Senior Partner & Co-Founder
As professional facilitators and conveners for all forms of consensus building efforts, we are big believers in their potential. With experience managing efforts across the U.S. on nearly every policy topic, and with efforts at the city, county, state and regional levels, we have plenty to share about best practices in the facilitation, design, structure, and membership management of task forces and work groups.
As my colleague Berrick wrote in the first blog in this series, our team has had the good fortune to be involved in some truly remarkable processes that hit all of these elements just right (or were able to adjust course to do so). We’ve also seen and felt the frustration when an overlooked detail or poorly designed process undermined the potential and with it, the support of stakeholders.
Design, structure, membership, management and facilitation will be critical considerations for any collaborative decision making effort but there is one foundational question that must be answered first that will inform everything else:
Why a task force or work group vs. simply just empowering system leaders to develop the solutions?
In our experience, there are six primary reasons to utilize a Collaborative Decision Making Process or CDMP to tackle complex or contentious issues whether in policy, practice, regulation or system design:
In considering whether or not to use a work group or task force, there may not be opportunity for all six of these conditions or even a need for all of them to be fully integrated. If the issue being addressed would benefit from most if not all of these, then a CDMP should be seriously considered.
An important note of caution: There is perhaps nothing as damaging to a decision making process or the credibility of its sponsor as one done with a thumb on the scale or a lack of authentic openness to the diversity of perspectives and the outcomes they may produce. If you are genuinely open to the recommendations of a consensus based collaborative process, a well designed CDMP can make breakthrough progress where other efforts have stalled.
In our next post in this series, we’ll explore some of the best practices I mentioned like how to design, structure, manage and effectively facilitate these groups. Later this fall, we’ll be releasing our white paper that draws on our team’s experience managing over 25 CDMPs, facilitating over 500 meetings in the process and engaging over 15,000 stakeholders in efforts that have informed over 100 policy, regulation and rule changes.
Carrie Steele is Policy Director and Senior Project Manager for Confluence PSG. She oversees the day-to-day activities of each client engagement. Carrie takes a hands-on approach and is currently leading the coordination of projects that range from an inter-agency state government work group to a 200+ stakeholder statewide coalition. Carrie has a diverse background in politics, public policy and corporate finance where she gained insights into the challenges and benefits of leveraging diverse perspectives to drive the most powerful outcomes.
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