Alexis Lindsay’s excellent blog led me to the Public Participation Spectrum. The spectrum outlines engagement intensity from informing through to consulting, involving, collaborating and empowering. The model is also relevant to engagement in the commercial world. For example, how would your staff rate the degree of participation that you enable? The five levels of engagement/participation could also be applied as a dimension of stakeholder mapping.
Engagement hasn’t been the default mode of communication. So it stands to reason that we need to re-evaluate how we communicate for engagement, and learn to use some new tools. Earlier posts looked at the communication spectrum and the shared meaning model. You can add dichotomy busting as a tool to surface the underlying thinking that will support or hamper engagement.
Dichotomies
Humans have this natural drive to create neural patterns. (Here is a link to a cool YouTube video providing a great metaphor for creating neural patterns). Our primitive nature, for survival purposes, prompts us to categorise things – good/evil, friendly/hostile, in the box/outside the box, potential meal/might eat me. Sharp distinctions aid quick decisions and these dichotomies are useful for our survival. But for higher thinking, dichotomies are a mixed blessing.
In I Am Right You Are Wrong, Edward deBono illustrates how ideas can become polarised with an elegant metaphor. Imagine a drop of rain falling on the peak of a mountain range (such as the Andes). If the wind is blowing from the east, the raindrop will end up in the Pacific Ocean; if the wind blows from the west, it will traverse other lands and end up in the Atlantic. Dichotomies tend to polarise. Edward deBono claims that dualistic, right/wrong thinking, came from the ancient Greeks and today,plagues our institutions, public and private. It is embodied in our language and works well for argument and physical sciences, but no so good for engagement. The author then highlights the need for more flexibility in our thinking.
Our existing perceptions, concepts, models, and paradigms are a summary of our history. We can look at the world only through such a framework. If something new comes along we are unable to see it. Or, if we do see it, we see it as a mismatch with our older perception so we feel compelled to attack it. In any case we can judge it only through the old frame of reference (page 283).
Dichotomy busting
Our dichotomy buster is a quadrant, aided by questions of enquiry. Its is similar to polarity mapping, but I believe, simpler.
When a strong dichotomy exists, the positions can be seen as polarised on a continuum. Here the costs associated with engagement create the polarity. Engagement is seen as resource hungry and tight budget constraints position engagement as being an expense.
If we change the continuum to a quadrant, we open possibilities for increasing positions from two to at least four. Here is the same example below.
Notice that in the top right hand corner questions direct attention to finding synergy between what might have been conceived as polar opposites. And notice how this relates to the deBono quote above – we are impelled to look to new ideas for solutions.
But people are challenged by this. Recall the raindrop, travelling down one side of the Andes. As it travels it gravitates to deeper and deeper channels until it reaches the see. So it is with deeply patterned thinking. It is very easy to reach polarised conclusions.
…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
–F Scott Fitzgerald
Using the dichotomy buster
If you use the dichotomy buster please let me know how it goes.
Crest Energy has won approval to install turbines in the entrance to the Kaipara Harbour in northern New Zealand. But when lengthy compliance and court processes position stakeholders as adversaries, there will inevitably be losers. How might we find a win-win?
Crest Energy plans to install up to 200 turbines in the mouth of the harbour, to generate up to 200 mw of electricity. The Kaipara harbour is the largest harbour in the southern hemisphere of 947 km2 with a 800 kilometre shoreline. About 8 billion cubic metres of water flow through the harbour entrance daily.
Looking from the dunes to the wild and magnificent Kaipara Harbour entrance
The Minister of Conservation, Kate Wilkinson, announced on 17 March 2011, approval for Crest Energy’s turbines. Local stakeholders, including local Mäori, farmers and fishers responded by organising further meetings in protest. The Indigenous people of the area are Te Uri o Hau, a hapu (subtribe) of Ngati Whatua. Along with local farmers and fishers, Te Uri o Hau are concerned about the environmental impacts of the turbines.
Stakeholder engagement?
