Two weeks ago, I stepped out of a session at the IAP2 North American Conference, walked a few blocks, and found myself a sunny spot on a bench on the Vancouver seawall. I needed a few minutes to write. I needed to process my AHA moments from the past two days. I needed to translate my thoughts into something that was bigger than my shameful realization that I had failed…colossally.

In case I forget to mention it later, IAP2 stands for the International Association of Public Participation. It was created as gold standard guidelines and practices to shape how and why governments should engage with citizens. I am a big believer in these principles, and have built them into my business practice. In other words, whether our team engages with citizens, staff, clients, partners, or government, we apply IAP2 standards as the foundation of any stakeholder or interest-holder engagement we do on behalf of clients.

Anyway, back to the story.

Day three of the conference opened with an incredible keynote delivered by Aidan Eyakuze, CEO of Open Government Partnership – an international group I had worked with when I was in the Executive Council Office of the Manitoba government from 2017 to 2020. His remarks took me back in time to the days when we were driving transformational change across most Canadian provincial governments. In Manitoba, we were building a culture of excellence, collaboration, and public sector innovation (this was literally the first line of responsibilities in my job description).

My walk down memory lane focused on the whole-of-government commitment my team and I had led, which enabled the systems, policies, and people needed to engage citizens in public policy-making. But as I listened to him talk about the role that meaningful engagement plays in strengthening the relationship between governments and the people they serve, I realized that when I was leading this work for Manitoba, I fell into the very trap I warn my clients about today.

We solved the problem right in front of us. And we did it exceptionally well. But we failed to plan for long-term sustainability. We created an incredible system. But we didn’t see the threats that were right in front of us.

Why public engagement?

At a time when public trust in institutions is increasingly fragile, the importance of meaningful public engagement is hard to overstate. Citizens want to know their governments are listening. They want opportunities to share their knowledge, experiences, and priorities to inform decisions that affect their lives. And most importantly, they want (and deserve) to see evidence that their participation actually matters.

High quality public engagement delivers all of this. It helps governments understand the implications of their options, identify perspectives and communities they might otherwise miss, and make better-informed policy choices. When this work is done authentically, it also helps build something governments desperately need right now: legitimate public trust.

I want to be clear: not every decision requires extensive public consultation. Good engagement means understanding when public input is needed, whose perspectives should inform a decision, and what level of participation is appropriate. It also means being clear about what is open for influence and what has already been decided.

As an example, inviting my 80-year-old dad to share what he thinks should be our province’s economic priorities is a very problematic idea. Not because he doesn’t have opinions; I promise you, he has many (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree). But his opinions are shaped by his experience, his education, and his environment. As a 20-year retiree (formerly an aircraft mechanic) who spends more than a third of his year in his fishing boat on Lake Winnipeg, he has little insight to inform the big picture economic strategy that our province needs to sustain and strengthen our way of life. At best, his opinions are a distraction; at worst, a reason to dilute critical policies.

That said, if government were interested in understanding the priorities of people who live and play on Lake Winnipeg, the changing impacts of zebra mussels on the fish population, or the connection between water quality (AKA toxic runoff from the Red River into the Lake Winnipeg basin), he is the perfect guy to ask. This is where his opinions are actually based on lived experience, observations, and worries about the future of one of his favourite places. This is where his perspective is very valuable. 

So in short, engaging the public and doing it well are two very different things.

Build something remarkable

During my time in Executive Council Office, I had the privilege of working with an extraordinary group of colleagues across Manitoba's public service to develop a government-wide approach to public engagement. We were an ambitious crew. But we had the authority, funding, and drive to deliver. 

Our goal was simple: make it easier for department staff to engage Manitobans in meaningful ways to inform public policy. Our work was also pretty straightforward: create the conditions so that when they chose to engage, our team had the knowledge, tools, and support to do it well (and by well, I mean consistently...right across our 12,000-person organization).

Under the leadership of my tenacious project leader, Rachel MacDonald, the team (volunteers from across all government departments who were already doing this work) translated IAP2 practices into practical frameworks and guides designed for the Manitoba context. They procured and iterated the right technology to support consistent, one-stop-shop engagement activities. As part of this project, we trained hundreds of public servants across all departments as practitioners of IAP2, creating a community of internal experts who understood not just how to engage the public, but why different approaches were appropriate in different circumstances. And finally, we trained senior leaders, political staff, and elected officials about what quality engagement looked like, and why the integrity of the process mattered.

