Why am I at this roundtable?
Making big stakeholder meetings less daunting, and more useful
The first policy roundtable I attended went badly. It was thirteen years ago, I was an external affairs assistant for a charity, and I’d been sent to a meeting at the Government Equalities Office to talk about tackling discrimination against bi people. I missed my train, turned up twenty minutes late and was the only person in the room wearing a suit. Tongue-tied, I spent the rest of the meeting working up the courage to speak.
Since then I’ve done lots of anxiety-inducing things in my career. TV interviews, select committee sessions, and high-stakes meetings with Ministers. But there is still something about a big roundtable that immediately sends me right back to feeling like an overdressed 21-year-old, surprised to be let into a government building.
The room where it doesn’t happen
A few years later, at a different charity, I found myself spending a lot of time in windowless rooms at the Department for Work and Pensions offices at Caxton House. One of the Ministerial advisory groups I was on felt particularly chaotic. It had a standing cast of about thirty attendees, surrounded fishbowl style by ten civil servants seated at the edge of the room. And it had all of the features of a meeting which doesn’t get things done.
The attendees ranged from policy experts who had been working on these issues for decades, right through to CEOs interested in issues tangentially related to the question at hand. Some people in the room had established relationships with officials and Ministers. They knew they had avenues to raise issues. Others were from campaign groups that hadn’t had this level of access, and felt they needed to use the space to raise points of principle. Lots of the conversation focused on who was or wasn’t in the room. Or what was or wasn’t in scope. We spent a lot of time talking past one another and inadvertently running down the clock. We were very much stakeholders who were being engaged.
After one particularly circular meeting, I was feeling frustrated at myself for not being more sharp-elbowed in raising some points. I ended up writing them down in an email and sending them to one of the officials that had been presenting. That email turned into a coffee meeting in which we were able to have a far more meaningful conversation about policy design than the roundtable had managed to surface. It also gave me a better understanding of what it was like to be navigating these problems from the other side.
Eventually that coffee became a series of meetings with other officials. It created opportunities to influence policy debates at an earlier stage. It led to a briefing call with thousands of Work Coaches to talk about people’s experiences of Jobcentres. And most importantly, it gave me the chance to bring together civil servants with people who had direct experience of the issues.
Access doesn’t equal impact. (That’s probably its own post). But to the extent that we wanted access, we achieved it by breaking out of structured stakeholder engagement and into the push and pull of individual relationships.
Reframing what the roundtable was for
That experience changed how I understood the purpose of a policy roundtable. The audience isn’t everyone in the room, it’s the people in the room who you might want to have a proper conversation with later.
For me, realising this was probably the single biggest thing that lessened the anxiety around these kinds of meetings. It stopped them from being a performance where I needed to demonstrate expertise. Instead they became an opportunity to connect with other people who might already be interested in my organisation’s insights. More often than not these meetings were the starting point for a relationship rather than where most of the work happened.
Often that means policymakers, but not necessarily. On a different occasion, a chance conversation with someone from a membership body led to a project that improved the way health services supported people at risk of having their benefits stopped. This project didn’t directly involve policymakers, but it was an unexpected good outcome that came from being present and open.
Getting through it
If you’re inclined to agonise over your own performance, it can help to set yourself an easy target. Thirteen years on and my mental model is still essentially ‘I’ll make sure to say one thing, and I’ll try to say it as early on as possible’.
That one thing doesn’t need to be anything incisive or new. It could be as simple as ‘I completely agree with X, we’re seeing this problem too and it’s a big priority for us.’ It’s so much easier to continue to contribute once you’ve got over that initial hurdle, and it can free up your brain to focus substantively on what’s being said, rather than planning your entrance.
It’s great if you can get your point across well in the moment. But it’s not fatal if you don’t. A thoughtful follow-up email or catching someone at the end of a meeting has every chance of achieving the same impact.
Thinking back to that roundtable thirteen years ago still makes me cringe. But I wanted to write this piece because I have a feeling that at some point or another, a lot of us involved in policy influencing have felt a level of uncertainty about the work.
Policy change looks very different across contexts, especially the kind of work which relies on insider relationships. Right now someone trying to create change in migrant rights is existing in a very different world to someone pushing for more employment opportunities for young people. But there’s untapped value in digging into how we all go about this, what works and what doesn’t.
If you’ve got advice, reflections, or just your own buried-away roundtable experiences, I’d really love to hear them.
If you’re looking for training, coaching or consultancy support on an influencing issue, you can find out more or book a call at my website.