Joan Carles Contel

If we want change to be systemic, we need to engage people across multiple levels, from influencing and involving many, to co-creating with some. The "Engagement Staircase" from Russ Gaskin (CoCreative) and Akash Bhalerao (Ashoka) is a really helpful, research-informed framework for thinking about who we need to engage and how. Their core premise is that engagement is not a single act. It exists on a spectrum of levels, from communicating to many, through consulting, involving, and collaborating, to co-creating with a smaller core. Each step represents a progressively deeper level of stakeholder participation, ownership and shared power. In health and care, that tends to mean a lot of communication and consultation, and not enough collaboration and co-creation. We often inform people about change. We ask for their views. We call it engagement. But informing is the bottom step of the staircase, and consulting, however well-designed, still positions the leader as the one who decides. Working at higher levels of engagement requires a different kind of change leadership capacity. Co-creation is likely to mean relinquishing control over outcomes. Collaboration requires an ongoing investment in relationships, not just in on-off tasks. Most change leadership development is better at building lower-level engagement skills than upper-level ones. In our sector, there is a big push towards “co-production” or “co-creation” which is a positive thing. However, It is also problematic to think that we need to co-create with a lot of people. The higher up the staircase, the fewer people are involved, and that's by design. We communicate to many; we co-create with some. We have to be intentional about this distribution. The risk is trying to get everyone to the top step, or, just as problematic, keeping everyone at the bottom. Both are strategic errors. We should seek to work across all five levels simultaneously. It’s about holding large-scale awareness and influence across a wide network while nurturing a smaller network of co-creators who are deeply invested in the work. This requires thinking about engagement like a portfolio, mapping who needs to be where on the staircase, and actively managing upward movement over time. There is also an equity dimension. Who gets invited to collaborate and co-create? In too many change initiatives, the higher levels of engagement get reserved for those who already hold formal power or existing relationships with the change leader. Creating the conditions for systemic change means actively seeking out people whose experience is closest to the problem, even when that requires bridging structural divides. We might treat the Engagement Staircase as a mirror - reflecting on which levels we are working at, with whom, and what it would take to move the right people to higher levels of ownership of the change. The article: lnkd.in/eaDX8z5p. It has links to some great resources.