Learn to learn from Everyday Experts

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

This episode is about how to bring the right people into the room, and how to facilitate the process to make better decisions.

I learned not only about solutions to fundamental “people problems” in our democracy on this episode, I learned how Dani is approaching getting help from “everyday experts”: he took the business community’s “focus group” concept, improved on it, and applied it to public service, learning from bus riders, or hospital patients, or utility customers – by “building community at the neighborhood level and tying it to a larger mission.”
7:40 – “We do have to solve those big problems… but before… we have to raise the level of not only civic participation but civic empowerment, civic trust.”

10:42 – “the person responsible… is not an elected official… their work is… the source of disaffection… if we want to increase people’s sense of civic… engagement… we have to also go to this other source of decision-making and power, which are these (non-elected officials).”

12:08 – Cohear exists to help public officials “to get the right people to talk to…”

14:27 – “we believe living an issue every day makes you an expert… and learning from those experts leads to better outcomes.”

15:01 – “we are here to change the culture of how decisions are made… by embedding the principle of everyday experts.”

20:34 – “to do culture change… you have to have small, meaningful (person relationship building) interactions.”

24:42 – “It’s a way to feed two birds with one scone.”

25:09 – “If you don’t build the trust… you won’t get the level of creativity that you want.”

27:43 – “what you do with everyday experts is set up a time and a place to listen to them, let them talk, and have a decisionmaker in the room…not by filling out a Survey Monkey.”

If you want to learn more about Cohear’s approach to Everyday Experts, you can reach Dani at [e-mail].