Chapter 5: Process Attributes
Sharing and Listening
Sharing and Listening
Providing opportunities for active involvement in which all participants can share and listen to others’ perspectives is a critical factor that enables individual and group learning. Perspective sharing entails building consistent opportunities for community-inclusive sharing and listening (Sharma-Wallace et al. 2018). More, scholarship on change through stakeholder engagement highlights the importance of “listening deeply” as a practice necessary for co-producing problem frames (Lewicki 2002) and collaboration more generally (Kearns 2012).
Described in more detail in Chapter 7, the most important goal of facilitation design and processes is to foster sharing and listening among all your participants. Incorporating this core tenet, or principle, into your processes will help you build trust, collaboratively enhance group knowledge and skill capacity, identify issues, concerns, and considerations, determine the most feasible and sustainable set of solutions and foster the relationships you need for long-term success.
Perspective Sharing and Listening in the Water 4 Ag Project
In our process model, the concept of perspective sharing and listening was integral to every phase of our initiative. Equally important, the evidence we have collected finds considerable in-depth learning and perspective sharing among participants was welcomed, and in many cases led to documented collaborative learning.
Tools & worksheets
Process Attributes Worksheet
Helps you identify and plan for the process attributes most appropriate for your engagement initiative.
Additional resources
Stakeholder Engagement Process Attributes
This slide deck addresses the following questions related to stakeholder engagement process attributes: (1) What are they? (2) Where do they come from? and (3) Why are they important?
The World Café: Overview slides by WorkshopBank
“The World Café is a 20 year old workshop activity for engaging your participants in conversations that matter. It draws on 7 design principles to create a simple, effective and flexible format for hosting large group discussions for between 12 to 200 participants.”
A Quick Reference Guide for Hosting World Café
A manual and reference guide produced by the World Café Community Foundation for hosting World Café Conversations.
The Role and Importance of Boundary Spanners – Fact Sheet
Describes the role played by “boundary spanners” – individuals who manage complexity and interdependencies and seek to establish new alliances, collaboratively develop innovative solutions, and encourage the transfer and translation of information – in engagement processes.