The Shape of Engagement: The Art of Building Enduring Connections with Your Customers, Employees and Communities

By Scott Gould

"... a must-read for anyone working in any form of engagement ..." 

"I love every model in this book." – B. Joseph Pine II, author of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business Review Press) 

"Relationships matter. In the early days of Twitter we did all we could to build enduring connections with users — and it worked. This book shows you how to do the same." – Claire Diaz-Ortiz, award-winning author (One Minute Mentoring, Twitter for Good) and Silicon Valley innovator 

"An excellent, insightful read. This book should sit on the shelf next to your other go-to books for strategic and tactical advice." – Richard Newton, author of The Management Consultant (Financial Times) 

"…a guide useful for any executive or individual seeking to understand the fundamental elements and importance of engagement" – Bruce Bolger, President of The Enterprise Engagement Alliance 

*** 

Do you know how to successfully engage with your customers, employees and communities? 

The answer is probably no. While engagement is one of the biggest buzz words around, and one of the most needed things in our fast changing world, most executives and managers shrug their shoulders in bewilderment as to what it actually is, and how it actually works. 

But no more. 

In this short but incisive book, expert consultant and speaker Scott Gould demystifies and breaks down engagement into seven profoundly simple shapes that explain the mysteries behind what makes people form enduring connections with ideas, brands, organisations, and each other. 

Eight years in the making, and drawing on almost two decades of experience, Scott will reveal to you:
What makes engaging companies outperform their unengaging counterparts by 29.9% increase in stock price year on year 
What's getting in the way of your  engagement succeeding, and why trying to "get" people to engage doesn't work
Why a click is NOT engagement, and what the difference is between participation, connection, and interaction
What the three types of engagement are, and how to tell if they are at work in your  organisation
What the six psychological steps of engagement are, and what strategies to use at each stage
What truly motivates people to engage
How to operationalise engagement within an enterprise
Using the experience and insight garnered from working in a broad range of industries as diverse as media and entertainment, aviation, education, local councils, advertising agencies, tourism, national government, digital marketing, youth work, and even from being a church minister, Scott will show you how to put the shapes of engagement into practice, so that you never again scratch your head wondering what to do to engage. 

This book is a must-read for anyone working in customer engagement, brand engagement, employee engagement, community engagement, and enterprise engagement. 

Get to ready to learn, once and for all, the shape of engagement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Gould
• Release date: Oct 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781976095153

Scott Gould

Scott Gould is the author of the story collection, Strangers to Temptation (Hub City Press), and the novels, Whereabouts (Koehler Books) and The Hammerhead Chronicles (University of North Georgia Press). His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Carolina Quarterly, New Stories from the South and others. He is a multiple winner of the Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose from the South Carolina Arts Commission, as well as the Fiction Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina. More information is available at scottgouldwriter.com.

Book preview

Preface

It began with a problem.

When consulting with my clients – from small NGOs, startups, the public sector, and through to Fortune Global 500s – I kept hearing the same complaint from people on the front line of engagement over and over again. They were trying as hard as they could to increase engagement, using tactics that seemed to work one day and then didn’t the next, but they had a distinct lack of a strategic framework to guide them, and to help them get to a place of sustainable, consistent engagement.

I, on the other hand, had developed numerous frameworks and concepts for describing how engagement works and could be harnessed, through 18 years of experience in working with people, from running conferences and concerts to broadcasting and television, from aviation to education and to government, and from building online communities to being a church minister.

I had managed to get my frameworks out to a certain degree through client work, seminars, and blogging, but I wanted to do more. At the same time, requests and recommendations for a book that brought my ideas together started coming in, but I wanted to delay this for as long as possible owing to the stacks of research, books, and fascinating people that I waned to draw on to write a full work on the subject. However, to create a short, punchy work that contained the core frameworks in one collection: now that was something I could certainly do in the meantime, and has been my project over the summer of 2017.

Thus, you hold in your hands the result: seven key frameworks for engagement developed over my 18 years in the space.

Being the short book that it is, I regret that this book is without footnotes that would add evidence to my ideas, without case studies that would add far more life to the frameworks, and without discussion of and development on the work of others. Should I have the opportunity to extend on this initial offering and write the fuller work that I have described above, I will certainly address these shortcomings.

Additionally, the litany of people I need to thank for encouraging me and providing suggestions and feedback along the way – which surely numbers into the hundreds – is far more than I can fit into this small volume, and so I also hope I will have the chance to rightfully thank them by name too.

Fortunately, the lack of formally referencing the work of other authors is not too problematic for this short treatment on the subject. The ideas contained within here are the product of my own painstaking work over eight years, during which time I’ve thought constantly about this subject and taken each framework through its paces and numerous redesigns.

However. There are a handful of authors who simply must be recognised upfront. These thinkers are the giants upon whose shoulders I have stood, whose ideas provoked and inspired me, and without whom this book would sincerely not be possible.

