Thought leadership

One of the perennial questions we have about public consultation and engagement is how much do you have to disclose other than, of course, the output that comes out of the dialogues themselves? Now I've been looking into the recent decisions of the information commissioner because you'd be surprised how many of the two hundred odd cases that they process in the ICO every month do concern, engagement, and consultation. And almost at random, just look at the last few months, there is a interesting case from co fold parish Council, somewhere near horsham, I think, where there'd been a controversy over the wind farm and, the complainant had put in a freedom of information request for so much information. The council had produced some of it, but not all goes to the information commissioner. They're told you've got to produce all of it. Does it always go like this? If you go back just a month earlier in leads where there'd been a controversy over the cycle lane, a particularly enthusiastic campaigner had put an extraordinary list of things that he requested to know about. And the ICO ruled this was unreasonable. It took not too much of the resources of the council I'm not sure if it was vexatious, but it was pretty close to being vexatious. Now, we had a recent case in Lincolnshire hospitals. A request was made for such an information. They provided some of it, this often is the case, but they were told to provide all of it. Little further south. Again, few months ago, Cambridge County Council was told that it had to disclose the names of counselors who'd been involved in certain stakeholder dialogues. And hilariously, of other ironically. Let me tell you about a case last December went under the radar where the department of leveling up was upgraded for not responding to a freedom of information request. Guess what? About a two thousand and sixteen consultation ironically on changes to the local government transparency code. And the department was told you've got to produce all the data on the output of that consultation even though they hadn't shamefully published it, but they were allowed to retain all the documentation relating to the government response had there been any? Now these are all different. Organizations today and every day receiving requests of enormous complexity, whether they're large organizations like the ministry or the small organizations like a parish council. And the reality is we need people to be able to respond to this because we live in the need of transparency. That's why I spent a considerable amount of time urging people to equip themselves with the right tools. Nothing short of a sophisticated stakeholder management system will enable some of these requests to be properly responded to. Not only do you need the systems, you need people who know how to store and skillfully retrieve the information when it's needed. And probably they need some training in consultation and the freedom of information act.

My latest article for Tractivity began life as something I wanted to write about social capital, and it's ended up as an article about football. So let me explain the connection. Anybody who's interested in stakeholder management needs to try to understand the dynamics of different communities. It could be geographic communities, like towns or cities, or they could be communities of interest, or indeed, it could be how a particular market works. And for the purposes of understanding communities in towns or cities, we've started using a concept called social capital. And all it means really is the aggregation of all the different networks and relationships that exist across society and the underlying goodwill, the trust, the self confidence, or otherwise that is displayed. And it's been seen as kind of wealth, but not of the financial kind. How rich is your town or city in terms of its capability to withstand the bad as well as the good times? How does it cope in adversity? And, traditionally, the social historians write very eloquently about how in Britain, we relied a lot upon municipal institutions, but charities, the self help sector, faith groups, trade unions, and so forth, and how over the years these have changed and the movers and shakers in society are now different. And, this change was chronicled not only in the UK, but also in America. And the classic book on this, I'm sure many of you will know about it, is called Bowling Alone by Putnam. And the title of Bowling Alone stems from the fact that he'd observed that throughout America, in every town and city, there's some bowling leagues. So one team would play another against another team and a different team next week, and how these gradually in the last half century, dwindled. They didn't exist any longer. So if you wanted to go bowling, you went bowling alone. Now where does football come in? I was watching television the other day, and what did I see? But Newcastle United, fresh from its victory in, in Wembley, not the most prestigious competition, but they'd won and a hundred thousand people or more from Tyneside turned up, a form of mass demonstration of allegiance and loyalty. Wow. What's a demonstration of social capital? And it made me think how our football clubs now are at the apex of influence in how they mold, how a an area feels about itself. And many of them do really admirable community outreach, work. I've illustrated, some of these in the article for Tractivity. And if you look at it, they are filling some of the gaps that universal provision doesn't adequately fill in education or in health or in employment, in skills, really excellent work. But what's different is that the government is now seeking to regulate football, and it's a controversial measure for some. But there is pretty universal acceptance that there is one good thing, and that is statutory fan consultation and fan engagement. It obliges the big clubs to talk to their fans. And by that, I take it to be the entire society, the community that supports them. This is why I think this is really good news for local authorities to try and leverage what is in some cases is worldwide brand recognition for some of the, football clubs that have made it big on the international stage. All this is part of the fabric of the way that social capital has changed. And from now on, I think we will look at football clubs as one of them. Indeed, I'm involved on the 14th of May. I will hope to be addressing a Tractivity sponsored event to look in detail as to how fan consultation is really gonna work. It should be a win win for everybody, but there are some pitfalls, and we better start scratching our heads to make sure that everybody gets this right. Social capital and football is a key part of it.

In my latest contribution to activities growing knowledge base on stakeholder management, I've chosen to focus on the challenge of balancing conflicting stakeholder interests. And I've done it in relation to the subject of regulators who I think, are the organisations. Their raison d'etre exists, in my view, to make the trade-offs involved in that balancing act. And regulators have, in fact, been much in the news. A couple of weeks ago, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, summoned them all up to Downing Street to give them a lecture about, the need to support economic growth and to, urge them to abandon the culture that she characterises as being risk averse. Now you'll all have your own opinions as to whether that's a wise thing or not because I want to focus on the core principle around which they are built, which is that somebody has got to take these decisions. Now we have a hundred-plus regulators, challenged with that task. There's a reason for that because politicians are very nervous about being, too close to some of those trade-offs. I mean, they're difficult to do. You're balancing, many conflicting urges. And, the thing goes back to the dawn of capitalism. Companies have always had to balance between the interest of shareholders and the interest of the workers, the staff, and employees, and the interest of the, consumers, the customers, and the interest of and the interest of suppliers. Nonetheless, there are many lessons we can draw, and there's much to be admired in the way that the best of the regulators set about this task. Fundamentally, they need to transparently, do a lot of fact-finding, and a lot of that comes down to consultation. Now in amongst the regulators in the UK, I've seen some of the best-ever consultations and also some that are close to being the worst. And in my article, I've drawn attention to four points in the main. Number one, you cannot duck these difficult trade-offs. Politicians, when asked to do it themselves, are very good at doing the consultation, but less good at taking the decisions. And we've seen, a whole host of episodes, a consultation followed by another consultation, followed by another form of institutionalized procrastination, kicking the can down the road as it's often described. The second thing, to note is that if you look hard enough, if your due diligence is excellent, you can often find areas of common ground even amongst stakeholders who ostensibly look to be poles apart. And that's often because they agree on the long-term destination, if not on the way to get to it. The third point I highlight is that many stakeholders are themselves coalitions of different interests. That applies to trade associations who have to balance large companies, small companies, companies in the north, companies in the south, companies in this sector, companies in that sector, and amongst voluntary and community organisations. And you need to have very good antennae as an organisation if you want to understand the crosscurrents of opinion within your own stakeholders. Finally, I draw attention to the undesirability of being seen to be successfully lobbied. And there's a lot of difference between somebody who is a professional advocate for their cause and the, playground bully who's got a lot of clout, and who intimidates you or tries to intimidate you. It's not so much whether you are lobbied. It's whether you are perceived to be, acknowledging the power of the lobbyists. Now, ultimately, all your stakeholder management must come down to what your own objectives are. And for some of our regulators, that's difficult because the politicians themselves have demurred and vague things up. There is a role in British politics, unfortunately, for what one would call constructive ambiguity. You're asked to do this and you're asked to do that. So if you're off what, yes, you want us to enable our rivers to be cleaned, but you also, please, got to keep the price levels down for consumers. And that's why it's difficult to balance the rights and the interest of different stakeholders. We need, therefore, highly professional, skilled stakeholder management., and we also need highly capable stakeholder systems as well.

Over the summer, we finally received the long awaited report by sir John Cunliffe on the water industry. Oh, dear. What a mess. And it matters because the water industry is crucial for industry, for agriculture, indeed, for every planning authority that has to give planning permission for something, and, of course, it matters for the quality of our environment. Now I've read almost all four hundred and forty pages, and I've looked at all the recommendations. And it looks to me as if we have an industry that's done itself no favors. Everybody hates the water industry at the moment. That must be tough for the people who work in it and for the people who manage stakeholder relations with the water industry in one way or another. And I've been thinking a lot about what this means for stakeholder management in this industry because water is not the only industry with reputational problems. Think of the post office, or maybe we think of the court system, particularly this month. I'm thinking of civil servants in the home office and elsewhere wrestling with the problem of where do we accommodate asylum seekers. And I've been thinking, are there lessons from the experience of the water industry that we can apply more generally? And I've come to the conclusion there are two or three, and in my article for tractivity, I cover even more. I particularly think it behoves those of us in stakeholder management to be crystal clear as to who is responsible for what. Now in the water industry, the picture painted by sir John Trenleaf is of a regulatory mishmash of overlapping, overlapping because you had off what as the nominal regulator. You had the environment agency with its own remit, the drinking water inspectorate. We have the consumer council. And behind it all, we have the ministerial powers, vested in DEFRA and in some other organizations. And not even the people in the industry themselves really knew what levers you pull to achieve what outcome. And yet, for those of us managing stakeholder relationships, we have the job of explaining to people who does what. The other lesson is that it's so easy and the temptation we must all resist to join in the blame game. When everybody hates you, it's very tempting to say, but, actually, it's not us. It's them over there. It's that body over here. I mean, consider that many of us might have responded to the regular five yearly consultations on river basins. And people would have said, well, this river here is suffering, and we need something done about it. This all came out in the Pickering Fisheries case at the high court, a short while ago. And, of course, what had happened was people had responded to the environment agency's consultation, but the water companies themselves, right there saying we don't take our instruction from the rights agency. We take them from Ofwat. And, of course, Ofwat, to give it its due, had been told year after year to keep water rates low, and that's what it did. We therefore have a crisis of underinvestment in this industry. So very easy to join in the blame game. But communication is also about listening and listening constructively and the way in ways that build trust. Now one of the more foolish decisions taken by the water industry, in my view, was to go for something called operator self measurement. And to the British public, that looks as if you're marking your own homework or in this case, measuring your own rivers. So it's hardly surprising that assiduous sewage society and all the environmental pressure groups in this country suddenly started finding that the number of pollution in this incidents was grossly underestimated by the water companies themselves. Therein lies the seeds of trouble because trust and confidence is so easily lost. Now it's going to take a long time for the woes of water to be cured, and there are legislative and administrative changes we'll have to wait for. And in the meantime, people managing the stakeholder relationships need to keep a cool head. They need to defend the industry where it is defensible, but it also needs to be open to realize the damages has been done. So I think it's going to require tremendous amounts of skills. I actually think it's gonna require a degree of training, and I think it also needs, obviously, excellent systems. The water industry needs investment, but stakeholder management in the water industry also needs investment.

