I recently came across some principles for “making large-scale change happen“. I think they’re worth sharing.
Here’s the text version:
More focus on networks, communities, and informal power.
Less formal change management; more choreography.
More virtual connection.
Identifying and working through super connectors.
Young leaders at the heart of change.
Less change programs; more change platforms.
Less top-down; more bottom-up and inside-out, middle-led.
More 30, 60, 90-day change cycles; less one or two-year change programs.
I like and agree with all of these principles. In particular:
Number 6. focuses on creating lasting process and culture that supports and normalizes change in an organization. This is a superior approach compared to the traditional lumbering change programs that are generally irrelevant long before they are “completed”.
Number 8. emphasizes the importance of small, quick experiments. The hardest problems organizations face are chaotic and complex (the Cynefin model). Therefore, they require novel and emergent practices: experiments to learn more about how the problem areas respond to action and probes.
I have one caveat. Number 3. “more virtual connection” is certainly appropriate if it adds to the repertoire and quality of connections or reduces access privilege. But be careful not to replace important face-to-face connection opportunities with virtual ones. Until we get the holodeck, virtual doesn’t provide the quality of connection and engagement that routinely occur at well-designed face-to-face events.
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to waste valuable meeting time.
Ask attendees why they go to meetings and their top two responses are to learn and connect. Remember kids that ask a question, and when you answer it they say “why?”
“Why can’t we go outside?” “Because it’s raining.” “Why?” “Well, water’s coming out of the sky.” “Why?”
So be that annoying kid for a moment and ask: “Why do you want to learn and connect?”
If you play enough rounds of the why game, and ignore the unprofessional but possibly truthful answers — for example: “I’m hoping to get to know an attractive colleague better”; “My boss said I had to and I need a pay raise”; “It’s been too long since I ate fresh Maine lobster” — you will find that the core motivation to go to meetings is to change in some useful way. Change how you see things, and, most important, change how you do things: i.e. behavior change.
The dubious value of public speaking
So now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s review what Harold Jarche, a veteran educator in the Canadian Armed Forces and now a leading consultant on workplace learning, has to say about the value of public speaking [emphasis added]:
“I do a fair bit of public speaking. But I doubt that much of it has changed anyone’s behaviour. I may have presented some new ideas and sparked some thinking. With a one-hour lecture, you cannot expect more. Yet a lot of our training programs consist of an expert presenting to ‘learners’. Do we really expect behaviour change from this? That would be rather wishful thinking. Learning is a process, not an event.”
“To learn a skill or get better at one you have to practice. Deliberate practice with constructive feedback is the key for long-term success.“
“I conduct face-to-face workshops as well as online ones. For my on-site sessions, usually 1/2 or a full day, I try to cover the basics and the key concepts. We do a few exercises to get people thinking differently. But I don’t expect significant changes in performance as a result of one day together.”
—Harold Jarche, no time, no learning
Like Harold, after years of running meetings and workshops I’ve learned that the likelihood creating permanent valuable behavior change increases as a power of the time spent together. By “together” I don’t mean listening passively to an expert talk. I mean working together as a group to learn new skills and approaches and ways of thinking and practicing with constructive group and expert feedback.
We’ve all heard we should be doing these things to maximize the value of our valuable time together. But very, very few of today’s meetings involve even a smattering of facilitated deliberate practice with constructive feedback.
When you think of all the expensive time we continue to waste doing things we’ve been doing for hundreds of years which we now know don’t work — well, I think tragedy is an accurate description of what routinely passes as a “meeting”.
Change is hard. We now know that social production is the way to maximize learning that leads to significant, valuable, long-term change. At meetings, the instantiations of social production are facilitated workshops run by and/or with content experts. That’s what we should be doing.
Not lectures from experts. Don’t waste valuable meeting time doing that!
In my keynote at Blend Abu Dhabi, the inaugural meeting industry conference at the new Yas Conference Centre, I shared six reasons to change conferences for them to remain relevant to today’s attendees.
Although I’ve written about these issues before, this is the first time I’ve summarized them in one place. Together they make a strong business case for the participant-driven and participation-rich meetings I’ve been advocating since 1992.
Enjoy!
