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Harwood Mini-Tool: The Principles of Authentic Engagement

(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)

We know you’re passionate about creating real, lasting change in public life and politics, and you want your community to be part of that change. But how do you engage that community in a way that will accelerate your efforts and help you build a deeper relationship to the place you care so deeply about?

Lack of time, a shortage of resources, and demands for instant results make it difficult to create the kind of engagement we really need – a kind of authentic engagement builds public knowledge and creates new pathways for people to act on their common challenges. As a result, our mechanistic impulse tends to lead us to find “off the shelf” engagement models and “plug and play,” or create spaces where we act more like customer service providers with the public acting as the claimants. And, we hardly ever give people the time and space to wrestle with the tough trade-offs that almost always exist in tough public issues. Does any of this sound familiar?

Authentic engagement, in contrast, is a commitment to building new relationships and a new way of doing public work. Through authentic engagement, the community itself can be strengthened – even built from the group up. Authentic engagement can lead to new relationships emerging, shared norms and values taking shape and growing’ and social networks evolving.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve developed a great deal of content and knowledge around what it means to authentically engage; the “path” that authentic engagement takes; how to create spaces for authentic engagement to take place; how to leverage these opportunities to take effective civic action; and much more. Today, we wanted to share with you a small but important piece of this content – some core principles that we believe must underpin any authentic engagement effort. We’ve found these principles to be a useful guide for anyone wanting to change the way they engage their community. We hope you will, too.

The Harwood Institute’s Principles of Authentic Engagement

1.    Pursue authentic engagement, not public input. Have you ever been to a meeting where people have been asked to stand up at the microphone and give their 30-second speech? These kinds of conversations lead to input, but not authentic engagement. Authentic engagement takes time, requires give and take, allows people room to wrestle with values and value trade-offs, and produces public knowledge about people’s deeply held aspirations and common purpose.

2.    Engage people as citizens, not consumers. When we engage people as consumers, we inflate people’s desire to think about their own self-interests and see people as customers, which often leads to conversations where participants become claimants making personal demands. In these conversations, we don’t ever really challenge people to think beyond themselves and begin at a place of “What can I do for you?” Engaging people as citizens, however, means creating conversations that allow people to see beyond just themselves.

3.    Discover voices, not simply demographics. How many times have you been in a conversation around planning an engagement exercise that began with, “Let’s make sure all of the demographic groups are represented.” Sure, you want different demographic groups to be represented, but by employing a demographic lens, you may be inadvertently assuming that each demographic group has a different voice or opinion, and you may end up analyzing what you learn only along demographic lines. Consider an alternative –Be open to the idea that people may hold similar perspectives and aspirations across demographic lines.

4.    Seek common ground, not consensus. Say to a group, “we’re here to build consensus,” and you are sending the message that they must come to agreement on everything before they leave. Does this ever really happen? Seek instead to build common ground, where the test is, “Can I live with this?”

5.    Provide knowledge, not more information. Public knowledge comes from authentic engagement and is built over time. But when people don’t know something, we often assume they are “uninformed,” so we end up rushing to give them tons of information, seek to “educate” them, and see them as passive recipients. Let’s assume instead that people seek knowledge. When engaging around tough public issues, people are seeking clarity and coherence. They need knowledge that illuminates the ambiguities in issues and the essential facts around issues so that they can make connections between and among these facts.

Here are some ways you can use the Principles of Authentic Engagement to accelerate and deepen your engagement work:

1.    Post the five principles at your workstation as a reminder of how to engage.

2.   Watch the videos of Rich Harwood discussing the principles in more detail. Then, for each one, ask yourself, “Where does our organization fall in the way we do engagement?” For example, do you seek consensus, or common ground? Have your colleagues do the same and have a conversation about what you can do to infuse your efforts with these principles.

3.    Make a list of three things you can do to change the way you engage others in the community to make that engagement more authentic.

4.    Hold a “quickie conversation” with a group of people from the community with the purpose of simply learning more about what they care about. Use The Harwood Institute’s Take A Step conversation guide (PDF), which was created to help people in communities imagine new ways to talk and work together.

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