Consultation fatigue? Stop surveying and start listening

This view underpins work in local and central government, the heath service and housing organisations. An unintended by-product of this approach is the growth of the survey. Being a reasonable citizen these days is a very paper-intensive task. In the past week alone, I have completed a community safety survey and a questionnaire on the future of the local swimming baths.

I am not alone. One often comes across neighbourhoods where people complain of consultation fatigue.

Most service organisations have an enormous thirst for information about how they are doing with their customers. This tends to be satisfied in the form of, you've guessed it, a survey. These things are static and immediately out of date, but are widely used as a genuine attempt to find out where the priorities ought to be for service delivery and what customer expectations are. It constantly surprises me that people fill in these questionnaires as there is often no mechanism for feedback, you never find out whether your view has been taken on board and a decision may or may not relate to any comment the individual citizen made.

However, people are getting less keen to provide information for organisations where the outcome in terms of the customers' preferences is unclear. What's more, hundreds of thousands of one-to-one interactions between the staff of organisations and their customers go largely unrecorded. Even when there is a dialogue and information is collected about people's perceptions on particular issues or their views about the future, it gets lost because there is no way of feeding it into the decision-making machinery of the organisation.

Because of this regular interaction, frontline staff usually have a pretty good idea of what is going on. They have a view on the major protagonists in particular issues and what the organisation should do about it. How often is that information collected in a formal way to inform the organisation's policy and direction? Equally, the data that frontline staff pick up daily is often volunteered by members of the public and is exchanged in such a way that it doesn't feel like formal consultation or data gathering.

These things are static and immediately out of date, but are widely used to find out where the priorities ought to be for service delivery

We must radically change the way in which we gather information about consumer needs so the emphasis is on collecting real-time data about people's view of the service and the things they would like to see done differently.

This requires a major culture shift to create organisations that are full of consumer-driven and curious people who want to provide the services our customers tell us are needed.

There is also something slightly archaic about the change processes that traditional data gathering prompts. Periodic data collection will tend to drive substantial reviews and top-down initiatives, whereas regular dialogue leads to lots of small-scale local change, which in turn drives better responses from the organisation. At one group, childcare was provided after female heads of households said they were unable to go to work because childcare was inadequate and expensive. This wasn't a top-down strategy but a response to the dialogue with individual customers.