Sessions provide no connection around content
Today, the most important reason why people go to conferences is to usefully connect with others around relevant content. But our conference programs still focus on lectures, where a few experts broadcast their knowledge to passive listeners: the audience. During lectures, there’s no connection between audience members and no connection around lecture content.
At traditional conferences, connection is relegated to breaks, meals, and socials! That’s why you so often hear, “The best part of that conference was the conversations in the hallways.” It doesn’t have to be that way! Peer conferences provide conference sessions where participants connect around relevant, timely content.
Lectures are a terrible way to learn
We’ve known for over a hundred years that lectures are a terrible way to learn something. Lectures are a seductive meeting format because they are very efficient ways of sharing information. Unfortunately, lectures are perhaps the least effective way of learning anything.
Why? Over time, we rapidly forget almost everything someone tells us. But when we engage with content, we remember more of it, remember it more accurately, and remember it longer. Every measure of learning increases drastically when attendees actively participate while learning in sessions.
The rise of online
Most broadcast content is now readily available online. An internet connection provides expert content anywhere, just in time when it’s needed. You don’t need to go to conferences for broadcast content (which you’ll probably have forgotten by the time you need it) anymore!
Professionals learn predominantly socially, not in the classroom
Until about twenty years ago, professionals learned most of what they needed to know to do their jobs in the classroom. Today we know that only about 10% of what we need to know to do our jobs involves formal classroom teaching. The other 90% is informal, provided by a combination of self-directed learning and social, active, experiential learning with our peers on the job or (what an opportunity!) at conferences with our peers.
Though ~90% of the learning modalities adult workers need these days are informal social learning from our peers, we persist in making the bulk of “education” at meetings formal presentations by a few experts! Instead, we need to concentrate on and provide maximum opportunities for the just-in-time peer learning our attendees need and want.
Today, everyone has expertise and experience to share
Everyone who has worked in a profession for a while is an expert resource for some of her or his peers. Instead of limiting content to broadcast by a few “experts”, peer conferences provide process and support to uncover and tap the thousands of years of expertise and experience in the room. Remember how David Weinberger puts it: “The smartest person in the room is the room.” We need conference process that uncovers and taps everyone’s experience and expertise while people are together at the conference!
Most pre-scheduled sessions don’t address actual attendee wants and needs
Because we’ll forget learning that isn’t currently needed and reinforced, conferences need to provide just-in-time learning. And you can’t predict most of the just-in-time learning by asking a program committee, or attendees for that matter, in advance. My research has found that 50 – 90% of all pre-scheduled conference sessions are not what attendees actually want and need! In contrast, just about all peer conference sessions, chosen and run by participants during the event, are rated highly because they provide the just-in-time learning and connection that participants want from the event.
Conclusion
My books explore these six reasons to change conferences in detail. To get the full story, buy ’em!
But the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret is so embarrassing, we don’t even talk about it in private.
We make no attempt to discover (let alone evaluate) the long-term value of our meetings to attendees!
Before the event, we turn up our marketing to eleven, create FOMO, and do everything we can to get potential attendees to register. It’s going to be great!
During the event, we do our best to put on a heck of a show.
After the event? Crickets.
Once the event is over, it’s done. We barely look back; we’re on to the next one. Don’t look back! (You might not like what you see.)
This is fine for special events, which are primarily about creating an emotional experience and celebrating cultural rituals.
It’s not OK for any other kind of meeting.
Long-term meeting value for participants
Did the event have any significant long-term impact on the lives of the participants? Did anything significant change as a result? Or was the event effectively a short-term-feel-good, short-term-high-impact experiential blip?
If you think about it, this is shocking. We spend vast sums of money and consign umpteen person-hours to a meeting. And we have no idea whether it made any significant long-term difference to the people who attended it!
Notice I’m not concentrating on other meeting stakeholders here. Those who run meetings as a business can determine whether a meeting met their profit goals or not. Sponsors have metrics to help them decide if the event business booked, new connections made, and existing connections strengthened were worth the time and money expended. Even presenters, to some extent, can discover via feedback their audience impact and often find out whether their exposure led to future opportunities to speak or consult.
