FS67 - Public Dialogue with Suzannah Lansdell Facilitation Stories

In this episode Nikki talks to Suzannah Lansdell about Public Dialogue.  Suzannah is a  freelance facilitator who also advises organisations on how to do public and stakeholder dialogue, particularly in the science and technology sector for Sciencewise. 
 They talk about
Public Dialogue as a process bringing together members of the public with specialists and policy makers to discuss complex and controversial topics and gather public insights on the issues without necessarily coming to firm recommendations;
“this is this is not a Focus Group. It's not kind of top of mind views. It's digging behind that”
 How members of the public are engaged to take part; The role of a facilitator in Public Dialogue and how it’s different from other types of facilitation;
Some recent topics for Public Dialogue including Embryo Research, Future Flight and the role of Data;
The experience of participants and how this differs from other consultative processes; 
“one of the key things about Public Dialogue as you give people the time to kind of wrestle around the issue and think more deeply.”
 How information is shared with participants, including striking a balance on the level of detail and the importance of including a diverse range of specialist perspectives; Evaluation in Public Dialogue and the focus on monitoring longer term impacts from the process;
Suzannah’s hopes and expectations for the future of Public Dialogue, becoming more embedded in policy making and democratic processes.
A full transcript is below.
Links
Today’s guest:
Suzannah Lansdell on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/suzannah-lansdell-ab23a78
Today’s subject
 Sciencewise: https://sciencewise.org.uk/
 Involve Resources: https://involve.org.uk/resources/knowledge-base/resources
 Involve Methods: https://involve.org.uk/resources/methods
 
To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter:
 Facilitation Stories website: https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/
 And to email us: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org
 IAF England and Wales: https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales
 
The Facilitation Stories Team:
 Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/
 Nikki Wilson:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/
  
Transcript
N.W
Hello, and welcome to Facilitation Stories brought to you by the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Nikki Wilson (NW) and today I'm going to be talking to Suzannah Lansdell (SL) about public dialogue. So welcome, Suzannah. 
 
S.L
Thanks, Nikki, lovely to be here. 
 
N.W
Okay, so to start off with, could you tell us a little bit more about you and what you do.
 
S.L
So I'm a freelance facilitator, I've been doing that for about 15 years or so. I started, and so how I got into it just as a bit of context, as it sort of helps a bit with the public dialogue is, I started working for an environment charity back in the 90s. And I was doing a lot of work then with businesses, convincing them that there were commercial implications around environment sustainability issues. But one part of that the charity had was also about consensus building, about how do you get different organisations to approach environment sustainability issues, that at that time in the 90s, were very kind of adversarial in a more kind of consensus based approach. And absolutely core to that was facilitation, as a way to, to break through that more adversarial approach. So then I started working a lot on that and I kind of cut my teeth on some of the big issues of the day, things like nuclear waste, oil disposal, oil infrastructure disposal, biotechnology. So some really kind of big issues where people were on opposing sides and a facilitative approach helped people to kind of have more constructive conversations and find a way through. So that's kind of where I cut my