FOREWORD
The Means of Engagement
We put great energy into trying to change our organizations, and it is always more difficult and takes longer than we imagined. Some of this is in the nature of change and the general human reluctance to give up a known though painful present for an unknown though possible future. Much of the resistance to change, however, grows out of the way we try to achieve it. Often I think that people are not so much resistant to change, which happens all the time, as we are resistant to imposition and to persuasive, new-age coercion.
The most common way we try to change organizations is through strong leadership, clear vision, enrollment, rewards, and training events designed to get the new message across. Leaders and their specialists huddle to devise strategies to get employees, customers, and the universal targets of change—the stakeholders—“on board.” Those planning the change somehow think that it is they who are in the boat and others who are in the water. When people talk of the need for change, they are usually thinking that it is someone else who needs to change.
This mind-set is what drives modern change management methods that include many meetings, many presentations, endless discussions of burning platform issues, lots of process-improvement programs, and a basket of essentially leader-directed moves. And when the change process is too slow, the typical response is to redouble our efforts and drive faster. As if picking up speed will solve the problem of being on the wrong road. In some ways it may help, for we are able to get to the wrong destination faster.
The alternative to leader-driven change and leader-driven meetings held to drive the change is to explore the possibility of engagement, relationship, and democracy as the methodology that will get us to the right place. That is what this book is about—the tools and strategy of engagement, innovative ways to mobilize human energy in service of the institution or community.
The uniqueness of this book is its concreteness and its lovingly democratic values. It is very specific and creative about the choreography of how to bring people together, not to dance or to socialize, but to get something done. If you watched a change or learning effort take place, you would not observe minds whirling; what you would observe is people meeting with each other. We need a rational strategy, clear vision, and good information, which come into use when we talk about them. If you are interested, then, in how change and learning really take place, you end up designing meetings. Who should be in the room, how should we seat them and group them, what is the conversation people ought to be having?
The way we bring people together, then, becomes a major concern for how change happens. We live in a culture that believes that the way to plan a meeting to gain support for new ideas is to make a strong case, present it well, and ask for people’s commitment. It is basically a selling strategy. If you look at the way we meet in organizations and communities across the country, you see a lot of presenters, a lot of podiums, and a lot of passive audiences. This reflects our naiveté in how to bring people together.
Also, when we do search for new ways to structure a gathering, we relegate the question to facilitators and process specialists. Too often we think it is a third party’s job to worry about the people side of a gathering, it is the manager’s job to give attention to what we want to present to each other. We act as if “process” and “content” are somehow separate questions and often at odds with each other. Even then, if you simply measure the amount of time devoted to content and process in each planning and strategy activity, “content” wins without a contest. A good group process is needed whenever two or two hundred people meet, and the tension between process and content is a fool’s dilemma. There is no need to choose between the two—both are essential; they fail without each other.
The time is right for a book on how to bring people together in a way that defines a change strategy based on genuine participation and human interaction. And we need a book that is written not for specialists but for managers and staff people who need a good group process and yet do not think of it as their life work. How we come together, which is here labeled engagement, is everybody’s task, every time we meet, and the conventional wisdom about how to manage a meeting is in serious need of updating.
Many of our conventional ideas about gatherings find root in the beliefs of one Henry Martyn Robert and his rules. Robert was a Civil War military engineer who grew frustrated with the lack of productivity he encountered in community work after the war, and he published a pamphlet about how to get things done in meetings. It went unnoticed until the turn of the century when a publishing house picked it up and it got wide distribution. Now Robert’s Rules of Order, or its grandchildren, invade every conference room and meeting hall. There is no escape.
The contribution of Robert’s Rules is the importance the book gives to the question of group process. The downside of the rules is the essentially legislative solution they offer to meetings and the way they promote the thinking that control and predictability are the keys to success. Even though, in most work settings, we do not follow the rules explicitly, the belief that meetings should be engineered for efficiency is still very much with us. We have this image that a good meeting is one where the presentation is clear and “PowerPointed,” things move quickly, there is little conflict, and we don’t waste time with feelings. This is the industrial model of relationships.
We need to amend this worship of efficiency. Workplaces and communities are human systems. Human systems require patience; they grow out of conflict and succeed when feelings are connected to purpose. Meetings have a deeper meaning than just to cover the content and decide something. Meetings are an important place where commitments and relationships are either chosen or denied. Every change effort holds a meeting at some early point to move the change forward, and it is often the experience we have in that meeting that influences whether we decide to commit to the change or simply give it lip service.
What is missing in the consciousness of many managers is the reality that the social structure of how we come together determines the real, human outcome of the event. You cannot have a high-control, leader-driven meeting to introduce a high-involvement, high-commitment change effort. High-control, efficient ways of coming together, symbolized by Robert’s Rules and “good presentation skills,” sacrifice the opportunity for relationships to be built both between employees and their leaders and among employees with themselves. If you want change to be supported, even embraced, you focus less on charisma, rewards, and motivators and more on honest conversation, high involvement, and strong, high-trust relationships.
A meeting also has a symbolic significance over and above the specific content it was called for. It is much like the meaning dinnertime has for our experience of the family (on those occasions when we eat together). It is when all of us are at the dinner table together that we get a sense of the whole. It is the moment we are physically reminded that we are a part of something larger. When we are on our own, we know intellectually we are a part of a larger something, but it is a thought, not an experience. At the dinner table, we get a concrete, visceral picture of what the place is like and how it is doing. Whether the meal becomes a warm conversation or a food fight, we still get the picture. The family dynamics and culture become visible at these moments. And if we no longer all come together for a meal, that too becomes a measure of our isolation and separate ways.
Same with an organization’s culture. It becomes visible and is open to influence when groups of people are gathered in the same room. It doesn’t matter whether we come together to get information, to learn something, or to try to decide something. The structure, aliveness, deadness, whisper, or shout of the meeting teaches and persuades us more about the culture of our workplace than all the speeches about core values and the new culture we are striving for.
This is why meetings are important. The experience of the meeting carries the message of the culture, and most critically, it is the quality of this experience that determines whether people leave the meeting with optimism and a genuine desire to make something happen. Even using the term “meeting” understates the importance of when and how we come together. What we call “meetings” are critical cultural passages that in each case create an opportunity for connection and the kind of engagement that this book is about.
It is right, then, to equate engagement with change. Each time we come together, whether it is a conference, a training session, a public hearing, or a large group meeting of employees, there is the opportunity to create a culture of openness, relationship, and trust in leadership. If these gatherings are done in a way that evokes people’s optimism and trust in their environment, then whatever the content of the meeting, the participants will leave more committed and willing to invest than when they arrived.
If you are in the business of attempting to shift a culture or change the direction of the organization, then your methods of engagement will be the vehicle to make this happen. This is why this book is important.
This book, as a reflection of Dick and Emily’s work over the last twenty years, offers the specifics of how engagement strategies can work. If we have held onto leader-driven and directive strategies too long because we do not know what the alternative is or how to implement it, then these questions are answered in the book. After you read this book, you will no longer have the excuse that we sustain leader-driven, directed change because we do not know what else to do. If you really believe that instead of engagement, stronger drivers are needed to reach your destination, then you had best not read the book. Better to be accused of innocence than negligence.
Regardless of your own philosophy of change, read the book and enjoy it. It is a much broader statement than simply how to bring people together. It positions engagement as a cornerstone to our future and gives every manager and staff person the skills and concepts that until now have resided primarily in the hands of facilitators and consultants. The bible can now be read by lay men and women, and in this intention, it is much needed and gently revolutionary.