But long-term value to participants? We have no idea, because we don’t do anything to discover if there even was any, and, if there was, what it might be.
The invisible elephant in the room
Why do we ignore what I believe is the most important outcome of meetings from the attendee perspective: long-term change? After all, if you go to a meeting and nothing significant changes in your life as a result, what was the point of going?
I think we avoid talking about attendee long-term benefits from our meetings because we secretly know that most meetings do not lead to long-term change for most attendees. And we are embarrassed by this reality.
The meeting industry’s invisible elephant is that most meetings are incapable by design of producing significant long-term attendee benefits.
But, but … we do evaluate our meetings!
If you think that smile sheets dropped in a box at the end of a session, app-based evals, and online surveys that must be completed within a few days provide an accurate picture of the long-term benefits of a meeting, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Even if we include them (and we often don’t), short-term evaluations measure emotional impact, not long-term change and are unreliable[1,2] measurements of event value. They tell us nothing about the impact of meeting attendance months later, when the stirring closing session story told by the motivational speaker that you thought was great at the time has been forgotten and, most likely, hasn’t changed your life or perspectives on it one bit.
OK, I hear you. So, if were brave enough to explore my event’s long-term impact, how would I do it?
How do we expose and face the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret?
<soapbox>First of all, if you really want to create events that are maximally likely to provide long-term attendee value, you need to think about event designs that are likely to provide it! That’s why I design and facilitate meetings that meet participants’ actual wants and needs, rather than the traditional pre-determined, best-guess programs that, from my extensive experience, don’t.</soapbox>
Here are three tools that can be used to explore the long-term impact of an event.
Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
A time-delayed evaluation of conference and sessions’ Net Promoter Scores provides summary feedback about long-term value. (The link explains how NPS is calculated from respondents’ answers.) Use questions of the form:
“Considering the value you gained from Conference C/Session X, Y & Z, how likely is it that you would recommend Conference C/Session X, Y & Z to a friend or colleague?”
Adding an open-ended request for respondents to share their reasons for each rating will provide useful feedback on the value of a conference and its sessions.
A Letter To Myself
Set aside around 30 minutes just before the end of the event, supply each participant with notepaper and an envelope, and ask them to reflect on the changes they would like to make in their lives as a result of the event over the next [3 months/6 months/year/appropriate time period]. Attendees write letters to themselves about their changes and insert the letters into the supplied envelopes, which they then seal and address to themselves. The envelopes are collected and mailed out, unread, by the conference organizers once the announced time period has passed.
A Letter To Myself provides participants with a personal method to evaluate the long-term effect of an event, but meeting organizers remain in the dark unless participant responses to receiving their letters are shared back. That’s why I developed the following tool.
The Reminder
The Reminder is a more sophisticated version of A Letter To Myself that adds valuable long-term feedback to the conference organizers. See the link for full details.
Do it!
If you want to really know about the long-term value of your meetings to attendees, I’ve given you concrete things you can do to find out. I know it can be scary to ask these questions, because there’s usually that little voice in your mind that says, “Suppose I find out that what I’m doing really sucks? Then what?”
I’m here to tell you that the likelihood is very high that you will hear really good stuff about what you’re doing — and yes, there will be some unsettling responses too, because you can’t please everyone no matter what you do. Buried amongst the “not-so-great” responses will be nuggets of gold feedback you can use to improve your event for next time. Working on continuous improvement is increasingly important in the competitive world of meetings, and here are some implementation tools.
It’s your choice whether you use them or not.
Do you agree that not evaluating the long-term value of our meetings to attendees is the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret? Do you have other suggestions for taking an honest look at what we’re providing to our meeting attendees? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
“On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story…”
From my earliest days as a reader, I have loved science fiction. I think this is because good science fiction is the literature of ideas, as Pamela Sargent described it. It’s a fascinating place where the consequences of making different assumptions about the world can be explored and expanded on in myriad ways creatively tied to our human experience.
One evening in 1966, Frederik Pohl wrote Day Million: a classic science fiction short story that starts with the sentence above, and paints—in two thousand words—an ordinary yet unbelievable day in the future.
The story ends with one of the most perfect final paragraphs I’ve ever read:
“Balls, you say, it looks crazy to me. And you—with your aftershave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night—tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?”
