As part of the development of Ausgrid's 2024-2029 regulatory submission, two randomly selected customer panels deliberated over a collective 10 full days. The panels, facilitated by MosaicLab and Gauge Consulting, considered how Ausgrid should look to the future while remaining fair to customers today. Ausgrid's three-year engagement process allowed customers to influence what Ausgrid spends customers money on, giving them a rare insight and influence over the cost of electricity, an issue that directly impacts the lives of everyday people.
We’re feeling energised as we zoom through the first month of the new year. That’s because we can see what’s ahead, and we’re excited about the possibilities. Are you ready to set sail with us? We’re celebrating what’s been achieved in partnership with people just like you so far, while setting our sights on facilitating more important conversations in more places and having even more positive impact on more communities. We’re ready to embrace where engagement and deliberation are going, are you?
A message of thanks to you - our clients, participants, partners and friends - and hope for what’s ahead. As we head towards the end of a big year of big conversations, our team shares what they’re grateful for, their biggest highlight of 2023 and what’s really lighting them up when they think forward to the new year ahead.
Meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Belinda Lowing and Fox Gillen. Both Belinda and Fox have long career histories that span across interesting and complex roles that have included facilitation and engagement in many forms. Learn more about these two and gain some insights into who they REALLY are through their answers to our fast five questions!
Ever wondered what makes our facilitators tick? Meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Jody Kingston and Aaron Bosch. Both Aaron and Jody have fascinating, diverse backgrounds and have come to MosaicLab and facilitation via interesting pathways. Find out what they love about their work, what impact they hope to have and how they answered a list of fun and probing questions that we like to call The Telling Top 10...
Power is always at play and often in surprising and unexpected ways. It’s your job as a project manager, leader, facilitator or engagement professional to notice and foresee power problems, address and prevent power imbalance and protect the integrity of your engagement process. In this deliberation disaster we let you know where power issues tend to lie, what you can do about them, and what your role is in tackling them.
Have you heard about standing panels? They’re a form of deliberative engagement that can be super effective, particularly if you have a lot of different issues and topics you need to engage your community around. They’re also a really cool way of embedding deliberative practice in decision-making. Plus, they’re already happening in Australia. We’ve got the lowdown on what they are, the key considerations in planning for them and some snapshots of the two ongoing standing panels we’re facilitating in the local government realm.
Deliberative engagement aims to build trusted decisions. That’s only achievable if the people impacted by the outcome have access to information about the process. This isn’t as easy as telling your communication team to send out a media release or publishing a few social posts telling your community the panel or jury is happening. Your communication approach needs to be thoughtfully planned, aligning communication and engagement efforts and ensuring deliberative principles aren’t compromised.
What are you asking your participants to help you with? Topic choice and how you craft the question, challenge or remit you put to your community is critical to a successful process. In this deliberation disaster, we explore the most common mistake we see made. Plus, there are free tips for selecting and communicating a topic that will result in better response rates, a more meaningful experience for participants and more useful outputs for decision makers.
Ready to put your best engagement foot forward in 2024? We have the free resources for you! Whether you’re prepping an important engagement project, have a tricky engagement problem to wrangle or just wanting to upskill, we’re here to help. We have so many free resources, it can be hard to know where to begin, so we’re sharing what our top 7 resources were in 2023 so you can see what others are reading and learning about. Jump in and let this be your most effective year of engaging yet!
Did you visit our carnival stand at the recent IAP2 Conference? If so, you might feature in this post! And if not, here’s your chance to fight the FOMO and have an insight into the bean bag toss fun (and really cool dancing) that happened. We also have some super tips for you from IAP2A Chair Tony Clark around increasing accessibility and inclusion in engagement (spoiler - it’s not always easy, but progress is better than perfection). And we share our program highlights. Let’s dive in!
Engagement processes must be accessible if diverse voices are going to be included. One of the many ways we can achieve this is through the use of interpreters (both for online and face-to-face engagement). If you’re working with interpreters it’s essential to collaborate with them and think carefully about how the session will be facilitated. We spoke to Bruce Song, a Mandarin interpreter whose worked with us previously.
There’s a new round of engagement on the way for local government in Victoria. You need to start now if you want to achieve a process that meets the requirements of the Local Government Act 2020, works around key dates and council elections, incorporates a wider engagement process and delivers useful outputs for their council and community. This isn’t easy. So, to help, we’ve created a short, free guide that you can download today. This free ebook includes a roadmap outlining timelines and phasing, biggest lessons learned from 11 local government deliberations in round one, advice from council leaders and decision makers, a guide to scaling your deliberation based on budget and more.
Facilitation is a practice, and that means facilitators never stop learning, no matter how experienced they are. We’re constantly working to refine our skills, and we’re committed to sharing our knowledge with others. To honour International Facilitation Week, four of our facilitators are sharing techniques anyone can try out. Give them a go next time you’re involved in an interaction or group conversation, even if you don’t normally think of yourself as a facilitator.
Deliberation – what can go wrong? The short answer is lots! In our second article in this new series, we tackle ‘information inputs’. We’re talking about information you feed into a deliberative process to support the deliberating group’s discussion. It’s super important to get this right and the quality of what you put in will affect the quality of what you get out. So, we’re helping you avoid potential pitfalls and learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before you. Learn what to do (and what not to) inside …
