What does engagement mean to you? We asked that a while ago and continue to ask because it seems that there are so many different interpretations. The dictionary definitions are not a lot of help. It’s one of those words that needs context and perspective.
Defining Engagement
The standard dictionary definition defines engagement in three contexts; marriage, war and employment. In marriage an engagement indicates a promise or commitment to commit. In war it means to be actively in battle and in employment or business it means a time limited business arrangement. None of these really describe what we intend when we talk about engagement at the community level. Linda Deneen, in an article about student engagement for EDUCASE Quarterly found this now obsolete definition - “the fact of being entangled; involved or entangled conditions. Obs.”
Snappy Words, a free visual online dictionary, provided this visual of the meaning of the word, stretching the definition to include the idea of a group process involving participation. 
If we take a closer look we see this. 
Participation, involvement and involution. Involution means being involved in something complicated or complex. Moving into a civic realm, I found this in Learning to Engage – Experiences with civic engagement in Canada.
For the purposes of this report, the term “citizen engagement” refers to processes where governments have taken the initiative to involve citizens in policy development and the clarification of values, principles and desired outcomes. Citizen engagement differs from more traditional forms of consultation by encouraging reflection and learning, promoting a focus on common ground, assuming that citizens will add value, allowing new options will emerge, and taking the time necessary.
This definition adds the ideas of values, principles and outcomes along with reflection, learning and finding common ground. This definition moves toward dialogue and I think it’s closer to what we mean what we talk about engagement. It makes the critical distinction between consultation and engagement. You can’t really explore the differences between consultation and engagement without a big nod to Sherry Arnstein who wrote A Ladder of Citizen Participation way back in 1969. Her distinctions between consultation and engagement have framed the conversation ever since. 
The Ladder of Participation has been used as the basic building block to create continuums of community engagement across many disciplines. Education, not for profit’s, marketing and big business are now more than ever concerned with engagement. Rob Engell offers this menu based on Sherry Arnstein’s original saying that,
The draw back of the “ladder” is an implied hierarchy but that is not the case – the important thing is to be clear about what you are trying to achieve with both yourself and those you are involving. Different ‘types’ are appropriate at different times and in different situations.
All of these models and definitions help frame engagement. When it comes to community engagement specifically, it’s hard to find a better description than the one from the folks at Tamarack.
People working collaboratively, through inspired action and learning, to create and realize bold visions for their common future.
Their list of criteria seems to capture all the elements most important in engaging community.
- A broad range of people are participating and are engaged
- People are trying to solve complex issues
- The engagement process creates vision, achieves results, creates movement and/or change
- Different sectors are included in the process
- There is a focus on collaboration and social inclusion
- The community determines local priorities
- There is a balance between community engagement processes and creating action
Like Tamarack, one of the things I wonder about, a lot, is the balancing of process and outcome. A definition is an outcome, an end result. Here at ThoughtStream we try to balance our focus between both.
The process of collectively defining what engagement means to you and your people is probably just as important than the actual outcome of having a clear definition. ThoughtStream is a great platform to hold that process and provides the opportunity to co-create an outcome, in this case a definition.
Here’s your chance to try ThoughtStream, as a participant. Click the link below, enter your email address and participate in a ThoughtStream that asks two questions. Your email address with not be shared or used other than to send you the invitation to participate.
1. How do you define engagement?
2. How do you “know” when you are part of an engaged community?
Next week we’ll share all of the ideas and feature some of the definitions in a special edition of our blog.
What it means to me? I’ve concentrated on nothing else since August of 1976.
My primary findings? Folk would rather make a living drawing graphs and charts (Recall “Alice’s Restaurant”? Yes, that … pictures with lines and arrows.) than actualizing the reality.
Discussion => Debate => Argument … what’s missing? Discourse.
Convince, Compel, Coerce, Conquer … time-tested dynamics. Again, discourse dis-solves the problematic.
But to make it so requires a Jobs, or a Gates … because personality politics trumps all. I.e.: we must contradict the levelling ideal in order to fulfill the levelling ideal.
Bosh. Those choices are symptomatic of the dominant pathology.
HeyHo, and so it goes. Or not.
1. How do you define engagement?
I would say that engagement is a two-way, ongoing conversation that mutually benefits and advances (moves forward) each party.