Projects such as this have multiple community stakeholders. The people of Northland and Auckland will benefit from a renewable energy supply, and New Zealand’s supply of electricity of renewables will be further enhanced from the current 74%. But the big unknown is the environmental impact of 200 turbines spinning in the depths of the harbour entrance. The Environmental Court supported Te Uri o Hau’s request for environmental monitoring – but the hapu is still concerned.
When engagement processes get to court, it can hardly be called engagement. Positions tend to become entrenched on both sides. Is there a third way? Is there will to explore a third way?
Riparian planting at Whaingaroa Harbour
The good people at Whaingaroa harbour near Raglan further down the west coast of New Zealand have planted over a million trees on the margins of the harbour and the rivers and streams that feed it. After a decade, the result has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of silt and animal waste entering the harbour. Seagrasses have returned to the intertidal zones and marine life, from tiny invertebrates to fish species, have a better environment and populations are rapidly increasing. Here is a link to a video demonstrating the improvements.
A win-win?
What’s the connection? I’m guessing that any negative environmental impact of the turbines would be dwarfed by the positive impact of environmental improvements resulting from a riparian planting project on the Kaipara. Of course, the massive Kaipara dwarfs the Whaingaroa harbour – but over time, replanting is achievable. Crest Energy has a great opportunity to divert a small percentage of power revenue to support replanting projects, and create a positive association between the company’s renewable energy production and harbour restoration.
It will be interesting to see if the various stakeholder aspirations can be achieved to create a win-win.
Just decades ago, the gulf between health practitioners and the many Mäori (the indigenous people of New Zealand), impacted on the quality of health outcomes for Mäori. Bridging this gap is an engagement process.
This is the first of my engagement stories and it is close to home. My wife, Huria works as an educator for Te Poutokomanawa (Mäori Health Services) at Whangarei Hospital in northern New Zealand.
The enlightenment crossroad
My ancestors were European, Huria’s were Mäori and Polynesian. They both shared a world-view that accommodated both the material and spiritual. Both the spiritual and material influenced health practice. For example, monasteries often included a pharmacy. Both cultures relied heavily on herbal treatments.
the Maori herb kawakawa and European herb rosemary
When Europe entered the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century science displaced tradition. Scientific truth became synonymous with progress. Like teenagers discovering new capabilities, the followers of science viewed traditional medical knowledge as something to leave behind. Science became increasingly reductionist, and the only thing that mattered was what could be measured. Hopefully the “teenagers” will come to appreciate the wisdom of their elders.
Clash of cultures
Even as a Pakeha (New Zealander of European origins) the medical world seemed unwelcoming and sterile. I still avoid hospitals and medical clinics. Doctors seemed to treat people as objects rather than people, and some still do. To those from an indigenous tradition, the gulf is much wider. Medical practices were alien. People were separated from whanau (family), and hospital culture (individualism, medical jargon, cold and impersonal, command- control practices) clashed directly with Mäori cultural practice. Medical language was even less understandable than English for native Mäori speakers.
Legislative change
Prompted by poor health outcomes for Mäori, the government passed legislation in 1993 and 2000 to ensure that Mäori could, among other things, “contribute to decision-making on, and to participate in the delivery of health and disability services”. The two main changes were the development of Mäori Health providers and the development of Mäori Health Services with the public health system.
Partnership: Working together with iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori communities to develop strategies for Māori health gain and appropriate health and disability services.
Participation: Involving Māori at all levels of the sector, in decision-making, planning, development and delivery of health and disability services.
Protection: Working to ensure Māori have at least the same level of health as non-Māori and safeguarding Māori cultural concepts, values and practices.
To achieve this, in practice, where Huria works the main initiatives are:
Having Mäori staff available in wards to facilitate engagement between Mäori patients and clinical staff.
Ensuring Mäori voice is heard at all levels from the board to the ward.
Promoting and educating in Mäori health and cultural concepts to hospital staff.
Promoting health careers to Mäori in the region.
