Building consensus in a large and complex setting

How do you create alignment across teams and colleagues who have different drivers and motivations?

While this challenge was familiar to Lucent in its work with charities and philanthropies, we were delighted to work with the University of Oxford on this same challenge in a different setting.

We partnered with Matthew Hickman and colleagues to help develop a strategy for Public and Community Engagement with Research.

To do this, we:

  • mapped complex University structures with them and developed a plan of who to work with and how;

  • supported engagement with the Advisory Board;

  • helped to grow ownership of the strategy through focus groups of public engagement leads from across the University;

  • acted as a critical friend through the drafting of the strategy, with an emphasis on clarity and simplicity; and

  • created a structured space for the team to learn about how it best engages the local community.

Mat Hickman said of the work:

“The strategy sets out a vision for nurturing our internal environment for engagement, and improving engagement practice. It recognises that public engagement must be part of the entire research process, not bolted on at the end. Lucent provided wise counsel throughout the process, offering us both support and challenge as we navigated building consensus in a large and complex setting.”

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BlogKatherine Rake