This celebration includes a big “THANK YOU!” to many people over the past decade. Raising the bar and daring to develop joined-up-thinking projects, while designing out associated risks and addressing sustainability challenges. In doing so, projects gained their Social License to operate (sometimes).
The end product is creating projects society supports.
Since early in the 2000s we learned again and again that we take other people’s decisions at our peril. No person is an island and all that... It also became obvious that much of the effort involved in stakeholder engagement and project development needs to go into organisational goal-clarity, team-cohesion, change-management inside the proposing organisation and ultimately co-design. This and a systematic and structured engagement approach proves essential to get to win-win results that sustainably benefited both the stakeholders and the proponent.
To mark our 10-year anniversary we have documented the five-step approach we follow. We call it Smart Engagement. It incorporates strategic planning, leadership, team-clarity and coaching, change-management, sustainability, stakeholder engagement and co-design. Project proponents and stakeholders need to see that risks are mitigated and benefits maximised. We have further documented how we use this approach to support the attainment of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Happy 2017!