Cultural practices
For Huria, Mäori cultural practices happened from the start. The image below is from Huria’s powhiri (welcome) on her first day at work. The powhiri is a ritual of encounter. Huria was supported by Mäori elders and family members, some travelling for half a day to attend. The family handed her over to the new employer, with the understanding that they will care for her. The powhiri is an expression of both engagement and appreciation. It was heart-warming to hear people speak so warmly of Huria’s qualities – a great way to start any new job.
Other common cultural practices Maori bring that change the flavour of the work environment are karakia (prayer) and waiata (singing).
Dollars and sense
No doubt there are those who think that this is a waste of money, and it would be better to fund more operations. But ultimately these engagement processes will change both health practice and Mäori perceptions of health practice for the better. Surely, if Maori are more comfortable and at ease in the environment that is attempting their healing, the outcomes will be better.
Health models based purely on scientific practice are deficient. Mäori academics contribute to the engagement process. Mason Durie’s Te Whare Tapa Wha model, for example, positions health as a function of four interconnected dimensions:
hinengaro – emotional and psychological
wairua – spiritual
tinana – physical
whanau – family and extended family
Engagement principles – worldviews
Two engagement principles are illustrated here. The first is the benefit of sharing world-views. If any system of knowledge becomes too insular and too dependent on its own resources, its ability to adapt and develop is compromised. Western medical models can only benefit by learning from traditional and indigenous world-views and vice versa. The more engagement, the better the learning.
Engagement principles – diversity
The staff working for any organisation, should look like the communities they serve. Having a diverse staff is not just a nice idea. People are more likely to feel at home and want to use services if they see people working there who look like them, speak like them and dress like them.
Ultimately there will be no need for Mäori Health Services, because Mäori will be more represented at all levels of staff, and the two world-views will sit naturally beside one-another. Hopefully it won’t take too many years for this to happen.
I’m convinced that stakeholder engagement is the leading edge of sustainability, and that those organisations most skilled at engagement, are more likely to survive and thrive. Engagement isn’t a new practice; good communicators have been engaging for centuries – but with stakeholder engagement emerging as a discipline we have a better understanding of both the importance of engagement, and the processes required to formalise it.
The scaffolding
I’m also convinced that formalising stakeholder engagement shouldn’t be too complicated. As with any new discipline, it will require specialised resources until it becomes second nature – patterned into the organisational neural map.
The role of stories
People will engage more effectively if they are able to navigate the engagement universe. I call it a universe here, because it is so broad and diverse. If we can understand the myriad possibilities for engagement, we are better equipped to engage.
This is where stories are useful. I will be scanning for examples of engagement locally and globally, and hopefully getting leads for stories from you. Companies make considered statements about stakeholder engagement in annual reports and sustainability reports, but they are typically “high level” without revealing what people actually do in their engagement.
The examples I have in mind represent a tiny sample of the diversity of engagement. They range from global community and government level, right down to individuals making a difference in the local community. For example there are the agencies set up to bridge the divide between health clinicians and indigenous people, the oil refinery that provides a secure habitat for an endangered bird species, and a teacher engaging in new ways with parents in the first week of a new job.
Engaging the heart
James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s great book Encouraging the Heart told us how stories were so important in motivating and inspiring people. Stories also help to create emotional bonds. When we hear the stories of others we empathise with them and new possibilities can be awakened in our hearts as we learn of their lives and achievements. And engagement involves understanding and appreciating the world of your stakeholders. When you have that appreciation, you are far better equipped to find areas of mutual interest and potential collaboration.
Your stories
My stories will follow soon. I would love to hear your stories of engagement. Who were the stakeholders? Was there a gap to be bridged? What was learned? What were the gains?
Less than a year into blogging, I am getting a glimpse of its potential. I thought it might be useful for those of you considering the blogging option for personal creative expression, stakeholder engagement, or as an option for a business website.
The free option first
I started, as many do, by opting for a WordPress.com site. This is WordPress’s free option where they host your blog on their site. This blog is a WordPress.com blog – if you look at the name, you can see the WordPress name in the URL.
