation (eg. by religion or gender), and where it was possible to congregate together.
Then we trained a team of 20 local residents as interviewers (always drawbacks to such a process but many benefits too, and options are limited in these situations) to gather the semi-structured data we needed to develop plans and submit them to the Council and Government for regeneration funding and employment and training initiatives.
We carried out a diverse series of research, engagement and empowerment initiatives with these communities over a 7-year period, from initial scoping, through putting plans and funding bids together, to evaluating impact at the ‘end’ of the programmes (never an ‘end’ really of course, just the end of phases of this ‘continuous conversation and development work’).
Being inclusive, and being seen to be inclusive
Another project was recruiting an audience for a BBC Panorama programme on policing, after the release of the Sheehy Report. Most of the audience were selected to be a cross section of the community, but about a third were carefully targeted (by the production team and the RBA Team working in partnership) to include those who had recent experience of contact with the police as victims, witnesses, perpetrators, activists, people who’d contacted the police and were satisfied with the response, people who’d contacted the police and been dissatisfied with the response, people who’d decided it wasn’t worth contacting the police because “they wouldn’t do anything”, etc.
Given that the West Yorkshire area was culturally and ethnically diverse, the recruitment brief emphasised how important it was to have representation from all ethnic communities, especially the large Asian and Black communities (each of these being diverse as well of course, within these broad categories, eg. Muslims, Sikhs).
As this was television, big audience national television, it was emphasised that the audience not only had to be diverse but it had to be seen to be diverse. It had to look diverse and representative on the screen. This might sound cynical, and it can sometimes be cynical (I once went with a group of friends to the recording of a BBC comedy programme with a small audience, we filmed two episodes of the programme, and ‘at half time’ we were asked to put on different clothes and sit in different seats!) but, in this case for Panorama, it was well-intentioned and designed to give credibility to the TV programme and confidence in its output.
That said, I still wake up at night sometimes with the memory of being told by the leader of the production team (now a top presenter on a daily BBC news programme) yelling at me two hours before we were due to go on air “I know you’ve got a mix but they’re not black enough, I want some really black faces, and get me a couple more turbans”! To be fair, they were under pressure and just doing their job under duress with the clock ticking down. We sent our interviewers out onto the streets outside the studio and duly recruited more citizens precisely to the ‘visually diverse’ brief. The programme was a huge success and everyone was very calm and human the next day.
This historic case study has relevance for today’s rash of Citizens’ Assemblies. There’s a live, and lively, debate about ‘transparency’. Deliberative democracy advocates and practitioners claim to believe in transparency, as a key principle of democracy, and yet there are very different approaches in practice. Notably, ClimateAssemblyUK being very guarded about revealing details of Assembly Members and who or what was shown on live feeds or videos (claiming it was ‘protecting privacy and confidentiality’, although clearly also ‘cultural’ — both UK national culture and the ‘organisational culture’ of those running the exercise); the Irish published all the names of Assembly Members and the part of Ireland they came from, with plenty of open footage; and the French Convention had portraits painted and displayed for all their participants.
When the footage of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly was shown, one of the first comments was about it not necessarily ‘looking like a representative sample’ and in particular ‘looking very white’. Those arranging these types of Citizens’ Assembly can often be rather dismissive of others’ practices but, with no room for cynicism from anyone here, they could perhaps learn from the experience of TV programme researchers, and programmes like BBC Panorama!
Meanwhile, we were carrying out involvement and empowerment projects for many councils and public institutions, where there was a real desire to involve all citizens. And the RBA ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ mentality gave them confidence to stretch the commitment and imagination. We continued to deliver with tailored designs.
Sticking with the police theme, we were carrying out some R&D for West Yorkshire Police as part of a culture change programme, including shifting the organisation from ‘the Constabulary’ with the emphasis very much on compliance and enforcement, to ‘the Police Service’ with the emphasis on working with the community in partnership to solve crime, prevent crime, and make people feel safer in their homes.
I had the chance to run a coaching workshop with the top slice leadership, about 300 in the room I recall, and one was being rather cynical about ‘this sounds like marketing-speak — all about our ‘image’ in the community’. I replied with “If you have a more positive ‘image’ in the community and communicate better with the public, would it help you solve and prevent crime?”. There’s a time and a place for a leading question!
No ‘no go’ areas
After making much progress, West Yorkshire Police then contacted us to say they were having major problems in one area of Leeds, around Halton Moor estate, where there’d been ‘open warfare’ in the streets, police cars being rammed and police officers assaulted, and where they were finding it difficult to engage with the community as more residents called it ‘a no go area’. Did we have any ideas. Of course, yes we did.
