The Problem With Engagement

by Melissa Tullio

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I left a comment on Kent's recent post (See: The Future Of Online Communities) that was probably out of scope of what his post was about, and started reflecting on engagement in digital spaces versus in real life. Here's a challenge question I started thinking about: "How might we make the best use of technology/online systems to capture public sentiment and insights in a deeper way?" (I'm not going to attempt to navigate that one in this post, but maybe a future post.)

I think the key to this is something Kent also asked, which got me thinking in a different direction: "The question [about online collaboration] will move from 'How can we get people to engage?' to 'Who actually needs to engage, and why would they, in particular?'"

There's an assumption we make in government, especially in the communications world where I work, that whenever we make an announcement or hold a consultation, people are engaged and interested and will come. This isn't generally a bad assumption to make. We do get engagement; we do get people at the town halls and consultations we run. But the people who attend often represent people who we've heard from, time and again, over the years. The outcome of these consultations is almost completely predictable - we issue management the hell out of it; we can anticipate responses, and come up with plans to "mitigate" them.

So my next challenge question would be, "What's the point?" If you're doing a consultation and you know what you're going to hear, isn't it a big waste of time and resources to do it? Can't we do it in a more meaningful way that generates new solutions or ways to work together?

Beyond the Usual Suspects

One thing about design thinking that's different than other problem solving methods is taking time to interview and empathize with extreme users. It's crucially valuable to do this because taking time to reach out to, and empathizing with, extreme users helps to reveal the deeper, more systemic challenges in the design of your service/program.

This type of ethnographic research is not something we normally do enough of in government. We tend to create policies/programs that end up working for the mainstream user. The way we come to create programs is based on well researched best practices (i.e., existing solutions), which inevitably leaves some users behind in the process. This approach doesn't include extreme users in the problem definition stages (or problem solving stages), so we assume that what we design is good enough, without examining all those hidden assumptions we're making. The kind of research and deeper understanding that you need to do to really empathize with service users requires time, and in a lot of our work in the policy making environment (and exponentially more in the communications space), time is (artificially) something we don't have¹.

Another challenge isn't just the process/resource barrier in government work from doing this kind of research. Even if you design a program/policy to include time for this kind of deep dive research, how do you make the case for people who you don't normally interact with to gain your trust and let you into their spaces?

What's In It For Them?

When I previously worked in an HR role for Ontario, I was one of the people responsible for the formal employee recognition program. Something we constantly struggled with was how to tap into people's intrinsic motivation for doing things. There are a lot of smarter people than me who have done research in this area, and the short answer is, "it's complicated." I was most interested in what motivates people to engage and interact with online spaces because another file I worked on was an ideas management system, and I was curious about why these kinds of systems often fail.

Something my team learned is that online engagement is limited. Taking idea generation to the next level requires an in person component that can't be replaced by online platforms (not yet, anyway). An ideas campaign, followed by observational/ethnographic research to figure out what you're missing, followed by a hackathon/jam/competition of some sort to test some theories, followed by an experiment/prototype-making stage, followed by reflections/sharing lessons to improve something, is what you need to make the campaign work through the full spectrum of engagement.

That goes back to the old constraint: who has time for this?

Online and in-person engagement

From everything we learned, online platforms simply aren't enough; some tangible, shared outcome from the ideation or consultation stage is needed in order for people to believe you're doing something for them, or else they lose faith and you lose credibility (See: Pulling the Trigger on Chekhov's Gun). Many people are happy with engaging online at the front-end - it's low-friction and easy (also less valuable to gain deeper insights); extreme users, the ones we need to take time for to understand better, need more (and so do we if we want to reach those deeper insights to design things better).

Any online or offline engagement platform not only needs to ask the question, "who needs to engage?" but "who else needs to engage who isn't already raising their hand to volunteer?" Knowing how to answer the corollary question, "how do we motivate them to?" is definitely the tougher one.

^{1. I'd say resources (people/funding) are something we have less and less of in a more real way than time; time for empathy/good design can be worked into our processes (assuming we've taken a good look at our culture and we're able to move towards changing it to include mindsets like human centered design in our work). ↩}

Personal Stories and Testing Assumptions

by Kent Aitken

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Recently a few of us spent an evening deconstructing the idea of storytelling: why we're drawn to it, how it works, and how we use stories personally and professionally.

(I've written about storytelling on CPSRenewal before (see: Towards a New Professionalism in Government), as has Nick, probably multiple times (see: Purposeful Story Telling).)

We looked at a number of angles, but the one that stuck out for me might be called the stories we tell ourselves. Ashleigh Weeden opened this rabbit hole for me with her fantastic blog post on the subject, and most of my post, today, is just encouraging you to go read it.

Humans have a deep-seated tendency to find patterns, categorize, and sort things in our minds. These can turn into heuristics about how we see ourselves, which could be as simple and innocuous as saying something like "I'm very intuitive." It might be true, or it might just be rationalizing shortcuts on decision-making. In other cases, some stories that may well have been true at some point can outlive their usefulness. And they influence how we approach the world and our jobs, for better and for worse.

Examining our stories is an incredibly useful exercise, a healthy testing of assumptions. But we also noted two things about this kind of introspection during that evening:

• it's deeply uncomfortable - and full of cognitive dissonance - when we realize that some of the things we tell ourselves and others aren't true
• it must be highly deliberate, with others challenging us and prodding; it would otherwise be as easy to rewrite our stories with just new, different fictions

I'll forgo the temptation to apply the above to public service renewal and change initiatives.

All of that to say. If you're interested, and you should be, you should read Ashleigh's excellent and courageous post. With the warning that it may lead to an uncomfortable but ultimately worthwhile exercise of introspection. 

