I've led stakeholder engagement across government, iwi, and community organisations. Isaac has run discovery processes for enterprise technology projects. We come from different worlds, but we've landed on the same conclusion: the best engagement starts with listening, and the worst starts with a plan.
What You Need to Know
- Stakeholder engagement is not a communications activity. It's a relationship-building exercise that happens to produce communications outcomes.
- The government-iwi-community dynamic in Aotearoa requires a specific approach, one that respects Treaty obligations, power imbalances, and the long history of engagement done badly.
- Listening before speaking isn't slower. It's faster, because you avoid the cycles of miscommunication, rework, and trust repair that come from getting it wrong the first time.
- The framework we outline here works across sectors: government, enterprise technology, community development.
Why Most Engagement Fails
The standard approach looks like this. An organisation decides it needs stakeholder buy-in for a project. It writes a communications plan. It schedules consultation meetings. It presents its preferred approach and asks for feedback. The feedback is polite, noncommittal, and largely ignored. The project proceeds. Six months later, the organisation is surprised when the community doesn't engage with the outcome.
This isn't engagement. It's notification dressed up as consultation.
83%
of public sector stakeholder engagement processes rated 'inform' or 'consult' on the IAP2 spectrum, with only 6% reaching 'empower'
Source: IAP2 Australasia, Engagement State of Practice Report, 2023
I've sat through dozens of these processes, both as the person running them and as the community representative being "consulted." The difference in experience is stark. From the organisational side, the boxes get ticked. From the community side, you feel like a prop in someone else's process.
The Listening-First Framework
What works is different. It's slower at the start and faster overall. Here's what we've learned across our combined experience.
Phase 1: Show Up Without an Agenda
The most effective engagement I led at Te Hiku started without a project brief. We spent weeks in the community, attending hui, having kōrero over cups of tea, and building relationships with no transactional goal. This wasn't wasted time. It was the foundation everything else was built on.
For government work, this is harder to justify in a business case. But at the Ministry of Education, I've found ways to build listening into the early stages of policy development, before the options are written, before the preferred approach is locked in. The quality of the resulting engagement is incomparably better.
Phase 2: Map Relationships, Not Stakeholders
Most organisations produce a stakeholder map: a grid of names, influence levels, and engagement strategies. This is useful for managing a process. It's useless for building relationships.
What matters is understanding the relationships between stakeholders, the history between them, the power dynamics, the unspoken tensions, and the shared aspirations. In the iwi-government space, these relationships span generations. You can't map them in a workshop. You learn them by listening.
In technology discovery, we see the same pattern. The stakeholder map says "IT Director, high influence." But the person who actually determines whether the project succeeds is the operations lead three levels down who's been burned by the last two system changes. You only find that out by listening.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
Phase 3: Co-Design the Process, Not Just the Outcome
Here's where most engagement goes wrong: the process is designed by the organisation, and the community is invited to participate in it. That's backwards.
At Te Hiku, the community shaped how we engaged, not just what we engaged on. The hui format, the karakia, the order of speakers, the way decisions were made, all of it reflected the community's tikanga. This wasn't a cultural add-on. It was structural. The engagement process belonged to the community, and that ownership produced genuine participation.
In government, co-designing the process requires giving up control. That's uncomfortable for organisations used to managing timelines and deliverables. But the alternative, running a process the community doesn't own, produces outcomes the community doesn't support.
Phase 4: Close the Loop, Every Time
The fastest way to destroy trust in an engagement process is to ask for input and then go silent. Every piece of feedback needs a response, even if the response is "we heard you, and here's why we went a different direction."
This is where many organisations fail. They run excellent engagement sessions, collect rich feedback, and then disappear into internal decision-making processes for months. By the time the decision is announced, the community has moved on, or worse, concluded that the engagement was performative.
2-3x
higher implementation success rates for projects where stakeholders report genuine engagement
Source: New Zealand Government, Better Business Cases Framework Review, 2023
What This Means for Technology Projects
Isaac and I have talked about this a lot. The parallels between community engagement and technology discovery are real.
In both contexts, the people closest to the problem have the best understanding of it. In both contexts, the organisation commissioning the work tends to assume it knows the answer before asking the question. And in both contexts, listening first produces better outcomes, faster delivery, and less rework.
The difference is that community engagement carries higher stakes. When a technology project skips discovery, you get a product that doesn't fit. When a government policy skips genuine engagement, you get outcomes that harm communities.
The Hard Part
None of this is new. The IAP2 framework has existed for decades. Treaty of Waitangi principles require genuine partnership. Community development literature is full of listening-first approaches.
The hard part isn't knowing what to do. It's doing it when the funding timeline is tight, the minister wants results by June, and the procurement process requires a detailed plan before you've had a single conversation with the community.
I don't have a neat solution for that tension. What I have is experience showing that the projects which make time for genuine listening, even under pressure, consistently outperform the ones that don't. The shortcut of skipping engagement is never actually shorter.