We came up with the idea of running what we called a ‘Mutual Understanding Exercise’ and subsequent uses of this method became MUEs (which seemed appropriate as we ‘mused’ on many complex topics!). We recruited a sample of 8 residents from Halton Moor. One of our interviewers, Norah, lived in the area and had credibility, so was able to ‘broker a peace’ in terms of finding the 8 people we needed — all sceptical and suspicious about the police but prepared to participate in our project.
We brought them in to our offices in Chapel Allerton, on the north side of the city, where we had a research studio with viewing area behind-the-mirror. Everyone was briefed and knew exactly what we were doing, and they could leave at any time if they wanted to. Behind-the-mirror we had senior police officers, including the Commander with responsibility for the Halton Moor area, and the Head of Community Relations, which was a new post I think.
I facilitated a discussion among the residents while the police watched and listened from behind-the mirror. I asked them to describe their experiences of living on the estate, their experiences with the police, what they thought about the police, what other residents were saying about the police, what their expectations were from the police, what they saw as solutions to the recent problems, and what they thought the next steps should be. This initial discussion lasted an hour and, as usually happens, they ‘warmed’ to the fact ‘we’re being listened to’, although still very frosty towards the police.
Meanwhile, one of my fellow RBA Directors was in the viewing area with the police, listening to the discussion, noting down key points, getting reactions to the comments from residents, framing questions that needed further discussion, with a rolling analysis of areas of agreement or conflict.
Then, we swapped the two groups around. Police into the research studio, residents behind-the-mirror. I stayed with the residents, maintaining the rapport we’d built up, to be able to analyse their reactions and comments, and to prepare for the next iteration.
My colleague, who’d built the appropriate relationship with the police whilst being behind-the-mirror with them, facilitated a discussion covering what the police thought of the estate, its problems, its residents, how they tried to police the area, what plans and strategies they’d used and what the outcomes were, their frustrations, their desires, their commitment, their questions.
As the residents watched, for around 40 minutes, I noted down all their comments, including ‘that’s not right’, ‘I don’t trust them’, ‘they don’t know what they’re doing’, ‘I feel sorry for them’, ‘that’s actually a good idea’, ‘that’s a good plan but poorly executed’, and — as the ‘mutual understanding’ fully bedded in, ‘I can see what they’re trying to do, and I can see they have good intentions but…’.
We swapped two more times before agreeing to all meet together, and then there was a very positive discussion before we called the session to a close, and agreed to meet again in two weeks’ time for a more conventional meeting.
This methodology ‘goes against the grain’ in terms of, ideally, trying to work with citizens and communities as much as possible in their ‘natural environment’. However it was appropriate — we couldn’t have gone out to the local community at this time — and it was effective.
It was purpose-designed to meet the needs of both citizens and police, at that time, in that delicate situation. The depth of deliberation was extremely deep indeed, even when the citizens and police weren’t in the same room together in a ‘synchronous’ deliberation — so that challenges a myth and a common, unnecessarily narrow definition of what ‘deliberation’ is!
Including people with disabilities — whatever their disability
I used to also do a lot of work at this time with clients around trying to include, engage and empower people with disabilities. My wife was working for councils and the NHS in policy and service development for people with disabilities and people in challenging circumstances (Jacs was also one of the UK’s first tranche of HIV Prevention Co-ordinators, and also turned around a failing Child & Adolescent NHS Mental Health Service) so we’d often compare notes and devise ways of including everyone.
I used to regularly run focus groups and deliberative workshops for blind people (amazing how often we’d end up connecting people — and their dogs — who would say ‘haven’t seen you for a while’!); deaf people (usually the noisiest groups as they all clattered around not realising how ‘deafening’ they were for the rest of us!); and people with a wide range of ‘intellectual disabilities’ and ‘communications difficulties’.
A lot of this work was intensive and art-therapy-based, helping to find ways to enable people to express themselves.
Too often with narrow, contemporary models of Deliberative Democracy, the emphasis is on intellectual, IQ-based exchange (there are 12 other forms of intelligence available!), conversational discussion, and text-based communication. Just relying on this is, effectively, discriminatory!
I recall discovering the transformative quality of music therapy where people who’d lost the power of speech could still sing, so we could communicate in song and a coherent language with different ‘hums’ and head movements indicating views and strength of views.
But one of the simplest (and, again, most powerful) techniques when working with people who had communications difficulties, eg due to cerebral palsy, autism, acquired brain injuries, heavily slurred speech, severe dyslexia, or even chronic shyness, was to carry out extended one-to-one interviews, allowing twice the usual length of time, with a tape recorder (and, yes, it was a cassette tape recorder then!).
I’d ask a question, they’d give their answer, I’d play it back, they’d tell me if they were happy with their answer or not. If they were, we’d move on to the next question. If not, we’d go again until they were. And they’d also write or draw answers where this helped.
