HOW TO HELP PEOPLE HELP YOU

A wise colleague once drew the diagram below to illustrate the idea that, in any attempt at engagement, there are essentially three audiences at play: active, engaged and interested. They all have a relationship with you, but the dynamic of the relationship is different for each.

The active group are often valuable. But, whether well-informed or not, critics or constructive contributors, they are often the same vocal participants you would likely hear from no matter what. The engaged group are those who essentially watch but don’t speak. They pay attention but don’t feel either compelled or comfortable enough to actively contribute. And the interested group are those who may not even be aware that they have a vested interest in the discussion because they don’t see the relevance of it to their lives. But this doesn’t mean their input is potentially any less valuable.

The goal of effective communication, if you're serious about making something happen, is to move more of the interested and engaged toward the active group to expand that group beyond the usual suspects and build some critical mass. One important element in achieving that movement is to ensure the engaged and the interested understand the issue and its relevance to them. The simple truth is that people more actively involve themselves in things that matter to them if they are comfortable enough that they understand it. Note there is a difference between whether they actually do understand and whether they think they understand. Arguably, many of those who are actively involved already are less informed than they think or misinformed by others. And when that’s the case, what’s the value of their contribution?

So increasing actual understanding of what you do, how you do it and why can ultimately serve to:

• Ensure the actively involved are well-informed, adding greater value to their contributions and avoiding unnecessary confrontation.
• Reduce the barriers that potentially keep the engaged from actively participating. 
• Increase the likelihood that the interested will see the relevance of an issue to them, thereby making it more likely they will move to the engaged or active group.
• Overall increase the number and diversity of voices involved in any discussion.
• Build a more trusting relationship between you and all those involved.

Not that understanding is the be all and end all, but it is a necessary gateway to engagement. My wise colleague also talked about the need to provide what he called ladders of participation. By that he meant that once you have their attention and they have sufficient understanding to want to act, you need to give people ways to act. And, importantly, you need to give them more than one option. My colleague used the example of Greenpeace. There are those whose support for Greenpeace extends to a donation and wearing the Greenpeace t-shirt. Then there are those who are willing to chain themselves to a whaling ship in protest. And Greenpeace provides a range of participation options between those two extremes. Once you're engaged, you choose how to act.

These ladders are particularly important to help those seeking to move from engaged to active status. Options for how to participate do two important things:

1. They respect and empower the participant by placing a level of choice in their hands; and
2. They reduce the amount of courage required to become actively involved with you and your thing.

So know who your people are, and then help them become what you need.

DON'T WASTE THE CHANCE TO COMMUNICATE

Don't waste it, the precious opportunity you have to really get people's attention, to help them understand, to help them trust, to forge the relationship. Don't waste it on junk communication. Don't waste it on content that doesn't matter to anyone but you. Don't waste it trying to be something you're not. Don't waste it talking about the obvious. Don't waste it trying to replicate something that worked for someone else. Don't waste it with messages devoid of meaning and relevance and humanity. Don't waste people's time.

Countless other voices are competing for their time and their attention and their trust and their loyalty. Whatever communication you put out there, make it worth somebody's time. Not everybody's - just the ones you care about. And if you make it worth their time, they'll give you more of their attention next time. But if you waste it, they won't give you a next time. Because they don't owe you anything in return until you've given them something of value. 

IT IS UP TO THEM

Policy decision, business change, campaign promise, crowd-funded idea, whatever - even the best ideas are only as good as your ability to implement. Making the choice or declaring the idea is half the battle, but only winning half the battle is losing. Can you deliver? As Godin would say, can you ship?

And the tricky part to implementation is that it isn't entirely up to you. It's also, to a large degree, up to them - the people your thing affects. Clients, customers, citizens, employees, voters, funders. If they don't get it, don't trust it or don't buy it - as perfect and beautiful and elegant and better as it may be - your thing doesn't matter. You need to help them, but they get to decide. 

More often than not, they will decide not based on what they think about your thing but based on how they feel about you. And that is going to be heavily determined by how you make them feel about themselves. When we talk about "hearts and minds" there's a reason "hearts" comes first.

REMINDERS

Five things I try to remember:

1) One giant leap changed what we thought was possible, but it was the small step that changed what we believe.

2) Never underestimate the simple power of being able to explain something so clearly that it helps another human being see the world differently. That is art.

3) Every individual and idea, every institution, every thing we create and every endeavour we pursue is a story to be told.

4) You can't control the conversation, and truth be told you never could. But you can control the reason people talk about you. 

5) At the core of the human condition is the desire to believe and be believed, trust and be trusted, understand and be understood. Therein lies all the potential you need to bring people together and achieve something remarkable.

DELIVER US FROM BAD STOCK PHOTOS

Somebody somewhere selected the photo below to illustrate their carefully crafted online article. Guess what the article was about? 