I've been asked what might be a priority for stakeholder managers, and I resolved that it should be to shield your stakeholders from surprises. And I guess I'm inspired by watching the new president for America, scare us all with his unpredictability. Now there are people who say that unpredictability can be a force for good, that he can solve problems and, stop wars, and I think that's a load of nonsense. If you think of European governments right now as stakeholders for America, I can assure you that what they want more than anything is predictability and stability, and it'll go for your stakeholders as well. Serious organisations of all kinds need to plan ahead. How can they plan if they have no idea from one day to another, from Wilton Week to another, what's going to happen? If you look at our local political landscape, how did Rachel Reeves get into such trouble at the beginning of her chancellorship? It was that announcement on withdrawing winter fuel allowance, and it's not that it's necessarily the wrong thing to do or a bad policy. It was the sheer unpredictability. Nobody saw it coming. It was out of the blue. Nothing in the labor manifesto. No politicians in the election campaign suggesting might have to have a look. It just came there. And what that does to stakeholders and the many stakeholders in that particular issue, it undermines their confidence in the relationship they had or they thought they had with the prime actor. So in talking about surprises, I've made four points in the article that Tractivity has published today. I make the point that a surprise actually is a subjective, not an objective test. It's not whether you think, well, look at the world outside. Couldn't you see that coming? It's what that individual organisation, that individual stakeholder, organization, that is in your stakeholder base. It's what they thought. If it was a surprise, it's a surprise. It's a subjective test. Secondly, it follows from that that you need to spend time thinking about and studying what your stakeholder expectations will be, and they will be different. Some people are more clued up than others. If you're an important body for them, you can expect them to be more clued up than if you just have a peripheral, influence upon their work and activities. My third point is you need to become brilliant at impact assessment. How many times have you seen the senior managers in a stakeholder respond to something you're doing by saying, well, yes. That's okay. We we understand that. Only to find that at the grassroots, their own staff suddenly start saying, hang on a minute. There were unforeseen consequences. We are worse affected than we thought we were. So go into detail on the impacts of what you're doing. My fourth point is that if a surprise is inevitable, acknowledge it. It goes a long way if you say, look. We know you were not expecting this, and we appreciate that it may cause you inconvenience, may cause you problems. I think that's a good signal because, basically, you're safeguarding your your relationship by accepting irresponsibility for any problems that you're causing. Now at the end of the article, I do acknowledge that there are times when surprises can be good news. But be careful. Communications experts will tell us it's very easy to make a mess of good news. We've all seen the press releases, that are full of self congratulatory over the top narratives. And surprises, even if they are good, can sometimes go wrong. So to summarize, we need to shield our stakeholders from the kind of surprises that will damage your relationship with those stakeholders. And that's my message at the start of a year when I suspect Donald Trump won't necessarily observe it, and he'll continue to be as unpredictable as ever.

I was really delighted recently, To discover that Tractivity has in its latest round of enhancements put in more functionality for organizing public events. And I've reflected there's nothing more unfashionable than public events these days. And it's been like that for some years, we used to run training courses on effective public meetings. And we would begin with a flip chart session. What's wrong with public meetings? And of course everything is wrong with public meetings. People are unrepresentatives. It attracts a certain demographics. People come there for grandstanding. Others just come for a bit of a showdown with official done. Everything's wrong with them and yet we still have them. There were some who thought that COVID would be a watershed moment where never again would we rely on public events, everything would be online, but that's not what's happened. Turn on the television on any given week night. What do you find? A public meeting in this town, parents anxious about education and schools. Another town. There are patients worried about what's gonna happen to their National Health Service. Go somewhere else, and there are villagers come together to talk about potential, new housing developments and training applications they maybe don't like. So we are going to have to learn to use public events to manage them and to organize them. And in the article that I've just written for tractivity, I put four reasons forward why the death of the public event has been wildly exaggerated for reasons why we're gonna continue to have them. The first is that there are of course an antidote to the obsession with online social media and such forms of community engagement because we know social media polarizes things with echo chambers and what have you. In an event in a room with people live human beings there, that's where you can have a civilized debate in one side and another. Hence are well managed, how well chaired they are. Reason number two, is that if you want as an organization to demonstrate that you're actually listening, do it in person There's nothing more dispiriting. If we've all done it, we've responded to an online consultation. We've given our views. We have no idea. Or if anybody human reads what we have said. So if you want to demonstrate your listening, do it in person. Third reason, we are currently experimenting not just in this country but abroad with new forms of public events. I have in mind citizens assemblies or climate assemblies we're bringing people in some numbers together to learn about a subject, a complicated one like net zero or new decarbonization of transport or something like that, We're asking them to debate, to deliberate, and then we say, what are we going to do with our findings? Very, very important experiments these. Fourthly, and this may surprise you, I predict that AI will stimulate a new resurgence in public events. Just imagine. There's ten of you and you've all expressed your views using the latest technology and you've gone and you've used chat, GBT, and its competitors. So I have ten lots of input from you. Only by bringing you together, am I going to find out what you think as to what the machine has offered you to think? So I can, in a room, ask Mary, what exactly did you intend to say, Mary? I can ask John, are you sure that this is what you mean to say to us. Now for all these reasons, I suppose I'd be foolish to predict a resurgence in public events but I think they are here to stay. And why captivity, of course, is absolutely right to see this as an important tool of stakeholder management. Now, of course, you can subcontract the whole thing There would be a queue of public affairs agencies and consultancy saying, oh, we can do this to you. We can run an event for you. Bear this in mind. None of them will know your stakeholders as well as you know them. And if you go and organize these events professionally and well yourselves You'll get to know your stakeholder even better..

I've been looking at the application of net zero at local levels. Decarbonizing our communities is going to take generations. And you can see how it's beginning to happen, a combination of top down policy making and bottom up mobilization of the community in many ways. And to see how easy it is to get the policy bit wrong, just consider that in England, since twenty fifteen, the planning regime has been such that it has been almost impossible to get approval for small scale on shore wind. It's being changed a bit now. The good news is that from bottom up, there is rapidly growing a community energy movement that is mobilizing groups and individuals and stakeholders of all kinds. In a variety of projects, not just electricity generating, but also changing the mix, replacing fossil fuel heating, for example, with local heating schemes and what have you. Now the rule that local authorities need to play has been well illustrated by a recent report called The Skidmore Review. Chris Skidmore used to be the energy minister. And in the early part of this year, he published a massive three hundred and forty page report that details so many of the changes, including changing the planning regime for on show wind that need to happen. And when looking at local authorities, he writes the following. And putting from I think paragraph seven hundred and fourteen. And what he says is, local authorities currently face a lack of clarity over their role, a disjointed and short term approach to funding. And they require further support to build the capacity and capability needed locally to deliver a successful transition. Can say that again, the government wants every council to encourage the growth of these community energy schemes. How are you going to bake the log jam? Well, in my article, I'm saying, well, you can get all the stakeholders dozens of stakeholder groups in your community together and inform them, educate them, encourage them, or you could do something different. You could hold a climate assembly, see if you can get sufficiently representative a group of citizens to form consensus that would be a compelling agenda for local authorities and would be a way to raise a lot of money. Well, the third thing you could do is you could use specialists like I declare an interest because I'm an adviser to community energy south. Because they have the expertise of running lots of these projects. They could run one hundred and twenty projects that have been run-in other parts of the country. And whatever you do, of course, recognize it's a massive stakeholder management exercise. Needs the very best tools and the very best people. There's a lot to do. It'll take years, but we're on that way.

In keeping with the recent warm weather here, I have been predicting a long hot summer of extensive engagements and consultation in parts of the NHS in England. Reasons are not hard to find. I think we're facing a general election where health will be uppermost in people's minds. The government has been on the defensive, having to cobble together a plan to ease access for the public to general practitioners and primary care to stop the eight o'clock in the morning surge. We've had controversy over whether or not there will be 40 new hospitals. The jury is out on that one. Then we've had something called the Hewitt report. That was looking at better ways of integrating health and social care. She, amongst other things, is recommending much greater accountability and scrutiny at local level. And on top of all that, the NHS has been producing five year plans. Each ICB - Integrated Care Board - has gone through engagement of consultation and has to have those five year plans signed off and sent to NHS England by the end of June this year. And of course, we've had local elections, which means that health and well-being boards, health scrutiny boards have themselves been reconstituted in many parts of the country. Now, you have to feel sorry for the ICBs with this amount of activity going on. But there is, underneath all the gloom and doom, some rather good news around. Dr. Claire Fuller, a year ago, did something called the Fuller Stock Take on Primary Care. She found a wealth of innovation and really, really good changes for the better occurring quietly, not in the newspapers, and you feel that somehow these will only take root. The NHS will only take advantage of the crisis if there is far better dialogue and interchange between local authorities, the NHS, and all the other stakeholders who have an interest in what happens to our health services. If ever there was a time when we need to organise the comms and engagement, use the best tools and technologies to ensure that all these separate dialogues are properly managed - this is it!

