There is an art to asking a good question, but all too often, the questions asked in community engagement make assumptions about the community, their knowledge and their needs. Communities can be an excellent source of knowledge and expertise, and Max Hardy demonstrates that allowing them to rise to the occasion through thoughtful questions can improve decisions, generate change and enhance democracy.
In this TEDx Talk, Hardy details his experience working with a community to create effective solutions. Hardy argues that, instead of treating the community as a barrier, the best practice is to utilize them as an asset. He uses the following formula for success:
Great Question + Genuine Curiosity + High Expectations + Diverse Community
= Healthier Conversations & Smarter, Enduring Solutions
When tackling public affairs projects that involve the greater community, be sure to involve that community and remember Max Hardy's formula for impactful results. Challenge the community with unflinching, curious, genuine questions. And more often than not, that community will rise above and beyond the challenge and suggest solutions you might have never considered.
Video Transcript
For the last 20 years, I've worked as a community engagement practitioner. You probably don't know what that is. Most of you don't. Don't worry, you're not alone. I remember, many years ago, getting a phone call from a very worried parent. And I answered the phone. She said, "Mr. Hardy?" I said, "Yes." She said, "You're Lenore's father?" I said, "Yes." She said, "I'm very worried. Your daughter came to our place. She came to my daughter's birthday party yesterday, and all the kids knew what their parents did, except your daughter struggled." So at this point, I was thinking that she reckoned I was a drug dealer. So I said, "Would you like me to try and explain what I do?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Right. Okay." For the next five minutes or so, I really did my best to explain what I did for a living. And there was just silence on the other end of the phone. I said, "Has that helped at all?" She said, "Yes, it has helped a great deal. Thank you." I said, "Great, so you know what I'm doing?" She said, "No, but now I know why your daughter couldn't explain it."
So, community engagement is known by a number of terms that may be familiar or not familiar to you, like community consultation, public participation, citizen engagement, public involvement, any of those terms. And generally, it's understood or defined as the process for involving the community in conversations about decisions that interest them or affect them. Often, community engagement is initiated by government. I believe that community engagement can do a lot more than just influence decisions. It has the potential to strengthen democracy. It has the ability to also build community, build connections and do a whole lot more than just provide some input to decisions. One of the things that's really concerned me for many years about the practice is that it hasn't fulfilled that promise. And one of the reasons for that is that government entities usually ask really ordinary questions of their community, and they expect very little of their community.
I do remember on one occasion, in 1996 – this was a long time ago now – but engineers were really concerned about a problem with the pipeline. It was a pipeline that ran a hundred kilometers from Oberon Dam, near the Blue Mountains, all the way to a reservoir in Glen Davis. It's sort of a long way from anywhere, but it's in the middle of the Capertee Valley, which is just about as big as the Grand Canyon. Anyway, in the 1930s, they built a shale oil refinery there. And in order to have that shale oil refinery operate, they needed water. So they built this massive pipeline from Oberon Dam to Glen Davis. It was decommissioned in the 1950s because it wasn't financially viable. So, the town then that was quite vibrant shrunk, and became a ghost town. But unusual for a ghost town, it had running town water. They got very concerned when they measured the water flowing from the top of the escarpment down to the bottom that thousands and thousands of liters of water were being lost. It was going to cost about five million dollars to replace that pipeline, and that didn't stack up commercially when you only had 40 permanent residents in the town. So, government came up with a plan. And the plan was to disconnect the water supply – the pipeline – and to give people water tanks.
They knew they had to engage the community in a conversation about it. But engage them about what? The officers of this government authority were so nervous about going there that they would find a way of delaying taking any action in the hope that they could get transferred into another job. And this happened for about four years until someone had the great idea of getting a consultant to do the job for them. Anyway, they found, luckily for them, they found a naive, young consultant who was pretty desperate to get some work. Unluckily for me, I was that consultant.
So that was interesting, and I thought, well, okay, the first thing I need to do is, I need to approach the Progress Association and ask them whether it'd be okay if we use their hall for a few meetings. So, when I rang up and asked him, he said it might be possible, but he asked me a much more powerful question. And the question he asked me was, "Will you be bringing your bulletproof vests?" At that point, I knew why they delayed so long to actually go and talk to this community, and also why they referred to it as Deliverance Country. I want to return to the story a bit later on to tell you what actually happened there.
Our questions for community engagement are often very, very ordinary. And for that reason, the processes are fairly bumpy and communities are often marketed to; solutions are marketed. And I was really impressed by the work of David Cooperrider and some things that he said. He said, "Our questions are fateful. We live in the world that our questions create." And I think that's quite significant and quite profound because in my experience, the questions we ask around community engagement are fateful. They have the power to damage and polarize. And they also have the ability to potentially to transform and connect, and deliver really smart outcomes.
