From Resolution Copper and Grasberg, to reopening mines in Minnesota’s Iron Range, we’ve been working a lot lately on mining and energy projects that are facing increasingly stiff and well-promoted opposition; action that has the potential to deeply burden or even halt important resource developments.
Helping industries to engage meaningfully with their host communities and other critical stakeholders can have its challenges, especially when trust has been lost, and opposition is high.
And for most industry-stakeholder interactions, the methods have become routine and the eventual outcomes predictable. But special approaches are needed when these interactions escalate to crisis levels, with polarised views, outrage and well-organised opposition that can stop projects and shut down operations.
Social scientists have built, adapted and strengthened methods and tools to help promote the success of these engagements over time. Likewise, public relations (PR) professionals, attorneys and executive/board advisors have established methods for engagement from their areas of expertise.
As specialists dedicated to helping stakeholders find common ground even amidst the most challenging opposition, we have worked extensively around (and occasionally been drawn into) violent conflicts.
We’ve also provided expert witness testimony/advice and press commentary for high-profile and controversial cases, and mediated disputes among groups with entrenched differences.
In doing so, we’ve come to recognise which characteristics distinguish industry-community interactions that become so high profile they require special approaches. Key characteristics include:
- Transition of community groups’ reactions from uncertainty to loss of trust, to anger, to outrage.
- Public review processes that transition from dialogue to complaint and, on occasion, to lawsuits.
- Civil actions, such as protests, blockades, strikes and boycotts.
When these cracks start to appear, opposing parties often give up hope of building collaborative paths forward.
But when there remains a thread of will or a requirement for both sides to continue to engage, we’ve learned some important lessons about practices that can make a difference in finding common paths to at least productive dialogue, if not a reliable state of consensus.
“In our first meeting, a member of the group interrupted the introduction and yelled ‘we don’t want you here!’ Where do you go from there?”
Here are ten key lessons that leaders can apply to encourage engagement through a crisis:
- Lean to objectivity – Encouraging dialogue that is directed by opinions, judgement and intuition can be helpful in guiding productive engagement in the absence of extreme opposition. But when that level of opposition is present, focusing strictly on mutually accepted facts and evidence of key points is often a safer and more reliable means of keeping parties engaged in dialogue. Otherwise, it can be surprisingly easy to say something that alienates or appears biased toward one side, which could result in a loss of trust.
- Listen powerfully – Exercise the commitment and strength to listen actively and deeply. Reflect what you’ve heard impartially and with firm and clear diplomacy. Model this style for opponents to move beyond simply speaking to being heard.
- Model transparency – Following extended and open listening, when groups signal that they want to hear from you, share the proponent’s efforts to allay stakeholder worries, emphasising quantifiable commitments and actions above ambiguous promises. It’s important to ensure these efforts are grounded in a commitment and gut check to consistently follow through on promises, even in the heat of opposition and rhetoric that may seem unfair.
- Preserve uniformity across all channels – To prevent contradictory messages that can damage confidence, make sure your messaging is consistent across all platforms of communication, including press releases, social media, and stakeholder meetings.
- Understand and acknowledge cultural nuances – One of the most impactful ways to foster dialogue in these situations is by deeply understanding the cultural and historical context of the communities involved. Outrage often stems from underlying grievances, such as perceived cultural disruption or exclusion, which can escalate when these perspectives are overlooked. Ensuring that informal and traditional power structures are acknowledged alongside formal leadership is critical for inclusive and meaningful engagement.
“Sustainable solutions must align with community values to foster lasting acceptance.”
- Use culturally grounded communication – Engage with and build capacity of local community representatives to help communicate using local metaphors, narratives and/or rituals. This can help reframe conflict and foster understanding. By aligning proposed actions with the community’s values and identity, resistance can often shift toward collaboration. These approaches don’t just help resolve immediate tensions but can also lay the groundwork for long-term trust and sustainable relationships.
- Look beyond just impacts to manage behaviours – Communities are typically vocal about adverse impacts and consequences, but their perceptions and trust are often more heavily (but not visibly) influenced by a company’s underlying behaviours and daily openness to dialogue – particularly in legacy environments of anger and opposition. Don’t over-rely on impact assessments and grievance mechanisms. Make sure that workforce and corporate behaviours reflect the spirit of partnership you want to create and the positive legacy you want to leave.
“Adopt the practice of interactions that are open with genuine intent where communities are then more willing to say: ‘I don’t necessarily agree with you, but I appreciate the honesty and transparency’.”
“Communities don’t want to know everything about a company, but they value the day-to-day consistent efforts to keep them informed, having conversations that may elicit creative ideas, demonstrating relational respect, which directly affects longer-term company-community relationships.”
- Facilitate both group and individual outcomes – The International Association of Facilitators’ Core Competencies for Certified Facilitators calls for committing to successful outcomes for a group, but also tending to the needs of individuals within that group. When using a facilitator to enable dialogue through public meetings, working groups or focus groups, ensure they are not only focused on helping the group to raise issues and achieve consensus, but also attentive to members who are ‘stuck’ on an issue and need extra time, information or care to move forward.
- Know when and how to move from facilitation to mediation – The objective of facilitation is typically to reach group consensus on points of conflict or uncertainty. A good facilitator, especially one who is also a trained mediator, will know at which point dialogues get heated enough that it’s time to introduce mediation techniques into the mix. Always start this transition by being transparent and asking the parties if they agree to use non-binding mediation to try to find a resolution that both sides can live with.
- Manage the boundaries between social science, PR and legal approaches – Lawyers and PR professionals often share differing viewpoints when it comes to issuing public statements in high-risk environments. Both are critical to managing high-risk company-community dynamics, especially when collaboration degrades to crisis. But finding a sustainable pathway out of that crisis also requires a deep understanding of the facts, background and cultural determinants that influence how opponents see their heritage, values and societal security being affected by an outside change. Trained social scientists have the tools to help both sides better understand, appreciate, and build productive dialogue regarding those determinants.
Finding mutually agreeable paths forward
Prime time news, social media and, too often, board meetings are full of stories about multi-billion-dollar development programmes that are stopped by adamant opposition.
The dual trends of increasing polarisation and growing opponent success in litigation will likely overpower the recent swing to more business-friendly government policy to fuel further losses and reputational damages to good companies that mean well.
As well-organised opponents increasingly promote the escalation of stakeholders’ uncertainty to loss of trust, anger and outrage, business can meet this challenge by engaging qualified social scientists to help neutralise conflict, carefully explore common ground, and potentially forge co-developed and sustainable paths forward.
The results are likely to provide a better outcome for everyone.
About the authors
Lead author: Dean Slocum, sociologist, de-risking expert and mediator, founder and President of Acorn International, LLC.
Contributing authors:
- Corinne Scott Hancock – cultural anthropologist, keynote speaker and “chaos coach”, currently serving as Peace Corps volunteer in northern Namibia.
- Tara Goodwin – public relations specialist focusing on crisis, founder and President of Goodwin Consulting PR agency.
This article was first published on the Acorn International website. Read the original here