I thought the Tractivity community would be really interested in the themes that we've been discussing in April on the threat of legal challenge to your stakeholder management and stakeholder consultations. In my Consultation Guru blog, I've drawn attention to legal challenges far and wide. There's a challenge from Bristol residents on the boats in the harbour, against the increased levees that they're going to have to pay in their harbour dues. There's another legal challenge to the consultation that has taken place on adult social care cuts in Dorset. Staying in the same area down in Bournemouth, cycling UK, a challenging consultation that's taking place on the closure of a bridge. You may all know about the challenges by two or three of the London boroughs against Sadish Khan's ultra-low emission zone consultation. And there are other challenges that aren't directly against the consultation themselves, such as West Lindsay Council, they are objecting to the government's proposed use of military facilities as an RAF scampton for asylum seekers, and they're not saying there was something wrong with your consultation they said, you haven't had a consultation, and you should have a consultation. There's another one in Braintree. All over the place. And my analysis is, that regardless of government attempts to suppress judicial reviews, you're not going to stop people who object to things from threatening legal action in circumstances like this. And there are many drivers of this. One of them is the fact that it's not usually a legal issue, it is a political issue. Your consultation may be legally foolproof, but you might still end up in court. The second thing is that the inhibition of high costs of going to law are disappearing. Now with crowdfunding, crowd sourcing, it's possible for many campaign groups to raise the fifty thousand pounds or more that it can cost to go to the high court. The other thing is, remember, sometimes they don't even have to win. You know you could lose but in a way that makes it very difficult for the public body you're challenging to proceed with its original plans. Now, the impact of all this on decision makers and on public bodies is you do have to get your act together. You can, it is true, be legally challenged even if you've had a wonderful consultation. But believe me, if it does go to court, or even if you just get a letter before claim, you'll have to show that it was a wonderful consultation. And without the tools and technologies, that platforms like Tractivity offers, you are going to have great difficulty amassing the evidence that shows that people were approached in the right way, at the right time with the right information, and given an opportunity to have their say. So as the months roll forward, we will be looking at a number of these cases I think we're in for a number of important judicial interventions as the year goes on.

With local elections still in our minds, and thinking about the need for local authorities and public bodies of all kinds to respond to public expectations, we've been thinking of how they need to understand what really makes communities tick. And few people actually fully appreciate the complexity of the myriad of organisations and bodies which create an ecology of social capital in a town or in a community. Twenty years ago, Robert Putnam wrote this book called Bowling Alone, where he analysed the situation in America and concluded that there was an illusion of the bonds that made people join together in clubs and associations. Now, since then, the internet has rather disproved his theory. It's now easier to find people with whom you share a common interest or with whom you can make common cause. So in any town or city, you've got a huge number of faith groups. You'll have a large number of sporting or recreational organisations, you'll have cultural organisations, choirs and drama groups and reading groups. Then in the area of health and social care, we have something 'called condition-specific pressure groups'. So these are people who campaign either for asthma or for multiple sclerosis or for any one of dozens of illnesses where people are coming together in a self-help spirit in order to further research or care for their conditions. And our towns and cities are full of organisations like this. Add to that the business community, the political community, and all the others, and you can see why councils and other public bodies need to invest in systems that track the hundreds of these organisations, the people who represent them, so that you can manage communications better with them and appreciate what makes the entire area work.

Hi everyone, welcome to another espisode of our Ask the Guru series, I'm Mariana from Tractivity, I'm here with our Consultation Guru, Rhion Jones. Hi, Rhion. How are you? Full of seasonal goodwill and cheer. Sounds good. Glad to hear it. So, this is our episode number eight and the last episode of our Ask a Guru series for 2024. And since we have discussed quite a wide range of issues during our series and we've had quite the busy year, I was thinking to get started by asking you about your reflections on this year. So what stands out for you? Well, it's been a strange year, hasn't it? I mean, we started off with an unpopular government. We then had a an unexpected general election, and we finished the year with another unpopular government. That, in a sense, tells its own story. You have a peaceful transfer of power. They said that this year was going to be the year when more democracies went to the polls than ever before. And, you have to reflect on how many countries have a smoother transfer of power as this country has. And this speaks to a wider truth, which is that we live in one of those countries where our politics is remarkably uncorrupt. If you want to make things happen in this country, by and large, the rule of law applies. You know, there is less bribery and blackmail and hit squads and all those features of less well governed countries. And I guess that's why stakeholder management, is doing so well in this country. There's a proper way of doing things. If you want to win arguments, if you want to have influence, then I'm afraid you have no way to do it other than to building sound relationships and winning arguments. Yes. Absolutely. So speaking of which, as you mentioned elections, how big a deal was the election then? I think for lots of Tractivity customers, it would have been quite a big deal. I mean, you do realise that there are three hundred and twenty something new members of parliament. People who've never been there before. And, you know, you're gathering a lot of information about people that you need to interact with, whether you're a local authority, whether you're a health service trust, or what have you. I was talking to our friends and the Tractivity collaborators, this firm called Mapolitical because they provide you with all the data. And, of course, they are absolutely making hay because so many people need so much information about the changes in parliament. And, also, of course, there's a rapid churn of government departments, civil servants, special advisers. So the election will have caused a lot of activity customers, a major reason to overhaul their data gathering and also to sit down and try and work out what are our target messages. Because although a government like the new one comes in with a lot of key policies in place, the devil is always in the detail. And I've been looking at a number of bills recently, things like the, new, work, rights. And you find that at the detail level, there are lots of things that many activity stakeholder managers, would be looking at and saying, well, do we want to say this or do we want to say that, or do we just want to keep back and having a holding beef? A general election always brings both a lot of work, and some significant changes or messages from any stakeholder managers. Yes. And as, hopefully, some of our viewers will be aware, we held our Stakeholder Engagement Summit in Manchester, last October. Rhion was one of our dear speakers at the event. And I was curious to ask you, what did you take away from that day? Actually, I thought it was a brilliant event. I I do hope, we have another one next year. Just the fact that we bring together a hundred or so people whose job it is to manage stakeholders, I think it's a very powerful message in itself. It it struck me being there that the stakeholder management discipline is somewhere the same as where consultation was when I formed the institute back, twenty two years ago. In other words, there was a lot of things going on, lot of consultation being done as a lot of stakeholder management is being done, but there weren't many standards. There's very little training, and there was a desire to exchange information and insights of what best practice was being. I thought there were some outstanding contributions. I thought people were very interested in the question of standards. I thought the accountability presentation was important. I do hope that this activity continues to work with firms like that. And you listen to National Grid and speakers who are using standards like AccountAbility's, and you think to yourself, well, that's the way things will develop in future. Yes. And, well, we do have some news regarding, a partnership with AccountAbility. So I'll just ask our viewers to stay tuned. We have more news coming soon about that. And so given your particular interests, have there been any specific developments you would like to share with us? Well, you may know that the Consultation Institute ceased trading after 22 years this year. I was really, really sad about that, although I was not directly involved in it. And, of course, looking at the wider picture, I'm still much involved in the law of consultation. I I've spent two days in the high court in the last month, watching for cases that may make a difference. And they'll make a difference to many, people that are working in public authorities. I went to an extraordinary case. We don't know the result of it yet where, planners in the local authority consulted the wrong street about erecting a warehouse. Now it's gonna be known as the wrong Weetabix factory case where, a mistake was made by a local authority and residents found themselves, being confronted by the erection of a warehouse, in a street that hadn't been consulted. Things like that shouldn't happen. But when they do happen, our courts have to settle who's responsible and what should happen next. So we've had a regular string of court cases, many of them about the environment. The most important case of all probably, concerned exploring for, oil, in in Surrey of all places. So this constant drip feed of changes to the legislation and changes to the rule of law as the courts have decided is something we have to keep an eye on and which stakeholder management. everywhere, need to be aware of, as these developments happen week by week. Yes. Sounds like we do have quite a few things to keep an eye on for next year. And what are you particularly watching out for for 2025? I know why you've asked me that. Maybe you're a football fan. Yes. I've been very excited about, partly because it's overdue, about the football governance bill, that's going to enshrine in law the right for football fans to be consulted when their favorite teams, their favorite football clubs make significant changes. But the question that has excited me is, what does this fan consultation, amount to? I mean, who is a fan? I mean, some of the biggest clubs in the Premier League have associations of fans all over the world. There are football supporters supporting Manchester City or Manchester United, and there are other clubs I know. And all of these needs to be fitted into a framework whereby the club can show that it is engaging with fan, that's fan engagement, and consulting with fans, fan consultation. So, I've been quite exercised by that and whether the gunning principles, which many of your readers will know about, whether they will or will not apply. So that's something to keep me occupied in the early part of two thousand and twenty five. It sounds like it, yes. Well, thank you so much, Rhion, once again for for having this chat with me. I want to wish everyone a great end of the year and a very, very happy New Year, and I will speak with you soon, hopefully, for next year. Yes? Welsh, we would say Nadolig Llawen and Blwyddyn Newydd Dda. Nice, thank you! See you soon!