These kinds of approaches were often excluded from mainstream research, community engagement, and deliberative democracy projects because those projects were designed, costed, and scheduled very tightly and didn’t allow for the time and investment required, if truly committed to inclusion. Remember “no-one is hard-to-reach, or hard-to-engage, some are just more expensive to ‘reach-and-engage’..!”.
As I commented at the recent XR CAWG webinar, Citizens’ Assemblies are, by definition, an exclusive methodology not inclusive, and webinars like this one asking ‘how do we make our Citizens’ Assembly more inclusive?’ could instead be asking the broader question: ‘How do we achieve greater inclusiveness in our democracy processes?’ which could lead to the answer ‘don’t do a Citizens’ Assembly’ or ‘don’t just do a single Citizens’ Assembly, and make sure you also have more inclusive methods in your design’.
Also, some ‘methodology-driven fundamentalists and purists’ would tell me then, and still do in the #DelibWave era, that their methodology needs citizen participants to function as a group, and deliberate as a group, usually also all in the same room at the same time. Why? It’s not only unnatural, it’s actually a discriminatory practice because some people function better in groups and some not in groups, especially those with intellectual disabilities or communications difficulties, but many other citizens too.
It’s a bit like the lack of perspective and sensitivity when Citizens’ Assembly advocates say “everyone should be together in the same room, face-to-face, but if this is not possible they must all connect up together online, synchronously, so they can all deliberate at the same time”.
Why? And what about those who find it harder to listen or speak or formulate their ideas or articulate their ideas, who need more time? In asynchronous online forums, it’s actually much more ‘fair’, ‘inclusive’, and ‘natural’ to allow time for ideas to form, be expressed, be considered, be evaluated, be best shaped, and to be clear on conclusions and recommendations.
Being deaf — their disability or yours?!
Finally in this section, saving the best for last, the most memorable project was another one for Kirklees Council. I got a call “Can you help us Paul. We’ve been trying to engage with the deaf community and we’ve not been successful. Very few deaf people turn up to our meetings. And yet we know they need our support, access to our services, and we need to ‘hear’ from them”.
We started with some one-to-one interviews, me and my team going out to people’s homes and already scheduled meetings and gatherings, with interpreters, both independent and those we knew were already familiar to the local community, to build rapport and gain the initial insight we needed.
It was one of the most heartbreaking experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life. We heard endless stories like these: “I wanted to buy a car but I couldn’t communicate with the car dealer so I decided not to get a car, even though the bus services are terrible round here”, “I wanted to go on holiday, haven’t had a holiday for years, but the bloke in the travel agents couldn’t understand me, so I just decided to forget about the holiday”, and “I had rats in the kitchen but I had problems getting through to the Council so I just had to keep batting them out the door whenever I wanted to go in the kitchen”.
We continued doing some one-to-one and small group work, and liaising with carers and support workers, but we agreed that ideally we did want to try and arrange some sort of gathering where we could bring a large group of people in ‘the deaf community’ together with ‘the hearing community’ as an engagement and empowerment exercise. Instinctively, we felt this was the right thing to do and, intellectually and emotionally, we could see the benefits of demonstrating commitment to listening and supporting.
So we discussed having an ‘exhibit-ask-listen-support’ style meeting where there would be tables from the various Council Services — Housing, Planning, Social Services, Leisure, Transport, etc — with the opportunity to go around the tables and talk with the relevant Council staff, with each table having at least one interpreter.
But the challenge remained “How do we get deaf people to come along?”. We then heard that there was a local activist who’d developed a really popular ‘stand up comedy’ routine (I recall his first name was ‘Billy’, can’t remember his surname), doing his ‘act’ in sign language, and drawing crowds.
We contacted Billy, briefed him, booked him, and we arranged for him to be the ‘entertainment’ for the evening, inviting all the local deaf people to come along for this ‘deaf community engagement exercise’ with Billy being the ‘headline act’. We let everyone socialise and get to know each other, then announced Billy. We’d briefed him to do a 20 minute set.
For the first 10 minutes, he was asked to ‘poke fun’ at the Council and private service providers, with biting satire around these cases of deaf people being disempowered and services being inadequate. For the second 10 minutes, Billy was asked to lighten the mood and then finish with a ‘positive pep talk’ saying “Look, to be fair, the Council has come here tonight, all the Services are here, on these tables around the room, they all have interpreters and all the information you might need, or other deaf people you know might need, and they really do want to help, so please go round and see them all…and they’ve provided some free drinks and snacks!”.
It worked. We had 135 deaf people attend. Everyone, including our clients at the Council, said they’d never seen that many deaf people in a room together, and said it was one of the most uplifting experiences of their lives.
Now, at this point, I know some readers will be treating this as a ‘manual’ or ‘template’ and might want to try and replicate this exact same approach — this is the curse of the method-led researcher, engagement facilitator, or deliberative democracy practitioner, but please don’t think like that. It’s only when you tailor and be creative and adaptable that the magic works!
