Our unique stakeholder engagement process taps into and leverages your community’s aspirations for new economic development opportunities and capitalizes on what already works well. We bring multiple stakeholder groups together to design, reach agreement about and implement new projects and programs.
We are mindful that the intersections of interests and world views can present major roadblocks and/or setbacks, especially where (a) there are high stakes, (b) the issues at hand are politically or emotionally charged, and (c) there is a diversity of opinions.
We see challenges as opportunities, not merely to marshal the collective co-creativity of the community—by resolving the conflicts into a higher level of order—but also to simultaneously initiate a process of informed interaction, interests integration and commitment to shared goals and joint activity.
We do this through structured conversations between diverse groups. We engage a broad range of stakeholders from multiple localities, including arts, education, sporting, retail, tourism, recreation, local government, infrastructure and business, to create programs that address each community’s unique needs and aspirations, and identify opportunities that are synergistic between communities in the region.
We use the Zing complex adaptive meeting system to facilitate conversations. The tool provides a common “thinking space” for multiple minds, to bring different perspectives and resources to an issue. All participants are able to simultaneously view and contribute ideas to synergistically co-create new knowledge, plans, projects and programs.
The outcomes are a “living strategic plan” that:
- Taps into community creativity and synergies
- Establishes a firm foundation on which to revitalize or further energize the community
- Builds on local capacities/resources, attracts new resources and satisfies future economic, social, environmental and educational needs
- Leverages emerging economic, social and innovation trends, to create new products, services and program concepts
- Expands the community’s capacity for future economic development, and takes into account the shifts in skills required for both existing jobs and those that are currently being invented
- Integrates global trends and local perspectives so that participants can apply their unique knowledge to new program and project concepts, which capitalize on emerging opportunities
- Expands the community’s capacity for future economic development