The issue
Community engagement becomes strategic when it changes the future under consideration.
Too often, people are asked to react to a narrow set of prepared options. This may improve implementation detail, but it rarely accesses the full diversity of local imagination and knowledge.
How this affects Australians and Queenslanders
For Australians, earlier co-creation can improve the legitimacy and implementability of major public decisions.
For Queenslanders, residents, First Nations knowledge holders, practitioners, young people, industry and government can reveal consequences and opportunities before choices become difficult to change.
The second-order cost of late engagement is avoidable redesign, delay and mistrust when overlooked impacts surface after commitment.
A preferred future would invite diverse participants to shape possibilities while the future is still genuinely open.
This shifts the central question from:
How do people respond to the options?
to:
Whose perspective is missing from the preferred-future conversation—and what possibility might they reveal?
#CoCreation
#CommunityFutures
#EngagingFutures
#InclusiveFutures
#PublicLeadership
Originally published on LinkedIn: Dr Colin Russo on LinkedIn