Pohl demonstrates in Day Million how our very notion of “normal” can morph over time into something almost unrecognizable. What’s noteworthy is that it’s not the technology of the future that seems foreign, but its inhabitants’ attitudes about their routine lives.
And this brings us, finally, to meetings. Like the readers of Pohl’s story, we stay stuck in our beliefs about what should happen in a “normal” meeting. We cannot imagine how they could be different, in the same way as an Elizabethan merchant would be dumbfounded by the idea of buying almost anything we wanted from a box in our room and having it delivered over thousands of miles in a couple of days. When we look at the past we have no problem seeing how our perspective has changed dramatically. We frequently wonder why no one then thought to do what seems obvious today.
And yet we can barely start to conceive how our future will be different.
But it will be different.
That’s worth remembering when someone in the meetings profession proposes something crazy. Multi-day meetings with no preplanned agenda. People constructing during the event sessions that work for them. Conference sessions designed so that attendees interact with each other.
In 1982, Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was the cause of most ulcers, challenging the established medical doctrine that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. Their claim was ridiculed, so Barry drank a Petri dish containing cultured Heliobacter and promptly developed gastritis. His self-experiment eventually helped change medical thinking. In 2005, both men were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
So, how do we convince people?
Changing events
Often when I’m working with a client on implementing experiential and participant-driven events, he wants to understand how what I’m proposing will work.
It’s perfectly reasonable that he wants to understand. The trouble is, unless he’s had the experience of participating in an experiential and participant-driven event, he simply may not be able to understand how the format works.
If you think about it, this seems silly. Every day we experience unexpected things, and some of them change our world for the better in ways we’d never rationally expect. Right? So why are we skeptical that this can happen at our events?
Because most meetings and conferences are tightly scripted and controlled. So we’ve likely never experienced the intense conversations, learning, and facilitated connection around topics and issues that we, not a conference program committee, chose. We’ve never had the opportunity to discover the empowerment and joy when we get to meet, face-to-face, peers who share and have insights on our specific challenges. We’ve never seen a solid, long-lasting community of fellow participants being built before our eyes. And we’ve never encountered an event that galvanized participants into appropriate and effective action.
The need to understand
So when someone like me proposes a “different” way to design events, clients want to “understand” how it works before they’ll give me a go-ahead. When they don’t, I’ll get responses like this [verbatim extract from an email I received this week]:
“We presented our program to [our board] last week and got some push back on having two full days of the format/program devoted to the unconference. The primary concern is being able to effectively market the program such that potential attendees can show the published programming/topics and get manager support for the expense to attend/travel to the event. Without a descriptive agenda with topics – the fear is that managers won’t be able to justify that it is a relevant agenda for professional development.”
In fact, everyone who experiences a well-designed participant-driven event knows that on-site development of an agenda that is truly relevant to the attendees’ professional development is not a problem. Yet without that experience, most people cannot understand how such a format can work.
If I get sufficient access to the decision-makers, I can usually provide enough “understanding” to convince them to go ahead. But experiencing the design itself is far more effective. Here’s a post-event communication excerpt from a decision-making former skeptic:
Thank you for your efforts in making our very first [foundation] meeting a huge success. The meeting far exceeded my expectations and I have been reporting the success of the event to the leadership here at [foundation].
And here’s a participant’s feedback from the same event:
Thank you Adrian! I was skeptical at first of the conference format. But now I’m really glad that it was organized that way!
Experience to understand
Sometimes you need to experience to understand. Seth Godin puts it like this:
It turns out, humans don’t use explanations to make change happen. They change, and then try to explain it. —Seth Godin, Clarity vs. impact
When I have the opportunity and authority to facilitate an experience that can lead to powerful, appropriate learning and change, I don’t spend much time explaining why it might do so. I just start. The hardest part is being given the authority to do it. Because that requires trust in my ability to deliver what I’m offering.
I don’t blame the skeptics out there. The world is full of people who promise miracles and don’t deliver. That’s why, besides attempting to explain why what I do works, I also encourage clients to talk to some of the tens of thousands of people who have participated in one of my experiential sessions or conferences. If they take the time to check, this usually does the trick.