The project took about 18 months (thanks to Rachel it finished a couple of months early and slightly under budget). It was a deep investment in organizational capability, supported by talented people who genuinely believed that better engagement could contribute to better government. And we stood it up, fully functioning, just three weeks before the global pandemic hit Canada. Our first real use of the system involved engaging with Manitobans to understand the impacts of pandemic restrictions, informing iterative (in some cases, daily) adjustments to public policy.

In truth, I couldn’t have dreamed of a better use case to drive deep adoption of the skills and tools that we developed than the urgency of a constantly shifting global context. And it cannot be understated how critical the EngageMB platform and the people supporting this work were to ensuring that Cabinet actually understood the implications of the decisions it was making in response to a rapidly changing global event. Those public servants were trained and ready – and when they were called up, they delivered.

In 2021, the project was celebrated internationally. Manitoba received the IAP2 Core Values Project of the Year award for its work developing a coordinated approach to public engagement, including the frameworks, technology and training that supported its implementation. If you’re a nerd like me, you’ll appreciate that the coolest thing about this project was that it actually applied the IAP2 principles to the project of creating an IAP2 practice in Manitoba (this is the public service version of Shakespeare’s play-inside-a-play).

Six years later, and I am still enormously proud of what we accomplished together. But sitting in on that park bench on the seawall, reflecting on the conversations I’d had over the past two days, I found myself in a bit of a shame spiral – realizing that my own blind spots prevented me from seeing a critical point of failure.  

Don’t forget to build it to last

We had done an excellent job of building the capability to deliver excellence in public engagement. We had frameworks, technology, and an army of deeply experienced practitioners who knew how to do the work well.

But we had failed to recognize a slowly changing trend in public service: golden handcuffs were no longer as powerful as they had once been.

Take me as an example. In 2020 when we launched EngageMB and all the might beneath its shiny exterior, I had almost 20 years of public service under my belt. I was a senior executive and had done some pretty great work throughout my career. While I might have been interested in leaving to try something else, I was in my early 40s, had two kids with presumably expensive post-secondary education needs ahead of them, and just over ten years left before I could retire with a very healthy pension. If you told me that by 2022 I would no longer be a public servant, I would have laughed at you. 

I didn’t think I was going anywhere. And I looked around me and saw my colleagues in the same boat. Sure, maybe the work wasn’t as exciting as it used to be. But the pressure of the “sandwich generation” experience meant that the work associated with starting something fresh – along with the risk of a lower paycheque, and the loss of a very lucrative defined benefits pension plan made the idea of leaving nothing but a delusional fantasy.

What I didn’t realize was that the discontent and frustration that existed at that senior level was not unique to me. It was quietly pervasive. And the loyalty of those public servants was fragile. Once the first person at that level left, the dominoes started to fall. Once senior executives saw former colleagues succeeding outside the system they had grown up in, they had hope of something new. I left. And many of the champions for our work left too. In many cases, they were replaced by leaders from outside the public service. For example, I just pulled up a list of Manitoba’s current Deputy Minister roster. Of the 22 currently serving, only 6 remain from those in place in 2020, and fewer than half received any training in IAP2.

To add to this, in 2023, a new majority government was elected, bringing in new political staff – none of whom even knew what effective public engagement was…nevermind that an extraordinary engine of IAP2 practitioners, tools, and technology existed to support effective citizen engagement (aka political trust-building) in policy making.

As I sat on that bench in the sunshine, I shook my head in wonder. How did I not foresee this eventuality? How did I not plan for this obvious risk?

Why a successful project isn't enough

What eventually pulled me out of my haze of regret was the realization that all is not lost.

During the conference, I had the opportunity to connect with some academic practitioners from Simon Fraser University's Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. The Centre has developed a Maturity Model for Public Participation, which is a practical assessment tool that helps organizations understand how well public participation is supported within their structures, processes and practices.

I deeply love this kind of work – work that can only be accomplished by stepping outside the day to day of delivery and into the stratosphere of organizational meta-trends.

The model they developed helps organizations see beyond the work. It provides organizations insight into the broader conditions that would allow them to perform engagement work consistently and effectively. It helps them identify what needs to be strengthened to mature their practice. And most importantly, it helps organizations start where they are and identify baby steps that can move them toward more effective practices, consistently and sustainably.

The one thing that I noticed about the model (and yes, I had some pretty great converstions with the team from the Centre about this) is that it had the same blind spot I did. It made assumptions about the stability of organizations – and in particular, organizational leadership.