With what I know now I wouldn’t take that option. But it did give me a great opportunity to learn about blogging and a platform to get my ideas out there. I started with infrequent posts in August 2010 and received an average of two page views a day that year. In February, I started posting more frequently and from January to April the average monthly page views were 4, 6, 13 and 41 respectively. If I maintain the momentum I have established, I will easily clear 5,000 page views for the year. But I fully expect to exceed that acknowledging the steep learning curve I am on. If I compare that to my previous publications – my book Better Business for a Better World in 2000 and articles in academic journals, blogging wins hands down as a publishing platform. Granted, many of the blog visitors might not linger long, but on the other hand, others have engaged and recommended the blog to friends.
WordPress.org
In March, I purchased another hosting plan with OpenHost for $NZ6.99 a month. Just ten days ago, I installed the WordPress software on my own site www.stepstosustainability.com. The WordPress software includes free themes to customise a site, but I chose to purchase a theme from www.elegantthemes.com as I wanted a professional and hopefully eye-catching site. In just over a week, I have the site up and running. It is still a bit rough, and I haven’t customised a logo yet, but it is working very well.
Static and dynamic
WordPress’s versatile software enables a site that is both static, supplying a stable presence for the site, and dynamic, with the inclusion of a blog. It has features important to me – I am able to embed video and, using a WordPress plugin (free third-party software to “plug in” additional features) each blog post has a group of buttons to enable readers to share posts through their social networks. This image shows the main static page in the top row. It includes a link to the blog. The main categories of the blog appear as blog menu items in the bottom row.
Blogging for stakeholder engagement
Large companies such as General Electric are using blogging for stakeholder engagement. In the wake of the Japanese tsunami, GE was in the firing line, as they made the Fukushima nuclear reactors. Many GE engineers have been blogging for some time, and when the tsunami placed GE in the spotlight, those engineers were ready to engage through blogs. Mitch Joel identifies seven types of company blogs.
Using WordPress software for your website
For small and mid-sized companies and not-for-profits, WordPress’s software is ideal as a website to provide those static and dynamic features mentioned earlier. Traditional websites have generally required a massive pre-launch investment, and then typically decay in relevance over time. With a blog website with static pages, the approach can be different, with less investment in the infrastructure, but more investment in engaging and keeping content current. What I don’t know, is how well a blog website can handle databases, but I suspect plugins will take care of that.
Skill required
There are three zones of skills:
Most computer users can reply to blogs or forums and interact with social networking software.
Others get to know how to use software interfaces, such as those of WordPress. There is a bewildering array of things to learn, but there is also lots of online help. I have used Moodle extensively, (a learning management system). This exposure has helped and I can now make sense of html (a computer code).
The more techy stuff requires higher degrees of expertise. If you don’t have these skills, you need to have access to them.
So for a tiny financial outlay, I now have a website I am happy with, and I am confident it will meet my needs as the website develops. If you are considering developing a blog, please share your thoughts.
Here is a link to a post from the TopRank website by Dave Folkens. A brief extract:
” At a minimum, this should be on the radar for any business that cares about how its brand is viewed. In the Harvard Business Review study mentioned earlier, a stunning 75% of the companies in the survey said they did not know where their most valuable customers were talking about them. Twitter is a real-time opportunity to listen in on the conversations of 200 million users. Setting up simple searches allows companies to hear comments that could go unnoticed if ignoring this social channel”.
The firestorm that raged through finance and other companies over the last few years exposed the deficiencies of the current brand of capitalism. The naked greed and short-term thinking that characterised much of commercial world was over-looked as consumers enjoyed a bonanza based on the cornucopia of cheap finance.
But as we stand surveying the wreckage, with hindsight, more of us can see the flaws in the system. In the March 2011 Harvard Business Review, Dominic Barton, of McKinsey and Company identifies three areas to create a more sustainable and kinder capitalism:
fight the tyranny of short-termism
serve stakeholders and enrich shareholders
act like owners
Short-termism
The equities markets have developed a hummingbird metabolism. Barton identifies that “roughly 70% of all U.S. equities trading is now done by ‘hyperspeed’ traders – some of whom hold stocks for a few seconds”. This is hardly the basis for a long-term company-investor relationship. When oil prices peaked at $US140 a barrel, for every barrel of oil consumed in the U.S., 100 were being traded. These short-term market signals generate short-term management thinking, pursuing favorable quarterly results rather than longer-term thinking. There are encouraging signs that the lessons are being learned and some companies are refocusing on longer timelines.
