Conversations with Government can improve your data health.
Conversations with Government can improve your data health.
By Peter Hanley
Consultations are not for everyone. I am going to invite you to think of consultation as a purposeful and useful part of helping society to work better. I will also suggest that if you are a first timer, you think about buddying up with someone with experience of consultations as a way of getting used to how they work and how to approach them.
No one was ever an Olympic swimmer without training and coaching. Consultations are no different, except that you tend not to get a medal for putting in a leading contribution. I have been involved in designing and responding to government level consultations for the best part of 30 years, and the most I got was a warm response email. That was sufficient reward for me to know my work had landed with someone who was part of initiating the consultation.
We need to be clear what a consultation is. It is not the irritating and often unwelcome and unnecessary email/text asking for you to score a delivery service or experience. To me, this is simply data gathering by the supplier that will make no real difference to the product or service.
A consultation is what an organisation, which has a significant role in the governance of a city, region or whole nation (UK), uses when it wants to change how it does business in a way that will affect that group of citizens.
I really enjoy responding to consultations! The bigger and more significant the better.
Consultations are a purposeful and useful part of helping society to work better.
The first consultation I was involved with for JAAG was to comment on: “Competition and Markets Authority Annual Plan Consultation 2021/22” (a link to the original document is here ).
Among the many government interests for inquiry involved was this item of relevance to JAAG: “how auditability and explainability of algorithms might work in practice.” A team of JAAG volunteers compiled the responses in the short time available: 15 Dec 2020 to 28 Jan 2021. Having a clear purpose to focus our attention kept us going; it is unlikely that one group will be able to cover all the topics on which government wants comments.
Purpose
Purpose was relevant when I was the Hon Treasurer for a national faith charity. I became aware of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) consultation on “Risk Management, Internal Control and the Going Concern Basis of Accounting”. As a treasurer of a charity, I felt I needed to have an in depth appreciation of the meaning of “Going Concern”.
Working through the consultation papers, I gained a really good grasp of this topic, sufficient that some 6 years later the senior partner of our auditing firm said our charity knew more than they did.
Purpose, I have found, helps you to develop an appreciative perspective on a topic. It’s important to allow the creative ideas to flow, which is what government needs and ultimately serves society. If consultations are conducted in a warm and friendly way, then better outcomes stand a better chance of emerging.
Consultations well done are good for our society and good for us; that’s my belief. As I said, you won’t get a medal, but as my Royal Navy officer training director said: “If a job is worth doing, then it is worth doing well”. As volunteers, this clarification of purpose and the good that our contribution could make are important to the relationships we build with other people who see our work.
When we go into submitting consultations, we unknowingly become part of a much bigger team of people, also in search of better ways to do things. I personally find that an amazing and humbling experience.
Peter Hanley is an active member of JAAG and Co-Founder of The Success Laboratory conducting research into the practicalities of achieving success which is fun and less frenetic and damaging to ourselves and our planet.