Critical Junctures along the Path of Engagement

By Richard Harwood

This article is excerpted and adapted from The Engagement Path: The Realities of How People Engage Over Time—and the Possibilities for Reengaging Americans, published by The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation.

We live in a time when many Americans have retreated from politics and public life, and many civic-minded organizations and public leaders seek to reengage them. These efforts are taking place through school districts and civic organizations, foundations, and leadership programs, as well as elsewhere. But to what extent are these engagement efforts sensitive to the realities of how citizens engage?

The Engagement Path lays out a framework for addressing the subject of public engagement. Like any framework, it creates a way of thinking about the topic at hand; it is not intended to serve as a rigid system or a foolproof model. Among other things this report identifies key hurdles people face as they move along the engagement path. The Harwood Institute calls these challenges “inflection points.”

Inflection points are inherently dramatic. At each inflection point, people reach a critical juncture; their engagement will either move forward, be derailed, or simply get stuck. Too often, when inflection points are reached, people try to go around them, hope they will fade away, or pretend they do not exist. The key to engagement is to identify and grab hold of inflection points—to use them to generate progress. The Harwood Institute has identified a series of key inflection points that can beset engagement.

1. Frustration Overload

When people engage, their conversations often start with their own frustrations or even with demands and claims. While this is a vital forerunner to the process, things can easily get stuck here. And, when they do, people often disengage, feeling a lack of possibility. People want to know that their conversations are leading somewhere, that they will be productive.

The key to moving through this inflection point is to pose the right probing questions. Such questions open up new space for engaging people, creating a pathway for them to articulate and discover shared ideas, beliefs, and emotions; such questions set people on a quest to figure things out, thus generating the sense of possibility so necessary in engagement.

2. The Missing Story

Sometimes when people engage on an issue they feel as though they are making progress—but then “it” happens. The conversation goes in circles, repeatedly coming back to the same topics and issues. Someone says, often with a touch of disgust or exasperation, “Didn’t we already talk about that?” The problem is that people do not take the time to define an issue in their own words. Instead, as the conversation progresses, people simply assume that everyone is in agreement—“We all know what we’re talking about.”

But what is missing, and what is critical for moving along the engagement path, is the vital sense of coherence. People need room to figure out what it is they are talking about and to describe it collectively using their own language. When people can authentically capture the essence and complexity of an issue, things begin to make sense to them. People gain ownership.

3. Too Little Tension

Discussions on many public concerns can become mired in conflict. However conflict comes about, people often shy away from it, sidestep it, or opt out of the conversation. The conversation is then stymied.

Tension is absolutely necessary in order for people to move along the engagement path. Tension is rooted in wrestling with competing values, different assumptions, and underlying worldviews. Tension produces creative juices and ideas. It emerges from points of ambivalence— those instances in which people feel truly torn over what they believe, or how they feel, or what to do. At issue is whether people can successfully recognize and turn moments of conflict into points of tension.

We find that by acknowledging tension it is possible to accelerate and deepen people’s engagement. When people engage with tension it produces a sense of possibility—that there is a role for them to play. By engaging tension, people become actors rather than bystanders or spectators in public life.

4. The Imagination Trap

People will sometimes move along the engagement path and then hit a spot that stops them in their tracks; they simply cannot imagine a way to act on the dilemma at hand. At issue is whether people can trigger their imaginations to find an alternative to current conditions and practices—that is, how things can get done, why, and by whom. Moving through this inflection point takes people reimagining what progress might look like and what steps can be taken along the way.

5. Personal Unaccounting

There is always that interesting moment in engagement when it is time for people to step up and act individually or as a group. It is no secret that it is easier for people to talk about what others can do than to talk about themselves. At this point, when it’s time to act, people often become silent. They look down at the table or out the window; they shift uncomfortably in their chairs. Engagement can literally break down here. There can be a stifling feeling in the room—that people’s engagement has been wasted, because individuals will not take a role.

This inflection point can result from a lack of common expectation of personal accounting. No norm of responsibility has been generated in the engagement; there is an unwillingness to ask the tough questions about what “we” (as individuals and as a group) will do. Moving forward on this inflection point must be done with care. We must understand the rhythms of people’s engagement—their readiness for action.

6. Disconnected Action

A vital point in engagement is when people simply fail to connect their discussions about actions to the substance of their engagement conversations. As a result, when it is time to decide what actions to take, people reach back for their favorite ideas, the ones they had long before the engagement ever began. They pine for the quick fix and they look for what might sound good to others.

The key to moving through this inflection point is to use the conversation as a filter or lens for generating actions. It takes enormous discipline and vigilance to check how one’s proposed actions fit with earlier conversations. At the point of “action” in engagement, people typically want to move quickly, but the results of people’s conversations need to be placed side by side with proposed actions to check their alignment.

7. The Time Is Not Ripe

There are times when people in a community may not be ready to move along the engagement path. And yet, there is an attempt to move too quickly. This inflection point is about ripeness: Are people ready to take the next step along the engagement path? Our caution is clear: pushing too hard can result in people retreating from public life.

Getting beyond these obstacles is not easy. They are often embedded in our own assumptions and reflexes about why people engage and what it takes for people to engage. They emerge from our desire to move things along, to get “more people involved,” or simply to get the next grant.

Normally, people’s intentions are good; yet our actions can defy the realities of how people engage over time. The Engagement Path seeks to engage each of us in examining those assumptions and reflexes as we work to reengage Americans in public life.

Richard Harwood is president and founder of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Harwood Institute for Public Innovation.

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