I participated in the City Partnership Workshop yesterday at the 2018 Gigabit City Summit. Talking with one city's representatives about strategies to sell-in a broadband recommendation with voters, they asked whether it is okay to engage its citizens after city leadership develops a recommendation.
My answer?
Engage your audience in collaborative strategic planning earlier than later. If you haven't engaged them earlier, then do it right now, even if it's later than what’s ideal.
Aaron Deacon of KC Digital Drive at #GCS18
Here's the difference between the two options.
If you engage your audience early in the collaborative strategic planning process, you can make a legitimate claim to creating a collaborative vision. You can involve audience members in shaping the vision. You gain insights your leadership group does not possess. You can understand language your audience uses and incorporate it into messaging. Most importantly, you can shape strategies based on integrating audience input during the earliest stages. This opens the door for making strategy creation an experience that many people actively participate in doing versus just learning about after-the-fact.
If you broadly engage your primary audiences AFTER you've developed the strategic plan, the nature of the collaboration is very different. It involves more constraints. At that point, you don't want to create a collaboration environment that needlessly derails solid work leading to the plan recommendation. That means the range of collaboration opportunities narrows. You don't want to ask extremely open questions that might lead to input that goes beyond the strategy. Instead, you start asking questions about HOW to implement the direction, what might have been MISSED, and what things are CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS. There are other questions you can ask, but once the strategy recommendation is complete, you don't want to waste time opening doors to non-productive strategy options.
That's why it's better to start engaging your audience EARLIER than LATER in collaborative strategic planning, even though later is STILL better than never. - Mike Brown
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