At a recent workshop, I was asked whether the Engagement Competency Model can be applied to very large companies. In other words, can a massive and decentralized organization be represented by one manifesto and one set of engagement strategies? And my answer was: yes, no and maybe. :-)

Let's use a real example. I've been working with four institutions that were merged administratively a few years ago. A new director came in who sought to create one powerful brand encompassing the four entities. But the distinct personalities and brands of the individual institutions must also be preserved. So, the way I see it, that overarching brand will represent the one conversation that all four want to have with the world. And this idea of one convergent conversation has been the basis of the unified manifesto that my colleague and I helped them craft. The overarching brand is an artificial construct -- it doesn't exist in reality as a separate entity. But in engaging the public in that convergent conversation, we bring the transcendent level of life into being, in the same way that your cells come together to form your body. Each institution may not create its own manifesto (though it might), but they will each be able to use the ECM to guide their individual strategies.

So, from this example we see that, YES, a large organization can have a meaningful and guiding overarching manifesto and set of engagement strategies.

And NO, that's not the end of the story -- each component within the large organization can also have its own engagement strategies and possibly also its own manifesto, down to the level of each individual employee.

And MAYBE this still won't actually work, if the overarching entity is not truly a transcendent form of life emerging from its integral parts ("body from cells"). One of the workshop participants mentioned the example of Time-Warner and AOL -- this was Frankencompany, not an integral, convergent whole, and so the leaders finally decided to separate the entities into a more natural arrangement. My feeling is that there are a lot of Frankencompanies out there and that this is going to be more and more problematic (which may need to be the topic of another blog post).