One was, there was actually a Victorian Council had an issue with large trees that were jacking up pavers in the main street. And a lot of people had difficulty getting around in that street, but especially people in wheelchairs and who had mobility challenges. So the Disability Access Committee had been lobbying council for years to get this fixed. In their wisdom, council flicked it to their public works section and asked them to come up with a solution. Which they did. They're going to pull out these trees that were over a hundred years old. They were going to re-lay the pavers – flatten them out beautifully – and replace those trees with other trees with less aggressive rootstocks. And the question they went to the community was: Do you reckon this will help you get around the street okay? So, not only was there public reaction and outrage, most troubling of all, is that people with disabilities on that access committee started getting hate mail, and people were blaming them for wanting to pull the trees out. It took them a while to take stock and to realize that this wasn't going to work terribly well; it was actually doing damage. Eventually, they came up with a much better question with a bit of help and that was: How can everybody get around and enjoy this street? How simple. Instead of trying to sell a solution, they invited the community to be part of a creative process to solve the puzzle: How can we do this? And they did it. They worked together beautifully. They came up with a solution with the help of some technical experts, and they sort of had a nice pathway on the other side of the road. They kept the trees; actually made beautiful gardens there; they had these access crossings; they turned a two-way street into a one-way street. And guess what? The solution was less than half the price of council's original solution.
So, I've got another question that I thought was a pretty ordinary one when we were pulled in to work with a National Parks and Wildlife Service, and they wanted to go to the community with a question because they were being lobbied by conservationists and by recreation enthusiasts. And what they said to this National Parks and Wildlife Service is, "You need to resolve this: What are national parks primarily for?" And they wanted to go with the question of: "What are national parks meant for, primarily? Is it for conservation or for recreation?" That is an excellent question if you want to start a brawl. That is how you polarize a community. And so fortunately, it was intercepted before it went public. And they had a go and came up with a better question. The next one was slightly better. It was: "How do we balance the needs of recreation and conservation in our national parks?" That was a bit better. The problem being that it assumes that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other, which also makes it a stupid question. And so in the end, a much better question was arrived at: "How do we maximize enjoyment of national parks, and improve its environmental value or improve conservation? How do we get both?" Now, that was a question worth asking. And you'll know from a number of solutions in national parks that boardwalks mean you can actually enjoy the national park much more, and you do less damage to the environment because you're not walking on the earth.
So, ask a better question, a community comes together. Questions that we ask are often not terribly well thought through, and so I've got this formula that I use. And I had this in the back of my head all the time about what we need is a great question, genuine curiosity, high expectations and a diverse community. And that will lead to healthier conversations and smarter, more enduring solutions. For me, that's what it's about. So, we need to put more thought into questions.
Einstein said something that was actually quite useful about questions, and that was he said, "If I had 60 minutes to save the planet, I'd take 55 minutes trying to generate the right question because once I worked out the question, I could find the solution in five minutes." There's something about community engagement that we kind of don't spend a real lot of time wondering: What is the question we are asking people to resolve? This affects community engagement a great deal, but it also affects us in every realm of life. What are the questions we're asking of people, and what impact will those questions have? And I think that if we don't believe that people can rise to the occasion, we think that people are so stuck in their point of view that they're incredibly selfish, that they're opinionated, that they're stupid. Then, why would you engage a community? You wouldn't. The best you can do is try and actually tell them what's good for them and persuade them that you know what's good for them. It doesn't work, but if that's the attitude, then that's likely to be what happens; that we market the solution. And of course, that is what happened at Glenn Davis. So let's return to the story of Glenn Davis.
Because people didn't believe that the pipeline was falling to bits, they actually said, "You know what, we just think government doesn't care about us anymore here in Glenn Davis." And so, they were so mistrustful of the engineers' report about the loss of water that we had a tour of the pipeline. And we piled into two Land Rovers – Land Cruisers. And that group consisted of some community members and some engineers and public servants and me and the maintenance fellow who actually looked after the pipeline. So we did the trip over the terrain. We checked out a number of points along the pipeline, and lo and behold, they said they discovered that the pipeline was in pretty good condition. And they were kind of really confused. I said, "The pipeline seems to be fine. It seems like all this stuff the community was saying about the pipeline being okay was true. But there was a problem, what was happening with all this water loss?" And a woman looked at me and she said, "Whiskey." I said, "What?"
"Whiskey. I heard a rumor of a fellow who was illegally tapping into the pipeline to grow crops from which he made whiskey." And it was investigated, and it was absolutely true. So here we were, trying to sell a solution to a problem that didn't exist because we're trying to work on the wrong problem. So after a bit of investigation, we found out that was true, the government authority had developed a memorandum of understanding with the community. The problem was solved; water is still running, which is kind of cool. And at the end of that field trip, we ended up back in the community hall where we felt that our lives were under some sort of threat, and the president of the association opened the fridge and invited us to drink beer with him. So here's a picture of us at the end of our trip feeling a lot happier then. And it was kind of a happy ending. But of course, every time I share this story someone will say, "Oh yeah, but what would have happened if the pipeline was falling to bits? Wouldn't have been any happy ending then." True, but I find that people are able to move on and think creatively about things or will much more easily accept hard decisions if they know why they're being made. The other thing that happened is when we had those meetings in the hall is I had a gentleman who's about 85, who said, "Do you know what? I might be the oldest person here in the room, and I was here before that shale oil refinery was built. And we used to walk up into the foothills, and we used to get some spring water out of from the foothills. And there was enough water there for our population of 30 or 40. Roughly what we are now." He said, "But I bet your engineers checked that out and it's not viable for some reason." The engineers went bright red. They didn't know anything about it.
So, isn't it amazing? We sort of think our community sometimes is a problem to be solved rather than an asset to utilize. So I want to leave you with some questions. One question is: What would happen if you asked questions that were really thoughtful questions, where you expected more of people, where you were genuinely curious, where you actually had high expectations of the ability of people to come together to arrive at a solution? And the last question for you is: What world are you creating with the questions you are currently asking?