Serving stakeholders
Barton’s article confirms for me that the stakeholder focus is now becoming mainstream. Capitalism is in the twilight of its hunter-gatherer phase, as companies learn to focus on more than the singular pursuit of profit.
“In 2008 and again in 2010, McKinsey surveyed nearly 2,000 executives and investors: more than 75% said that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives create corporate value in the long-term. Companies that bring a real stakeholder perspective into corporate strategy can generate tangible value even sooner”.
The transition from hunter-gatherers to corporate farmers will see companies becoming more embedded in the communities they serve and more relevant to them. There are two reasons that this has to happen – the first is that the predatory relationships in places such as the supply chain are unsustainable. And the second is that the public, over time, will become more insistent for ethical and sustainable corporate behaviour.
More on predatory relationships
Lets consider the chocolate industry. A BBC Panorama documentary exposed the widespread use of child slave labour in West African cocoa plantations. And the small farmers who actually grow the cocoa are paid so little, that marginal profits are forcing them to look elsewhere for income.
So the chocolate you eat, could have been produced by slave child labour. As the world is increasingly interconnected, this is an issue from every one in the supply chain, from the farm labourers, to the end consumer. Fair Trade chocolate overcomes this issue, by establishing labour and environmental standards, insisting on schooling for children and setting fair prices insulated from market fluctuations. Large chocolate manufacturers, such as Cadburys are including Fair Trade chocolate in their offerings. They are limited by supply. So the big challenge is to move as much chocolate production as possible to the Fair Trade model.
This is more than a moral issue for consumers. It is also a security and economic issue. The largest chocolate producer, the Ivory Coast, continues to be embroiled in conflict. Impoverished conditions are the culture for the conflict germ. We are all stakeholders.
Act like owners
Barton’s third point encourages organisational leaders to act like owners to engender a longer-term focus. This includes more commitment from board members and more sensible CEO pay. I recommend his article.
Challenging assumptions
Going deeper, we need to challenge the assumptions that drive hunter-gatherer capitalism. These are revealed in the language of capitalism. For example justifying a dodgy business deal with the phrase “business is business” tells us that business defines its own rules and is not answerable to broader public sentiment. In a stroke of brilliance, John Elkington coined the phrase, “triple bottom line” – a discursive tool that eventually will see the phrase “the bottom line”, with its implicit dominance of the profit motive, fade from prominence in business discourse.
Of course, hunter-gatherer capitalism is ably supported by (up until recently) unbridled consumerism. I would like to explore the relationship of these two bedfellows, but I will leave it for another post.
And I am not saying we need to abandon chocolate. But if we eat a little less, and pay a little more for Free Trade chocolate – we will all be better off!
Part one of this post featured the stakeholder map. For those who want to cast the net wider when identifying stakeholders two possibilities are online surveys and email data mining. But it may be more useful to just get started and regard the stakeholder map as an iterative process.
I recommend that you keep the process as simple as possible and avoid over-planning or over-complicating the stakeholder mapping process. It can be initiated by a small of group of people, ideally with some external facilitation to ensure that the focus is on external stakeholders. Your initial attempts at a stakeholder map (or matrix) can be shared with others and updated accordingly.
On the other hand, if you want to cast the net more widely a couple of suggestions follow.
1. Surveying staff
You can quickly set up an online survey using a website such as Survey Monkey. Ask staff to identify two or three external stakeholders for a series of perhaps five questions. Here are some ideas:
Identify two or three stakeholder groups that have some legal or regulatory influence on the work you do.
Identify two or three stakeholder groups that you think are impacted by our operations.