The question that the model still needs to explore is important: What happens when an organization develops a powerful engine, but then the conditions that supported that maturity begin to change? Because leaders move on. Governments change. New executives arrive with different experiences and priorities. Organizational structures are adjusted. The people who championed the original work will eventually no longer be in the room.

Can the capability survive? If it does, what allows it to remain active, visible and valued? And if instead, it finds itself like a sports car, covered in tarps and hidden in the back of the barn, can it be recovered? And what is required to tune up the engine, pump up the tires, and get that sports car back in action?

This is not just a public sector problem. But yes, these are especially relevant questions in the public sector, where changes in political and administrative leadership are inevitable – and where the loss of something as important as public engagement practice is actually detrimental to public trust in institutions. but the truth is, I think most organizations have experienced some version of this. Think about the investments you've made in strategic planning, continuous improvement, innovation, project management or organizational development. How many of those capabilities remain as strong today as they were when you first introduced them? How many depend on the enthusiasm of a particular leader or the persistence of a handful of committed employees? And how many have gradually faded from view, despite the continued presence of the people and resources needed to deliver them?

If I could turn back time

If you’re of a certain age, you’re most certainly humming that tune. Let’s be honest, this has been a long article. I’m going to wait right here. If you promise to come back for the ending, go ahead, enjoy a little dance party…

Looking back on our work in Manitoba, I don't actrually think our challenge was a lack of ambition, expertise or investment. I think we just underestimated the importance of building enduring structures around the capability we were creating. We focused considerable attention on developing practitioners and giving them the tools to deliver high-quality engagement. We also worked with leaders to build understanding and support. But much of that work depended on the people who were in those positions at the time.

The big miss was failing to create the mechanisms to ensure future leaders received the same orientation, understood the same principles, and recognized the capability that was available to them.

In government, elected officials establish direction, while public servants provide advice, administer programs and deliver services. Political staff play an important role in supporting ministers, reviewing advice and helping navigate the relationship between policy and political priorities. If meaningful public engagement is to become an enduring part of how government operates, people on both sides of that relationship need to understand its value and their respective roles in supporting it.

When we first introduced Manitoba's public engagement approach, we actually delivered training specifically for political staff. We helped them understand what quality engagement looked like, why certain processes were designed the way they were, and how thoughtful engagement could help their Ministers make better decisions and build stronger public trust. It was valuable work and well-received. But it wasn't embedded as an ongoing part of political staff orientation or onboarding.

Similarly, while we developed considerable expertise throughout the public service, we didn't consider the importance of integrating that knowledge into the enduring systems through which new public servants are oriented and developed.

We could have explored opportunities to embed engagement principles in Manitoba's Values and Ethics framework, executive leadership development, departmental onboarding and other institutional mechanisms. And we could have worked more closely with those responsible for onboarding political staff and incoming elected officials to ensure that the principles of good engagement continued to be understood as people changed roles. Of course, not all of those mechanisms were within our authority to change. But we could have sought opportunities to collaborate with the people who did have that authority. Nothing prevented us from trying.

I think we also made an assumption that is increasingly difficult to defend in today's public service: that future leaders would come up through the organization, carrying with them the knowledge and experience they had developed along the way. We assumed that we just needed to sustain training at the practitioner level – because the existing practitioners would eventually move up into positions of higher leadership. But the tides have shifted, and we can no longer assume that knowledge will travel upward through an organization.

In other words, if something is important enough to invest in building, it should also be important enough to incorporate into the systems that help new leaders understand how the organization works. And that includes understanding not just what resources are available, but why they exist and how to use them effectively.

Building for today is different from building for the future

This is the lesson that has stayed with me. When organizations introduce new capabilities, much of the attention naturally goes toward implementation. We develop the framework. Train the people. Establish the processes. Introduce the technology. Communicate the change. And when all of those pieces are in place, we celebrate the achievement, as we should.

But creating a capability and sustaining it require different kinds of attention.

Implementation asks whether people have what they need to do what needs to be done. Sustainability asks whether we have created the conditions for that practice to continue, even when the people who originally championed it are gone.

That requires us to think about some different questions:

1. Where does this capability need to be reflected in organizational policies, values and expectations?
2. Who needs to understand it, beyond the people who will use it directly?
3. How will new leaders learn about it?
4. Who is responsible for maintaining the tools, refreshing the training and supporting the community of practitioners?
5. And importantly, what happens when the organization's attention inevitably moves somewhere else?

