Meaningful Model Making: Designing Strategic Stakeholder Engagement through Conversations

Effectively engaging community stakeholders in urban system decision making is becoming increasingly important considering the complex environmental conditions threatening the well-being of citizens and their cities. Participatory Modeling, coupled with complementary participatory techniques, can be a powerful approach that helps communities take charge of their future and develop solutions to address the complex problems they are facing. Community stakeholder satisfaction with the modeling experience can be positively impacted by designing for strategic engagement through conversations. While conversations are the smallest and the largest unit of human change, we spend very little time carefully designing them. Well-designed and executed conversations can help create and sustain the clarity, trust, agreements, and roles necessary for strategic community engagement throughout all phases of the modeling project. Taking a conversation-based approach directly engages community stakeholders in defining diverse pathways for their participation. When planning a modeling project, design engagement conversations to define modeling team roles and to staff the roles, determine the types of engagement needed from each role during each phase of the project, and ask community stakeholders about their capacity and availability (don’t assume they are too busy or unwilling to participate deeply). Prioritizing and undertaking an intentional conversation-based process will help to achieve diverse engagement driven by stakeholders who identify and own their own participation level and contributions. I will present lessons learned from food systems modeling projects in Flint, MI, and Cleveland, OH, as well as, discuss the aspects of those projects that might be appropriate to replicate in Detroit, MI. The session builds on concepts introduced in the iEMSs 2018 session “Making Meaningful Models: Partnering with Stakeholders Throughout the Modelling Process”; and the “Identifying and Engaging Stakeholders in Participatory Modeling Projects” workshop facilitated at the Innovations in Collaborative Modeling – Participatory Modeling Field School hosted in Detroit in 2019.