We only came up with this elegant solution because we were not thinking pre-determined method, we were totally focused on the needs of deaf people and our client and how we could fulfil their objectives. If we’d try to impose our ‘model’ or ‘methodology’, we might have had a handful of deaf people in the room going away disappointed.
Also, these days, we have so many more ‘tools in the toolkit’ in terms of online options, so please consider these as well.
And remember that deaf people are often (usually?) excluded from face-to-face Citizens’ Assemblies and Juries, plus they can find synchronous online forums hard, but they often love extended asynchronous online forums.
Inspired Youth (IY): How to Fly
As mentioned earlier, we often used to hear researchers and engagement facilitators saying ‘it’s hard to get young people involved in our surveys and deliberative processes…any tips?’ and when we put this question to young people they’d say “don’t do surveys and use different processes”.
Simple really, except some advocates, commissioners and practitioners become wedded to a particular model or method (eg. ‘Citizens’ Assembly’!) and want the young people to fit in to their artificially created world rather than working with the young people in the young people’s world.
I started working with an incredible organisation called Inspired Youth (IY) in York. Disclosure: my son, Chris, was one of the founding partners and directors, along with Kev Curran. Both highly talented, creative people who care passionately about young people.
The ‘IY model’ was to work with disadvantaged young people (on their terms, wherever possible within the bounds of commissioned projects), establish what their concerns were, what they wanted to say, and use arts-based communications to help the young people express themselves.
IY facilitated projects on teenage pregnancy, teenage alienation, mental health, the experience of being a young carer, the experience of living ‘in care’. Every single project they did was breathtaking in its insight, level of engagement, level of empowerment, and quality of work. Every single project they did won at least one award, often several.
I was asked to join the IY Advisory Board and to mentor the Directors. There wasn’t really much to ‘teach’ them about their work as they were teaching me so much through their brilliant creative designs and productions, and inventive engagement approaches tailored to young people, but I was able to advise on running IY as a business or ‘social enterprise’ and also assist with marketing and dissemination to maximise recognition and impact.
Kev is a stunning filmmaker. Chris is a natural in terms of intuitively working with young people, often disenchanted, marginalised, disillusioned, disempowered young people, and creating approaches that empower and energise them. He spoke at an RSA event in Brisbane, at the Powerhouse, with incredible case studies which blew away the Australian audience.
One I recall was a group of young people who arrived ‘hoods up, no eye contact, shoulders down’. They were given an initial briefing, including ‘we want to know what your issues are, we want to know what you think, we want to know what you want to say’, ie. ‘this is all about you’.
They were then asked to fill out a questionnaire (groans around the room!) to note down what they thought the issues were, and ‘to find out a little bit about you’. They started filling out the questionnaire with a few personal details and issues of concern, and then it asked ‘what’s your favourite biscuit?’. Then more details about their household, school, preferred communications channels, and ‘what’s your favourite types of sweets?’.
They went away from the first session and were briefed that the second session would be a ‘creative workshop’ with drawing and sketching and storyboarding. Some came to life, some groaned, some slumped further.
At the creative workshop, they were each given a personalised bag with crayons, pens, highlighter markers, paintbrushes, sticky labels, paper…and also in their bags was a packet of their favourite biscuits and a packet of their favourite sweets! At this point, shoulders came up, heads came up, hoods came down. It was a tangible example of being listened to. It was a deep psychological signal ‘you’re an individual, and you’re important’.
IY would discuss the issues, and the most appropriate way of the young people expressing themselves (art, music, poetry, making a video). They often made videos, very high quality videos, partly because that was Kev’s area of expertise but also because the young people loved it. They often made two videos — the output itself, articulating the message, and the video of ‘the making of the video’. This meant everyone was a ‘star’. They’d be given training in front of camera and behind camera, in design and production.
And they all became part of the distribution network. IY would ask the young people to share the content with their friends and via their social networks. They would hold IY events where young people from different projects got together and shared their content. I also helped promote some of the videos far and wide, including getting Sir Ken Robinson (he of the most watched TED Talk of all time) to Tweet one of the IY videos (and the new ‘stars’ of the Oscar-winning movie ‘Twenty Feet From Stardom’ which the young people could relate to, as a group who had been discriminated against and abused).
I’ll never forget seeing their work empowering ‘Young Carers’, young kids who’ve become the primary carer in their household by default due to parents being physically or mentally ill, or drug addicts, or incapable of looking after the family. Research showed these Young Carers had an average age of 12!
Disadvantaged by their circumstances, misunderstood and discriminated against by their schools — often writing them off as ‘poor attenders’ and ‘low achievers’ without realising they’d just worked a night shift, got their mum off the floor and into bed, and got the siblings to school before they’d turned up ‘late’ for their own school, before being punished for falling asleep in lessons.
