The fiscal decisions made by our leaders in 2021 will determine the next three decades of Hawaii’s history.

Since COVID-19 hit Hawaii in March 2020, the Hawaii Council on Revenues continues to modify its projections on our state’s budgetary shortfall. The most recent projection, released on Sept. 9, now estimates Hawaii faces a $200 million shortfall over this next year. Our leaders at the local level continue to struggle to decide how to effectively allocate those resources available through the federal CARES Act.

Where coordination is complicated by many layers of competing interests among businesses, communities, bureaucracy and elected leaders, we are still faced with the need to decide how to effectively allocate and spend many hundreds of millions of dollars before 2020 concludes.

To better plan for Hawaii’s future, our leaders need to implement sustainable practices that expedite deliberative discussions and ensure that tangible actions are taken following those conversations. A partnering process known as “partnering facilitation” can provide that structure.

In the last three decades, partnering facilitation has bridged divides between opposing sides of complex issues, especially in the national construction industry. Impressed with this new process, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers adopted its own partnering facilitation techniques in 1991.

The three elements of the process are: 1) the facilitator, 2) the ground rules, and 3) the agreed goal: consensus.

The ground rules require total buy-in from all stakeholders. Everyone with a “stake” in the outcome of a problem is a stakeholder. In the context of our present fiscal crisis, every resident of Hawaii is a potential stakeholder. The single mother of three working two retail jobs, the public school teacher, the banking executive and the seasoned state legislator are all stakeholders.

Even before COVID-19, the fiscal health of our state was precarious. In October 2019, the Committee on Government and Civic Education of the Hawaii Executive Conference published a report that identified three fiscal issues threatening the state of Hawaii: 1) climate change, 2) infrastructure, and 3) our unfunded liabilities.

The projected costs associated with these three issues alone will total approximately $88 billion. Partnering facilitation needs to play a larger role in local government. It is time to allow the potential applications of this process to future conversations about the state’s fiscal future.

At our company, HiMediation, the process when approaching any crisis challenges is for stakeholders to directly face one another in a facilitated environment, where conversation is carefully regulated to ensure that every angle of an issue is addressed.

This partnering process imagines conversations driven by an appointed facilitator, who can carefully navigate between competing narratives and agendas. The facilitator is not there to propose any solution or advance any agenda, but to direct the conversation toward a collection of goals all parties can agree to follow. This is achieved through a quasi-official document, known as a “compact charter.”

It is self-evident, but from time to time we forget how interconnected we are to one another. Our businesses, organizations and government are all members of Team Hawaii. Where stakeholders with different agendas, demographics and perspectives cannot find common ground, partnering facilitation offers a foundation for collaborative issues we face as one community.

Lest we forget, we inhabit a common home, where we must find a way to live, work and play with one another. In those challenges that lie ahead, we need to be one team with a common purpose to always work with one another and for one another.