8 minute read
Engage the public and get work done: a shared responsibility strategy
Steve Wamback, MPA
Solid Waste Administrator Pierce County Public Works & Utilities, University Place, Washington Presenter, 2012 APWA Congress
ublic works officials, managers, and professionals are regularly called upon to interact with customers on project planning and implementation efforts. While we understand the importance of these contacts, there is often a certain amount of dread.
Have you heard any of these complaints?
• “If I spend so much time working with customers, I won’t get anything done.” • “The stakeholders want all of the voice and none of the responsibility.” • “The ‘electeds’ will just ignore them.”
The Pierce County Public Works and Utilities Department has implemented three Shared Responsibility Strategies to bridge the gap between Engaging the Public and Getting Work Done. One such approach, Appreciative Inquiry, helps customers, stakeholders, contractors, and employees recognize themselves in work effort. Pierce County has recognized that when someone sees themselves as “co-creator” of a vision/plan/strategy/project, they are more likely to want to be a “coimplementer” as well. Through shared responsibility, engagement and work happen simultaneously.
About Pierce County
The Pierce County Public Works and Utilities Department provides road, solid waste, sewer, airport, ferry, and surface water management services to over 600,000 residents in the southern third of the Seattle metropolitan area. In addition to being a direct service provider for urban, suburban, and rural unincorporated areas, through contracts and interlocal agreements, the Department serves customers residing in twenty-one cities and towns.
Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry (“AI”) is a “post-problem solving” organization development tool-set which breaks from traditional organizational problem solving by dispensing with a normal first question: “what’s wrong”; and instead asking: “what’s right.”
Quoting David Cooperrider from Case Western Reserve University, AI allows users to embark on a “cooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them. It involves systematic discovery of what gives a system ‘life’ when it is most effective and capable… AI involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to heighten positive potential.”
Appreciative Inquiry in Program Planning
Used successfully in community building and corporate change exercises in school districts, corporate America, and even by the Dalai Lama and the United Nations, Pierce County first used AI in a year-long community effort to develop environmental education programming for a 900-acre Countyowned property. As a provider of youth environmental education,
Youth and adults from across Pierce County used the tools of Appreciative Inquiry to design engaging and interactive education programs.
Students from Gig Harbor High School (Gig Harbor, WA) biology classes prepare to survey beach conditions along the Puget Sound.
Students from Charles Wright Academy (University Place, WA) participate in habitat restoration projects in the Chambers Creek Canyon.
the Department coordinated teams of youths from throughout the community interviewing elders from within their families and among public and private sector community leaders.
Instead of looking at developing environmental education as a problem to be solved, or a plan to be written, the youth asked questions such as “tell me a story about a time when you felt connected to family and nature.” The path forward was then rooted in capturing and building on what was right, rather than what was lacking or wrong.
This approach also gave interviewers (the youth) and interviewees (the adults) a shared stake in creating a vision; and then a shared stake in helping to implement that vision. More important, the inquiry process derailed the more conventional plan which emerged from a traditional planning exercise. Instead of building a “12,000- to 16,000-square-foot environmental education center,” the County has embarked on providing youth and their families with hands-on experiences on the property ranging from beach cleanups, to invasive weed removal, and overnight eco-camps. Projects on the near-horizon include artist- and scientist-in-residence programs. And the vision has expanded beyond the initial property with environmental education across the county now including youth-led development of rain gardens, vegetable gardens, and school food waste composting systems.
Appreciative Inquiry in Contract Negotiations
The County used AI tools again in a more traditional public works project: the scoping and renegotiation of a solid waste management system contract with a private vendor. Prior to the expiration of a contract, County staff, elected officials, and the contractor explored the successes of the thirty-year contractual relationship between the County and its contractor. These successes included: the first countywide curbside recycling program in Washington; the siting and construction of a County-owned yard waste composting facility and the first wide-scale yard waste collection programs in the state; being first in the state to achieve a 50% recycling rate; and building the first new municipal solid waste landfill in the urban Puget Sound region in decades.
The initial focus of the inquiry was to explore why and how the above were successes. What elements— people, tools, organizations, funding, political will, corporate will, confidence, etc.—contributed to making a positive difference?
After identifying the roots of all that was right with the current contractual relationship, the parties turned to envisioning “what might be.” Conversations focused on creating an ideal operating environment for the County and its contractor. This resulted in surprising changes, most notably agreements to provide significant support for waste reduction and recycling programs which would result in a 75 percent reduction of how much waste would require disposal such that the in-county landfill life (and the contractor’s return on its capital investment) would be spread 25 years longer than originally anticipated. In exchange, the County agreed to take a full-generation approach to a new contract and committed to a 25-year term.
When is this a good tool?
AI is effective when working with stakeholders, staff, contractors, or customers. Having some “shared
Students from Charles Wright Academy (University Place, WA) learn about invasive species through ivy removal.
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history” helps, but is not crucial. Principally, there needs to exist a foundation of trust, credibility, and mutual understanding that allows the participants the freedom to abandon the traditional problem-solving paradigm.
For its initial use of AI, Pierce County and a nonprofit community foundation partner hired two consultants to provide approximately 60 hours of training to County staff and youth partners. Subsequent staff-led efforts grew out of this initial training and the use of resources such as the Appreciative Inquiry Commons found online at http://appreciativeinquiry. case.edu/.
Related Strategies
In conjunction with Appreciative Inquiry, Pierce County has built “outside-in” project management teams which include customer and stakeholder voices jointly producing initial scoping documents, selecting consultants, reviewing the consultant’s work, identifying additional stakeholder voices to bring to the table, presenting work product to larger audiences, and making implementation recommendations. The customers and stakeholders involved on these teams “see themselves” at each stage and in the end result.
Helping to further cement customer and stakeholder advocacy in project results has been the use of a policy assessment and implementation matrix to transform visionary recommendations into implementable action items. The Department and stakeholders have learned that using transparent tools to prioritize recommendations makes for broader acceptance by those who had not been able to participate in a process, especially elected officials. A crucial function of this tool is to link “vision” and “data” in mutually supporting ways.
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Steve Wamback will give a presentation on this topic at the 2012 APWA International Public Works Congress & Exposition in Anaheim, California. His session is entitled “Engage the Public AND Get Work Done: Shared Responsibility Strategies” and takes place on Monday, August 27, at 3:00 p.m. Wamback was the recipient of the 2011 APWA Professional Manager of the Year Award – Solid Waste. He can be reached at (253) 798-4656 or swambac@co.pierce.wa.us.