Most people around these genuises didn’t realise they were effectively going through a forced, accelerated leadership development programme. Indeed, many have gone on to roles of great responsibility (including our daughter-in-law, Hayley, who had her own young carer experience before becoming facilitator for the Young Carers support programme in York and has now just graduated in Midwifery from University of York — with a First!).
Here’s a short video illustrating how amazing these young human beings are:
And I must tell you about ‘How to Fly’ — an engagement and empowerment project designed to work with young people who’d experienced being ‘in care (in state-run or charity-run institutions or foster care) and help them articulate their thoughts and feelings about their experiences.
In the creative workshops, there was a common pattern of experience, and a very strong message that the young people wanted to send to the authorities and care providers.
Many of the young people talked (often with great pain) about the experience of “going into care” and being split from their siblings, not able to see them, sometimes not able to even stay in touch. Sadly, our history as a society is littered with examples of institutionalised cruelty, until eventually it’s brought to the attention of a generation that says ‘this must stop’.
The young people in this project wanted to make a music video to be able to ‘get our message out there’. Two semi-professional artists were brought in (Liam and Isi), the rest of those you see in the video below are the young people themselves, all having experienced life ‘in care’.
Watch and see how powerful it is. It was also empowering for the young people themselves, talking about the lows but then the highs of being reunited with their siblings.
Listen and watch right to the very end, as Liam’s outtro is special (with the key message ‘You are not alone’!), plus the final frame ‘SHOUT OUT TO CJ’ (I’ve got tears in my eyes as I type this) which was a collective message of support to our son Chris who was undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour (he’s doing really well now, still in key roles empowering young people).
Enjoy ‘How To Fly’…
Briefly below, here’s another relevant extract from my forthcoming book, if you want to read about case studies of online engagement and deliberation over the past 12 years.
I include it here, partly because it emphasises these approaches are not new and certainly not ‘experimental’ but, rather, they’re established nowadays…and also because of the examples of ‘digital inclusion’ with ground-breaking approaches via adopting and adapting flexible and creative designs around the ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ mentality.
Innovation in Digital Democracy, Online Engagement & Deliberation
I was interviewed recently and asked “Where would you just do online?” to which I replied “I wouldn’t recommend ‘just doing online’, I’d almost always recommend a mixed methods approach”. The interviewer followed up with “Can you give me examples of projects you’ve done in the past which have just been online?”. Questions can be as revealing as answers of course, although the context was the COVID19 Crisis, to be fair.
So I said “The only examples I can give of ‘just online’ are from 2013–2014 when I was working with a consultancy firm in Sydney, Instinct and Reason, and we issued a challenge to our (120) clients to ‘identify a specific group of people or issue you don’t think can be ‘done online’ and we’ll rise to the challenge’…”.
This led to a number of projects, and fascinating case studies, demonstrating what can be ‘done online’. I’ve documented these case studies in a separate Medium piece here:
The case studies in the article/chapter referenced above include designing and facilitating an extended online forum for homeless people.
Every time I talk about this case study in my Business School lectures and conference presentations, I always have at least one person looking on incredulous, though that’s mainly because of their own prejudices.
What happens is they have an image in their mind of what a ‘homeless person’ is, most commonly an old guy, sleeping rough in a shop doorway or church grounds, with a bottle-in-a-brown-paper-bag.
In fact, the reality is that most homeless people these days are young people, moving from one temporary accommodation to another, often couch-surfing, with occasional periods of sleeping rough.
Most of them have smartphones (it’s a lifeline) and many of those sleeping rough in railway stations and shopping malls have pay-as-you-go (basic model) smartphones (a lifeline, even more so). So, we connected them up to an asynchronous 24/7 online forum, optimised for mobile devices, and the forum was a great success.
Continuous Digital Inclusion During COVID19
As you can imagine, during the COVID19 Crisis, I’m in great demand for running continuous online forums to stay constantly in touch with what is happening on-the-ground, and feeding this back real-time to decision-makers with a continuous flow of communications.
I do occasionally read pieces from some people, including the #DelibWave Clubbers advocating for their Citizens’ Assemblies and Citizens’ Juries and “deliberative forums that can come together (face-to-face?!), after Lockdown and other restrictions, to review the experience, what we’ve learned, and plan for a better future”.
While they advocate for future Assemblies and Inquiries, myself and other facilitators are busy getting on with the job of getting feedback (live feedback, every day, in a constantly evolving situation that needs ‘everyday participation’ and ‘everyday deliberation’ not ‘wait ’til later’!); having rolling reviews and evaluations; shaping policy, adapting practical responses to the Crisis; planning the best routes out-of-Lockdown; designing and delivering optimal wellbeing support during Lockdown, etc.
