On the topic of engagement, I have found no better authority
than Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who’s written several excellent books based on his
decades of research on the topic. (Here’s a gratuitous link to his page on Amazon.) I would strongly recommend his work to
anyone whose profession involves the “soft skills” or whose success requires
getting people to remain engaged in an activity. Because his foundational concept of “flow”
is so critical to customer experience, I figured it worthwhile to summarize.
The Concept of Flow
“Flow” is the term Csikszentmihalyi uses to describe the
quality of an engaging experience, one in which an individual becomes so engrossed
that he devotes himself to the completion of an activity and becomes immune to
all distractions, to the point of being utterly mesmerized. It is not a state that people find to be
disagreeable but, quite the contrary, they find it highly pleasurable and
undertake a great deal of inconvenience and make significant sacrifices in
order to find and pursue opportunities to become engaged to this degree.
Flow is also the ideal state into which a marketer desires
to place a prospect and the peak performance state in which a manager desires
to place employees – one in which a person is single-mindedly devoted to the
completion of the activities required to buy a product or perform a task. Moreover, work and consumption are two
activities that are particularly suited to the application of flow.
However, few firms seem adept at getting customers,
employees, and other stakeholders on whom their success depends – and most theories
and practices that are undertaken to achieve success are not merely incapable
of facilitating a flow state, but instead they interrupt and prevent the initiation
of a flow state by advocating practices that undermine engagement and disrupt
individuals who are already in a state of flow.
It’s for this reason that understanding the core qualities
of a flow experience is worthwhile: to assess whether a suggested practice has
the potential for success with an eye toward adapting it or abandoning it in
favor of a more suitable approach.
Core Qualities of a
Flow Experience
According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are certain qualities
that create and sustain engagement. Not
all flow activities entail all of these qualities – but of greater importance,
if anything is done that prevents these qualities, engagement is decreased,
undermined, and ultimately destroyed.
These qualities are as follows:
- Intrinsic Reward – There is
a desire to engage in activities or achieve an outcome for its own sake
rather than seeking to earn a reward.
This is the difference between doing a job one enjoys for low wages
and doing a job one detests for high wages.
- Challenge – The difficulty
of the activities must be in the upper range of an individual’s
capabilities, challenging him to do his best and perhaps exceed what he
thinks are his limits. Simple tasks
that are done mindlessly are not engaging, nor are tasks that seem
impossible.
- Feedback – The individual
is able to sense that his actions are contributing to the achievement of
the outcome (or that they are not and he should try a different
approach. Ideally feedback is
objective, sensory, immediate, and personally recognizable.
- Focus – The individual’s
attention must be fully directed to the actions he is taking, without
distractions or unrelated obstructions.
Largely, this pertains to the environment rather than the task
itself.
- Control – The individual must have a sense of personal control over the situation, the activity, and the outcome. The situation may involve factors that are beyond control, but there are no artificial impediments to the individual’s ability to decide and take action
- Serenity – An individual in a flow state experiences serenity: he loses track of time, loses awareness of his physical needs, and even loses his self-consciousness, being only vaguely aware of his physical self as a resource that is engaged in the task.
Note: Csikszentmihalyi identifies ten qualities, but some are
redundant so closely related that I have grouped them (the three items listed
under “serenity” are three separate items in his original list and “challenge”
covers two separate items for things that are too simple or too difficult).
Caveat: Engagement
and Enticement
Aside of the redundancies mentioned above, I have one other
qualm with Csikszentmihalyi’s work: it seems to blur the line between the
separate qualities of enticement (the desire to begin a task) and engagement
(the desire to complete the task once it has begun). He seems to assume that a person will find enticing
a task that he knows or suspects to be engaging – and I would conceded that
this is often the case.
However, while it is often the case, it is not always the
case – and this is a particular weakness in customer experience design. There are significant differences between the
motivations of the prospect and the repeat customer as well as between the
shopping, purchasing, and using experiences. Very often, prospects are mishandled on the
premise that they will be enticed by something that is engaging (when they are
not convinced that it will be engaging).
For that reason, I recommend making a stronger distinction between the
two and avoiding the assumption that one follows the other.
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