Thus, let me break the traditional order of books, and ask you to consider this upfront as the bibliography, further reading, and credits, but where it deserves to be: before anything of mine.

First and foremost:

Joe Pine & James Gilmore to whom I pay my utmost thanks, gratitude and respect. It was Joe’s TED Talk – the first that I ever watched, back in 2008 – that introduced me to their ideas, but more so, opened my eyes to the power of frameworks to expound and understand things. In particular, any use of the word experience within this book, especially in Shape 3, the 3-E Maturity Model, directly relates to their terminology as expounded in their seminal works, The Experience Economy and Authenticity.

Furthermore, I’m grateful to Joe for his personal support and encouragement over the years. Anyone familiar with Joe and Jim’s work will see their thinking runs through mine like blood through veins. It is, therefore, most fitting that Joe graciously offered to write the foreword, for which I am doubly grateful.

The rest are alphabetical:

Ken Blanchard, creator of the One Minute Manager Series. My thinking around meaning, purpose and worthwhile work, especially in Shapes 1, 3 and 4, is inspired by his example in Gung Ho, which I consider to be the best engagement book on the planet.

Bruce Bolger, co-author of Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap, who was pioneering the field of engagement before most of us were even using the word. He created the concept of enterprise engagement as referenced in Shape 4.

Robert Cialdini, whose succinct book Influence: Science and Practice was the textbook from which I lectured at a post-graduate leadership school. After four years of lecturing on the book, his six principles of influence have undoubtedly (and suitably) influenced my work. The granularity of Shapes 5 and 6, and the concept of internal motivators, is particularly influenced by him.

Robin Dickinson, a dear friend who encouraged the early blog posts in 2009 that have led to this book. His life lessons, summarised in his book, The Fortune 8, has become part of my life and shaped the way I think. Shape 2 is in the vein of the type of granular conversations we would have, as is the point that engagement is not the end goal, the bigger intention is.

Sam Ford, co-author of Spreadable Media along with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, who personally encouraged me in the early days of my thinking that I was onto something with the idea of Scattering, Gathering, and Mattering. His work affected Shape 3.

Seth Godin, whose under appreciated book, Unleashing the Ideavirus was an early inspiration for my Scatter, Gather, Matter idea. It is a cliché to reference Seth these days, such is his popularity and quotability, but my book would certainly not exist now without his, and thus it rightfully appears here. Shape 1 is inspired by thoughts that originated from reading his work.

Chip & Dan Heath, who through their book Switch, taught me the power of using metaphors to make an idea memorable, and the division of reason, emotion, and environment. Shape 5’s classification of emotion, mental, action, etc, is developed from their division.

Mark Knapp, creator of Knapp’s Relationship Model as framed in his book Social Intercourse. I came across his framework after finalising my own relationship model (half of which appears in this book, under Shape 6), which served to corroborate my findings.

Patrick Lencioni, who with The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, showed me how to use shapes as frameworks, which has become the very concept of this book. His model was an inspiration for how my presentation of Shapes 2, 3 and 5, and in my understanding of employee engagement, reflected in Shape 4.

Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, who created the participation ladder in Groundswell that inspired me to work on my own version in 2009. That evolved considerably to appear here as Shape 6.

Simon Sinek, creator of the Golden Circle and author of Start With Why. Along with the millions that have watched his TED Talk, he made the word WHY come alive for me, as well as the other members of Kipling’s Six Honest Men. The simplicity of Shape 1, I hope, echoes the simplicity of his Golden Circle.

David Taylor, who wrote the curiously titled The Naked Leader. One idea in that book, about connecting with people by finding things in common to talk about, changed my life when I read it some 15 years ago. The S in Shape 5 is inspired by that revelation.

Thank you all.

Scott Gould,

Plymouth, UK

Foreword to

The Shape of Engagement

B. Joseph Pine II

What a beautiful little book you have in your hands (or on your screen)! I love every model in it, for each one will enable you to deepen the experiences you stage as well as the relationships you have with your customers, your employees, the community in which you serve, and – see Shape 4! – yourself.

Scott Gould – whom I consider my friend with the highest ratio of relationship to time physically spent together – has marshalled an impressive set of ideas and frameworks (with this wonderful connective tissue: shape) all centered on the topic of engagement.

And what an important topic it is! When I work with companies on embracing the Experience Economy and want people to understand the distinction between staging experiences and (merely) delivering services, manufacturing goods, or extracting commodities, the crucial term is exactly that: engagement. You must engage your customers in order to stage a true, distinctive experience, an experience that reaches inside of them and creates a memory within them that lasts long after the experience recedes. And, of course, if you want to create an engaging experience for customers, you first must make sure you engage your employees, giving them the wherewithal to perform on your business stage.

Each and every model Scott takes you through deepens the