It is a stark divide between the ‘let’s plan to do something post-COVID19 Crisis’ Club, and the ‘we’re doing something now’ crew.
And also between the method-led #DelibWavers, academics, and think-tankers talking about doing something whilst many research and community engagement practitioners are actually doing something right now!
Using Online Engagement to Save Lives!
My own live work during the COVID19 Crisis includes a continuous online forum and integrated communications & engagement network for the NHS and Zero Suicide Alliance among Global Stakeholders to pool resources and ideas for practical support to protect and promote mental health and wellbeing, and for suicide prevention and early intervention.
This includes discussions and deliberations, asynchronous and synchronous, and pioneering digital resources and digital technology solutions, including accelerated development of the #DigitalLifeSaving initiative I launched from the Opera House stage at TEDxSydney in 2014.
It also includes continuous online forums (one among people aged under 40, one among people aged 40–59, and one among people aged 60+) for a charitable foundation that runs the arts and cultural entertainment programme at one of London’s iconic venues. Like all venues (whether run by charities or on a ‘commercial’ basis — they’re all ‘non-profit’ at the moment!), they have ongoing costs (with the expectation of keeping the physical venue alive and providing online services during Lockdown) but no income, or only a small amount of income in donations and some paid-for online content.
All the venues are collaborating in an audience tracking survey which is an excellent survey in terms of methodology, sampling, questions, analysis, and regular reporting. Just one problem though. The results show that very few audience members, ie. those who have been to past performances and would be first-in-line when the venues re-open, are wanting to buy tickets before November or December 2020, and a majority say they won’t be buying tickets for shows before January 2021. If this happens, these venues can’t survive.
So, there’s no point in having people or organisations, democracy advocates or lobbyists, saying “let’s wait until after COVID19” or “let’s deliberate on all the issues once we’re through the Crisis”. Some organisations won’t make it through the Crisis!
And, sadly, many individuals won’t make it through the Crisis either, as we’re heading for mass redundancies and, over the past 40 years, every 1% increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 0.79% increase in the suicide rate (plus we now have a new psychological condition — #LonelyLoss syndrome — the trauma of losing loved ones and not being able to be with them ‘at the end’ or not able to have a (proper) funeral, so the increase in suicides in the UK (forecast by the Brain and Mind Centre at University of Sydney to be 40–50% increase in Australia as a result of COVID19) could be in excess of 100%.
So, no time to ‘wait’. In the continuous online forums, we have cross-sections of citizens (in this case: by gender, age, primary leisure interest, location, when last attended a venue, and usual mode of travel) diarising their COVID19 experiences and discussing their daily lives, needs, state of health and wellbeing, digital experiences, plans for post-Lockdown, etc).
We’re having deep explorations, and ongoing conversations, around the key issue of safety — not what ‘the experts’ tell us is ‘safe’ but, much more importantly, what citizens and communities think is safe, and feel is safe; what they would expect in the outside world (from public and private venues to public transport) to give them the psychological safety they need; and what experience in-venue would give them the level of emotional security they need, both from environmental measures and interactions with staff, including ongoing listening and learning loops.
All of this work is, of course, transferable learning, and transferable recommendations — for government, councils, NHS, Emergency Services, all public services, all private services, all charities, all communities.
I often hear some DelibWaveClub Members advocating for national assemblies as if they are somehow ‘superior’ methods of gaining insight and arriving at conclusions and recommendations. In many ways, they are inferior, especially when so detached from the real world experience of citizens and communities, with so many diverse people excluded from them.
A Job-Saving, Life-Saving, Wellbeing-Enhancing, Economy-Kick-Starting Proposal for an Arts-Based Community Wellbeing Hub
We’re developing plans, policies and practices for every possible scenario, and we’re refining strategies each day based on the ongoing feedback. We’ve also developed a proposal (and already secured some grant funding but needs more) for converting this particular iconic arts and cultural entertainment venue into an Arts-Based Community Wellbeing Hub, with a…
…Phase Two: Physical Safe Space to encourage people to return to the venue as soon as possible (and return again, and urge others to attend) in order to be able to save jobs and save lives and optimise health & wellbeing; and with an initial…
…Phase One: Digital Hub to provide appropriate content and services online — from generic calming music, art, poetry, etc to specific therapeutic services, eg. for those recovering from a mental illness or trying to cope with trauma such as #LonelyLoss.
We plan to run a pilot in this one location (which is a large, open space with a concert hall and events rooms/meeting rooms but also a large foyer and bar and restaurant area, so it lends itself to spatial distancing, mobile hand basins, hand sanitiser units, live feeds from the rooms into the communal areas, etc).
And, if successful, this pilot could be rolled out nationally, with every town or city having at least one Arts-Based Community Wellbeing Hub.
