Tactics for Vested Engagement - Keeping it Simple

Recently, my mentor Martin Groder MD, suggested I read Bounded Choice by Janja Lalich. While the book is about True Believers and charismatic cults, it is a wonderful study in Vested Engagement and how not to lead Sustainable Organizations. While I found the book to be terribly repetitive and her theoretical “models” inflated with sociological jargon, it led me to synthesize a set of 10 tools to generate Vested Engagement. The pivotal issue that separates a cult from a potentially Sustainable Organization is that the focus of the cult is on a charismatic leader and on system of beliefs that preludes adaptive alignment. See my posting on Leadership of Sustainable Organizations for more about leadership.

Initiation – take people into the organization with ceremony and import
Ranks – insure that folks have a way of seeing up to heroes and down to newbies
Badges and Medals – develop markers or distinctions that indicate commitment or paticipation in campaigns or wars
Uniforms and Songs – have a code of conduct and/or dress and/or language that trades individuality for a sense of inclusion and membership
Enemies – identify an organization to oppose on the basis of culture or values, not merely competition
Creed and Motto – create an easily stated - out of reach ideal for members to aspire to
Confession and/or Testimony and/or Witnessing – create group events where members interpret themselves to another as failed or transformed or transforming in order to meet the ideal described in the creed or motto
Regulated Dissonance and/or Double-Binds and/or Crises – create situations where the choice to remain a member is an outcome of a conflict over irreconcilable values such as means versus ends, individuality versus conformity, faith versus works, etc.
Threat of Expulsion – periodically publicly apply standards in the creed or motto to define a member(s) as not measuring up to the ideal in the creed or motto
Merge Personal Identity With the Organization – use affinity networks to coopt familial relationships or friendships so that the member does not need to go outside the organization for intimacy or identity affirmation