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This latest blog from PACE comes from Andrew Cook, Chair of ADEPT East of England Board and Executive Director of Growth, Highways and Infrastructure at Suffolk County Council.

The essence of the PACE programme is to create the space, time and intellectual stimulation to facilitate deeper thinking on those thorny topics that we all find ourselves wrestling with. On that basis, one of the things that became clear as part of our reflections was just how differently we need to prepare, even at the business case stage, for the cost and resource involved in more effective engagement with partners and communities.

The important messages and schemes that we're trying to deliver are becoming more and more difficult to land in our communities as the fundamental shifts we are seeing in the relationship between citizen and government affect us at a local level too.

Despite how much we have in common and the fact that many members of our communities agree on the importance of improving our environment and places, it has become absolutely clear how successful the deployment of wedge issues can be. Loud voices on social media combined with emotive narratives, anger and misinformation are having a detrimental impact on local authority schemes, particularly those that are place-based, regardless of how well intended or designed they might be.

Building an understanding and proactive approach to behavioural insight into our programmes upfront is becoming essential if we are to avoid costly delays or even the collapse of our projects. Securing the kind of support and buy-in that will take a scheme past controversy and through to approval and completion, means building behavioural change work into our bids and funding applications. We are in our infancy in understanding what this means, but it is clear that our traditional forms of community engagement are no longer as effective. We will see more schemes derailed with detrimental impacts on the long-term aspirations for our areas, not to mention the prohibitive costs and enormous waste of precious resources when schemes fail.

This work does not come cheap. Stakeholder mapping and analysis; understanding audience values, experiences, drivers and motivations; and deploying behavioural change modelling, tools and techniques all need to be priced in. And while there is a precedent around the business case development for capitalisation, extending it into work of this kind is a grey area, even before we consider whether we have the expertise to do it. Will government accept the need for this work? It’s a critical question, because we can’t afford to do it without support and in this new climate, there is an ever increasing risk of scheme reversal, dilution or abandonment if we don’t.

Using decarbonisation as an example, I have responsibility for a rural area so the last thing I'm going to do is advocate that we should not have cars. But the message isn’t and shouldn’t be either/or, it needs to be far more nuanced than that - it's about choices. For example, if you choose a different mode for one in five or one in ten of your journeys, that has a 10% or 20% impact on congestion, CO₂ output and improvements in air quality through free flowing traffic. It also adds an opportunity for physical exercise that leads directly into improved mental health and wellbeing which lessens the pressure on the NHS and social care services. So, if you could turn the dial by 20% and have these behaviour changes advocated by a health professional or community champion rather than an environmentalist or highways engineer, there is the potential to make quite a significant impact across the board.

We need to put ourselves in the shoes of the communities and the people we are trying to reach out and appeal to. If we try to understand the psychology of how they're experiencing what we're trying to do and get into the detail of how proposed measures might impact upon people in individual situations, we can very quickly see how their opinions change for better or worse. That change is of course something our politicians are particularly sensitive to.

Members are instrumental in communicating with residents and advocating for projects and schemes, but it becomes much harder for them when communities start to coalesce around opposing opinions. That becomes another risk for us as officers and can impact on the stability of long term planning and decision-making. We’ve seen what happens nationally when volatility leads to flip-flopping on policy and initiatives. In local government that risk is potentially magnified at scheme level, and with such overstretched budgets, we simply cannot afford to add constant instability.

This final session also examined how behavioural insight can be used to aid long term, strategic, thinking - examining the impacts of cognitive bias alongside the three key stages of the decision making process: noticing, deliberating and executing. We also discussed how we tend to default to Fast System 1 thinking over the more deliberative Slow System 2 thinking and how that can get in the way of consistency.

We looked at the techniques we can use to address these potential issues and de-bias our thinking. Deploying a pre-mortem imagines a project failure and works backwards from there to find potential reasons why, while post-mortem reviews can help to identify reasons for success. Additionally, creating think groups can bring together a diverse range of people, while other tools include red teaming, a behaviour map, forecasting and using the EAST (easy, attractive, social and timely) framework.

As others writing these blogs have also said, being able to put the time aside to really develop our thinking on these issues has been incredibly valuable. Debating different perspectives with experts, colleagues and other place directors is such a rare opportunity, but also the friendships being formed here will offer us all long term support. There is a wealth of support and learning out there that can be harnessed, the challenge for those leading change projects is how we build these vital steps in to our project timelines and budgets.

Author

Andrew Cook, Chair of ADEPT East of England Board / Executive Director of Growth, Highways and Infrastructure at Suffolk County Council

Further information

• PACE - The Place Leaders Programme: www.adeptnet.org.uk/pace
• PACE Session 3 output - Using Behavioural Insight to achieve more consistent strategic decision making across local political cycles: https://www.adeptnet.org.uk/documents/pace-programme-session-3-using-behavioural-insight-achieve-more-consistent-strategic
• Amey: www.amey.co.uk