If you live or work in the Camden/Kings Cross/Islington area (or know others that do) and think you can help with a pilot (funding, in-kind support, ideas, contacts, etc), please get in touch with me.
100% Digital Inclusion (by December 2021)?!
I’m currently running another online forum for Age UK York Trustees and Staff (pro bono this one, as I’m a Trustee for Age UK York).
We’ve had the first phase of Crisis Planning and survived the initial crunch from losing our shops’ income, having to Furlough most of the Staff, and having to rapidly review and re-structure services (some suspended, some strengthened; some switched face-to-face to online, including the Zoom Day Clubs; some scaled back, some expanded, etc).
We’re moving into the second phase — from ‘Survive to Thrive’ — with the fantastic news that we can now re-open our shops with suitable safety measures, promoted on BBC News yesterday (with wide publicity around the arrangements and safety measures, learning from the feedback):
The focus now is increasingly on building our capacity to communicate and engage on an ongoing basis, with the assistance of a 24/7 asynchronous online forum (but using it as an ‘anchor hub’, integrating with Zoom hook-ups, telephone check-ins, postal newsletters, social media, occasional face-to-face meetings where appropriate or necessary, with suitable safety measures).
Basically, it’s a case of using all available methods of communications, participation, engagement, discussion, deliberation, collective decision-making (and there’s a few Quakers among the leadership so we prefer to naturally converge to solutions rather than have to go to a vote) — for a continuous conversation — without being wedded to or driven by any particular methodology.
Rather, it’s another case of being totally focused on our objectives and desired outcome (to ‘Survive and Thrive’) and completely flexible in our approach, our means to the ends, with a ‘what matters is what works’ mentality.
As 2021 is the 50th Anniversary Year for Age UK York, we’d wanted to involve as many of our Trustees, Staff, Volunteers, Service Users, Carers, etc in developing plans and rolling them out, so we’re naturally building the appropriate communications and engagement infrastructure to be able to do that, through the rest of this year, and throughout the Anniversary Year, 2021, so that would include running our core forum for 18 months.
In the circumstances, we’re accelerating the infrastructure development in order to have urgent exchanges about ‘coming out of Lockdown’, and re-opening the shops, and re-structuring the organisation, including planning more permanent moves out of central offices to more flexible working.
The plans for 2021 will just be natural conversations that folllow these urgent matters, although we’re finding that stakeholders want to discuss the 50th Anniversary Celebrations now because, firstly, they have ideas so we want to hear them now and, secondly, it’s a hopeful and healthy conversation to be talking about our long-term sustainable future having just had to experience a ‘life-threatening/organisation-threatening’ crisis.
And, yes, we’ve had a few ‘moaners and whingers’ saying “but not everyone’s on the internet…some are excluded because they don’t have a computer…not everyone has digital access”.
But, remember where we started this piece, we’re simply turning this around as a challenge and saying “so what are you doing about it?…what are you doing to give staff, volunteers, service users, and carers digital access?…do you want to help us give everyone access?”.
As a start point, we needed an extra 6 laptops for staff to be able to run the additional online services our service users require now. We’d spent years asking for donations of clothes and household goods, but never before computer equipment but, hey, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” right? The very first firm we approached for help has donated 6 laptops. Thank you NDL!
And now we have unstoppable momentum because we can see lots of options for increasing supply (eg. several large local employers interested, and citizens prepared to donate old devices which are no longer good enough for their more complex IT needs but fine for an older person who just wants to hook up on Zoom or Skype with their grandkids) and we’ve had a huge surge in demand (with previously technology-hesitant-or-resistant older people now wanting a device and wanting training and support).
I’m meeting with all relevant stakeholders now (all online of course) and we can see great potential for an initial surge now during Lockdown, plus opportunities to keep it going through the rest of 2020 and the 50th Anniversary Year in 2021 (as a central theme), celebrating the past 50 years and mapping out the next 50 years.
And so the goal we’re all now rallying around — and why not aim for the stars to be able to blow away the ceilings?! — is to provide ‘digital access’ (donated devices, plus some subsidies, with appropriate training & support) to every York resident aged 50+ by December 2021!
We’ve since discovered that York has many partner organisations wanting to achieve 100% Digital, and these partner organisations are all coming together around 100% Digital City initiatives.
Then we’ll finally stop the ‘moaners and whingers’ saying “but not everyone’s got digital access”!!!
If you know of any source of supply of desk tops, laptops, tablet devices, smartphones, digital photo galleries, printers, scanners (anything that facilitates sharing of photos, eg. grandkids and pets) or digital voice recorders (people love a bit of audio at the moment as well as, or instead of, video), then please let me know. We can get them direct to older people in need, or store them securely until we can. Thank you.
