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David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society has just posted six essentials for effective engagement, which is accompanied by a link to a great resource on public participation that he wrote ten years ago. David’s post trigged my own thinking on consultation.

Consultation is one of the backbone activities in my business. I simply love designing consultative processes that bring together stakeholders from multiple worlds to help co-create something. Most of my practice of course has centred on Aboriginal issues, but the lessons I have learned extend into any endeavour.

A few years ago I was asked to put together a think piece on my consultation philosophy. I chose to start with some stories that have informed my practice from the very outset.

It begins with two stories from my Elders.

Many years ago when I was embarking on my first serious consultation job with the British Columbia Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, I had an Elder staying with me, His name was Bruce Elijah, and in addition to being an Oneida chief he did a lot of work healing communities. A couple of nights before my first trip, to Chetwynd, British Columbia, we were sitting at my dining room table drinking strong tea and talking about this work.

Late into the night, as we were finishing up our conversation, Bruce summed it up by telling me that the first thing that he does when he goes to work with a community is ask to be taken to the community�s place of power. Sometimes it is a mountain, sometimes a school. It can be a natural place or an artificial one, it doesn�t matter. What matters is starting from there. If you start at the place where the community is most powerful, you can continually revisit that place in the healing work.

The second story was one told by Utah Phillips, the old anarchist folk singer at the 1996 Vancouver International Folk Festival. He told of a time when he was a young man in the 1940s and he had an opportunity to visit a cowboy who knew dozens of songs from the great cattle drives of the 19th century. The cowboy lived in a small house in New Mexico and was dying. It was a tremendous opportunity to get these songs from the mouth of a man who had been on these cattle drives so Phillips arranged a visit.

When he arrived at the cowboy�s house he was met at the door by a nurse who said that although the cowboy was in poor health, he was looking forward to the visit. It would take a few minutes to get him ready so Phillips was invited to make himself at home in the living room.

Phillips began perusing the bookshelves and was immediately struck by the huge number of books from the ultra conservative John Birch Society. His initial reaction was to ask himself what he was doing there, about to have a conversation with a man who was bound to feed him political babble that Phillips would find deeply offensive.

And then he caught himself and he realized that he wasn�t there to talk politics with the cowboy, he was there to get songs. He realized that talking politics with the cowboy would only result in a conversation full of canned ideas recited from a book. Phillips was after the truth, and in concluding the story he said, �if you ask people about what they truly know. They will always tell you the truth.� And what they truly know is not contained in the books they read, it is contained in who they are and what they do and what is close to their heart.

These two stories are the basis of everything I do with consultation, because the pose the two fundamentally most important questions that need to be answered in any consultation process:

• Who are these people really? And
• What is true for them?

The job of the consultation manager is to find the answers to these questions. And both these Elders give a very useful clue about how to go about finding out the answers.

Consultation is required when one group of people needs to know something about another group of people. It is not about selling ideas or concepts, nor is it about eliciting support for a position. It is fundamentally an investigation, an inquiry and an engagement. The selling, messaging and consensus building can come later, or can even be a sideline to the consultation process but those things have no place in consultation. On the contrary, consultation is often used as a tool in the service of those other activities.

So we can speak of consultation as a part of other processes, like building shared vision, developing consensus, creating new relationships, finding mutually beneficial solutions, mitigating impacts, demonstrating openness. Indeed none of these activities can be conducted well without knowing something about the �other� party. And the process of finding that something out is consultation.

So my job, as a consulter is to discover something about someone else that will help me to further my goals. How do I do this? And what is the job of the consultee?

My job is to know my stuff. I have to be intimately familiar with everything I am consulting on, because it is not the job of the consultee to know these things. My job is to know clearly what my motives re for engaging in consultation. My job is to communicate clearly to my consultee about all of the above. My job is to learn as much as I can about the consultee, interpret this information honestly and apply it to my work.

The job of the consultee is to tell me stories. They may know a little bit about what I am doing, and I may fill in some gaps, and they may be able to tell how they think what I am doing will impact on what they are doing, but I never consider this the responsibility of the consultee. The consultee needs only to tell me the truth about their life. The rest of the job is mine.

I’ve been a strong advocate of this starting position for my whole career, and it has served me well. Listening to people’s stories about who they are and what they love to do gives you the context that the stats and studies can’t give you. Ultimately whatever you are doing will hinge on this context, and all the numbers and objective data in the world are no substitution for being out on the land with a logger or an Elder listening to them describe their connection with the place.