2. How do you “know” when you are part of an engaged community?
When the dialog is natural, honest, and real. When you feel you have the freedom to be “you” and contribute your skills, talents, offerings, etc.
Thanks Emily!
Couldn’t agree more. Communication in both directions and especially the idea of mutual benefits and progress. I especially like the idea that you know you are part of an engaged community when you can contribute and be yourself.
Do you think there is a level of trust and safely that needs to be present for that to happen? How do we ensure or at least attend to that? Especially online when we can’t see body language.
jamie
Missed part two!
In an engaged community, something other than an endless round of meetings happens. Meetings are great, but too often I see human/intellectual resources squandered in the pursuit of gum beating for its own sake. Something must grow out of these meetings, or they are a feedback loop; toothless (probably from all that gum beating).
I hear you on that! I don’t know how many “community engagement” meetings I’ve been to that were either completely unproductive or worse were really productive but nothing was fed forward ort fed back tot he community.
Engagement is a determined effort to connect with processes, organizations, groups and institutions as a means of living out one’s beliefs. It is turning off the TV and getting off the couch.
It is praxis (reflection + action). Action without reflection is gratuitous. Reflection without action is navel-gazing. When both are pursued, the result is authentic engagement.
Hi Jamie,
I’ve enjoyed reading this awesome survey of thought on engagement. You’ve provoked additional insight from the commenters as well. It’s interesting, though, that when I use Safari’s search feature, I can turn up only one mention of emotion in all the text and comments!
To me, that is the heart of what we really mean by engagement! Emotional buy-in, a hook into desire, a pull on WHO we are in what we’re doing. Anything else is going through the motions.
Now, let’s take the workplace as an example. where going through the motions can look really good. In fact, some personality types are so good at polishing the art of going through the motions, that they even fool themselves, and get themselves promoted higher and higher up the ladder at roles that aren’t engaging them at all, but are actually costing them in wellbeing.
Yes, some good can come of this charade in remuneration for the simulated-engagement employee, and benefits to the employer—but let’s not confuse this with engagement. The landscape is littered with folks who are waking up in their 40s and 50s (and even much younger) and asking, “What the hell was I doing?” Lately, job-disatisfaction statistics are running 80-90 percent!
Our society is oriented to ACTION, and so we often think we can measure engagement by performance. But though often engagement and high-performance go hand-and-hand, engagement is a emotional/psychological state, that most often translates to what I call “inspired action”—action we feel good about, even when it is uncomfortable (as in doing something that is not our favorite part of the job, but is in our highest interest, and in the interest of others we work with, over time).
Confusing this psychological state with high-performance, overlooks the impacts of long-term “faking it” on the part of the individual, and the organization. High-performance, at least in the short term, is doable without engagement, though if you saw engaged high-performance side-by-side with non-engaged high-performance, you would sense a difference, and that difference would translate to more creativity and wellbeing, over time in the business, and from the engaged employee.
And here is the crux of the matter for me: though leaders can influence environments and policies that have less interference with engagement, engagement, as a psychological state, is really up to the employee! We need to stop investing so much power in leadership. Want more engagement? Get out of the way of what your employees and teams really WANT to do. Want more engagement? Promote transparency and invite employees to the “ownership” table by giving them a voice, and skin in the game. Want more engagement? Don’t dehumanize employees who WANT to work, with HR “technologized” reviews that reduce them to statistical blips. Want more engagement? Return your managers to mentors from the report-generators and readers you’ve turned them into. Top it all off with regular professional development in communication, self-accountability, and psychological wellbeing, and have leadership participate in this (this last will not work by itself under leadership that doesn’t “get out of the way”), and you’ll get somewhere.
Enough of all the easier-said-than-done, but readers who have “been there” will get what I’m getting at above.
Jamie, thanks for inviting me to post here!
Best to you,
Mark
Have to comment re: definition, because I think it’s critical to any kind of meaningful engagement. If we can’t describe our insights and ideas to our listeners, we can’t exchange them, add to them, or produce a meaningful outcome. I think the zen-like state mentioned along the lines of “presence” is all critical .. introducing elements like a suspended inner voice, active listening, focus, etc. .. that’s what creates the open state that allows us to receive .. but once there, what we receive has to have defined form, for us to even conceptualize it and respond to it.