Taking a leap
Yes, it’s hard to take a leap and trust something you haven’t experienced and don’t yet understand. Ask me to be the first person to ever jump from a plane with something called a “parachute” on my back? I’d turn you down. But you’re not the first person to jump! Talk to people you trust who have already made it safely and wonderfully to the ground. You may well realize that if they did it, you can do it too.
Then, go for the change. You can work on understanding it later.
This post is part of the series How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
Opportunities that can change our lives in amazing ways surround us. These opportunities come in the form of a choice between continuing with what we are already doing and doing something different. Think of them as forks in the road.
The fork in the road offers only two difficulties…
Seeing it.
and
Taking it
Most organizations that stumble fail to do either one. The good news is that there are far more people than ever pointing out the forks that are open to us. The “this” or “that” alternatives that each lead to success if we’re gutsy enough to take one or the other.
Taking the fork is hard because we fear change. Venturing into the unknown scares us. Perhaps we are scared of what might happen if we fail, or of feeling embarrassed. We may even be scared of what might happen if we succeed!
Change potentially threatens the way we see the world and when we confront circumstances that are inconsistent with our worldview, we’re likely to feel stress. How many people do you know who enjoy extra stress in their life?
Change is also potentially associated with loss. Loss, for example, of all the time and effort we’ve expended learning how to do something a particular way. How many people do you know who enjoy loss?
The reality of this extra stress and loss is a hard obstacle to overcome—and it must be dealt with in order for you to take the fork.
So how can we do better at choosing a new path?
Here are three steps.
First, notice how you’re feeling about taking the fork. If you’re oblivious to how you feel about a change, your emotions will likely determine your actions. When fear is the dominant emotion, you are unlikely to take the fork. If you do take the fork without awareness of the associated stress and loss, they will ambush you later, usually when their effects have built to dangerous levels.
Second, express how you’re feeling about taking the fork. I find that sharing my feelings with someone I trust is the best way to do this, though some people prefer to journal privately about the emotions that taking the fork brings up. Processing how you are feeling helps you work through your emotions and integrate the new path into a feasible personal future.
Third, take the fork! Like most things in life, practice makes taking the fork easier. When you feel those butterflies in your stomach it’s easier to make the scary choice when you’ve felt them a hundred times before and, most of those times, things turned out alright. There will always be more forks, and the more frequently you take them, the easier it’ll be to take the next one. Robert Frost “took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.” Follow his footsteps!
Photo attribution: Flickr user raptortheangel
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore why change is hard and various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
I make a sales visit
In one of my former lives (the one when I ran a solar manufacturing company) I sold devices called air-to-air heat exchangers. These nifty units provide fresh air ventilation to buildings while simultaneously using the outgoing stale air to heat or cool the incoming fresh air, thus saving heating energy in the winter and cooling energy in the summer.
One day I met with the owner of a large offset printing shop who was curious about these gizmos. Entering the print room, the smell of ink almost knocked me over. As Bill showed me around I began to get a splitting headache. Confident that his business could use what I was selling I asked him how he put up with the smell.
“The smell?” he said. “Oh, I don’t even notice it.”
“Does anyone complain?” I asked.
Bill thought for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “I guess most customers mention it when they visit the plant. New employees too.”
He paused.
“But you get used to it.”
To me, desperate to flee the premises, it was incredible that anyone could adapt to the stink. And yet it was clear that everyone else in the building seemed to be happily going about their business.
Habituation
Bill and his employees were providing me, for better or worse, with a good example of sensory habituation. Sensory habituation involves our amazing ability to adapt to sensory stimulation to the point when we no longer notice it. The tick of the wall clock in your home, the lumpy mattress you sleep on every night, the flicker of the fluorescent lighting over your desk. You notice them at first, but in time they disappear from your consciousness. Your amazing neuroplastic brain filters out constant stimuli over time so we can concentrate on the new and unfamiliar.
Most of the time, habituation is a big plus. Imagine always being unable to concentrate on a conversation because of a loud clock ticking, being unable to sleep on your uncomfortable mattress, or getting a headache from the flickering lights in your office. But when we’re trying to change behavior, habituation can get in the way.
