Community

To, Those who would ‘engage’ us,

We are already engaged.

We may not be engaged with you, or in what you think we should be engaged with but we ARE engaged. The things that we are engaged with offer us what we are looking for, perhaps consciously, perhaps not. Our chosen ‘engagements’ give us some combination of love, power and money.

There is a fourth thing that some of us get from our preferred engagement, and that is freedom from pain. Freedom from the pain of hope denied. Freedom from the pain of optimism dashed. Freedom from the humiliation of yet another ‘failure’. This pursuit of freedom from pain is what you label ‘apathy’.

We may choose to engage with you, and your agendas, if you offer us what we want. Unless we see possibilities for this our engagement with you is likely to be short lived and will change nothing. It might be enough for you to tick the box called ‘community engagement’, but little more.  Love and fun might attract us for a while, but it is making us powerful that keeps us engaged.

Many of us who you find ‘hard to reach’ or ‘difficult to engage’ have ‘been engaged’ with people like you before. We have been sold false hope and have suffered the pain of having that hope dashed when you let us down, or when you run out of funding. Your reputations go before you. Sometimes even your promise of cash can’t persuade us to engage…we know that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

You might pay us to move our muscles, or answer your questions, but you cannot buy our hearts and minds.

If you want to encourage us to change what we engage with, then you need to understand us, understand what we are looking for, and understand where our engagement is likely to take us. It is this ‘where it leads’ that is often the hardest part of the story for us to explore. Some of us have learned to live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. But, if you can really offer us something that provides us with a genuine shot at a better future…

Often your approach appears to us to stand on the premise that you have the right to engage us in what you believe to be good for us. You impose your sensibilities and priorities. Or you impose the policy objectives of those who pay your wages. You force us into a parent child relationship.

Imagine that a powerful outsider came and tried to persuade you to live your life differently. To give up some of the things that you enjoy. To ‘persuade’ you to work on a project of their design.  How would you respond? With enthusiastic compliance?

Perhaps instead of seeking to engage ‘us’ in your decision-making processes, or in co-creating your services, or in spending your budgets, you should instead seek to engage yourselves in our agendas, our decisions, our opportunities. You should put us as individuals and communities at the heart of your endeavours.

Before you seek to engage us in your agendas, perhaps you ought to spend a bit of time trying to engage yourselves in ours? Not by pushing your way in with your authority and your money.

But by winning an invitation. By being ‘helpful’.

So, the next time you sit down to write your engagement strategy, just think about what you might need to be like for us to invite you in.

C19 is horrific. Perhaps the most frightening thing I have ever lived through. But then I am too young for WW2 and was a new born at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when we stood at the brink of a nuclear holocaust. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Tsunamis, famines. C19 is right up there. But like most crises, it gets things done that our leaders couldn’t.

C19 has enabled thing to happen in a few months that leadership have been trying to make happen for years. We are reducing our use of cars and planes. We are increasing the use of technology. And innovation and creativity is springing up everywhere. Some previously moribund organisations are actually making stuff happen. That understaffed NHS? 750 00 volunteers and 20 000 returning clinicians. I wonder why they ever left? Leadership?

C19 is doing what our leaders couldn’t. And I am seeing it work in two very different ways.

The first is that of paralysis. Like rabbits caught in headlights. Sat waiting for the ‘top’ the ‘centre’, or ‘HQ’ to figure things out and give clear guidance and instructions.  If in doubt – do nothing and await further instructions.

Or, keep doing what we have always done – but do it with greater commitment, greater risk, and greater efforts to mitigate the risk too. Find the inner hero. Or have it thrust upon us. Strike the medals.

This perhaps is a reflection of a particular culture where organisations and individuals have formed a dependency on ‘authority’, that will eventually ‘know the way and show the way’.  And a reliance on habits and routines that have been proven to work in the past and will surely, hopefully, prevail again.

The second is that of open innovation and creativity.  Self organising and mutually supporting groups and networks have sprung up within days and all sort of innovations are being tested.  Restaurants are becoming take-aways. Makers clubs are running online.  Choirs and bands are performing from the sofas using collaboration platforms and new music is being released at an amazing rate.  GPs are doing nearly all of their consultations online with kit that had been gathering dust in their surgeries for years.  New hospitals spring up within weeks. This world is moving quickly, collaboratively and positively.

What influences which of these two reactions we get to the crisis?  Well, certainly personality, history and culture play a huge part.  

Some people are more prone to ‘flight’ or ‘fight’. When they face a threat – they act.  They experiment. They test their assumptions by acting. While others are more prone to freeze.  Let others take the risks. As the way forward becomes clear, guidelines will appear and we can then move with more safety. 

Both can work.  But what is best now, in this context?

I also think culture and structure play a part.  

Families with strong leaders look to them for assurance and guidance.  Organisations with strong hierarchies look to the senior management and the board for guidance and instructions.  Subjects look to Ministers and state sanctioned experts for assurances, advice and the wielding of new powers to keep us safe.

While families with more distributed leadership start talking to each other about what next.  Organisations with more empowered structures start to blossom with experiments as individuals and groups start to test the new waters in terms of what works, and share what they know. Civilians start to care for themselves, their neighbours and what they hold most dear.

But which response is best?  How should we develop our systems to better respond in the future? 

Well, I don’t think it is either/or.  It is both/and.

The best responses have both a strong top down influence and this blossoming of innovation.  They work together – exchanging information. Listening, challenging, supporting, testing. Top down and bottom up – learning from each other in rapid cycles of experimentation and learning.

Dependency is replaced by a healthier more human relationship.  A genuine association around a shared purpose where hierarchy and rank are less important than experience, wisdom, intuition, and when they are available, facts.

Take a good look at the systems you are part of professionally and personally.  What reactions are you seeing to the crisis? In yourself? In those around you? 

What does it teach you about the need for things to be different in the future?

What does it mean for you and your development?