Where’s the value arise from engagement?

Value arises from the outcomes of engagement, which are what Wenger and Axelrod rabbit on about, being free flowing communication and consequent emergent knowledgeability through exchange of social capital and intellectual capital.

New value is created through:

• More capability and improved productivity (Axelrod et al., 2004),
• People aligned around a common purpose & people grasping issues (Axelrod, 2001),
  
• A recognition of peoples' issues & concerns (Axelrod, 2001).
• Engagement sparks creativity and produces ownership It also builds trust and creates common languages (Axelrod, 2001) and
• Better understanding (McCormick, 1999) in (Axelrod, 2001).
• Engagement increases commitment and gives a greater feeling of community {McCormick, 1999 #1256)

There's a lot of Axelrod. I'd like to see something else, and something more academic. Axelrod tends to be more practitioner than academic literature. The McCormick paper is interesting and relevant but it's a PhD thesis that I haven't yet got my hands on.

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AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Why Change Management Needs Changing. Reflections, 2, 46-57.
AXELROD, R. H., AXELROD, E., BEEDON, J. & JACOBS, C. D. (2004) You don't have to do it alone: how to involve others to get things done, San Francisco, CA, Berrett-Koehler.
MCCORMICK, T. M. (1999) The impact of large-scale participative interventions on participants.
SAKS, A. M. (2006) Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.

Drivers and outcomes of engagement

I have a list of drivers of engagement and a list of outcomes of engagement, and sometimes they're the same. Or the way the authors write makes it difficult to distinguish between drivers and outcomes. I think drivers include:

• Trust, Commitment (Block, NAO 2006),
• Learning {Marcum}, Involvement {Marcum, Wenger}, Interest {Marcum}, Participation {Marcum, Axelrod, 2004},
• Dialogue {McMaster},
• Vigour, Dedication & Absorption {Schaufeli},
• Belonging, Being included, Negotiation Relations of mutuality Coming to the office {Wenger},
• Round tables {Block}
• Belief that people matter, Encourage collaboration, Foster participation, Create communities , Connect people, Embrace democracy {Axelrod, 2002}

I think I can combine these drivers with outcomes into a couple of dimensions:

• emergent knowledgeability
• communication

Then these various drivers and outcomes might make sense.

Prisoner's dilemma

In a well known game theory, two prisoners are separately interrogated. There’s insufficient evidence to convict them of serious misdemeanours so unless they confess they’ll get only a year’s imprisonment. But the prosecution offers a devious deal:

“Turn state evidence so we can lock up your partner for ten years and you’ll get off scot free.”

But there’s a hitch:

“If you both confess, we’ll lock you both up for six years.”

So there are four choices:
Czerniawska uses the model in her slide show of Storm Clouds Ahead, here.
The consultancy equivalent of the prisoner’s dilemma is that:

1. neither firm A nor firm B act so everyone loses
2. Firm A acts, firm B does not act, so firm A damages its own reputation and firm B freeloads on the action of others
3. Firm B acts, firm A does not act, so firm B damages its own reputation and firm A freeloads on the action of others
4. Firm A and firm B act so everyone wins

I don’t know what Czernaiwska said as she showed the slide so can only guess what she meant it to represent. Perhaps:

• Client and consultant working together or
  
• Two consultancy firms working on one client project

The point of the model is that collaboration is the best option.

However, it’s an overrated theory. To begin with the prisoners aren’t working blind. There’s nothing to stop them from conferring beforehand and agreeing to cooperate. But even if they did meet and agree to cooperate they could still stab each other after.

In a continued context, theory and computer models show collaboration works, which is what Robert Axelrod wrote about in his “the Evolution of Cooperation”. He represented cooperative situations using the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma the prisoners face their dilemma just the once, whereas in real life dilemmas tend to repeat so we might realise that our cooperation today might be an incentive for your cooperation tomorrow. Axelrod invited game theory experts to create computer programs to model the iterated prisoner’s dilemma to check this. The winner was tit-for–tat, which is the strategy of starting with cooperation and thereafter doing whatever the other player did on the previous move. Over time, infinity or no predetermined number of iterations, this tends this way to cooperate and therefore win-win. So it sounds like a suitable theory to model the consultant-client relationships that I’m looking at.

