Small group discussions are at the heart of a public deliberation. Participants sit at a table together, express their opinions, hear ideas from other participants, and wrestle together with the issue at hand. Table facilitators and note-takers play an essential supporting role to help each group’s conversation effectively inform and contribute to the deliberations of the whole group. Each table facilitator and note-taker therefore has a significant influence on the quality of the deliberation and its outcomes. But what does it take to effectively support and work with table facilitators and note-takers in deliberative dialogue? This article, which I co-authored with three other public engagement researcher-practitioners, explores the skills and aptitudes needed for good facilitation and note-taking and offers concrete ways to support people in these roles before, during and after deliberations. Our reflections and lessons learned are drawn from the six-year Alberta Climate Dialogue project.

In a democratic society, how important is it that all citizens have the same opportunity to engage? Do we want to hear different points of view, innovative ideas and creative solutions to problems? Of course we do, and as Canadians, we value active and fair participation and encourage important contributions and meaningful improvement. Yet supporting engagement in a Democratic society can be challenging and often, if the playing field is not level, important voices are not heard.

Prior to a successful consultation or other dialogue on a complex or challenging issue, an important preparatory step is to undertake what is called issue framing. The issue framing process names the problem or issue to be addressed and also develops three or four different options or approaches as to how the issue might be handled. The challenge with issue framing is that any options proposed must be viable. Significant up front work and research is therefore often required to both frame the issue and present options in a way that these can create an engaging and meaningful, platform for discussion.

Regardless of the type of consultation or engagement process that you are designing, it’s paramount that people come prepared with enough basic knowledge so that they are empowered to engage. Often, prior to a session, participants are given a handbook that they may take home and read through to become more familiar with the issue and the various approaches.

While there is typically some degree of preparation or preliminary reading involved, often, personal experience is enough. However, if the information is overly complex, difficult to comprehend or there are literacy challenges, alternative solutions are available for ensuring everyone has the same opportunity to understand the issue and participate effectively.

Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons that the mind knows not of.” As human beings, we are emotional. We are passionate about all kinds of topics and therefore when we discuss policy and science and technology, we do so with our hearts as well as our brains . So trying to take out emotion and passion in public engagement, is not only impossible, it can also be counterproductive in the end. After all, emotions often arise because the issue touches on our values and to be sustainable, decisions need to consider alignment with values. So how can we allow room at the table for emotion without letting it overwhelm or derail the dialogue?

Wendy Graham of the University of Aberdeen says, “Researchers are from Venus, policy makers from Mars. Communicators are possibly from Pluto.” It can certainly seem as though we all come from different planets, and the goal of public engagement is to bring these languages together and hopefully develop some sort of Rosetta Stone of understanding. To ensure this happens effectively and meaningfully, considering the overall process design is crucial. An informed and well crafted process design gives both experts and “non-specialists” the opportunity to engage in dialogue and learn from one another.

In 2009, the city of Edmonton created a citizen panel to examine ways to invest municipal tax money. The panel was comprised of 49 randomly selected residents who met six times to discuss spending priorities. They had access to in-depth information, including budget documents, growth plans, and infrastructure issues. They really dug into this issue, and after the intensive process, they offered several recommendations to the City Council as they created the 2010-2011 budget. So often we feel disconnected from such high-level decisions. Citizen panels are a way to create a bridge between policy-makers and citizens.

Desired results are often easier to achieve and change is more readily accepted when there is a participatory process. In other words, when everyone who has an interest or a “stake” in an important event or decision-making process is involved, it’s usually more successful. In organizational and community environments, stakeholders play a tremendous role and can have a significant impact on everything from creating policy to fostering shared values to promoting a certain level of client service. Stakeholders are a critical part of orchestrating and shaping the direction of a successful event or change process.

