Kitchen Table Sustainability

I spent the afternoon with the Will of the People people in Byron Bay, talking about Kitchen Table Sustainability. What a wise and special group they are! This was our first monthly workshop on the principles of the book.

See: http://www.willofthepeopleproject.net/oms/oms.php?&loc=gov1bb

We spent some time discussing the values and opinions of  “our communities” and I realised (again) that my community is far from a “geographical” one. My friends are all over the world and some of them I have known for sixty years!

That got me thinking about a dinner party in Vancouver not so long ago…. Read More »

The other day we abandoned the shed to the rats, the python and the floods and drove to the University at the Gold Coast. I was a bit early for my lecture so I enjoyed listening to the students making their presentations about a planning project.

They were sophisticated postgraduate students and very articulate. Great research and fine ideas.

But, oh, the PowerPoints!

In my new book, SpeakOut: a Step-by-step Guide to SpeakOuts and Community Workshops (see www.speakoutplanning.com), released by Earthscan last month, my co-author Wiwik Bunjamin-Mau and I dedicate part of a chapter to this issue because it’s such a massive problem in community engagement.

It’s bad enough in professional forums to have people reading long lists of bullet points or making the audience plow through dense text. But in community meetings, this can be the kiss of death. It can bring an otherwise lively and thoughtful event to a dead stop.

What are we to do to liberate this technology?

It’s very helpful and handy to have the handouts and the various features PowerPoint offers. I’m not debating that. It’s about trying to keep it straightforward and simple and interesting.

And not having every single slide “badged” with a corporate logo and a title that’s endlessly repeated. Blessedly, the features of flying wedges of text have now pretty much disappeared. But the dreary bullet points continue.

I suggest that if you are using PowerPoint, do not override the recommended font size unless you are making the font larger. For example, for a slide with a few major bullet points, PowerPoint suggests 32 point for the text and 44 point for the title.

For one with more detail, the recommended point size for the text is still 28 point.

I also suggest that you keep the number of words to a limit and use the opportunity provided by the software to make handouts for distribution to workshop participants. That way they can read along and make notes for their own use.

There are, fortunately, many excellent books to help ensure that your presentations (and especially those by technical ‘experts’) are appropriate for workshop and meeting audiences and participants.

Presentations for Dummies (2004) by Malcolm Kushner is an excellent start, as is Brilliant Presentation by Richard Hall (2007). Kushner has a particularly valuable section called ‘Avoiding Common Mistakes with PowerPoint’ (pages 235-243).

I have summarised below some important pointers from both of these books:

Dos:

• Follow the ‘4 by 4’ rule: no more than 4 lines and 4 words to a line.
• Maximum: 6 words per 6 lines.
• Make the ending look good.
• Be careful that sounds and transitions don’t become annoying.
• Check carefully for misspelled words.
• Be careful to talk about what’s on the slide and not something else.
• Write a contents page to begin with.
• Make a heading for every slide.
• Use Notes pages for your own notes (do not use the PowerPoint as the speaker’s notes).
• Consider using no bullets at all.
• Remember to practice beforehand.

 Don’ts:

• Don’t use too much text.
• Don’t over-emphasize your logo.
• Don’t mix different types of clip-art.
• Don’t use too many colours.
• Don’t emphasize everything.
• Don’t ‘prettify’ without a purpose.
• Avoid including too much information per slide.
• Avoid too many special effects.
• Don’t read slides out word for word.
• Don’t become obsessed with the pictorial side of things.
• Avoid large slabs of text.
• Not more than 5 bullet points or 30 words total per slide.
• Do not use sub-headings or sub-bullets.
• Avoid animations, transitions and sound without expert backup.
• Avoid complex charts (best to have more charts than one complex one).
• Avoid animations, transitions and sound without expert backup.

Please can we start a conversation about this? I need support in my quest to liberate PowerPoint in community settings.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Am I being too harsh here? Is there more to life than the “rules” of presentation?

Please respond!

Sources:

Atkinson, Max (2005). Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches & Presentations, Oxfor University Press, Oxford and New York.

Hall, R. (2007) Brilliant Presentation: What the Best Presenters Know, Say and Do, Pearson Education, Harlow, UK

Kushner, M. (2004) ‘Mastering the power of PowerPoint’, in Presentation for Dummies, Wiley, New York

I was speaking about Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation the other day to a group of students and I said that I thought it’d been eclipsed (in the past forty years) by other, better, models. I noticed an embarrassed look on the teacher’s face. Perhaps they had not updated their model?

