What genuine engagement looks like
By Nicola Bonas – Specialist Advisor | Strategic Communications and Engagement
For anyone working in public service, this will feel familiar. Another national engagement framework lands, a new policy, a set of expectations about “involving people.”
We nod, we plan, we put together a questionnaire and we hold a public meeting.
And then we wonder why it never quite changes anything.
THE DATA THAT TOLD US NOTHING
In Devon Primary Care Trust, I once sat with urgent care data that told us everything except the things that mattered. We knew which services people used, when they arrived and what they presented with. We did not know why they made those choices.
So, we asked them.
People told us about bus routes that took them straight to the nearest Emergency Department but not their GP surgery. About trusting one service but not another, because in previous encounters they had been sent elsewhere or simply not heard. About language, fear, habit and who they would call before they ever called the NHS.
None of that was in the data and yet it was the most important part.
Everything changed.
‘None of that was in the data and yet it was the most important part.’
WHERE NEW MUMS ACTUALLY GO
Later, working with pregnant women across Devon, we did not start with a survey. We mapped where new mothers went for help, whether that was church groups, cafés, community centres or WhatsApp groups and we went and met them there.
We sat down, we listened and we drank tea.
We heard things no questionnaire would ever surface: difficult, honest, personal things. Things women shared because someone had finally shown up in their world rather than asking them to show up in ours.
We built ideas as people spoke. Tested them in the moment and took fifty sheets of insight back to the office to make sense of what we had been trusted with.
That trust mattered to us and we wanted it to drive change. Those conversations were where the real ideas came from, the soft furnishings that make a maternity suite feel less clinical and more like home, the added touches sensitive to loss, the community support that helps a new mother feel like she matters.
Brilliance lives in those rooms but only if you go to them.
TRUSTED VOICES, NOT CLEARER MESSAGING
During the pandemic, the same approach helped us reach communities where anxiety was high and vaccination uptake was low.
Not through clearer messaging but through trusted voices. Fears we hadn’t previously heard because we hadn’t been where those fears were spoken.
We supported community leaders to lead their communities, giving them the tools they had helped us create. We worked together and vaccination uptake followed.
Three very different challenges but the same underlying principle: go to where people are, sit down, listen properly and build with them.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH
Here is where corporate arrogance takes hold and organisations gaslight themselves into believing they have involved people.
They default to engineering solutions for human problems by designing processes and expecting people to fit into them. They call it engagement when response rates are low and wonder why communities stop listening.
This is not a failure of effort it is a failure of mindset.
The questionnaire is not neutral and neither is the public meeting. They carry implicit messages about whose time matters, whose language counts, whose experience is worth collecting and whose is incidental.
Genuine engagement is not a stage in a process it is the process. It is uncomfortable because it requires organisations to relinquish control of the agenda, sit in spaces they don’t own and hear things they were not expecting. It asks leaders to be genuinely curious rather than merely compliant with consultation requirements.
When that happens, communities do not just respond, they lead. They generate solutions that no back-room design team would have reached. They invest in the outcome because they have been part of building it.
‘Genuine engagement is not a stage in a process, it is the process.’
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEADERS
If you are designing an engagement exercise right now, ask yourself three questions.
Are we going to where people are — or asking them to come to us?
Are we building with the insight people share — or simply collecting it and reporting back?
Are we trusting communities to lead — or asking them to validate what we have already decided?
The answers reveal where the real work is.
The NHS has extraordinary reserves of goodwill in the communities it serves. People still believe in it and they want it to work. They will give their time, their honesty, their ideas if they trust that doing so will make a difference.
That trust is not a given, it is built through presence, patience and genuine co-production. It is earned every time we show up on someone’s grounds, listen without an agenda, and do something with what we hear.
You need to go to where people are and sit down and listen properly, be in the moment as you genuinely build with them and then make things move together.
People, not problems.
Nicola Bonas · Specialist Advisor, Moore & Company