By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassThe plan has an engagement workstream. Inside it are a communications calendar, a newsletter, a set of roadshows and an intranet page.
Every one of those is communication. None of them is engagement, and the substitution is so routine that most programmes never notice they have made it.
The distinction, stated plainly
Communication transmits a decision that has been made. It can be excellent — clear, well timed, honest — and it remains one-directional by design.
Engagement is participation in something not yet settled, where what people say can change the outcome. The test is not whether people were asked. It is whether anything was different afterwards.
By that test, most engagement activity in transformation programmes is communication with a question mark at the end. The roadshow with a Q&A, the survey whose results inform nothing, the workshop where the design is presented rather than built — all communication, and people can tell.
Ownership is the construct that matters
McKinsey’s survey of 1,657 executives found that only 39 per cent of respondents said their organisation had built broad ownership of the change effort — falling to 11 per cent at companies whose transformations failed. The same research found frontline employees rating the communications they received as less effective than their leaders believed.
Put those two findings together and the picture is fairly clear. Communication volume is not the constraint. Ownership is, and ownership is not produced by being told things well.
The mechanism has been understood for a long time. Kurt Lewin’s wartime studies comparing lectures with facilitated group discussion and decision found that groups which discussed and decided changed their behaviour at far higher rates than those who were told. Working something out and committing in front of peers creates a different relationship to the outcome than receiving a conclusion does — and it is the part of Lewin that has held up best.
| Communication | Engagement | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Outward | Two-way, with consequences |
| Decision status | Made | Genuinely open on some dimension |
| Success looks like | People know | Something changed because of what people said |
| Measured by | Reach, comprehension | Decisions influenced, objections resolved |
| Cost of doing it badly | People are uninformed | People are cynical — and stay that way |
The bottom row is the reason the distinction is worth defending. Bad communication leaves people ignorant, which is recoverable. Fake engagement teaches people that being asked means nothing, and that lesson persists into the next programme and the one after.
What real engagement requires
Three conditions, and if any is missing you are running communication and should say so:
- Something is genuinely undecided. Not the goal or the date — those are usually fixed and pretending otherwise is its own dishonesty. But the sequence, the exception handling, the local process design, the training format and the support model are often genuinely open, and they are the things people care most about.
- Capacity to act on the answer. If the design is frozen and the budget spent, asking is cruel. The time to engage on process design is when it can still change, which is usually earlier than the engagement plan assumes.
- A visible feedback loop. People need to see what happened to their input, including the parts that were rejected and why. “We considered this and did not do it, because…” maintains credibility. Silence destroys it.
The third is the one most often skipped, and it is the cheapest. A short note listing five things raised, what changed for three of them and why two did not, does more for ownership than a quarter of newsletters.
Be honest about which one you are doing
There is nothing wrong with pure communication. Some decisions are made, some dates are fixed, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time.
What damages trust is presenting a settled decision as a consultation. People are good at detecting this — usually within the first ten minutes of the session — and the reputational cost lands on whoever is standing at the front, typically a middle manager who had no part in the decision.
Saying “this is decided, here is why, and here is what is still open” is more respectful and considerably more effective than a workshop designed to produce agreement with a predetermined answer.
The measure
One question settles whether an engagement workstream is real: name three things the programme changed because of what people said.
If the answer comes readily, engagement is happening. If it takes a while and produces examples of communication being improved rather than decisions being changed, the workstream is a communications plan with a different label — and the ownership figure will look like the 11 per cent rather than the 39.
More on readiness and leadership action in the Change Readiness Hub, or read why broadcast alone does not move behaviour.