We look at four alternative ways to help impact assessment professionals probe deeper and be more productive transformative leaders.
The way you ask questions during the various stages of impact assessment helps build trust influence and importantly releases information during internal and external stakeholder events.
Asking the right question at the right time and in the right manner is a critical EIA leadership skill and can fast-track a project team towards greater decision-making and performance. Asking questions helps keep stakeholders and project teams engaged in your risk appraisal and safeguarding agendas, crucial when you are to influence the risk of the project or ‘do significant harm’ (DNSH) design, operation or mitigation. This ties in with similar conclusions reached by Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffewho in their assessment of influencing skills as a core part of leadership investigated different forms of questioning that we use in our work.
The consideration of how powerful questioning can be has now been within us in the Western world for around 2,500 years. As early as 375 B.C., Plato was teaching the importance of helping children to ask and answer questions, helping lay the foundation of our belief that some questions are more insightful than others, but also that some people are allowed to ask more questions than others (teachers, barristers, journalists) and hopefully IA professionals in a business context.
A key part of the leadership style of many leaders is that they have been granted the authority (or have an unspoken licence) to ask a lot of questions and to receive honest answers back.
In my career I have reviewed and experienced many questionnaires, all looking for insights or in the case of consultative EIA questionnaires the answers to several social or economic issues raised through a proposed development. They are all founded on the simple belief that if you ask the right question, you will automatically be given the answers you need to make the correct decisions. With experience, you learn that not only is this not true at times, but poorly structured questionnaires or 1-2-1 questioning during EIA processes can delay projects, throw up non-significant diversions or even dilute the information coming in from other assessments tools. Poor questioning skills within IA practice can easily deflect the role of EIA in predicting risk from a variety of viewpoints, your opportunity to build trust and hence knowledge from other parties associated with the EIA- project development process and to minimise the scale or nature of the final developmental footprint.
If your questions lack the ability to make people reflect or think deeply on an issue, the less they will understand the nature, significance and importance of key issues. For example, asking early questions concerning environmentally inclusive design or the project team’s sustainability vision for the project across a new project team can be important in helping the team align across disciplines about what is important professionally to individuals and the wider team ethos. Asking the same projects too late in the project management cycle will rarely deliver results! It can also influence the behaviours and decisions they are willing to make, and the degree of flexibility they may show when working across disciplinary subjects.
I have experienced several project managers who actively oppose question asking amongst the project team, preferring a more transactional and authoritarian style of project management. This openly shows poor leadership as they seem to feel that a culture of question asking amongst the team somehow undermines their authority and control. I believe strongly that freedom to ask questions, to challenge conventional wisdom and to probe into another’s the discipline for greater insight and learning (through questions) help teams build trust, internal respect and build a better working environment. For a leader to curb such traits seems to prove an immaturity into how multi-disciplinary teams need to work and a lack of confidence in their own innate leadership authority to function as the ringmaster to this circus of talents. I call the dynamics amongst teams who own an open and pro-active approach to challenging their own and the work of others ‘creative tension’ and have actively fought against disciplinarian project managers who have looked to stem or curb this dialogue.
For an IA professional to truly unleash the power of questions and questioning, there seem to be four core techniques to master during the transition through the EIA process to help you be more productive and more engaged with both the project development and EIA-regulatory consenting process.
There are often three to five potential environmental or social concerns that will require detailed focus on during an EIA. In the case of wastewater treatment plants, these may be odour control, noise emissions, transport movements, house price impacts and water quality. For a windfarm, these may be landscape impacts, avian disturbance, noise emissions and construction impacts. The list will cover the range of project types, landscapes, and the nature of people and their environments.
Project teams often follow a pre-set agenda based on a team update method:
This is an effective management approach but focuses on individual team issues rather than cross-disciplinary challenges, providing other project members with information on the activity levels within other teams rather than focusing the attention of all players on project outcomes.
Too often, too little time is spent by the team focusing on the key issues that will define success – notably regulatory consents. No matter how good the engineering design is, if the project doesn’t clear its required consent and regulatory hurdles in terms of land use planning consent, it will not be built. So, it yields rewards when the whole team focuses its attention on the same problem at the same time. Bringing an intensive multi-disciplinary dissection of the issue, its cross-disciplinary components and the range of strategic alternatives that can deliver optimal outcomes for the project team. Giving teams time to focus on one issue and stimulating the group’s thinking by asking focused questions on that issue often leads to greater reflection and insight into potential strategies and residual actions. Seek to set out questions that focus the team into sharing their thoughts and ideas that can help the project deliver workaround or alternative design, prevention or mitigation strategies to address a critical key issue. Even when time is one of the key parameters (cost and quality often being the others) focused questions across the team to bring about closer alignment and strategic decision-making should be a priority.
