Public Engagement Facilitators

[Myra Immings <myra.immings@fta.dot.gov>]

I absolutely agree with the second method Sue Van Patten suggests for deploying facilitators.  We need people who not only understand the technical aspects of the alternatives surrounding projects, but who are also expert (or at the very least trained and motivated)communicators.  As an architect, I consider that the professional (planning, engineering and scientific) community is "trainable" in public engagement, but for many of the reasons Sue points out, we must step back from the attitude that our design professionals are capable facilitators of public engagement activities.

In college we learn that if we don't have the solution to the project in mind by the end of the first lecture, we'll never get the engineering and design drafted and rendered in time for the jurying.  This methodology carries over into our careers, and we tend to work backwards on "our" projects.  In this environment, public engagement is reduced to deflecting protest and engendering public acceptance of the solution we already have devised. Since we are iin such a hurry to get the solution implemented, we rarely seek public involvement before lots of time and money has been spent on what the professionals think is the best plan--actually taking the public views into consideration causes costly redesign and delays in implementation schedules.  In this scenario, we obviously lose all of the valuable social dynamic information members of the public could contribute (which can be very effective as value engineering in its pristine sense) to enrich the outcome of the work.

Some technical professionals are either afraid of people, or are just plain disinterested in public engagement--so let's let them off the hook, and use others who are capable in communication and who are interested in itegrating public input into the work.  When we've culled the group of potential facilitars down to this group, we need to stress communication skills and understanding of cultural predispositions and preferences relevant to communication.  With effort, we can place the right documents in the public's hands, effectively synopsize the hyper-technical into lay language, denude our conversations of acronym-laden jargon, and pick the points in time when public involvement will give us the best return on our investment.  

Timing is critical:  except for the handful of "professional citizens" whose loud, but perhaps not wholly representative voices are ever heard, citizens do not have extended periods of time to devote to our projects. If we try to infuse public engagement into each decision node of complex projects, we'll never get the work done.  Less is more.  Let's find the "sweet spots" in our design processes where public involvment does the most good, and perform then. 

As professionals, we should be relied upon to advance succinct documentation, concise discussion of viable alternatives, and the essential questions carefully crafted to elicit the information we need from the public.  It has been my experience that we are so eager to display superior knowledge, and are so focused on informing the public, that we do little to put our information into digestible terms, and listen to the feedback in an unbiased manner.