That's right, it was about the role of relationships in raising venture capital of course. But you can be forgiven if you thought it was about men wearing scarves because that's what this photo is about. This photo isn't about guys agreeing to give each other tons of money. It's about two dudes congratulating each other on rocking the man scarf. 

Listen, it's not complicated. I know everyone says you need "strong visuals to get your content noticed" but that doesn't mean you just trot over to the closest free stock photo site and pick the first thing that comes up. Actually think about the image. Think about whether or not it really conveys what you want and whether or not there is anything about it that might undermine or distract from what you want to say. Like, maybe, oh I don't know, a couple of scarves that pretty much dominate the entire photo. 

I'm not opposed to stock photos. Just pick more interesting ones. On the upside, this did get my attention because it wasn't just another boring stock photo of two guys shaking hands (which it would have been without the scarves). But it's the kind of attention that makes me think the person behind the article is a bit of an amateur. Just don't do this kind of stuff. 

ALL WE WANT

A wise colleague and educator once told me, "What most parents really want from their kid's teacher is to know the teacher really knows their child, really understands them, really sees them the way the parent knows them."

It's true, and not just with kids and teachers. All any of us really want in any relationship is to have some comfort that the other party understands and cares about the things we care about. If we get that, then things like trust fall into place. But make us feel like you've put your own priorities, process and politics ahead of what we really care about, and things like trust fall apart. Your choice.

ENGAGEMENT VS COMMUNICATION

How much do they trust you? How far will they follow? How much do they believe you? How much do they think you matter to their lives? How positive do they feel when you and your thing intersect with their lives? How likely are they to say something positive about you, or talk about you at all? How much of themselves do they see in you? How credible and relevant do they think you are? How willing are they to share with you? How fickle is their loyalty and how fragile their belief? How likely are they to defend you? These are the kinds of measurements that matter. Things that really drive change and success. These are things not easily measured. But they are the stuff of true engagement.

How many words you publish and how many times they read them, how many things you share and how many times they click them or like them or reshare them, how many times you speak and they watch and listen, or how many questions you ask and how many answers they provide - these things aren't engagement. They are communication. It's not the same.

Communication is what you do, but engagement is why. 

JUST DOING IT ISN'T ENOUGH

Launching a website is not a big deal anymore and hasn't been for some time. Setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook page or whatever new social toy you've found is nothing. It's time to stop acting like these things matter. Even your grandmother is close to getting over the golly gee whiz bang of it all.

The important part, which is also the hard part, is doing these things well. Using technology is not a strategy. Using it in ways that move a human heart is. 

IT'S PERSONAL

When I was a kid, I never got the pencil or cup with my name printed on it. There were times when I wished my name was something more common like Mike or Kevin or Doug so I could find my name on things. But I had a less common name with an even less common spelling, so I was out of luck. Of course, there are advantages to having a less common name, so I outgrew my pencil and cup envy. 

Or I thought I had until I went to buy a Coke the other day. Coke is doing this thing where they've put names on bottles - the most popular 250 names "among teens and millennials" apparently. I'm not a teen or a millennial, so I guess I'm not exactly the target market. But my name did not make the list. I know this because Coke offers a handy tool where I can enter my name and have it officially confirmed that it is not popular enough. The online tool does offer the reassurance that "on the upside, you must have a really unique name." And I can create a "virtual bottle" to compensate for my uniqueness. But I can't drink a virtual Coke. 

Which brings me to the problem with Coke's hyper-personalization experiment: when I went to the store to buy a real bottle of Coke I almost didn't buy one because I didn't want a bottle with somebody else's name on it. It just would have been weird to be walking down the street drinking a Coke apparently meant for Alejandro or Lisa or someone else who isn't me.

Personalization is a powerful engagement tool. It plays nicely to our innate vanity, except when it inadvertently does the opposite. Personalization by its very nature also excludes. Saying something is for somebody else by literally putting their name on the label also says it's not for me. Sometimes this is okay. Sometimes your thing isn't for everyone and the value gained by making someone feel special is worth the cost of someone else feeling left out. I assume Coke calculated this risk in planning the name promotion, as should anyone thinking about personalizing their engagement efforts because it's a delicate balance.

It's entirely possible I'm the only Coke drinker bothered by this. But consider this final point: I did end up buying a bottle, but only because I managed to find one that had the name I was looking for on the label: Coke.

IT'S ALL STORY

Institutions succeed or fail by the relationships they build, and those relationships succeed or fail through the stories they are built around.

Each of us is a story writing itself. Our public institutions are no different. From museums to parliaments, from libraries to law courts, from kindergartens to universities, each is the story of what our society is, where we have been and where we aspire to go. Their work and their very existence chronicle the narrative of when we choose to come together, when we fail to do so and how we navigate everything between.

