Equipping Historic England's staff with the tools to embed a new Participation Strategy
The challenge
Having supported Historic England to co-create their ‘Active Participation’ Strategy with people across the UK, we were tasked with equipping teams across the organisation to understand and adopt the principles of the strategy. This included working with a cross spectrum of people; some coming from teams who had until then had little to do with considering or delivering public engagement.
At the heart of the strategy for how Historic England would work with citizens going forward, was a shift from always being the expert in deciding what qualified as heritage and what were the key priorities, to being more of a learner open to a diversity of thought and ideas inside and outside the organisation.
Our approach
To support the adoption of the strategy we developed three main areas of activity: to build the ‘narrative’ of working with Citizens in different ways, to introduce ‘rituals’ for considering how to involve the public in the day to day work of different teams, and to create more attention grabbing ‘totems’ symbolic of how Historic England wanted to work with citizens.
We supported the Director of Public Engagement and Communication in working towards a ‘launch’ of the strategy including supporting senior leaders in the organisation to understand and talk to the why and how of citizen engagement.
We created a group of engagement ‘pioneers’ - self-selecting colleagues from across the organisation - to act as advocates and problem solvers for enacting the strategy. In tandem, we worked with a group of colleagues that represented a cross section of the Public Engagement and Communication Directorate, in an ‘Action Lab’ to immerse them in the insights and tools that supported the strategy and give space to imagine how these might be applied in their area.
We worked with identified ‘totem’ areas including Heritage Action Zones to support the teams in enacting the learnings and ambitions of the strategy through their work.
“Whatever role you have at HE, the opportunity to creatively work through the engagement strategy and its building blocks collaboratively with colleagues really enables you to understand its potential for the organisation and our work on a team and individual basis.” - Action Lab participant
Impact and learning
Historic England have committed to ‘Active Participation’ at the highest levels of the organisation - making it a central pillar of their ‘Future Strategy’. They have gone on to involve citizens in a number of landmark ways including the expanded ‘Blue Plaque’ scheme where the public can nominate historic figures in their community to be celebrated, and the ‘Missing Pieces’ project which invites people to add their stories to the heritage list.
For some people in Historic England it was a significant and concerning shift to consider involving the public in areas where traditionally they hadn’t played a role or to sometimes cede their role as the expert. One learning was about the importance of creating space for colleagues to share those concerns and for constructive conversations between colleagues that provided both reassurance and challenge.
It takes time to adopt new ways of working and build the belief for the difference this can make; finding advocates and going where the energy to show what is possible is an important way of building momentum and understanding.