Stakeholder engagement in policymaking has been a continuing thread in the Practice from the beginning. I helped facilitate a public consultation on the impact of 9/11 on and the rebuilding of lower Manhatten. This was preceeded a few months earlier by facilitating a national gathering of Canadian Afghan leadership and other Afgahn community representatives, women, youth, business people. They spoke of having fled terrorism in their own country only to find themselves perceived as potential terrorists in their new country. Afghans and New Yorkers both felt victimized. Having worked within these two cultures with little more than a few breaths in between was a unique, unforgettable and moving journey.

This feeling resurfaced in November 2005 while helping to facilitate a 500-person consultation in New Orleans, the Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference, sponsored by the Governor and the American Institute of Architects. Its mandate was to begin to plan the Katrina/Rita hurricane flooding recovery and rebuilding effort. Like "Listening to the City" it was organized by the America Speaks public consultation organization and staffed by volunteer facilitators.

The Institute's call for papers presented an opportunity to explore, develop and essay an insight emerging for some time from my work with clients. I shared with a personal friend and distinguished academic, Jean Burnet, my belief that "usual" is frequency based and "normal" is values based  to which she coined the word "oughtness" as a characteristic of values. After some eight evolutionary drafts, "Usual is Normal?" appeared as one of six articles in Volume One, Number One, Fall 1989. My intention was that it leverage positively the quality and effectiveness of organizational, professional and personal life.