Hi. This is Mariana from Tractivity, and we're back with a new episode of our Ask the Guru series with Rhion Jones. Hi, Rhion. How are you? I'm well. Great to have you here again. This is our episode number seven, and we thought about doing a bit of a special one because as some of you may know, we do have an upcoming conference in October the 8th in Manchester. It's the Stakeholder Engagement Summit. We're going to be talking about best practice in stakeholder engagement, and we do have some really good speakers lined up. We've got some organisations such as National Grid, SSEN, and also well, Rhion's going to be one of our speakers. Rhion, what are you hoping to cover during our event? Well, my session, I think, is on just after lunch. It's what they call the graveyard session, and I guess my role is to keep everybody awake after a good and very entertaining networking lunch. We're counting on you! I should say, I think this is a fantastic conference. I mean, last year's was truly, truly great. And it's quite an unique event because nowhere else that I know do we spend the whole day thinking about stakeholders. And my session was, of course, was designed when we all thought we'd be in the middle of an election campaign in October. I'm gonna be talking about stakeholder management at a time of political turbulence. And my gosh, we've had a lot of political turbulence in the last five years. And I think it makes a big difference if you've got policy instability. If you don't know who is the minister and what the policies are gonna be from one week to another, I think that instability has fed into a lot of confusion for many, many large stakeholder organizations working in the political sphere. Of course, a lot of us are not necessarily in the political sphere, but our stakeholder relationships are affected by changes of public policy. This goes in local government. It goes in the National Health Service. It goes right across the board. Now I want to just tease out some of the implications for the way in which we do manage those stakeholder relationships. And, hopefully, as we approach a period of greater stability, who knows? I've just heard this morning about the NHS ten year plan, and you think to yourself, there's gonna be quite a few periods in that when we are gonna be ask or say asking ourselves some really difficult questions and of our stakeholders. So as we approach a period of greater stability, I think there are a lot of issues we need to think about. Yes, definitely. I think it will be quite a relevant one for everyone, especially after the elections. And, speaking of which, we asked you to work on a few articles. So you do have a first one, which we have just published on Tractvity's website, which is called "Developing a stakeholder-conscious culture". What would you say, what how common is this? You know, I'm not sure how common it is because just because you've got a stakeholder management function or we have people called stakeholder management., officers or managers or whatever they are, doesn't of itself mean that in necessarily a stakeholder conscious, organization. I mean, the whole area of business cultures is, from an academic point, really interesting. There's been a lot of fantastic work done over the years, and we now for those studying this subject and interested in it, we know the difference between a clan culture, a hierarchical culture. You talk about a customer-focused culture. There's something called a market-driven culture. And I haven't come across specifically much of an analysis of a stakeholder-conscious culture. But having delved into it, I think there's something really in this. And it's one of these things, you know, you recognize it when you see it. Now in my article, paraphrasing very briefly, I've identified three elements that, if you like, reveal that you have a stakeholder-conscious culture. The first is that you're very, very externally focused. You're very aware what's happening in the world around you that can affect you. The second thing I talk about is that that awareness needs to come from the very top. It's driven by your chief executive officer, by the board, by the members of your organisation. It has to be driven through, with the example set from the top. And the third thing I talk about is that and it's a consequence of the first two really. Your relationships will be not tactically, but strategically driven. Not what you want to achieve in your relation with this stakeholder next week or next month. It's what over the long term benefits you and your organization. You only get that, I think, by putting a fair amount of resources into your stakeholder management, having the right tools and techniques and so forth, but also having the confidence of the senior management in what you do. Absolutely, thank you for that. And, well, talking about your latest piece that you wrote us, is about best practice and how it can be elusive. So what what do you mean by that? What I mean by elusive is you can't often find where best practice is written up. There is not a lot of literature about best practice in stakeholder management. Why? Because it's one of these silent activities. Now if it's a bit like political lobbying. There is an overlap there, but it's different. If you're very successful in your stakeholder relationship, there are times when you don't want to tell anybody. You don't want the influence you've had necessarily that visible. Of course, if you are unsuccessful at whatever the outcome is, you don't tell anybody anyway. So it's not something that people actually write about. I mean, maybe you'll get more revelations when people come to the conference in Manchester, you probably will. But in general, to find best practice, it's like proving a negative. If you don't have best best practice, it becomes visible. You make mistakes. And looking at it as I did the other day, there are some basic common sense things which if you do well, it increases your chances of, success on the substantive outcomes. Things like making sure that your data is fully up to date, that you've monitored all the events that are important in the life or the corporate life of your stakeholders. Things also like, reviewing the minimum interfacing period. What's the minimum amount of time, that you should allow, for routine engagement with people? Can you do with just something happening once a year with them? You know, do you invite them to the annual social event once a year, or is it something where you need to have a review every six months, or do you send them a newsletter every month? You need to have worked out what the minimum, interaction period would be. So I talked about best practice like that, but I've concluded that actually a lot of it is quite hidden. We have to dig deep in order to find what best practice is. Yes. And I'm sure we're gonna be talking more about this at the event, and we do have also a third article coming out for us, coming soon. What can we expect to see in it? Well, I thought it'd be a good idea just to, if you like, look from the other end of the telescope and say what does the world look like from the point of view of your stakeholder. What do they look for in your handling of that relationship? You know? What are their wants and needs? I mean, I was once involved in a really, really, I thought excellent study where, a large organization in Northern Ireland wanted to know what do our stakeholders think of us. Now it took me back to my many, many years doing customer satisfaction service. How do you keep a, stakeholder satisfied where the subject matter, the substantive issue, could well be a matter of difficulty? Maybe they disagreed profoundly with you, but what do they think of the relationships? You know? And asking them some questions, you know, do we, handle you with, a degree of responsibility? Do you feel we listen to you when you say something? Do you, in fact, find what we say to you credible? There's some important questions to ask them. How should we do this? How often we should do it? What should we do with the answers? So I'm gonna just look at it from the stakeholder point of view and how should we monitor the success of our relationships from their point of view? Oh, I like that. So for all our viewers, Rhion's blog posts on our website will be available very soon. Those last two that he mentioned, you can find them available on tractivity.co.uk/blog. And, in terms of the conference again, what themes do you expect to be at the front of the attendees' minds? I was thinking about this because you'd asked me for three articles on three different angles. I think there's an underlying issue, and the word I would use is trust. I mean, remember, the word stakeholder, you know, originated in the Middle Ages with the person who'd hold the stake, for fighting, something like that, and it was the most trusted person in the room. And trust in some way or another is at the heart of stakeholder relationships. Now, all that I've been writing, and I think all that will be discussed in Manchester does boil down to how strong a level of trust. That's why the political thing is quite interesting because trust in politicians, trust in the civil service, trust in many of our institutions, you know, has really suffered mightily from, recent years, not just in the UK, everywhere. I think America right now. So that issue of trust then takes us to what role does best practice play in establishing and maintaining, that trust. Now I'm not gonna cover too much of the best practice in my speech, but I bet you that many of the other presenters will be able to show us. Absolutely. We're looking forward to having some insights from them and also some case studies, So I think it will be very, interesting. For those of you who haven't checked it yet, you can go to our website and you will find all the information about the event. And, Rhion, I really look forward to seeing you there, and thank you. Thank you.