I usually turn to Wittgenstein, Lakoff, Bohm and/or Senge for their thoughts on the importance of language in the learning and collaboration processes .. I just think getting the semantics right is key ..
Great points being raised Jamie, you’ve definitely sparked an interesting discussion. Thanks for creating some space for it ..
From experience I don’t believe engagment means just getting involved, I think it means a lot more. From my perspective engagement, means full hearty interest and”doing” on the topic/group your working with.
I think about this a lot, in the strange dance that I do between teaching 12-15 year olds by day and adult Masters learners by night, engagement looks VERY different. Silence means often means opposite things. Same with noise. The one, and only important, commonality to me is: Curiosity. The informing, educating and consulting steps listed above are, to me, hierarchical. Learners have to first be offered the opportunity, then drawn to invest in the topic, and then be able to be engaged. Rather like getting over that hump of “I don’t even know what I don’t know” . After uncovering a little rough gem and wondering if/how/where/and with what it can be polished….Polishing is another word for Engaging.
Thanks Jamie for the new word: “Involution means being involved in something complicated or complex.”
I guess all engagement is complex because we’re involved with people, institutions and change. So we’re engaging with complexity – but without thinking about our different strategies for how to manage complexity. Hence much connecting/engagement/partnership but no real traction on the ‘flawed systems’ that must change?
For me, engagement is the integration of self-awareness, empathy, and character (what we know about ourselves, how we treat one another, what we do togehter). In turn, an engaged community is one in which this integration represents the core values of the community.
With regard to the balance between process and outcome, I believe that outcomes are process (in other words, there are no real outcomes, just evolving process). And I’m not sure that having a clear definition of these things matters. The ancient Taoists were right about this, I think: the thing that can be described or defined is not the thing itself, which will always lie beyond capture by defintion and form. Things (what the Taoists called “The Ten Thousand Things”) are fluid, are a process. Defintions are just provisional hitching posts, ways ot talking.
So, as to how this relates to engagement: engagement is a fluid, integrative, non-defined process (like the Tao) that cannot be defined in any concise manner but which does require a way of talking about. I prefer the langauge of myth for this (obviously), so I would say that engagement is how we walk the path.
And finally: how do you know when you are part of an engaged community? For me, that’s simple: it’s when we are forced to grow more deeply into our self-awareness, empathy, and character, and we are pushed to do so at the absolute maximum of our ability to adapt and evolve. A good community pushes us right to the limit, which is just another way of saying that the community annoys, badgers, and cajoles us along, most of the time, like a strong and engaged family — and does so within a context of love. Love is a strange and unwelcome word, usually, in the context of contemporary research and debate; but it’s also the only word that matters. We should use it more. It is, after all, the source and fuel for any deep engagement.
Yes, love.
Today, when I was back on campus getting grad school advice and checking in with folks, I kept using the words “academic family,” because this is precisely what it feels like at its best.
Spot on, as usual.
Echoing barefootwriter, spot on as usual
I’ve given some (ok, a lot of) thought to the idea of approaching this from three levels; the self, the other and the community. Sort of a continuum of relational perspectives. What has to be in place for each of these in order for engagement to happen?
Any group of emotionally health people can probably engage fairly easily because they have that core sense of self that allows them to form relationships, to trust, disagree and risk genuine connection. Those are great folks to engage with. If our communities were made up of only those folks we probably wouldn’t need to define anything
I waffle back an forth around “to define or not to define”. I wish I was better at “be” ing. I am also not sure that having a clear definition matters either. It’s the process of trying to define or re-define it with a community that I find value in. The process is the goal. Although every once in awhile it does feel pretty darn good to say, just for this moment, Eureka! I get it and I have the right words to share it with others.
I was just reading Brian Solis’s lastest post where he writes it’s “not something you “do,” it’s something that you become.” He’s referring to social business but I think it applies here too.
On love. Yes! We do seem to be very good at leaving that out. I still share your teachings on how to work “with” people by finding something, anything, to love about them and speaking to that part. I have to tell you that one idea changed everything for me.
You now have me thinking about the head, the heart and the hand. Is there a cycle or spiral of engagement that includes those three states of engagement?
Thanks for opening another window on this.
