LOCAL COUNCIL
collaborative Decision making REVIEW
REFLECTING ON YOUR PROGRESS
Local councils face unique decision-making challenges. Like boards, they require a high level of collaboration between decision makers and decision advisors. In addition they often experience significant turn over in the councillor group, need to cater for considerable diversity in beliefs and opinions and operate under extreme levels of public scrutiny.
The following tool has been designed to help members of the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and Councillor group reflect on their overall effectiveness and capacity for collaborative decision-making.
Understanding the fundamentals of sound collaborative decision-making is key to both the quality of decisions that get made but also the productivity and culture across the broader decision making environment.
Now that we’re six months into the new council term it’s the perfect time to pause, zoom out, and reflect on the decision making environment that’s being created. It’s likely that challenges, gaps and opportunities for improvement are becoming more evident. At the same time, with most issues still yet to be ingrained, processes, outcomes, and relationships can still be shaped (or salvaged).
The review has been designed to be easy and quick to undertake and consists of just ten questions (based on key elements of my Collaborative Decision-Making framework). You may want to consider having members of both the Councillor group and Executive team undertake the review independently to see where perspectives align and differ*.
* If you’d like assistance in doing this anonymously please get in touch.
