Lesson 21. Communicating outputs

Outputs are important for two main reasons. First, they should reflect a common construction for the participants. Second, they should be able to communicate the main results to different audiences, depending on the case, decision-makers, experts or the general public. Therefore, the design of the products should be particularly well thought out and adapted to the target audiences: whether it be the vocabulary, the graphic representations, the result indicators, etc. Narratives play an essential role in this communication of results. The strength of the assessment lies in its ability to restore the subjective dimensions to reflect that the word of each person has been heard and restored after a work of analysis and reflection.

A distinction is made between the need to keep a record of the exercise, which can take the form of reports or large digital resources intended for specialists, and the production of summaries reflecting the quintessence of the co-constructed vision. However, source documents should be referenced in the synthesis documents to enable everyone to have access to the methodology or data.

This strong issue of communicability and co-construction of formats must be discussed very early in the process. For example, the choice of indicators for characterising the scenarios to be communicated may have consequences for the design of models, assessment tools or data collection. The objective is not to produce a single representation format but rather a collection of different perspectives on the issue under consideration to feed everyone’s thinking. The uncertainty inherent in different assessment approaches should also be part of the communication of results.