Since writing the above article, I’ve pulled together all of my published work, as well as responding to a number of queries from government clients and partners, and written my ‘magnum opus’, with the history of deliberative & participative democracy, the reasons why we involve people in decisions and increasingly involve people in decision-making processes, key socio-economic-political trends and ‘democracy heroes’. You can read it here:
Also since writing the above piece, we’ve had a Digital Inclusion workshop in York on 12 August, with 80 people from 24 partner organisations attending, to map out how to deliver the 100% Digital City vision.
And, at the same time, this excellent webinar was being run by the Centre for Ageing Better, showcasing some of the great work being done by the Good Things Foundation, and the considerable progress being made in Leeds on its 100% Digital City strategy. It really is an inspiring, uplifting webinar:
Paul Vittles FMRS FAMI FRSA is a Research Fellow and community engagement pioneer, who has been an advocate for and practitioner of deliberative & participative democracy over the past 35 years.
Paul has worked with governments at all levels in the UK and Australia, with 80 councils as clients (after being the first Research & Engagement Manager with City of York Council). He has been a consultant to the NHS; many arms-length government agencies and regulators; community foundations, charities and not-for-profit organisations; professional societies & member organisations; regulated energy and utilities businesses; corporates and private developers wanting to engage appropriately and effectively with their communities; and many partnerships and alliances comprising combinations of these.
Paul has designed and facilitated thousands of research, consultation, engagement, and democracy projects and initiatives. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, Paul led or facilitated many innovative and pioneering face-to-face approaches: including city/community regeneration; new types of school and learning facilities; building health and social care services around service users and carers; involving citizens in traffic and transport planning; and — perhaps most famously — leading the engagement exercise to decide what to do with the site of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, the former home of the serial killers, Fred and Rosemary West (Paul met with all the victims’ families before leading the team undertaking engagement with the local community).
Paul presented ‘The Role of Research in a Democratic Framework’ to the 1991 Market Research Society (MRS) Conference, and has presented many award-winning papers to research, evaluation and engagement conferences, as well as serving on national task forces, developing and evaluating national policy (from The Patients Charter in the UK to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, NDIS, in Australia to national suicide prevention strategies).
Paul was founder and ‘Chief Facilitator’ for ‘ListenHear: The Global Campaign for Effective Listening’ which won the 2011 TEDxSydney competition for “the best idea worth spreading”.
Paul was a TEDxSydney ‘Fast Ideas’ finalist in 2014, speaking to 2,300 people at the Sydney Opera House (and many more live online) about #DigitalLifeSaving — using digital communications technology to save lives. Paul also facilitated the ‘Breakthrough Ideas for Suicide Prevention’ Forum 2013–14, and helped implement some of those ideas.
In 2013–14, Paul also pioneered online research and engagement approaches, challenging 120 clients (from the ABC to the Australian Government to funeral services providers) to identify ‘what can’t be done online’ and then doing it — online!
Paul presented some of these pioneering case studies at the 2014 Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS) Conference (written up by Green Book), and subsequent conferences such as the Information & Innovation Exchange (IIeX) Asia-Pacific.
Since 2013, Paul has designed and facilitated 194 online forums, which is why he baulked at the claims by some democracy advocates, as well as democracy critics, ‘this can’t be done online’.
Paul knows from experience that it CAN all be done online (although flexibility, ‘fit for purpose’, ‘horses for courses’ is always the way it should be) — including the citizens assembly and citizens jury models — and adopts a ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ philosophy for his professional practice as well as his personal life!
These days, Paul’s focus is on transformational change projects — in community development (including a project “to design a new community around the happiness and success of its people”), improving quality of life for older people, optimising mental health and wellbeing for all segments of society, suicide prevention and the Zero Suicide Movement — and facilitating sustainable success as a consultant, coach and counsellor.
For the past 7 years, Paul has had a focus on using digital communications technology to find solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges. He is currently working on projects using data analytics, predictive & prescriptive analytics, real-time behavioural micro-targeting, and augmented intelligence for child protection, safeguarding vulnerable young people, ethical behaviour in large organisations, suicide prevention, and ending loneliness.
Paul’s keynote talks, interactive lectures, and workshop sessions on ‘Facilitating Transformational Change’ are often described as “inspirational as well as educational”, as was the case with the recent guest lecture Paul gave for the full-time MBA students at University of Durham Business School (on Friday 21 February 2020) — the last one before Lockdown!.
Paul is currently running continuous online forums — purpose-designed for ground-up COVID19 feedback, community support, and strategic planning — for a range of clients, including the NHS, the Zero Suicide Alliance, major UK charities, and a premier London arts & cultural entertainment venue which is one of many forced to close with its future threatened. The main focus of this work — for government, charities, commercial organisations, and not-for-profit organisations — is developing and implementing ‘Survive & Thrive’ strategies.
