I love helping clients identify and engage the right stakeholders, including providing strategic overviews of the engagement process, and design and facilitation of individual workshops or events. There's a video introducing some tools here. I also help backbone or convening organisations do their job better, learning about the six characteristic challenges of collaboration and how to move beyond them.
Government agency
What would have been a face-to-face engagement process had to be done online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working in a series of five video calls and using online collaborative whiteboards, the client team identified and analysed stakeholders and identified their engagement aims for each group. We then looked at the project timeline, and worked out who needed to be engaged in different ways, including small specific video meetings, bespoke online workshops or response forms alongside static project briefings.
UK supermarket
This well-known high-street name was developing its sustainability reporting, and wanted to find out which aspects of its sustainability impacts were of most interest to key stakeholders. But the business was considered so toxic by many stakeholders that it wasn't possible to bring them together for consultation workshops. Instead, detailed one-to-one interviews were carried out to identify the most important KPIs and qualitative insights helped the client team to develop its recommendation.
Competency framework for a profession
IOSH is the professional body for health and safety. IOSH wanted to develop an up-to-date competency framework with its members and other stakeholders, to ensure its professionals could take their place in leadership positions rather than always being seen as technical specialists and no more than that. My role included facilitating project team meetings and the project planning process, providing specialist advice on the overall stakeholder engagement process, and designing and facilitating workshops for different stakeholder groupings.
Collaboration in water catchments
The government's approach to meeting Water Framework Directive targets in England, is to catalyse collaborative working at catchment level. Working with InterAct Networks (on capacity building) and Dialogue by Design (providing strategic advice and facilitation of collaborative workshops), I helped my clients shape the national approach and built capacity for leading collaboration across the Environment Agency. I also worked directly with a number of catchment collaborations, designing and facilitating workshops which enabled them to find common ground and plan their work.