Debunking the "risk" of working more openly

I've heard a lot of chatter recently about how we (public servants) can't work in a more openly because of the "risks" of putting our information "out there".  I've always tried to push back on people who hide behind the risk argument because, quite frankly, I feel as though their fears are vacuous, unfounded, and have yet to run into someone who can substantiate them with a real world example.

At the risk of being pedantic, "risk" is often the public service equivalent of the boogie man, a ghost story we tell youth to scare them into compliance with the established norms of behaviour.


There are core assumptions that underpin this fear

However, when we examine them logically we quickly find that they are all categorically false. To be clear, when I speak of "openness" I'm not referring to out there in the wild writ large but within our borders - not the borders of your cubicle, directorate or department, but rather that of the enterprise as a whole - the municipal (local), provincial (state), or federal governments within which we work. This isn't the first time I try to tackle this particular issue on this blog, but given some the discussions I've had recently, the subject merits a redux.

But first I wanted to set up the discussion by arguing that GCPEDIA (the Government of Canada's official internal wiki) has the potential to be the single most transformative technology adopted by the Government of Canada since the first computers were issued to civil servants twenty years ago. It is the only technological environment (possibly with the exception of the lesser known GCConnex and GCForums) that allows public servants to share information across the entire enterprise. It has the potential to level geography, silos, and hierarchy and in so doing allows the civil service to tap into its cognitive surplus like no other technology to date has.


Yet, much of this potential goes unrealized

While there is likely a wide range of reasons why this is the case, I want to focus narrowly on the issue of the perceived risk of using GCPEDIA. For the remainder of the discussion, when I refer to "working more openly" what I am really saying is "working inside the Government of Canada's Open Wiki Platform known as GCPEDIA". That said, below are the false assumptions that keep civil servants from working more openly; I will go through each one after listing them:

1. People are interested in your work 
2. People will search for your work 
3. People will read your work 
4. People will comment / edit / interact with your work 
5. The comments / edits / interactions of others will decrease the overall quality of your work

#1: People are interested in your work

The first assumption is that other people are actually interested in the work you do, putting it in the open will obviously attract immediate and widespread attention from your public servant peers. However, the truth is that while you may think your work is of the utmost importance the simple fact is that majority of other people in your organization simply don't care. They have diverging responsibilities and areas of interest; yes, there will be overlaps but not anywhere near the frequency or intensity that the fearful would have you believe. In Canada, the federal Government employs over 250,000 public servants and the breadth of the work is as wide as it is deep. This leads me to think that it is far more likely that the mechanics of our work overlap than it is the substantive nature of that work. In other words, we may both be policy analysts (convergent tasks) but that which we analyse is radically different (divergent subject matter).


#2: People will search for your work

The second assumption flows naturally from the first, that people are looking for your work. We assume that putting it out there (in the open, on GCPEDIA) means that it will be exposed to everyone when in reality its more akin to hiding in plain sight. Think about open work environments as akin to the web itself. You aren't bombarded with everything on the web when you open your browser. It's more likely that you use an intermediary - like Google - to help you parse through the ridiculous amounts of data on the internet. Think about how much is actually on the web versus how much you have actually seen. The same holds true in open work environments. People use intermediaries - search - to help them parse through the massive amounts of information available to them. Having to search prior to discovering the content you are sharing may not sound like much, but think about the things you search for on a regular basis and then compare that to volume of things you don't search for. This is a akin to needle in a field of haystacks. Moreover, the act of searching should be considered as proof of interest. By this I mean the people who search for your work and find it, are likely to have a genuine interest in it.


#3: People will read your work

The third assumption - that your work is actually read-worthy - is another big leap. What percentage of things you search on the web do you actually spend time reading? If you are like me its probably a small fraction. I search, scan, move on, scan, move on, scan, pinpoint, deep dive, move on, scan, etc. There is simply too much information out there to engage with it all in a meaningful way.


#4: People will comment / edit / interact with your work

The fourth assumption, that people will interact in some way with your work is a stretch at best; in fact, I presented evidence to the contrary in a previous blog post. Think about your own usage of web based environments. Do you comment, edit, or share every article you read online or are you more meticulous in your interactions? Its more likely that you don't have the interest, time or expertise to interact with all of the content flashing across the screen.


#5: The comments / edits / interactions of others will decrease the overall quality of your work

I think that the final assumption - that the contributions / interactions of others will water down your work - is fairly presumptuous and smacks of a touch of ego. The prevailing thought process here seems to be (and pardon my plain language) that if I expose my work to others they are going to screw it up in some way. I think this line of reasoning also signals a complete lack of trust in your fellow civil servants.

Why would they troll you? The technology (GCPEDIA) provides some built in protections. All contributions are done through attribution and are easily traced back to a Government of Canada email address, you can set up alerts on specific pages so you are notified when changes occur, and the version control is extremely tight. I find it ironic that many people are willing to hand a printed document to a colleague and ask them to provide "a second set of eyes" but far fewer are willing to use a technological medium to offer that same opportunity to far more people.


The redux in sum

The false assumptions that the fear of openness is based on are interest, search, read, interact, and detract. I would like to conclude simply by encouraging you re-articulate the argument above to anyone who regularly pushes against greater openness in the enterprise.

Cheers

Addendum (Update 25/11/2012)

What I didn't mention, but is worth adding is that if someone actually does take the time to go through all of these steps, they likely were interested enough to search, read, and interact with your work. Under these conditions - and the technological restraints of a place like GCPEDIA - it is far more likely that they are adding value to your work, not taking it away. For evidence of this nuance, click here.





Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.ca subscribe/connect