These are questions worth asking at the beginning of any significant organizational change initiative, not several years after implementation.

For Crown corporations, the answers may involve board orientation, executive onboarding, leadership development, corporate policies and the ways organizational priorities are translated into operational expectations. For governments, the challenge is complicated by the relationship between elected leadership, political staff and the permanent public service. For non-profits, it may involve the relationship between the board, executive leadership, staff and volunteers.

The structures will be different, but the underlying challenge is remarkably similar. We need to build capabilities that belong to the organization, not just to the people who happened to be there when they were created.

Sometimes the capability still exists; it just needs a tune-up

Here's the part of my extremely long reflection that gives me hope.

I don't believe Manitoba needs to start over. The province invested in building an exemplary public engagement engine. Much of that knowledge and expertise is still available inside the public service. There are people who were trained in engagement practices and who understand how to design processes that are appropriate, inclusive and genuinely useful to decision-makers. There are frameworks, tools and resources that were developed to support this work. And there are public servants who have continued to apply their skills, sometimes within individual departments or projects, even as broader organizational priorities have shifted.

The opportunity is to reconnect those pieces.

Begin with a simple assessment. Which trained practitioners are still working within government? Which tools and resources remain current and accessible? Where is public engagement still happening? Which departments or leaders are actively supporting it?

From there, the work could be surprisingly practical. Reconnect the community of practice. Bring experienced practitioners together to share what they've learned and identify opportunities to collaborate. Offer a refresher for senior leaders, including those who have joined government since the original approach was introduced. Help them understand what resources are available and how meaningful engagement can support their policy and program priorities. Explore opportunities to incorporate engagement principles into ongoing executive development and political staff orientation, working with the people who have responsibility for those programs. And identify a few upcoming decisions where existing practitioners could demonstrate what thoughtful engagement looks like in practice.

None of this necessarily requires a major new initiative. In fact, the most important ingredient may be something that costs very little: permission.

Permission for practitioners to use their expertise, for departments to invest the time required to engage appropriately. And visible encouragement from leaders who understand that good public engagement is part of good government, not an optional activity to be considered when time and resources permit.

Yes, some tools will need updating, some skills will need refreshing, and some organizational supports may need to be rebuilt. But that's a very different proposition from starting again. A relatively small commitment to reconnecting people, refreshing knowledge and reinforcing expectations could unlock considerably more value from the investments already made.

Why this matters now

I keep coming back to the keynote that prompted me to leave that conference session in Vancouver. At a time when public trust in institutions is at a historical low, governments need to find more opportunities to engage meaningfully with the people they serve, not fewer.

That doesn't mean consulting on everything. It means being thoughtful about where public participation can improve decisions, where people have important knowledge or lived experience to contribute, and where decisions will have significant consequences for communities. It means understanding the difference between informing people, asking for feedback, involving them in developing solutions and sharing responsibility for decisions. And it means being honest about the influence participants can expect to have.

These are not simple skills. Good engagement requires judgment, experience and an understanding of both public expectations and the realities of government decision-making. That's why investing in practitioners matters. And it's why sustaining that investment matters just as much.

When organizations lose sight of capabilities they've already developed, they lose more than the value of the original investment. They lose opportunities to make better decisions, strengthen relationships and build confidence in the institutions they represent.

For Manitoba, I see an opportunity to build on work that has already been done, rather than recreate it. For other organizations, I see a lesson worth considering before the next major investment in organizational change.

It's not enough to ask how we'll build a new capability. We also need to ask what will keep it alive.

An invitation to connect

I remain enormously proud of the work my colleagues and I accomplished in building Manitoba's public engagement capacity. And I remain equally interested in what it could become. If you're working within the Manitoba government and wondering how to reconnect with that capability, I'd welcome the opportunity to have a conversation. There may be more available to you than you realize.

As a nerd that values public participation in democracy I love conversations that help public sector organizations with strategy, engagement and organizational change.

And as a pre-approved vendor for strategic planning services with the Manitoba Government (also all Crown corporations, municipalities, and publicly-funded institutions), we are here to make it easier to move your work forward quickly.

Whether it's reconnecting practitioners, refreshing leadership awareness or identifying practical ways to make better use of existing resources, I'd love to share what I've learned and explore what might be possible. Because sometimes the next step in organizational development isn't building something new. It's recognizing the value of what you've already built, and making sure it has what it needs to last.