And our relationships with these institutions depend on whether or not we believe the story they tell about us and how it intersects with our own experience.

A 6-YEAR-OLD AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Last night my son decided to rebrand his parents. He will no longer be calling us Mommy and Daddy. It is apparently time to transition to Mom and Dad. Recognizing that change can be hard, he was thoughtful enough to offer some justification to help us understand what is happening. "It suits my voice better," he told us. So a change, but still providing enough continuity that it won't confuse people (as opposed to, for example, suddenly calling us by our names). And a simply-stated case for change that still calls to mind positive concepts like authenticity, growth and maturity.

Appreciating the value of giving those most affected some time to adjust before an actual change takes place, he didn't make the common mistake of sharing the news with us at the same time he introduced it to the rest of the world. He is giving us some lead time to prepare. The change will take effect "maybe sometime next week." (Not that I question the depth of his planning or commitment, but I suspect that timeline may be extended.)

WHAT IF THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT?

At any given time, some of the people you might want to engage aren't going to like you. As helpful as it would be to have them with you, sometimes they just won't want to hear you. They aren't going to want to help you. They are going to object to you and your thing, sometimes so loudly that you will want to give up because you think you need those people to continue. And they may insist that you can't proceed without them, if only because you never have before.

Maybe that is true. Maybe you do need them. Or maybe they just think you do, and you think that too because that is how the story has always been told. But what if you're both wrong this time? What could you do then? And maybe most importantly: if you give up because of those who refuse to go with you, what does that say to all the ones who already are with you? 

THEY MAY NEVER BELIEVE YOU

Researchers have come to the rather discouraging conclusion that we can't stop people from believing things that aren't true. Or at least once they've invested themselves in a belief, there's little to no chance of changing their perspective. And it's especially true around political issues. 

Stories don't work. Facts don't work. Once views are entrenched, we're all far more likely to grasp at validation for them than we are to accept evidence to the contrary no matter how compelling or true it is. On the one hand, this actually isn't surprising and I suppose it's oddly comforting to know that flat-Earth types aren't crazy. They're just the victims of the weird things that our brains all do. On the other hand, it's still frustrating when you want to help people understand the truth about an issue. 

But this does reinforce the value of two things:

1) Don't wait until people have a strong opinion before you try to engage them. It's going to be harder or almost impossible to do it later once they're locked in on why you and your thing don't fit their world view. Start now.

2) Focus on the ones who still need something to believe or who already share your belief. Let the dissenters catch up if and when they are ready to change. 

WHAT LINKEDIN SHOULD CELEBRATE

I admit I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with LinkedIn. I see the value on one level. But happily I haven't had to actively search for a job for some time, so it always feels a bit like insurance. I should be on there just in case, but I don't invest much time in it. I'm not a natural networker and maybe I'm just not LinkedIn's type. But it also does weird things.

Case in point: trying to convince me that someone's "work anniversary" is a real thing and that I'm supposed to care about it. No matter how many times LinkedIn urges me to, I can't bring myself to congratulate somebody on their work anniversary. In large part that's because I'm not sure what I'm saying congratulations for. Am I congratulating them on not getting fired? Or on sticking it out another year in a job I know they don't like? Or on managing to find a job they do like? Or on failing to find something better? 

I prefer to congratulate somebody for an actual achievement. Just staying employed somehow doesn't quite seem like much of an achievement (getting a job is different). I suppose you could say the same about birthdays or wedding anniversaries, which I do celebrate. But arguably staying alive or keeping someone in love with you actually is, relatively speaking, an achievement worth noting.

Here's a thought: how about LinkedIn invites me to congratulate someone's employer on their work anniversary? I try to only connect with people who I know at some professional level and whose work I think is at least competent. So on their work anniversary, maybe I'd be more inclined to send their employer a message congratulating them on:

1) Not losing a good employee through bad leadership, poor business decisions or just general neglect; and

2) Making a wise hiring decision in the first place (which, if you've ever actually hired someone, you know is more of a crap shoot than any of us like to admit).

Because the truth is that it's often more of an achievement to keep a good person in a job than it is for that person to stay in a job. 

BE SIMPLE, BE RELEVENT

A study out this week confirms at least two things worth caring about when you want to do public engagement:

1) The top reason people choose to engage is because the topic is of personal interest to them. Not because it is of interest to you and not because you say it is important. They engage when it's something they care about. Sixty five per cent of people surveyed said they would only participate if the issue had a direct impact on them or their family. Not that they might be more likely to, but that they would only participate if they saw a direct connection to their lives. Build the bridge.

2) Fully 71 per cent said they would be more likely to participate if it was easy and convenient to do so. Easy and convenient for them, not you. And easy and convenient probably doesn't mean requiring me to set up an account for an online consultation or attend a meeting during work hours. Faced with the choice of making it easier for them or making it easier for you, choose them. Always.

