The recent BBC strategic review shines a light on a trend that is crippling public involvement across the public domain.

The BBC sees itself in some sense as public-owned and therefore needing to engage, even account to, the amorphous public it serves.  It also sees itself as inherently commercial and business-like, which it sees as giving it license to make its own decisions away from the complications of true public engagement.

Put simply, the approach involves exercising both engagement and commercial judgement in isolation, leaving decisions to be made and justified by mixing the two up as fits the situation.  So the Review started with the BBC being seen to listen through an elaborate tool-bag of engagement and consultation techniques, which between them provided a snow storm of data.  Far from enabling any greater sense of connection such engagement processes, used in this way, provide an even greater barrier between decision-makers and the public.

At show-time for the consultation document the BBC fielded a number of care-worn folk who, with almost audible sighs, explained how it was they who had to make the difficult decisions and that, although they would listen carefully, the burden fell squarely to them.  They did not want any of our sympathy, just recognition that they alone were qualified to make such decisions.

At which point it became clear the media headlines from the BBC Review would focus on threats to sacrifice two niche radio stations which would inevitably galvanise opposition, make the BBC look isolated and foolish, and require some kind of humiliating climb-down in future.

You have to ask 'what is the real purpose of this type of listening'?  Why do it at all? As with much current public engagement by corporations, councils and public bodies there is a missing component.  The leaders seem to lack the transformational quality of humility.  This humility is required to find ways not of encouraging and channelling opinion, which they can then manipulate or ignore to justify old-style decision-making, but in finding ways of increasing direct involvement of the public in decision-making and service design.

The inbred cynicism and disdain towards the public is endemic in many leaders who use proxies - expert patients, consumer panels, focus groups, which used correctly are appropriate enough - to diminish rather than increase the role the public can legitimately play in working issues through with those in positions of responsibility.  It is not good enough for remote officials to substitute self-serving and arrogant judgement, which comes inbuilt to their positional authority, for proper decision-making processes which work with the variety of informed and ill-informed opinion that public involvement produces.

The BBC Review is symbolic: it matters not just as an isolated event.  The tools and techniques used by the BBC are exactly those which public sector bodies, lagging as ever behind on technology, increasingly see as the basis for greater transparency and involvement.  The BBC model has already reached the position aspired to by many public bodies.

Here too there is seemingly little insight into the problems caused by giving the semblance of involvement without thinking through the implications or pre-requisites.  These include changes in decision-making and accountability structures and the necessary preparation of leaders, both democratically elected and appointed, for the radical shift in attitude and behaviour which an approach to "placing the public at the centre of all we do" actually requires.

Fontis is concerned that this lack of insight may yet cripple public services in a way that will affect us all more deeply than anything in the BBC Review.