Well, in South Lanarkshire (which is Glasgow, actually), the Scots have nailed it and come up with a much better model.

I can just imagine them, on a frosty Scottish night, putting another log on the fire and dreaming up this elegant model. It’s called “the Wheel of Participation”.

You can download the full 1998 article in the British journal, Planning, by clicking on this link: Davidson Spinning wheel article1998

The authors are local municipal practitioners working to redefine the ‘ladder’ of citizen participation originally proposed by Arnstein by offering an innovative approach to conceptualising the various dimensions of communication and engagement processes. They argue that a correct approach to public engagement could revitalise the planning system. To engage local communities effectively in the planning system, new and innovative approaches are required. The Wheel of Participation helps to minimise ambiguity associated with consultation, including reliance on inappropriate techniques and unclear objectives (see the illustration below).

The Wheel highlights four overarching approaches to community involvement:

• Information

• Consultation

• Participation

• Empowerment

The concept is that, with community involvement, a decision would be made as to which quadrant of the Wheel the project belonged. Then the appropriate strategy or strategies would be selected. The Wheel will only work equitably as a model if this pivotal decision is taken collaboratively. Otherwise, in the hands of cautious proponents, all projects could be deemed as ‘information-only’ projects and only limited approaches selected. The various categories of communication and engagement processes identified in the four quadrants of the Wheel are summarised below.

The Wheel of Participation

Drawing by Steph Walton

INFORMATION

Minimal communication

Council deciding on all matters itself, without community consultation (except when legally required to do so, via the minutes of committee meetings.

Limited information

Telling the public only what you want to tell them, not what the public wants to know.

Good-quality information

Providing information which the community wants and/or needs, e.g., discussion papers/exhibitions for development plans, guidance notes for conservative area development.

CONSULTATION

Limited consultation

Providing information in a limited manner with the onus often placed on the community to respond, e.g., posters and leaflets. 

Customer care

Having a customer-oriented service, e.g., introducing a customer care policy, providing a complaints/comments scheme.

Genuine consultation

Actively discussing issues with communities regarding your ideas before taking action, e.g., liaising with tenants’ groups, customer satisfaction surveys.

PARTICIPATION

Effective advisory body

Inviting communities to draw up proposals for the department to consider.

Partnership

Solving problems in partnership with communities, e.g., a formal partnership.

Limited decentralised decision-making

Allowing communities to make their own decisions on some issues, e.g., management of community halls.

EMPOWERMENT

Delegated control

Delegating limited decisions–making powers in a particular process or project, e.g., tenant management organisations and school boards.

Independent control

Council obliged to provide a service but chooses to do so by facilitating community groups and/or other agencies to provide that service on their behalf, e.g., the delivery of care services contracts by the voluntary sector.

Entrusted control

Devolving substantial decision-making powers to communities, e.g., tenant management.

For information:

Davidson, S. (1998) ‘Spinning the wheel of empowerment’, Planning, vol 1262, 3 April, pp14–15

Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Community engagement is a tricky matter.

We need to be flexible and still keep our eyes  on the ball. It’s a changing landscape. A bit like navigating white water rapids in a small canoe.

When we add the issues of “sustainability” to the mix, things become more complex.

Here are eighteen good ideas to help keep us afloat in difficult times. They’re based on my practice and reading over the past forty years. 

1. Distinguishing between community consultation and communication.

THIS MEANS: Making a clear distinction between the work of public relations, communication and marketing personnel and those undertaking community engagement and not allowing a “PR” approach to dominate the approach of the team.

 2. Capacity building: developing community knowledgeability and literacy about complex technical and environmental issues:

 THIS MEANS:

 Helping local people understand the implications of the discourses about sustainability and growth issues and to relate them to this project

• Building community capacity about options

 3. Beyond identifiable stakeholders (the “usual suspects”)

THIS MEANS: Reaching much deeper into communities and using a much wider range of approaches than is usually employed with identifiable stakeholder groups. This has significant resource implications.

 4. Addressing issues of cultural diversity by actively engaging culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) communities

THIS MEANS: Finding ways to target non-English-speaking and other cultural groups and to build bridges between and among cultural groups to open up a community conversation about options. This has significant resource implications in terms of translation and interpretation of all processes. It will be essential that processes employed with non-English speakers not be seen as abbreviated or lesser than processes for English-speaking community members.