This shouldn't be news. This shouldn't be rocket science. It's not. We're just too lazy to do it right sometimes, aren't we?

THOSE WHO CAN

So you have a plan for changing what you do and how you do it. Good for you. I bet it says lots of really exciting things. Lots of plans just dress up vagaries in fancy buzz words to make them sound like real ideas. But yours doesn't because you are serious this time. You're really going to change stuff. You probably even had a big launch of the plan to make sure everyone who should care knows about it and is as excited as you. Maybe you sent them the link to the flipbook version to show how innovative you are. 

But, setting aside whether flipbooks really are hallmarks of innovation (they're not), are you really going to do what's in your plan? Or is the plan the thing? We've all been there - the plan, the goals, the aspiration, the launch. Then a few flashes of initial enthusiasm and tracking against important sounding metrics to show how accountable you are. And then it all just kind of fades away. Followed by a year or two of drift. Then the cycle repeats - a new plan, new goals, new enthusiasm, this time you've got it right. 

I don't mean to sound cynical. Or maybe I do. Planning is good, but not for it's own sake. If it isn't going to become real, if it isn't really going to change anything, then it's just a waste of time, money, energy and credibility. If all you have to show in the end is less of all those things, you've failed. And failing probably wasn't the point of your plan. 

In a perfect world, you plan and you do. But if you don't have space or patience for both, then set aside the planning and start doing. Some people are scared of doing. It's much harder than planning. And not everyone is cut out for doing. But those who can, do. Those who can't, plan. 

THE POINT OF OPEN

How you do open does matter. Just throwing stuff out in public is fine. But it doesn't get you as far down the path as stuff delivered together with context and purpose. Because stuff with context and purpose builds understanding, and without understanding it's awfully hard to build trust.

And that's the end game. Just being open is not the point. It's a tactic. It isn't an end in itself, but just the means. Like other popular concepts like authenticity and transparency, the point of openness is to build trust. Because trust gets you the licence to act when you need it.

The sooner you build that licence the better. Don't wait until you need it. Don't wait until you realize you don't have it. You can never have too much. Don't wait.

ONE THING TO RULE THEM ALL

We all want something to believe in. It doesn't have to be visible or tangible - in fact it's often not - it just needs to be something we can hold on to emotionally and intellectually. It's where religion comes from, and also science and art and trust and exploration. It's probably where love comes from - the innate desire to believe in something and someone. And to have them believe in you. Even the skeptics and the conspiracy theorists want to believe in something, even if it's something more fiction than fact. The basic human yearning is the same.

If you want to create a connection, give people something to believe in. Or even better, you could show them you actually believe in the same thing they do. That's where magic happens - in the space of affinity and affiliation around a shared belief. You don't need to build that space. It's already out there waiting for you.

So you could use all your energy trying to convince everyone to join you. And some of them might. Or you could join those who are already where you need them to be, and use your energy (and theirs) to achieve something together.

THE SIREN CALL OF THE OPPOSED

Odds are that whenever you try to do something - really do something - there will be opponents and obstacles. They may be very vocal and persistent. Because they want to kill your thing. And if you let them, they will. So don't let them.

Don't let them become the focus of your effort. Don't let their agenda dominate your agenda. Sure, listen to what they have to say because maybe they can help you refine your thing. Maybe they are even right. But listen just as much to the ones who are with you. The ones who see the potential and are willing to pursue it with you.

So often we get so transfixed by the opponents that they use up all we have. There's only so much energy we can expend, and if we let the opponents consume most of it then there will be precious little left to do the work. Good ideas often fail because of fatigue - because we just couldn't stand the noise anymore. Because the opponents wore us down and made us lose sight of the point and the possibilities. Because we started to believe in them instead of the idea.

They're good at it, of course. And it's hard to resist every time they try to lure us back into pointless debates about the wrong things rather than engage in a meaningful discussion about what really matters. Don't shut them out. They'll just accuse you of being disconnected. Give them as much attention and respect as they are due (by your estimation and not theirs), but not a penny more. 

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WEB

Likes, page views, comments, hits, followers, retweets, favourites, shares. It's all data, sure. These things can all be used as some form of metric because they measure something. But more often than not they are little more than vanity metrics - figures we trot out and dress up to validate whatever we've done. We look at them and see what we want to see or expect to see in the quantitative mirror. 

But have you ever noticed that you often look different in a photo than in the mirror? How your voice sounds different in a recording than you think it does when you're speaking in the moment?

There's the mirror and then there's how the rest of the world sees and hears you. It doesn't matter which of those is real and true. All that matters is knowing they can be different. The difference is measured out in things like trust and openness and understanding and credibility. The metrics for things like that are tough to track, but they are the ones that count.