Hi there again. This is Mariana from Tractivity, and this is our episode number six of our Ask the Guru series with Rhion. Hi, Rhion. How are you today? Nice to see you again. I'm recovering from the election, but otherwise, I'm fine. So, speaking of which, after all the attention that has been given to the general election And we do have our own special on the election. If the viewers would like to watch it again, you can find it on our website or search it on LinkedIn with the hashtag "asktheguru". We talked about the election, and I thought that maybe we should ask you our Guru to talk about a few other things. So as this week, we do have, well, hundreds of members new members of parliament just signing on in the houses of parliament. I was just, wondering how our clients and, actually, other stakeholder management professionals, should be handling the situation. Would you say it's important to make contact with the new MPs right away? Well, the truth is there are three or four hundred new MPs and another two or three hundred that are coming back to parliament, and a lot of your customers people doing stakeholder management, the political stakeholders are actually very important. And it'd be very tempting to put their data on, first thing this week, not only their data, remember that the people who work for them are really important. So they've got a researcher in London who almost certainly they haven't yet got. And they've got a constituency administrator in their constituency, which again many of them won't have got. So you're gradually assembling information about the members of parliament. And guess what? Don't don't bother them straight away. I mean, many of them will take take them months to find their way around the, houses of parliament. It's a real labyrinth. And you also have to bear in mind the nature of the job. Now I was reflecting on that because it's not just new members of parliament that you sometimes find yourselves in a hurry putting onto your stakeholder database. You've got lots of other stakeholders far away from politics. They may be, clients. They may be customers, they may be suppliers, they may be researchers. You've got lots of these people and suddenly the question comes what do I put on the database and how quickly dare I make a move to contact with them? And, unless you get something really pressing, I'm going to suggest to you that members of parliament, you should leave them to the chaos and confusion of their first few weeks unless unless it is really depressing. Yeah. Just wait for a couple of weeks then. Sort of an ideal timing, you would say? Well, just think again about the principle of new people coming to your attention. Right? And think of the expectations that we create, amongst our stakeholders. I mean, the interesting thing about members of parliament is that they've got a responsibility for everything and anything. They are, if you like, wide angle stakeholders. In contrast, you've got other stakeholders that are very narrowly focused. You know, their job is something very narrow. And you have to treat them very differently. For members of parliament and people who have a wide angle, you need to have a compelling reason from their point of view why they should establish a relationship and why they should have contact with you in a hurry. Now, many of them will feel and suspect, I'm sure it's not true, but maybe it is, that you tend to sell them something or that you're trying to establish their support for something that you're trying to do. Ideally, they've got a problem and you can help them solve that problem. I mean, imagine if you remember the parliament and the biggest single issue in your constituency is, let's say, a, a controversial housing development. And supposing, you have, because you're representing clients in the building industry or you are the planning consultancy or something like that, you have the wherewithal to communicate with the stakeholder and help them. Those are the kind of situations that are very propitious for establishing early and meaningful contact. Yeah. So would you say that there is a standard professional approach to these new appointments? Let's say, for example, there's a new name that takes over a for a customer or for a supplier. What will be your suggestion in terms of how to professionally approach them? Put yourself in their shoes. As I mentioned, you know, is there a problem you can solve for them? Also, ask yourself the question, would my intervention, would my communication be of assistance to them in a way, that can help them with their mission in life. Now that means you've got to understand what their mission in life might be. For new members of parliament, you don't have to agree with them, but you do need to understand where they're coming from. What are the values and the policies to which they hold dear? And maybe you need to ask yourself, what is a big win for them in the early days or the early weeks? Now for non political stakeholders, you you have to ask yourself the question, what do I need to know about them? Do I need to know what job they did before they came to where they are now? Do we need to know maybe what university they went to? I mean, we're still in a, in a society where a common alumni makes a difference to the quality of the relationship. So, you need to do your research on the new people that are being drawn to your attention and having done that research, then find areas of the greatest common interest. Yeah. So what you mentioned about what they're looking to win or how can you best know them, that takes me to think about expectations. So in terms of, stakeholder expectations, how do we best manage that? Oh, I think we've got I I think there's a whole session on stakeholder expectations, isn't it? And I think it's it's plowing further into this fellow of what exactly do we know about their intentions. I mean, when we used to be teaching people to do stakeholder mapping, we used to say, remember, there are people you're putting on your stakeholder map who have got no idea whatsoever that you're interested in them. There are other people, of course, who would expect you to regard them as being really important. And, you know, sometimes you're you you don't share that view. I mean, ideally, you want to put yourself in a position where if the stakeholder map that is a confidential piece of, homework you're doing. If that became public, how embarrassed would you be? Wouldn't it be good if your own stakeholders had a pretty good idea of where on your stakeholder map they would be? One of the things you want to avoid, I think, is the hypocrisy of saying to people you're really important to us when actually they're not. I suppose we've all had these calls. We're on the phone, and it says your call is really important to us. I would regard that as a case of mutual deception. The they they don't think the call is important, and you know that they don't think the call is important. We can need to avoid that. We must never, in my view, fall into the trap of soft soaping a stakeholder, making them feel as if they're important when actually you do not regard them as important. The question of honesty and candor, I suppose. Yes. It's a lot about, keeping honest with, our stakeholder, and it's all about managing those, stakeholder relationships. So do we actually know how much about the way in which our stakeholders would like to be treated? How would stakeholders like to be treated? You know, I'd like to see more research done on this because my answer to you is more based on instinct. And my instinct is that stakeholders, want you to respect them for the job they do and the purpose they serve. Let's go back to members of parliament for a moment. Members of parliament, because it goes with the role, are very status conscious. And their status is something we should respect. Most of them have been elected by first pass proposed system. It's true. But although they may have had eighteen thousand votes, they will see themselves as representing approximately eighty thousand people. So in your dealings with members of parliament, you know, I think you need to respect the democratic principle that lies beneath their being there. And in the House of Commons they are inundated. Every cause, every self interest group wants a tiny bit of their time and wants their understanding. So I think when it comes to political stakeholder, I think there's a lot that your users and my clients need to learn about the best way to interface with those who take decisions. They're not just members of parliament, they're government ministers, they're advisers, their civil servants, and a lot of very important people. And if we're going to manage the relationships with them properly, we need to respect the jobs they do, understand their motivations and find ways of relating to them that is as convenient as possible not for us but for them. It's always a learning process I suppose. Rhion, thank you so much. And as some of you may know, we have a stakeholder engagement summit coming up, And I'm really looking forward to Rion's talk. He will be approaching more of the political environment. It's gonna be very, very interesting. If any of you would like to learn more about it, just check our website, tractivity dot co dot u k, and you can find more information in there. Brion, thank you so much, and I will see you next time. Thank you. See you next time.

Hi. Welcome to our episode number five of our Ask the Guru series. I'm Mariana from Tractivity, and I'm joined by our Consultation Guru, Rhion Jones. Hi, Rhion. How are you today? Good to have you again. Suffering a bit from the election. Oh, well, speaking of which, we've been doing a few really nice, episodes about a whole bunch of, different aspects on public engagement. So for today's episode, I was actually thinking that maybe we could reflect a bit on the election topic. I'm not sure if this is going to be much of an interest for our viewers or if it's going to drive them away? What what do you think? Well, if we assume that the audience for these little ten-minute videos are people involved in public affairs and public management, I think it's fair to assume that there are people who have an interest in what's happening. Now the recent weeks have been rather remarkable. The election has been different from what Rishi Sunak expected. I suspect it's been very different from what Keir Starmer, had expected as well. So there are many twists and turns, but those of us who are monitoring these things are probably fed up with the television coverage whereby placing far more emphasis on the people and, I think, not enough on the real issues. And this obsession that the media has with tax and spend tends to obscure the fact that there are dozens of other issues covered by the parties, and the way that the country decides on July the fourth will have a big impact on those, and that means on the jobs of many of the people working in public engagement. Yeah. Absolutely. Speaking of keeping up with the news, I'm just curious about this. I know you're very knowledgeable about all of this. How do you keep up with the news? Is it TV? Is it podcast? Is it reading? Do you have anything to recommend us? I listen to, generally speaking, five political podcasts. I mean, if anybody's interested, I listen to Newscast from the BBC, which at the moment is daily. I listen to News Agents, which is Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis. I'm a big fan of a podcast called Political Currency because that's Ed Balls and George Osborne. There's another one called Rock and Roll Politics, from a guy called Steve Richards. And what's the fifth one? Oh, yes. There's something called The Rest is Politics, and that is Alastair Campbell with Rory Stewart. Now, mentioning those five because that's what I listen to, and I'm sure there are many, many others. The dilemma that I've got is at the moment, they are more or less all saying the same thing. Their analysis of what is happening is broadly the same. And, occasionally, when there is a consensus, you begin to get suspicious. I get suspicious. Is there something I'm missing? There's something going on right now that is quite different from what the commentariat, the people who do these podcasts, are saying. But if anybody's interested, those are the five that I listen to. Oh, thank you. That's very interesting. I'll make sure to write them down when I publish this on LinkedIn and on our site so that we can all be checking them as well. Very nice. Thank you. So as you mentioned, election, massive impact for those public engagement teams. If you work with stakeholder management or public engagement, what do you do when an election is on? I'm sure some of these people are actively involved in party politics. They may be campaigning for the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, or in my part of the world, Clyde Camry and Scotland SNP. But for a lot of people, actually, you're not doing very much. You are actually, holding a watching brief so that you can understand what the arguments are developing, as the debate goes on. It's too late for lobbying. Many of us had assumed the election would be in October, November. This summer would have been a frantic time of getting your message across. But if you're an oil company and you're concerned about licenses in the North Sea, if you have a charity or anti-gambling or you're pro fixing child poverty or something like this, the time for lobbying is now passed, and it passed very quickly. All you can do is look at what's in the Manifestos and, equally interesting, what is not in the Manifestos, and wait until the election itself. Now a lot of people in public engagement have a very clear view of what their employers want to achieve. Your stakeholder databases will reflect who are the influencers that you need to work with. And I dare say there's a lot of housekeeping going on at the moment as we're updating the data that matters to you. Yes, of course. But there are some limitations now, especially because of the timing of the election. To what extent would you say, the public engagement staff's hands are tied? Considerably tied. We are in the middle of what used to be called Purdah, just a totally inappropriate expression, by the way. We now call it the period of sensitivity. I've never been particularly happy about it. I took the view that suppressing debate on current issues wasn't what you should be doing in the middle of an election. In fact, you should be fostering the debate, but, I lost that argument. And the period of sensitivity is now very entrenched in our system of government. So once an election is declared, there are things you don't do. You do not start a new consultation. You might not be reporting on an existing consultation if it's contentious. And if you are intending to do a consultation, you will hold everything until that period of sensitivity is over. And, you know, you always have a few exceptions to this, and there are storms in teacups all over the place. There's a big row in Milton Keynes at the moment because somebody has, revealed the results of a consultation on a on a sensitive bit of planning. But in general, people are observing this. And, yes, your hands are tied, especially for central government. Local government is a little bit more leeway. National health service, a little bit of leeway. But in general, yes, your hands are tied. But we only got another three or four more weeks, and then all hell will break loose as we know. Yes. It will. So you did mention the manifestos. So what difference do the manifestos make, you'd say? The manifestos are actually very important. I've spent last week I've read every line of every page of all the major manifestos. And, you know, I'm a bit of a political geek. I take them seriously. The reason why the parties themselves take them seriously is this. If you go into government and you are trying to put a con contentious piece of legislation through parliament and you get it through with your commons majority, assuming you've got one, and then you run into trouble with the House of Lords, the convention is that if it was in the manifesto, the lords are expected to back down. If something wasn't in the manifesto, such as the Rwanda flights, for example, then it emboldens the House of Lords to make much more of a nuisance of itself, although in the end, of course, they do back down. So it matters whether you can say put something in. There are many occasions in this crop of manifestos where frankly, the parties have either committed themselves to something so vague that it could mean anything or everything, not meaningful at all, or they have deliberately tried to phrase it in a way that gives them maximum flexibility. Neither of them is very helpful. And, indeed, if you subjected such commitments to the kind of standards we use in public consultations with the gunning principles, have you have you told people enough, as would enable them to decide, how to respond and give it intelligent considerations? They wouldn't last five minutes. Labour Party's got a commitment, on universities that is absolutely totally meaningless. And all the parties, I'm afraid, have got those vague commitments. So manifestos do matter, and those that haven't been able to put something specific in worthy to get into government, they might find it, less useful than they they might like it to be. Mhmm. Let's see how it goes. in terms of more practical changes for, especially for all the public engagement teams and staff, we know that they're gonna have quite a big job now updating all their stakeholder database when it comes to their political stakeholders. And actually, here at Tractivity, we do have a partnership with Mapolitical, which is a really great tool to update in real-time all the new political stakeholders coming into the government. So it's quite helpful. But in addition to that, what would you say are the changes, that the all the public engagement people will have to face after July fifth? It depends what environment you're working in. If you're in a very political environment, if you're in the NHS, for example, you know, it will be rather important to establish your relationship with new members of parliament. Now there could be upwards of three hundred new members of parliament, and that's where Mapolitical is superb. It avoids you having to key in all the details, and it's not just their name. You need to have their constituency addresses and all the other, stuff that is actually very important in running a stakeholder engagement service. And there are many, many, organizations that are not overtly political, so you may not need to know who the minister is, but you are affected by decisions that parliamentarians, government civil servants, and other bodies do. Sometimes you're affected by other bodies who themselves are affected. It's a sort of one-stage removed. And the really proficient stakeholder management people have long since learned that you probably need to do a fresh, stakeholder mapping exercise after each election because the dynamics of decision-making and the dynamics of impact assessment change considerably. This is where I think, our our friends and your clients, this is where they start earning their money, and it starts on July the fifth, I guess. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that, Rhion. I reckon some of these issues actually do apply universally, so that was very helpful. Also, I just wanted to take the opportunity to share a bit of news. We are hosting our second Stakeholder Engagement Summit this year, and I'm very happy that you're gonna be one of our speakers, talking about, political change and, how does that affect stakeholder engagement and stakeholder management. I'm really looking forward to it. And I thank you for your time today, hope to see you in a few weeks' time! See you after the election.

