“You only come to us when you need something. This isn’t a relationship, it’s insulting.”

I’ll never forget those words.

I had just started at NZTA and was meeting an important stakeholder about a bridge project on State Highway 2. I had no knowledge of the organisation’s history with them. They did though, and their experience went back to the days before NZTA, when it was Transit New Zealand.

The project manager and I had approached them because we needed to discuss the bridge. From their perspective, our visit continued a long-standing pattern. The organisation appeared when it needed something from them, then the relationship went quiet again.

That conversation has stayed with me because it changed how I thought about the starting point for engagement. For the project team, the bridge was the beginning of the work. For the stakeholder, this was another conversation in a relationship that had been forming over decades.

The same thing happens when people arrive at a community meeting. They already have a sense of what it is like to deal with the organisation. That may come from direct experience, or from watching what happened when somebody else tried to raise a concern.

Sometimes the team running the meeting knows that history. Sometimes, as I found on that bridge project, they are walking into it for the first time.

This helps explain why a community session or stakeholder meeting can be well prepared and still feel difficult from the outset. The presentation might be clear and the team ready to answer questions, yet people want to revisit something that happened years ago. They question whether the current process is genuine, or whether anything will happen with their feedback this time.

It is easy for the team to feel as though the conversation has gone off track. But from the community’s perspective, it may be entirely on track. They are trying to understand whether this experience will be any different from the ones that came before it.

Behavioural science describes part of this as epistemic vigilance. When we depend on information from someone else, we assess whether the source is credible as well as whether the information makes sense. Past experience helps us make that judgement. If an organisation has been unreliable before, people will listen more cautiously and look more closely for gaps between what is said and what happens.

When that happens, the instinct from the project team is often to provide more information. A subject matter expert explains the methodology again or adds another layer of technical detail.

That can be a perfectly good answer to the question on the surface, while missing what people are really trying to find out. Much of that concern sits between the lines and is communicated through body language.

If people are unsure whether the organisation can be relied on, more detail about the project will only take the conversation so far. They are also paying attention to whether the team understands their experience and what happens when they raise something uncomfortable.

Preparation for community and stakeholder meetings needs to begin with the relationship, before anyone starts working on the presentation.

In that preparation phase, I’d want the team to ask within their organisation:

1. What experience have these community members or stakeholders already had with this project or organisation?
2. Is there something they have raised before that remains unresolved?
3. What are they likely to assume about why we are approaching them now?
4. Is there history we should acknowledge at the beginning of the meeting?
5. What can we show people about how this process will work?
6. What follow-up can we genuinely commit to?

This does not require the current team to accept responsibility for every past decision. Nor does it mean every community meeting needs to become a lengthy discussion about what happened before.

It means recognising the relationship people believe they are in.

Sometimes a straightforward acknowledgement can change the starting point:

“We know some of you raised this concern during the earlier process and did not receive a clear response. We cannot change that experience today. We can make sure the questions we cannot answer are recorded, publish the responses and update you by 18 August.”

That response does not promise to resolve everything. It shows that the history has been heard and gives people something specific by which to judge what happens next.

Trust is built through the whole life of a relationship. It is influenced by how people are approached in the first place and what the organisation does when there is no immediate project need. It is affected by how the team responds when a community meeting becomes difficult. Then it continues through the follow-up, because people remember whether the organisation did what it said it would do.

Each experience becomes part of the next conversation.

That stakeholder on the bridge project was telling us that the years between formal engagements mattered. I have carried that with me ever since.

It is also part of the thinking behind the Conditions of Trust Network, which I’m developing for people responsible for stakeholder relationships around complex projects.

If this is part of your work, you can read more about the network and register your interest here.

Until next week.
Margot B
Trusted Voice in Authentic Engagement