Public Engagement Should Be Uncomfortable. Otherwise You're Just Clapping at Yourself in the Mirror.
Why honest feedback matters, how to build engagement systems that work even with difficult audiences, and how to manage the risks.
Let's talk about engagement in the process of producing new knowledge, expertise, and research.v
Mr. Burns: Where did I go wrong? I made all the right moves, didn’t I?
Burns’ Underlings: Yes, sir. Absolutely.
Mr. Burns: Oh, I see it now — you’re nothing but a bunch of yes-men. I was making all the wrong moves, and you were too gutless to tell me!
Burns’ Underlings: Yes, sir. Absolutely. Every move the wrong one.
What About Unsafe Engagement?
We are comfortable with peer review. Some of us are even ready for critical discussion within our professional community. But when it comes to real public communication — reaching different audiences, going beyond the familiar circle — we often prefer not to take the risk.
And honestly, why would we? Comfortable formats are comfortable. Friendly audiences are friendly. We are, after all, experts — and we more or less share the same assumptions and the same ethics of discussion. And if we can add a few glowing comments from the last event to the annual report (alongside the pleasant numbers of attendees) — that’s a win.
We like engaged people. Engaged people of a certain, agreeable type. We don’t like cynics. We don’t like those who push back, question our conclusions, methods, or framing. We don’t like people who don’t trust us.
But real engagement means being willing to be questioned and to hear something you didn’t want to hear. To get the questions your colleagues would never ask (because they don’t see it from that perspective, or because it’s simply not polite or acceptable in a professional setting).
We say we want engagement. Then we design everything to avoid being challenged.
Difficult audiences, difficult questions, difficult relationships
A comfortable audience (the one most of our engagement methods and metrics are built around) does not test our expertise, your methods, your organization, or your expertise.
Willingness to engage publicly with a difficult audience, with uncomfortable opponents, with critics gives (or at least can give) quite a lot:
It tests whether our knowledge actually holds up. Peer approval confirms what we already believe, but a skeptical audience finds the gaps we stopped seeing.
It forces clarity. We can’t hide behind professional jargon when the person across from you doesn’t share your assumptions. If you can’t explain it to someone who disagrees, you probably don’t understand it as well as you think.
It gives you questions your colleagues would never ask. People outside your field work from a different set of assumptions.
It filters for real value. Having to explain why your work matters turns out to be a surprisingly effective way of figuring out whether it actually does.
It builds real credibility. Anyone can present to a friendly room. Being challenged in public (and holding your ground, or changing your mind) is what actually earns trust.
It generates feedback you can use. Applause tells you nothing. Pushback tells you where the friction is, what’s missing, and what landed wrong.
It expands your reach, because comfortable audiences are already yours.
We are the ones who radicalize the feedback
In 9 out of 10 cases, the harsh question from the audience, the uncomfortable comment under your research announcement, the pushback you didn’t expect — these are not a sign that your audience is dangerous. They are a sign that your audience has no other way to be heard.
It is an infrastructure problem.
Here is what working with sensitive content looks like in practice. We conduct research on immigration and integration, focusing on questions of trust in institutions and attitudes toward difficult social and political topics. And we build engagement infrastructure around it: public events before the research begins, interactive articles with space for extended commentary, presentation events after publication in formats that invite real dialogue, including public talks with both researchers and community members. Not once has anything extraordinary happened. There was dialogue. Sometimes disagreement. Sometimes difficult questions. Always within reasonable bounds. And always useful.
What we found is simple: when people have no channels for critical feedback, or only sometimes radicalize in form.
When you build a system of multiple touchpoints and formats, difficult questions find space.
Our fear of difficult audiences is a consequence of our own short-sightedness. We treat engagement as a one-off event rather than a system. We turn the single annual public event or the occasional post into a space where people can finally say what they think — and then we’re surprised when it gets loud.
There are no difficult audiences or topics that are too sensitive (in 9 out of 10 cases). There are only weak engagement approaches - unsystematic, done for the sake of ticking a box.
Formats and principles to be challenged
Our engagement efforts should follow the pipeline of knowledge production and use (for a deeper look at what that pipeline looks like — Building Platforms for the Full Lifecycle of Knowledge):
Before: Engaging your audience before you produce anything helps you tune your assumptions, surface blind spots early, and often build legitimacy from the start:
Public discussions of research questions and research design, hypotheses, and goals before the study begins
Focus groups and community consultations with target audiences
Open calls for input: what questions matter to people, what they want to understand
Pilot formats: testing framing (and sometimes language) with real audiences before publishing
During: Bringing audiences into the production process is uncomfortable. It is also useful. It stress-tests your thinking while there is still time to act on the feedback.
Interim publications and updates on the process
Interactive formats that invite response at key moments — surveys, open questions, structured feedback
Consultations with community representatives or critics during drafting
Verification sessions: sharing preliminary findings with non-expert audiences to test clarity and relevance
After: This is not the end of the process, but the preparation and the beginning of the next knowledge production cycle. And that is exactly how it should be treated. The photos and numbers in the final report are a nice bonus.
Public presentations of results in a dialogue format. Structured dialogue methodologies (such as Timeout) offer a useful model: equal participation, experience-based discussion, and encounter between different perspectives.
Public talks combining expert voices with representatives of the general audience/community audiences being studied
Interactive reports and articles with space for extended public commentary
Structured feedback collection: what landed, what didn’t, what was missing
And, please, turn on your comment threads.
And then feeding that feedback back into the next production cycle as an input.
A few principles across all three stages
Regularity reduces radicalization. When people have one channel and one moment to be heard, they use it loudly. When there is a system of multiple touchpoints, the pressure is distributed, and the feedback form becomes constructive.
Different formats for different audiences. A public talk works for one group. An interactive article works for another. A structured survey works for a third. There is no universal format for engagement — only formats that fit or don’t fit a specific audience and moment.
Repetition is not redundancy. The same finding, communicated in three different formats to three different audiences, is not the same act repeated. It is translated and packed.
Moderate. And invest in it. Bring in a professional moderator for public discussions. Build transparent, clearly announced moderation rules into your comment sections. Engagement is not about letting everything go. It is a managed and open process.
So, what now?
We are not Mr. Burns. We don’t have trapdoors above a pit of hounds for inconvenient visitors. And our audiences are not the Simpsons — not a captive crowd with nowhere else to go.
At the same time, I’m not calling for naivety either.
I’m calling for openness. For not being afraid. And for building an actual engagement system — not a series of rare, often forced attempts that disappoint us precisely because they are rare and forced.
A single annual public event is not engagement. An occasional post with comments turned off is not engagement. A report sent to people who already agree with you is not engagement.
Build the infrastructure and the system. Make it regular. Make it multi-format and multi-touch. Make it open to people who will not simply nod.
The cynics, the critics, the uncomfortable questions — they are not the problem. They are the signal that your knowledge is reaching somewhere new. And challenged.
And that’s the point. Yep?
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