Hello. Welcome to our episode number four of our Ask the Guru video series. I'm Mariana from Tractivity, and I'm here today with our Consultation Guru, Rhion Jones. Hi, Rhion. Nice to see you again. How have you been? Well, I'm good. Well the sun is shining. Shame I'm not a weather forecaster because it could be really cheerful for the next few days, but maybe your questions are a bit more serious. I hope so. So we've been getting some positive feedback from the videos, which is really nice. And so I've brought a few more questions for you here today. So the first one is something that it's a strong theme I've been seeing in recent days. It's about standards for public engagement. So what role are standards playing in this area, you'd say? Well, standards is actually quite a complicated area in public engagement. In my own specialised field of consultation, we've got standards basically through the courts because you have something called the gunning principles. Now that's a set of rules, standards, if you like. But that only covers a small spectrum of public engagement. We don't have standards for public engagement that are universal. What you've got is in different sectors in the NHS, for example, you've got very, very clear standards set by the NHS through its own guidance. The planning function is something the same. There's very little that, transcends the entire field of public engagement. Now you can find toolkits varying from one to five hundred pages by organisations all over the world, everything from the World Bank through to the OECD, to the European Union. And I don't regard those as much as standards, but rather best practice advice. The one set of standards, that you might be interested in are published by a firm in New York called Accountability. Now about ten years ago, I think 2015, they published something they call the AA1000 Standard on stakeholder engagement. Now we looked at them in the UK then and thought, do these really apply to us? But I'm increasingly coming of the view that that's the best set of international standards, that I know about. I know Traktorviti is keen to ensure that it's fully compliant with those standards. And if they're updated, because they need a little updated, then I think that might be a source of, common, rules and standards, we can all look to. Sounds good. We will have some news about, working with AccountAbility soon that we will be sharing. So I hope that our viewers stay tuned. So in terms of the standards, who is or should be most concerned about them? Well, in a sense, everybody needs to take account of the standards. Certainly, going back again to consultation and the gunning principles, here in the UK, if you are conducting a consultation, notwithstanding some recent strange decisions we've had from the court of appeal, they will apply. But in my experience, the people who are most conscious of standards are either very large companies, very large public bodies, organisations that are what I would call reputationally vulnerable. You know, if they make a mistake, they're gonna be on the front page of the Daily Mail. You know, "Eccentric Energy has to apologize. It's sent a bill for five hundred pounds to a two-year-old" or or such something like that. And then you've also got, another category of organisations who simply have the problem of interfacing with often the same stakeholders but from different departments. And then what they have to do is ensure a degree of consistency of approach. So if you're observing, if you buy into a common set of standards, and especially if you deploy the same system tools across different departments in an enterprise-wide kind of application, then the standards become really important. And it's quite interesting to note that to my knowledge, the organisations in this country that are buying most into stakeholder standards, would be the energy companies. But then you'd probably be thinking of other major major, public bodies as well. Yes. So in terms of organisation-wide, you mentioned we did get a question about crisis management. So is this the sort of organisation-wide process you have in mind? It is. Crisis management is at the top end of the applications that you need to be able to fix. I mean, we've all got different experience of crisis. Let me tell you about mine. Fifty years ago almost, I was a young recruit to the Welsh Water Authority, and the crisis that the Welsh Water Authority had to manage through was the 1976 drought. And, all these major, suppliers and all the blue light organisations have to have a very well-developed crisis management plan. Now in the drought, I think somewhere in the BBC, there is footage of me standing in the middle of the absolutely empty Taf Fechan reservoir speaking in Welsh to the great Welsh public, telling them, as you can see, there's no water around, and this was the shower with a friend, age in nineteen seventy six. Now this is a very serious matter. If you run out of water, you run out to the, wherewithal of life. And, crises are all different. So you have to prepare for different things. Uppermost in many of our minds at the moment is the, are the implications of Martin's law that will sooner or later hit the statute books, and that's gonna require people who organise venues, and this is following the Manchester bombing, to have a crisis management process. And if you think about crisis management, what it requires basically is a lot of communications with very often key stakeholders. And instead of running off a spreadsheet, you know, you have a well-rehearsed plan. Going back to the Welsh Water Authority, I think there was a gentleman in the office whose fine role was to be the emergencies planning officer. I've got a feeling that they still exist in many of the larger local authorities. And the whole point of what he was doing was, to construct, to design a plan, and have the mechanism to be able to test it and to be able to implement it if and when, as unfortunately can happen, a crisis occurs. Yes. So putting this plan into action and keeping track of it, would you say there is a part to play when it comes to stakeholder management tools in a crisis management? Well, absolutely. I mean, back in the day, we didn't have the kind of functionality, that Tractivity and its, competitors can offer. And the whole point is how can you, build in a set of workflow options, and how can you keep enough information and keep it up to date about who are the people you need to contact in a hurry with some pre-prepared messages. Now that's at the heart of stakeholder management. And I think we should always remember that you don't have to be a big massive utility to have your own versions of crises. What sounds a mega, you know, life changing crisis for a community or for a business, aren't the only kinds of events that you need to plan and be prepared for. So, my view is that if you've got an effective stakeholder management tool, then you've got something that you can use in order to develop and to implement, your, response to those eventualities that you prefer would not happen. Don't have to call it a crisis because you can have the debate about when is a crisis, not a crisis. So I think, crisis management maybe is something we ought to return to at another time. And I'm just wondering whether it's not possible to develop some template, processes and template communications plans. I mean, remember, crisis management isn't just for the one person whose job it may be to design it. It's possibly involving a lot of departments. So if you are thinking of trying to present these tools as an enterprise-wide solution, I guess crisis management is one of those applications you'll have to have uppermost in your mind. Yeah. That sounds very good. And I reckon, many organisations do have to realise that crisis management and stakeholder management, it's not just only up to one person. It is something that should be more, implemented across the entire organisation. So organisation-wide process, that's something that maybe we could explore further on in one of our next talks. That would be interesting. So thank you, Rhion, once again. It's been great speaking to you as usual. I hope you have enjoyed it as well. And if anyone who's watching would like to send us some questions, you can contact us through our LinkedIn page, Tractivity's page or Rhion's page, you can contact him as well, and you can send us an email to marketing@tractivity.co.uk. And, Rion, I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks again. Thank you very much. And I promise not to mention the 1976 drought again. We could do with something of a drought here given the weather these days. It's fine. Thank you.