Key message: The fewer IA-related questions you ask and the less they are focused on determining key ESG issues, the less focused others in the team will be on their importance, the less reflection they will give to the issues and the poorer the cross-disciplinary alignment on an issue will be, and the greater the risk to the project that they are busy delivering outcomes of little value to the EIA.
All consultation questionnaires are based on the premise that there are the ‘right’ questions to ask. Incidentally, the questionnaire is also a project deliverable so there is often a temptation to make it fit the proponents desired outcomes. This can be a problem and has resulted in many questionnaires reaching new standards in blandness and whether that consultee really needs to ask that unnecessary question. So, what are the right questions to ask?
No consultee can have all the right answers to our questionnaire, and their areas of valid input will often cross different social and environmental parameters. Many IA professionals often seem to forget that we need to learn what they know to improve EIA decision-making, not treat the consultation process as yet another standalone chapter in the EIS. Consultations work significantly better when diverse consultees receive focused questions or are allowed to ask their own unique questions of the project. Improved data flows into the project result when consultee(s) have the freedom to express their own curiosity about the project, its design pathways and its potential for impact – and critically their priorities and information gaps that would determine their final decision-making.
Key message: Don’t be a dictator during the consultation process, the power to let others ask the questions that are key to their information needs and decision-making (and the quality and focus of your response in answering them) will go a long way in building trust. Make space in the EIA process for all consultees and communities to ask their own, in their own way and on their own terms.
Tapping into the knowledge and insight of consultees means recognizing that people accept, reflect on and feedback information in different ways and styles of communication. Whilst an EIS faces the later challenge of being poured over by technical and planning experts, and often lawyers. Documents such as consultation documents, exhibition information and the Non-Technical Summary should be written in a style that matches the literacy and capability of as many people as possible. I have often challenged my team to write clearly and concisely in a style that would allow a 1st-year university student to easily explain the project to his grandmother!
Yet I have come across IA professionals who have relished their intellectual ability – noise impact and geoengineering specialists being the worst, ecologists who love using the Latin name of species and worst of all corporate communication experts who are unable to talk to communities without using corporate speak.
The answer, position your written and oral questions in a style and manner that is easily understood by the recipient and critically give them time to reflect and respond. Finally, formally note and respond in a clear and concise mater to the key questions they have raised.
There is a growing issue in EIA that proponents and project teams view consultation and exhibit events as an opportunity to change minds. This should certainly be accommodated by allowing open questioning and active dialogue. However, the consultation process must not be trumped by PR activities, as this can leave communities and consultees believing that they have been talked down to.
Key message: The results of consultations, open questions and active listening by the EIA team during consultation events should create a detailed picture of what is important to communities and individual consultees, the process building on and affirming information identified in earlier baseline and scoping phases. Reactions will improve dependent on what kind of questions they’re asking and whether they are presented in a manner that they understand.
I am often surprised by the extent to which many IA professionals are asked to be exhibition managers and public space decorators in their work. Public exhibitions require careful thought about the level of information presented and the way it is presented.
I recently attended one masterful ‘EIA exhibition’ as a community representative for a proposed development of 500 new houses in my village of 1200 houses. The diagrams, maps and figures were so carefully developed that all the local villagers had trouble finding the site, its scale and what the development would look like. I challenged one of the EIA consultants over what questions they were being asked and their majority of questions seemed to be ‘Exactly where is this development located?’
I was appalled by the extent that the proponent was manipulating the data presented to the community, and by the tacit agreement of the EIA consultancy to go along with this. The Information provided in such events and the quality of data presented in the EIS are I believe core professional IA attributes. It is true that one picture can save 1000 words, and yet the quality of data presented in some EIS, and EIA consultations can be incredibly poor.
In the past when working on power infrastructure and renewables, I liked the first 4 exhibition boards to contain a series of Ordnance Survey maps for the area, from the earliest to the most current. This I believed allowed people to gain an understanding of how their local landscape had changed over the last 200 years and position themselves within those changes. This led to greater questioning about our projects impact within that environment and what sensitivities were most at risk.
Key message: presenting information in a manner that stimulates reflection encourages better dialogue, questioning and insight into the environmental and social issues at risk. Using such means to open questioning of the project demands that the proponent and his supporting team have a strong ‘need for the project’ story and for how it is being designed for reception within its receiving landscape or community.
Asking the right questions gives us the information we need as IA professionals to determine and anticipate impacts. It is therefore an invaluable leadership skill within modern EIA and needs to be considered at all phases of the EIA process.
Finally, the tools you use in communication and public participation are as important as the manner in which you ask questions. There are lots of techniques that IA professionals can use to develop their skills.