In 2012, the City of Edmonton, the Centre for Public Involvement (C PI), and Alberta Climate Dialogue (A BC D) collaborated to create a citizen dialogue and deliberation process focused on energy vulnerability and climate change. 56 citizens came together every Saturday for 6 weeks to provide advice and guidance to the City. This article is part of a seven-part series exploring some of the lessons learned about deliberative dialogue through the Edmonton Citizens’ Panel. The Energy Transition Strategy that incorporated the Panel’s recommendations was passed unanimously by Edmonton City Council in April 2015.

You can find the full working paper, written by Mary Pat MacKinnon, Jacquie Dale and Deborah Schrader, here: Looking Under the Hood of Citizen Engagement: The Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges.

While a critical purpose of deliberative dialogue can be to get citizen input on concrete and technical policy and program actions, it is understood that citizens are not expected to bring expert or technical knowledge to the table. Instead they bring their personal life experience and their values.

The Importance Of Emotion And Value Exploration

In most citizen deliberative dialogues, the role of values is crucial. For example, citizen a policy deliberation, citizens are often invited to deliberate on what values should guide government decision-making and what tensions between values need to be addressed. They then apply those values to the issue(s) at hand, including thinking through the trade-offs that people are willing to make for the collective good.

Deliberation on important issues that engage our values can be emotional (Gastil and Levine 2005; Fishkin 2006). Design needs to recognize this and make space for it. For the Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges we tried to make room for exploration of values and emotions in our session design.

Incorporating Values And Emotion Into The Edmonton Citizens’ Panel

One of the first activities on Day 1 of the Edmonton citizens’ panel asked participants to select a photo that represented their hopes, fears or concerns about being a panel member on the topic of climate change and energy resiliency. This gave a prominent place to feelings and emotions and explicitly made room for people to bring both their hearts and heads to the table.

We were concerned that people might be overwhelmed with the magnitude and complexity of the issues being dealt with (energy and climate challenges). So on the fourth Saturday, we addressed this directly with the help of an expert presentation on climate psychology, to encourage reflection on how emotions around climate change can thwart or advance action (Herr et al 2010; Goleman 2005).

The Challenges Of Incorporating Emotions And Values In The Edmonton Citizen Panel

It was clear that values and the use of values did not resonate with all panelists (though survey responses showed that most saw the benefit). This is not surprising as many of us do not explicitly think about or examine how we are living our values in the course of everyday life, even though the personal and public choices we make reflect different values.

Making values come alive in an authentic way is no easy challenge. Dialogue asks people to reflect on their lives and communities and the impact of the choices they make. This can be an emotional and demanding task, and also a disorienting one, especially when done within time constraints, such as in the Edmonton Panel. With more time to explore and analyze the overlaps between different values and divergent understandings of particular values, the exercise might have worked better.

Keeping the values aspect of the dialogue alive took consistent effort, as the technical nature and content heavy aspects of the Discussion Paper’s recommendations took centre stage in subsequent sessions.
For some panelists, an explicit overlay of values was challenging and led to frustration. However, the early work on values proved its worth, as panelists did continue to link their advice to a framework of values. The Panel’s final recommendations and report included four value-driven principles and a core set of four values: Sustainability, Equity, Quality of life, and Balancing individual freedom and the Public good.

A Balancing Act

The deliberative process needs to involve both the heads and the hearts of the citizen participants. Values guide our behavior and our attitudes, even though we aren’t called upon to examine them every day. During public deliberations it is difficult, but essential, for participant to identify and express the values they hold that are relevant to the issue so that we understand the underlying value code informing public decisions and how those values are reconciled when they pull us in different directions.

Helping groups to work together to solve complex issues can be a challenge, particularly when those groups don’t see eye to eye. Perhaps the biggest challenge in pulling together a coalition of groups is that you’re likely to get a mix of different types with differing perspectives. Social groups, business groups and fundraising groups, for instance, all have different priorities. The challenge escalates when the issue in question is politically divisive. In such cases, it often seems competing groups are speaking different languages. This, needless to say, makes communication difficult.