Hi everyone, it's Mariana from Tractivity. Welcome to our episode number three of Ask the Guru with Rhion Jones. Really happy to say that we've been receiving some very positive reactions to our series. So if you are curious about our previous episodes, you can find them available on LinkedIn, just search for the hashtag "asktheguru", or you can head over to Tractivity's website and you can look under our Thought Leadership section and you will find our previous episodes there. So without further ado, hi Rhion! Nice to see you again, and what have you been up to lately? Oh, I'm very busy. Well, this morning's excitement was, the aftermath of a an article I published overnight on the football governance bill. I'm probably going to upset a lot of parliamentarians and parliamentary draftsmen because I think they've made something of a mistake in drafting the bill. It's all about the difference between engagement and consultation. And I've been upsetting some Crime, Police and Crime Commissioners, and I've also been, very busy with the Community Energy business because there's meant to be a government consultation there as well and hasn't quite emerged in the way that was promised. So I'm I'm having a wonderful time. Sounds good! So, you know, since our last session, we did receive some quite interesting, questions, which I believe you will enjoy answering because they are regarding consultation. So, about the validity of consultations and the data that they provide, are people right to be skeptical about what is gathered as information in a in a consultation? Well, thank you, Mariana. You drew my attention to this particular issue where people were concerned that, consultation had been held, could they really believe the analysis and the numbers and so forth? And it's a good question to raise because there are lots of consultations where I'm quite unhappy about not so much the level of the analysis, but what parts of the analysis have been published. I recently came across a consultation, it was actually by the previous, the current Police and Crime Commissioner here in Bedfordshire, and he'd done a big consultation. I I think all that was published was the number of responses. You know, we've had two thousand or twenty thousand, whatever it is. So what is published is actually rather important. And the query you raised with me was what happens if amongst the responses, there are some, shall we say, dubious submissions? What happens if somebody calls themselves David Cameron or calls himself Boris Johnson or calls themselves Mickey Mouse and Donald Depp? Now most analysis firms, most market research firms, to be fair, are very accustomed to wheedling out the joke responses. But there are real issues here because you need to avoid duplication. You need to avoid people misrepresenting themselves, and I think that's the key principle. You mustn't allow people to misrepresent who they are, and you certainly don't want them masquerading as somebody else when it's clear from their response that they're a little bit of mischief making. In general, you're going to count everything, but you need to keep a weather eye out, for some malicious, or some fraudulent, submissions. Sounds good. And what about anonymous responses? Where do you stand on the anonymity issue? I have never liked anonymity in public consultations. I think in principle, you know, if you've got an opinion and you want your opinion to be taken into account, you should be sufficiently confident of your opinion to say, well, this is who I am, and this is what maybe I represent. But, of course, there are exceptions. If you are doing a consultation on something sensitive, something like domestic violence, you would clearly have to offer anonymity. So there are exceptions, but in general, ask yourself why should somebody want to be anonymous. I recently saw a government consultation, and public bodies were claiming respond anonymity. Why on earth should they do so? It's a little bit like civil servants not wanting to be named. And there has been a recent court judgment, incidentally, which says that government departments cannot redact the names of some civil servants just because they are not at the very top level, from papers and reports that go to judicial review. I think in general, we need more transparency, and not less. So with exceptions, I would avoid anonymity. If you're being asked for anonymity, try and understand why. There are good reasons, but very often, they're not such good reasons. Yeah. Absolutely. That makes sense. And so for example, our system Tractivity, for our clients, they do have the option when they're running consultations using it, to have confirmed and unconfirmed responses. So that means when someone responds to your consultation, they will receive an email back to confirm that they were the ones who submitted the response. So should we perhaps give more weight to confirmed responses? What's your opinion on that? Well, it's a good feature to have, in a piece of software that's handling public engagement. Of course, it's not unlike if you sign a petition, they will ask for the confirmation that you intended to sign it. It's a bit like if you are in one of the donor software sites. You've pledged fifty pounds, and they'll ask you to confirm. So in principle, it's a good thing to do. I would be telling people, just have a look at the rate, the percentage of responses that don't get confirmed. Because there are lots of reasons why people maybe don't press the confirmation button. Either they're busy or they miss it or they might take the view. We've spent enough time already giving our views. Why should we press a further button? Have a look. Is it two percent that haven't confirmed, or is it twenty five percent? Now if it's two percent, you're not gonna worry too much. It's twenty five percent you're gonna ask some questions. And if you're unsure whether it's right to exclude them or not, you can always analyse those that have confirmed and compare the responses with those who haven't confirmed. Is there a significant difference? So it's a good thing to do. Now bear in mind, there is a difference between quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Now in qualitative analysis, we always want to know coming back to the anonymity, do we want to know who the people are and what their experience is, where they're coming from, and so forth. With quantitative analysis, you can actually, have a bigger margin of error. At the end of the day, the difference between sixty two percent and sixty four percent is not a lot. Qualitative analysis is a bit different. Yeah. Sure. That makes sense. And but what about petitions or mass responses? I've always taken the view that petitions are actually rather important in consultations. Because if you stop and think about it, even if it's online and therefore, in principle, not very difficult for somebody to respond, there are lots of people who are not comfortable to give their views on an individual basis, but who will want to signal their support for a particular cause or a particular policy through a petition. And over the years, I'm not sure we've given enough regard. I've seen too many consultations "oh, we've had thirteen thousand responses, and the next sixty pages detail, you know, the breakdown of who said what. And, by the way, we had a petition of ten thousand people". If there's a petition's organiser and they've gone to the trouble of rounding up whatever the number is, especially if they've used the old fashioned methods. The least you can do as a consultor is to take that effort seriously. It signals something. It signals that people feel sufficiently strongly. And, you know, the numbers aren't everything. A hundred people signing a petition does need to be taken seriously as well as one that's got ten thousand people. And I've always said, look, invite the petition organisers in. Give them a cup of tea. Ask them what their thoughts are because that's, after all, is why they've done it. So I think petitions, we need to take a little bit more seriously than maybe we do, and we need to find a way of incorporating them into the analysis report other than just look in appendix five of all the petitions that we received. Yes. I think in terms of petitions, we could even consider doing a whole session about it. Maybe it could be our next topic. It's a good one. Yes. Hopefully, you know, whoever's watching, if you'd like to for us to run a session on petition, just let us know. Thank you, Rhion. Thank you so much again to be, for being here with us, it's been great. For those of you who are watching again, if you want to send us your questions, issues, anything you would like to ask the Guru, we're happy to receive them. You can contact us on our LinkedIn page, Tractivity's page, or you can send us an email at marketing@tractivity.co.uk. And, Rhion, I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you so much. Next time it is.

Hi there! I'm Mariana from Tractivity, and welcome to our second episode of "Ask the Guru" where we're gonna be asking some interesting questions to Rhion Jones, aka the Consultation Guru and former director of the Consultation Institute. If you missed our first episode, you can find it on Tractivity's website under the Thought Leadership section, or you can go to LinkedIn and type in #asktheguru and you will find the episode there. So let's get started with today's episode. Hi, Rhion, nice to have you again! So I wanted to start with a question about a consultation that happened in South Gloucestershire. There's been a consultation about charging parking spaces. and I noticed in a recent LinkedIn post you were talking about it and about a counsellor who was complaining about this consultation. And, I quote here, he said: "consultation is just a judicial review avoidance scheme". So what's your opinion on that? Is that a joke? Is there some truth to it? Yes. There is a bit of truth into it. It's a wonderful story, by the way. And I'm indebted to Councillor Bourton. Do you know how sometimes somebody says something all over the country, there are dozens of people saying, oh, I wish I thought of saying that. And what the council is doing is expressing a frustration that many politicians have, many decision makers, many counsellors have. When they see a consultation, they think is just going through the motions. Now what he was getting at, of course, was there'd been a consultation on car parking charges. Absolutely. Everybody says, no, we don't want higher charging for car parking our cars. Nobody says, oh yes, please charge me more. And I think he was questioning why on earth do we bother. And of course, the reason they would have bothered is that by law, they will be required to consult and it's just a judicial review bypass judicial review avoidance scheme he said. Now we should all be concerned if ever there is public money being paid, our time being taken, talent's being wasted on a consultation that really is meaningless. And we've all seen them just going through the motions. The telltale signs of a meaningless consultation are fairly easy to find. First of all, they're usually for a very short time. Secondly, they tell you the square root of damn all in the narrative. And thirdly, very often, the decision making process effectively is non existent. So the telltale signs when they go wrong. Funnily enough, in the high court this week, this kind of cases being played out. What's it about is that the mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, wants to take over the role of the West Midland's police and crime commissioner against the labour police and crime commissioners' will. It's a hostile takeover. And what happened was that the mayor applied to the home secretary in the autumn. Home secretary said yes. And then they discovered - can you believe this? Then they discovered that they needed to do a consultation. So a consultation was hurriedly done over Christmas and the New Year. When they finished on January the 31st, three or four days later, the result was out, and yes, you can go ahead - despite the fact that most of the consultees said, no, we don't want this transfer of power to take place from the police and crime commissioner to the mayor. Now it's gone to the high court I think it's going to be well argued. They'll say decision had already been taken. They're gonna say, you clearly didn't allow enough time to consider and to deliberate over what people had said. So it's a gunning one for those who know the law of consultation, it's gunning four challenge. So It may or may not be one. All I can say to you is at judicial review, you may well find that it has been ruled to be a meaningless consultation. Thank you. And someone else actually asked how many judiciary reviews are there? So in terms of being taken to court, are we all overreacting a bit in terms of the threat of being taken to court? Is it is it small the chance of being taken to court? Right. If you're open any local newspaper, any week, in my experience, somebody somewhere saying, oh, we don't like this, and we will take them to judicial review. Because it's almost a reflex action by campaigners against them, because they know that they have the right to question decisions taken by local authorities, by central government, and other public bodies. In reality, 95% of these cases never get to court. Because there's quite a long convoluted process. Now some do. I reckon there were 22 significant consultation cases determined in high court last year. That's quite a lot. But there are probably hundreds that started off with campaigners demanding with a letter before claim being issued by a solicitor. That's the process. You sent letter before claim saying we think that you are in breach of this or that. And then you have to get permission of the court to go to judicial view. It's a permission stage. So there's a real filter before they go to court and the only ones that go to court frankly are the fifty-fifty ones. Because if you've got a wonderful case and the public bodies is in the wrong, they will almost certainly concede it. Equally, if you've got a hopeless case, no solicitor is going, well, very few solicitors will take your money for taking it to court. So it's a realistic threat. You've gotta take it seriously. You've got to examine how good a case is being put against your decision or your process. So the threat is there. And the and the only answer to that is really getting clued up properly on what, the law of consultation and the other attendant laws on equality and on the environment might be. So would you say what would be the the stakeholder management practices that could help avoid legal challenges? Well, this this is where you need to consider how well do you know your stakeholders? I could turn this to the the other way and say, be very, very careful. You don't upset the wrong people. It's a very famous legal case going back many years now in North London, in Mill Hill, actually. There's a there's a street called Partingdale Lane. Partingdale Lane was a rat run. And the residents were thoroughly, fed up with being used like that. So the council closed it and stopped through traffic from going down this lane. Then there was a there was an election and a counsellor for counsellor the conservative party in this case, said vote for me and I will reopen parting their lane to the great delight of the, of the people who are in traffic jams trying to go through mill hill at other times. The residents of Partingdale Lane, included a lot of rather senior lawyers. So they took the council, to court, and they won their case. Now I use this story to illustrate the fact that you need to know the stakeholders as well enough. Are they the kind of people who if you mismanage your relationships with them, or if you hurt their interests in a particular way, they could indeed take you to a judicial review. Now, listen, they're very injust in that. I mean, feel very strongly that people without the means to go to court very often have the greatest injustice, served upon them simply because they don't have the means to challenge it. So from a stakeholder management point of view, it it's the old advantage. Always get to know your stakeholders well enough. Understand where they're coming from and what their capabilities are and how they will interface with you if things go wrong. Yes. Absolutely. And speaking of stakeholders, and this is actually one of the questions we have received. Do people like being referred to as a stakeholder? I suppose you're back again to, know your stakeholder well enough to know whether they like being called stakeholder. I would never recommend writing a letter saying "dear stakeholder". I mean, at the end of the day, it is actually a management term. You know, they're not stakeholders, they're tenants, they're passengers, you know, they're clients. And one of the things that I think is is very undesirable is that we impose the management speak and the management jargon upon what are basically human relationships. Right? I discourage the use of it except in its proper management context. A few years ago, actually around about the time of the coalition. There was a a secretary of state for local government called Eric Pickels. And Eric tried to ban, oh this is the story, tried to ban the term stakeholders from being used by civil servants. I don't think this lasted more than a few weeks because it's a very handy term for us to describe people whom are dependent on us in some ways for their interests being adequately served. It's a useful term, we use it for stakeholder Mapping, but "dear stakeholder", I don't think so. I agree! Rhion, thank you so much for this chat. And, for those of you who are watching, this is our monthly series hosted by Tractivity. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us and let us know either on our LinkedIn page, Twitter, or through Tractivity's website, or you can send it to our email marketing@tractivity.co.uk. Rhion, thank you so much for your time, and I'm looking forward to seeing you again in a few weeks. Thank you. Next time!