5. Tempo

THIS MEANS: Finding ways to maintain community interest and involvement over a long period, perhaps by tying processes to established community events and activities. Whatever processes are used to maintain pace and tempo, they must not smack of “tokenism and must be related to real target dates and deliverables.

6. Link to specific Council community engagement plans/protocols and successful modes of operation

THIS MEANS: A full inspection of each Council’s preferred ways of operating and reference to government protocols.

7. How can we ensure that consultation outcomes are actually fed into the feasibility study process?

THIS MEANS:  An integrated design for the feasibility process which clearly indicates when and how community information and opinions will be taken into account to influence decisions at key target dates and deadlines. Feedback loops must be established so that the community can see how their views are being taken into account in the refinement of the approach taken.

8. Representativeness and tracking of community engagement activities and successes

THIS MEANS:  Ensuring that participants in community engagement processes are representative of the wider community; developing and using deliberative democracy and other emerging processes that enhance representativeness; regular monitoring of representativeness issues and including ways to increase representativeness.

9. Relationships between and among various advisory groups and the servicing of these groups.

THIS MEANS: Developing clear draft terms of reference for each advisory group, including draft working protocols, assisting groups in refining these terms of reference and protocols and establishing clear reporting and liaison relationships between those groups and the project management, the ongoing community engagement strategy, as well as between those groups.

10. Skills and experience of engagement personnel, including experience with complex projects

THIS MEANS: Ensuring the personnel are selected and/or engaged who have a wide range of relevant successful experience and that senior personnel are employed, so that the community engagement function of a study is not seen as a “poor relation” with little real power to influence outcomes.

11. Evaluation proposals for community engagement:

THIS MEANS: Creation and maintenance of clear evaluation frameworks for the community engagement and precise use of outside evaluators (if engaged). In particular:

•  The work and results of external evaluators must be made available to the project management  (this will require details of their contributions and findings);
• Regular summaries of evaluation outcomes to enable ongoing monitoring; and
• Clear processes for responding to the results of evaluation processes.

 12. A wide range of proposed approaches to be used (not simply a few old-fashioned approaches)

THIS MEANS: Community engagement processes should reflect the wide range of available approaches and not be limited to the traditional modes (often limited to public meetings, focus groups and exhibitions). Approaches should be selected for their relevance to the task at hand and the stage of the process, as well as the degree of community empowerment and partnership envisaged. A wide understanding of available methods should be demonstrated.

13. Encouraging the sustainability debate (to counteract NIMBY responses)

THIS MEANS:  Actively pursuing community education options so that local people are offered genuine opportunities to explore the implications of automobile dependence for the sustainability agenda and develop an interest in exploring options. This will require a much richer model of community engagement than has been used on some projects.

14. How reports from community engagement personnel will be presented and how qualitative data and the emphasis participants place on issues will be depicted.

THIS MEANS: Employing sophisticated ways of analysing qualitative information so that it does not get treated as inferior to so-called “hard” data from engagement (or other) processes. Including the raw information for all processes so that participants can track how the material they provided was reported.

15. Intergenerational participation: involving children and young people

THIS MEANS:

• Developing discrete, creative, tested and appropriate ways to engage children (up to 18 years) and young people (up to mid-twenties) and incorporating the results of those engagement processes into reports. This will require a deep understanding of the field of engagement with children and young people.
•  Helping adults understand the wisdom of children and young people and ensuring that their contributions are treated with respect are key considerations.

16. Opportunities for creativity, where local people can become engaged at a deep level.

THIS MEANS:

• Using appropriate and tested creative approaches from community cultural development realms, community visioning and creative visualisation and refining approaches to ensure that they are fully inclusionary.
•  Using these approaches with discretion so that those familiar with more traditional approaches are not inadvertently excluded.

17. Electronic means of engagement: what methods work best and what methods are feasible for this project?

THIS MEANS: Working with all levels of government and other specialists and advisors to develop appropriate electronic community engagement methods and monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of any selected methods or techniques.

18. Reaching and engaging hard-to-reach groups and individuals.

THIS MEANS: Developing specific approaches to target hard-to-reach and marginalised groups (older people, people with a disability, Indigenous people, young people, members of CaLD communities, isolated and/or rural residents….) and monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of those approaches.