Trust in the Leader of Collaborative Process Design and Facilitation
SKILL SK-01 | Pre-Development & Early Engagement
Landscape Awareness
The ability to read social, political, cultural, and historical context before any formal engagement begins. It means understanding who holds power, what prior experiences have shaped community attitudes, and what sensitivities exist before arriving with a project agenda.
How to Develop It
1. Pre-entry community briefing
Before visiting, interview at least 3 people with deep local knowledge (barangay officials, CSOs, teachers) using open questions about history, relationships, and prior development experiences. Take notes and use them to revise your engagement design.
2. Community timeline mapping
With trusted community members, reconstruct a rough timeline of significant events (projects, conflicts, resource changes) that have shaped the relationship with outside actors. Use the timeline to identify what sensitivities to design around.
3. Observation walk
Spend time in the community without a project agenda before any formal engagement. Observe, listen, and note what you see. Afterward, write down three assumptions you held before the walk that were revised by what you observed
Why This Skill Matters
Projects that enter without landscape awareness make preventable assumptions. Assuming a neutral reception in an area with prior project grievances, or engaging through authority channels in a community that distrusts local officials, signals that the project does not understand local reality.
Observable Behaviors
+ Seeks historical and contextual information before designing any engagement approach
+ Identifies key relationships, alliances, and tensions among stakeholder groups before entry
+ Adjusts the entry strategy based on what is learned about prior project experiences in the area
+ Notices who is absent from initial engagements and asks why
+ Avoids projecting assumptions from other sites or project types onto the current context
Self-Assessment
Read each Reflective Question below and honestly consider how consistently you demonstrate this in your actual fieldwork, not how you think you should behave, but how you do behave. Then assign a score from 1 (lowest) to 4 (highest):
(1) Not yet developed: Rarely demonstrated in practice
(2) Emerging: Demonstrated sometimes, but inconsistently or only under favorable conditions
(3) Established: Demonstrated reliably in most situations, including moderately challenging ones
(4) Adaptive: Demonstrated reliably even in high-pressure situations, and practitioner actively helps
Common Gaps & Pitfalls
! Relying entirely on official sources (LGU, developer records) - these often miss community-level history
! Treating landscape awareness as a one-time pre-entry activity rather than a continuous practice
! Assuming that context from one barangay or project site transfers to others
Connections
SK-02: Contextual Humility
SK-03: Deep Listening
SK-07: Community Sensitivity
Reflective Questions Score from 1 (lowest) to 4 (highest):
I seek historical and contextual information about a community before designing my engagement approach
I adjust my entry strategy based on what I learn about local power dynamics and prior project histories
I notice and ask about absence - who is not participating and why
I can identify my own assumptions about a community and test whether they are accurate
Th shared to the public for free courtesy of the
THE CONFLICT RESOLUTION GROUP FOUNDATION
www.coregroup.org.ph * info@coregroup.org.ph
in partnership with SustainABILITIES Lab
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