Hi! I'm Mariana from Trativity, and today, I'm very happy to bring you our very first episode of what we're gonna be calling Ask the Guru series. It's going to be a short video series of ten to fifteen minutes once a month where we're gonna be asking Rion Jones, aka, the "Consultation Guru" in the UK, a few questions related to all things about consultation, stakeholder and public engagement. So I'm very happy to bring Rhion Jones here today with us. And our first question for him is, so 2024 it's looking like it's a General Election year. Will that make much of a difference to people who are managing stakeholders, you'd say? Well, I suppose almost every year has felt like a general election in recent years, well with changes of prime minister, we had five of them, six chancellers of the exchequer, seven foreign secretaries. It's as if we've had changes of administrations regularly as they have you turned and white turned and under turned and overturned, the policies have often felt as if they belong to very, very different governments. So what's different? Is this just gonna be like politics as we become used to in recent years? Well, actually, if you're managing stakeholders, there will be a difference this year. And one of the reasons is, of course, the last two general elections have been unscheduled ones. We weren't expecting them necessarily. This is the first scheduled general election. Which means we know it's going to happen in the next twelve months or so. And that has consequences if you're working anywhere in the public sector or in the public realm, if you're working with infrastructure that's being paid for by public money. If you've got political stakeholders, it's going to make a difference, a big difference. And you will be, confronted with some announcements and some initiatives being brought forward so that government can be visibly doing things before a general election. And equally, lots of difficult decisions being deferred until after a general election. Now, it depends whether you have political stakeholders, people like members of parliament, or whether you have other stakeholders whose expectations will be influenced by the politics. Now if you're in the health service, for example, lots of the people who are your stakeholders may have unrealistic expectations of what a change of government might bring. And that's a particular challenge when it comes to managing them in a general election year. And would you say will it result in more or less need for consultation and engagement, public consultation and engagement? Now now that's interesting because here, the political timetable comes into play. Right now, we're in the middle of a plethora of government consultations on pretty important things as a consultation on sentencing of prisoners, and letting them out early. There's a consultation on, the replacement of A-levels in education in England. We have another really contentious one. You know, the guidance that schools are going to have to observe on transgender kids or kids who think they're, transgender. There's lots of planning reform. And in a way, it's fairly dishonest because none of these consultations are going to result in actions that will be taken by this current government. So a lot of it is to do with being seen to be responding to issues that are on the table, looking as if they're active, and there will come a point when we're getting closer to the election where all of that will stop. As you know, there's a concept called "purdah". Once an election is announced, you're not supposed to do any public engagement or public consultation. It's a convention, which I have consistently argued against. I think you don't have to suppress debates on difficult issues when you come to an election. But that is the convention. And so government consultations will stop, and it's a bit more debatable whether we should be stopping consultations in the National Health Service, on local authorities, and so forth. So, whilst consultations will be, very prolific now, will stop, public engagement, and engagement generally, will go through the roof. And for good reasons because there'll be lots of people who will want to ingratiate themselves to you if you're an important decision maker and there will be lots of people that you will want to ensure have a good relationship with you going forward. Do you remember the moment that a member of parliament becomes a candidate for, and he stops picking MP, because there's gonna be an election, once you become a candidate, you have to be fair in the way that you deal with all the other candidates as well. You can't invite the sitting MP to your factory if you don't also invite the other candidates. And all these niceties, I'm sure we'll talk about them nearer the date of the election. But of course, engagement in general will go through the roof. And speaking of engagement and consultation, Are you sure people are clear about the difference between engagement and consultation? What's your opinion on that? If I've been given a pound for every time we've been asked the difference between engagement and consultation, I would be an extremely rich man at the moment; unfortunately, there is massive confusion, and it's because a lot of the terminology, a lot of the terminology, has been spread in a very, very, unthinking way. So you have the word that participation, you have the word involvement, you've got engagement and you've got consultation itself. Look, engagement is about relationships. Engagement, as when you get engaged before you get married, it is establishing that you're in a prety permanent relationship. So engagement is about finding people that you want to have a relationship with. It's building, nurturing, sustaining that relationship, and it could be for all manner of things. It's not just to advise you on taking big decisions. You might you might be trying to explain things to people, you might be trying to persuade engagement, very often is a question of advocacy. If you've taken the decision of a local authority, here you've got your climate plan, climate change response plan, and you've already signed it off, don't consult about it, you already made up your mind. But you might want to engage the public enthusiastically to persuade them of behavior change that you might need to do. Engagement might involve sitting down co designing, co producing, co delivering various things, all of that engagement is very different from consultation because unlike engagement, consultation has a set of rules, very clear rules and rules that you can enforce in a court of law. You can't do that with engagement. Engagement is largely a rules free zone; consultation is a rule's intense. And if you don't observe those rules, then you'll end up in court. Does that help? Yes. Definitely. And in the upcoming months, what do you what would you say should be all those engagement professionals' priority? Whether you have a general election or not, you know, the standards for good practice in stakeholder engagement are pretty much the same. And I would characterise it like this: you'd better have a stakeholder engagement programme that fits with what it is you're trying to do. That's why we all use systems these days, because if you are pursuing a long term relationship with any stakeholder, you need to know what the milestones, what the dialogue has been, who said what six months ago, and in what context might matter a lot. You know, we don't need systems just to pick up a little bit of tittle tattle and happeningly noting something you've learned from somebody. It should be part of a plan that has an objective, "this is what we want to achieve. In our dialogue with this particular stakeholder". So think, the priority doesn't change just because you've got a general election, but you might have some specific objectives that might be new. I'm sure we'll return to this time and time again. Just one final word about standards whilst it occurs to me. I said that, engagement is a rules free zone and that consultation is rules intense. Well, harbinger for the future, I see signs that the courts are beginning to get interested in giving those people who are being engaged with, some form of rights. Consultees have rights in front of the court. I think we're going to in the next few years find that people being engaged with also acquire some rights. They haven't got them today, but that, I think, will be the direction of travel. And in the meantime, we can all look forward to a year that I think would be quite exciting for many of us. Yes. That sounds great. Thank you so much, Rhion, and I think you've given all of us a bit of food for thought for this year. I appreciate it. And, for the viewers, if you have any questions for us you would like the Guru to answer, just feel free to to reach out to us to Tractivity on our social media channels on LinkedIn or Twitter, or you can email us at marketing@tractivity.co.uk, and I will see you all next month. Thanks, Rhion. Goodbye.