Unfortunately, if the prisoners know how many iterations there’ll be, say five, then on the 5th iteration, there’s not the incentive to cooperate, as you know it’s the end of the game, and so in that case, why cooperate on the fourth iteration either if you plan not to cooperate on the last? Or for that matter, why cooperation on the previous iteration – it’s called backwards induction and forces mutual defection. So the Prisoner’s Dilemma model has a number of flaws.

A possibly better model is the Stag Hunt. Rousseau proposed this game, which involves more than two collaborators with the task of chasing, hunting a stag. One person alone cannot catch the stag; it requires collaboration. However, individuals could go off and do their own thing, hunt rabbits, thereby ensuring a smaller prize.

Perhaps I should apply this model to clients and consultants on collaborative IT projects.

Clients & consultants as prisoners

Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation could offer an alternative framework - I could take the relationship of clients and consultants from an economic perspective, value being added depending on they cooperate through an extended version of the iterating prisoner's dilemma. How fascinating!

But would it be engagement?

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Axelrod, R. (1990) The evolution of cooperation, Penguin, London.
Robert Axelrod, not Richard Axelrod who writes about engagement from a practitioner perspective

Axelrod on engaging with clients

How should a consultant engage with clients?

Axelrod says through

• widening the circle of involvement
• connecting people to each other
• create communities for action
• embracing democratic principles

I shall look for these activities in my research. But will it be the consultants or the clients who do these?

His advice to create communities is interesting because it suggests the communities of practice that Wenger writes about.

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Axelrod, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco. 936
Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: a brief introduction. Available from: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro_WRD.doc from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ [Accessed 8/08/ 2008].

Engagement undefined

Definitions of engagement are woolly and soft. People don’t say what it is but they work around it.

For Axelrod engagement is a “paradigm for change” (Axelrod, 2001)
For Block engagement is “the art of bringing people together” (Block, 2000)
For Buckingham it is “a journey of sensing and learning” (Buckingham, 2005)
For the NAO, engagement is “a critical element of a consulting project” (NAO, 2006)
For Robinson, engagement is a two way relationship between employee and employer (Robinson D, 2004).
For Smythe it is a management philosophy (Smythe, 2007).
For McMaster it is a “process of communication” (McMaster, 1996)
For Wenger, mutual engagement is a dimension of a community of practice that involves processes of community building (Wenger, 1998)

So engagement is:

• A paradigm
• A journey
• An element
• A relationship
• A philosophy
• A process
• A dimension
• An art

Can I reconcile all these metaphors?

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AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BLOCK, P. (2000) Flawless Consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer.
BUCKINGHAM, M. (2005) Chapter FOUR: 'Buy-in', not by-pass: the rules of engagement. Leadership for Leaders. Thorogood Publishing Ltd.
MCMASTER, M. D. (1996) The Intelligence Advantage: organizing for complexity, Butterworth-Heinemann.
NAO (2006) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment. National Audit Office.
ROBINSON D, P. S., HAYDAY S (2004) The Drivers of Employee Engagement. Institute for Employment Studies.
SMYTHE, J. (2007) The CEO chief engagement officer: turning hierarchy upside down to drive performance, Gower.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Involvement

How does involvement differ from engagement?

• involvement often refers to user participation in a systems development process
  
• is distinguished from participation, being a separate construct that refers to a psychological state (Barki, 1989 : 53)
• is an intervening variable between user participation and system use (Hartwick, 1994) (which seems a bit like engagement being the intermediate variable between website drivers and consumer behaviour in Mollen's MRes dissertation)
• job involvement has to do with self image and how employees employ themselves in the performance of their job (Saks, 2006: 602)
• managers can be "a priori involved" or "inquiry involved" (Swanson, 1974) depending on whether they make queries about using a system or whether they initiate changes. Activities that make a change possible sound a bit like engagement to me.
• "working with others to get things done" {Axelrod, 2004 :xi} written after Axelrod's book on engagement makes it sound like Axelrod thinks engagement and involvement are the same.
  

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AXELROD, R. H., AXELROD, E., BEEDON, J. & JACOBS, C. D. (2004) You don't have to do it alone: how to involve others to get things done, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use. Management Science, 40, 440-465.
SAKS, A. M. (2006) Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.
SWANSON, E. B. (1974) MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS: APPRECIATION AND INVOLVEMENT. Management Science, 21, 178-188.