Posting again .. Thoughtstream already has me doing my thinking in more granular, atomic insights. Nicely done .. !
re: a layered continuum, if you haven’t already, check out Stephen M. R. Covey’s Speed of Trust .. he provides a useful walkthrough of how trust builds up in a layered manner, from self, to others, to teams, to society, etc. Not to put more on your reading list. I’m like you, it’s hard to research and do at the same time .. !
You could also say “Engagement is like ogres and onions; it’s made up of many layers” But then we’d be quoting Shrek.
re: love, I agree, it has been white-washed out of our western “factory model” culture, though I do think it’s making it’s way back into the mix in the guise of passion and intention; those seeking to make longer-term commitments (marriage, war, jobs, etc.) are likely to surrender something important in order to gain something important .. Ross, Jamie, “Barefoot”
.. great point here, thanks for calling it out ..
Engagement is being fully involved in the class, event, etc. It means that you are participating interactively with others in the class, group or community. You are asking and answering questions. You are contributing to the success of the event or project.
I recently attended a TEDx event and I would say that you can’t leave TED without being engaged throughout the talks and the breaks. During the breaks there were groups huddled together discussing what they had heard and discussing how they can take what they just saw and heard and take it back to their schools or communities. Thus you know you are engaged when you are participating in the discuss and/or process.
Hi David,
I like the way you describe engagement. The words you use describe actions and as I’ve been told more than a few times, it’s the actions that matter.
Participating, interacting, asking and answering questions, contributing, and the eliciting the type of energy that promotes the behaviour of huddling. It’s an amazing experience when that happens.
How do we “do” that with folks that would never go to events like a TEDx. How do we include, invite and engage people who would feel so out of place in those kinds of events that they wouldn’t even consider it an option?
I haven’t been to a TED event, yet, but from what I have vicariously experienced, they draw a type of person that is ripe to engage and that have the language and social skills to fully participate. What kinds of things do we need to do to create a safe and inclusive space for other people?
I’m re-reading Peter Block’s book on Community – The Structure of Belonging, as he seems to be trying to answer the question of “how” to engage. Of course that is only leading to more questions and more reading
and less doing.
Werner Erhard suggests that all transformation is linguistic which creates for me, an awareness that the very words I am using, and the medium holding this message, create barriers that, for some are insurmountable.
What can we “do”, to more effectively, invite people to co-create the kinds of engagement that you have described? That’s what keeps me up at night.
jamie
Thanks Ellen!
I’ve been following your work for quite a while and really appreciate your brain-based learning perspective and the great information you share on your blog. I especially like your focus on how asking great questions and using the right tone can inspire people and shift culture.
You’re bang on – engagement is often the missing piece and traditional approaches don’t work and motivation is the key.
Maybe the key is in creating an environment that facilitates engagement – safety, inclusion, invitation?
jamie
Thanks Jamie — great work here and I sense it goes very closely with work I do in similar areas!
I agree with you about the missing pieces that hold us back and see these reflected in your diagrams.
Just this morning one man used very poor tone to respond to another in a LinkedIn think tank. Then he can back when the man reacted to his poor tone with this statement: “Rick – did I insult you? I’m my own person – not a cut out of anyone else. (then signed his name)
Yikes! This is the example of lack of tone skills to disagree and then keeping flawed approaches alive by suggesting you are your own person. This response just cements the problem and adds more dust to the flaws in our broken networks:-) Love the work you are doing to turn this around:-) Bravo!
Thanks for sharing that example Ellen,
Was just chatting about the power of language, and to me that includes tone, with @dprindle aka David Prindle. (see comments above)
Do you think that learning the language of diplomacy and genuine dialogue is something that the school system could be more proactive in? Do you know of any schools – K-12- that include that in their curriculum?
jamie
Nice work Jamie — I especially like your top rung and am most interested in how that citizen power gets done. I use a systen known an mindguide and that works really well to get the results you illustrate so well here.
Engagement is clearly the missing piece in most flawed stystems and as you point out – it takes a very different approach than traditionally used.
What do you do to motivate citizen power where you see power craved by a few in flawed systems?
I love that simple word, Ellen: “approach” because that is what engagement ultimately is .. a new way to interact with people in a shared context. Technically, perhaps, it is both process and outcome, as described above, but for a feet-on-the-ground frame of how do we change things for the better, I think “changing our approach” is both clear and intuitive .. and definitely worth some focus ..