Identify two or three stakeholder groups that you believe we could create shared value with.
Identify two or three stakeholder groups that might share our aspirations.
Identify two or three individuals, external to our company, who you believe are most important to the sustainability of our company.
The collated results will help to populate your stakeholder map. But avoid making the map too big. Use the same ranking system as outlined in the earlier post to identify your most relevant stakeholders. The beauty of using a tool such as survey monkey, is that the information will be collated for you. If possible, supply three text fields for each question, so the responses are easier to sort.
2. Mining email data
Your techies should be able to provide a means to identify the domains most frequently used by your staff when emailing externally (hopefully its not ebay or Facebook :-). For example, which government department do we have most contact with? Or which of our suppliers do we generate most email traffic with? And a ratio of internal to external email will provide a raw indication of how externally orientated the company and its departments are.
Can anyone suggest software that might achieve this?
Remember, these two methods may give you a more complete picture for stakeholder mapping, but if they slow the process down, their value will be minimised. Make your stakeholder mapping an iterative process – its more useful to get out there and encourage other staff to get out there, and engage and revise the map as you go.
Your staff are potentially your best ambassadors. If they are positively engaged, both at work and outside work they will be leading your stakeholder engagement. Improving staff engagement is a win-win that will improve internal processes and strengthen external engagement.
Ideally, your staff are great ambassadors for your business. When they are at work, they interact with a range of stakeholders, and outside work they interact with the wider community. We know from the 2010 Hay Group Report, that the best leadership companies harvest knowledge and best practice from wherever they can, and staff, and contacts of staff are sources of this knowledge.
Fostering better staff engagement has great synergy with external stakeholder engagement. If staff are feeling good about the company, they will project that goodwill into both their workplace and social interactions. Both activities require the same skill sets – so by improving staff engagement capacity, external engagement improves.
But staff engagement is not in good shape. For example the Tower Perrin 2007 Global Workforce Study, based on nearly 90,000 employees worldwide found 21% of staff engaged, 41% enrolled, 30% disenchanted and 8% disengaged – a total of 38% in a negative space.
The Hay Group reported that 59% of employees in the UK started 2010 resolving to find a new job.
Identification, citizenship and engagement
Another dimension of engagement is how staff identify with the organisation. The following diagram illustrates four different types of identification. Some staff as in the second column, will identify strongly with the organisation. Another possibility is ambivalent identification as illustrated in the fourth column; in this situation the staff member identifies strongly with their work team, but not with the organisation itself. An example might be engineers or health clinicians, who identify strongly with their professions, but are disenchanted with the organisation. They might be technically engaged, but not engaged as corporate citizens. Thus, while they are happy in their work, they may not be good ambassadors for the organisation.
Having disenchanted or disengaged staff costs. I think of it as the company never quite managing to shift into top gear. The Hay Group found that “employees who are both highly engaged and enabled are 50 per cent more likely to outperform expectations”. So when times are tight, while the cost cutting game may yield a few percentage gains, raising engagement has greater potential benefits.
senior management sincerely interested in employee well-being
opportunities to improve skills and capabilities
the organisation’s reputation for social responsibility
employees able to input into decision-making
the organisation quickly resolves customer concerns
the organisation sets high personal standards
excellent career advancement opportunities
challenging work assignments to broaden skills
good relationships with supervisors
innovative thinking encouraged
In the previous blog, leading engagement, I shared the Hay Group findings about best leadership practices for engagement. The companies with leadership worth emulating, are good at reaching across boundaries to learn from people and to connect people. They help people to find meaning in their work and link their tasks to a greater good. The story of the stone-cutters illustrates this: A traveller encountered two stone-cutters and asked them what they were engaged in. The first said “I’m cutting a stone”. The second said “I am building a cathedral”. For effective engagement, we need more cathedral builders and fewer stone-cutters.
[1] adapted from Kreiner, G. & Ashforth, B. (2004) Evidence toward an expanded model of organizational identification. In Journal of Organizational Behavior 25:1, 1-27.
Bruce-Iri 