Habituation’s downside
As a child in school, most of the time teachers are teaching us things we don’t know. This is because we cram the fruits of thousands of years of human learning into ten to twenty years of school. There’s no way we can be an equal contributor to the teacher’s learning under these circumstances. As a result, is it any wonder that we believe that learning is something that only happens one way: from a teacher to a learner?
And while we’re being taught in school, we sit in straight rows of chairs so other kids won’t distract us while all this knowledge is shared with us. Is it any wonder that we’re habituated to believe that sitting in straight rows of chairs is how we should sit when we’re learning new things?
By the time we become adults, models such as learning and the “normal” room set while learning are habituations. Even though we know that working adults can quickly amass expertise and experience in their professional field that is of great value to their peers. Even though we know that straight-row theatre seating is perhaps the worst arrangement for facilitating the peer-to-peer interactions that are most effective at creating appropriate, accurate, and lasting learning.
Get unstuck
So how do we overcome our habituation to the familiar that may be preventing us from seeing something important?
When we are oblivious to our habituations, we don’t even notice things that might be worth examining. The first step is noticing.
We return from a vacation and, entering our office that has been absent from our life for a week we see the flickering light above our desk. That’s the moment when we have a chance to realize that something may be worth changing in our work environment.
We notice that our neck and lower back are hurting after 15 minutes while sitting at the end of a row twisted towards a speaker who is going to be talking at us for another 45 minutes. That’s another moment when we might make a note to revise the seating plan at our next event.
Amy asks us about a session two days later, and we notice we couldn’t remember anything the speaker said. That’s an opportunity for us to evaluate the effectiveness of the education we’ve been serving up at our conferences.
Noticing is tough. It’s easy to dismiss that little flicker of awareness and let the powerful force of habituation sweep us back into the familiar. A few hours later, we’ve forgotten that we even noticed the flickering light, and we dismiss our evening headache as an unwelcome side effect of going back to work.
That’s why the second step in getting unstuck from the downside of habituation is capturing what you notice. I’ve written about David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which explains how to create safe places to capture ideas and tasks. You can expand his methodology to capture things you notice too. Once captured, we can review them regularly to reinforce what we’ve noticed and begin to work on the process of change.
You can’t win ’em all
My visit gave Bill a chance to notice that his work environment was making newcomers uncomfortable. But the force of habituation won out. By the end of our time together, he remained unconvinced of the need for ventilation, based on his own and his employees’ habituation.
I didn’t make the sale.
The next time you notice that little attention flicker of something out of the ordinary, try capturing it immediately and reviewing it later. You may have noticed something formerly buried by your habituation, something worth changing.
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
The devolution of the British roundabout
I grew up in England, where roundabouts are more common than traffic lights as a way of routing traffic. (Fun fact: Hertfordshire, England, built the first roundabout in the world in the early 1900’s.) When I was a kid, roundabouts were walled constructions in the center of traffic circles. They looked like this:
In the 1960’s, the Brits realized that such elaborate constructions were overkill, and roundabouts became more like this:
As time went on, roundabout design was simplified further to this minimalist design:
These so-called mini-roundabouts were smaller than previous versions because they allowed the rear wheels of large vehicles to drive over the edge of the central circle when making tight turns.
While in London last year I saw the most recent evolution of the British roundabout. The physical barrier of the central island has completely disappeared, and the roundabout has just become a simple painted circle, with directional arrows painted on the road surface.
Four lessons we can learn about facilitating change from this brief history of roundabouts
When we are facilitating a desired change, we need to clearly communicate the change we want to make
Think about what would have happened if the initial replacement for the street intersections that human cultures have used for thousands of years was a plain white circle. People would not have understood how it was supposed to function. Without a physical barrier forcing a circular route, drivers would have been tempted to drive straight across it. The first roundabout design had to impose a fundamentally different way of navigating intersections; otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked.
It’s easier to facilitate change in small increments than in large leaps
By the time of the plain white circle roundabout, the concept of driving around, rather than through, circular objects placed at the center of intersections was imprinted on the British drivers’ psyche. The final design is quite different from the elaborate early roundabouts, but it developed through a series of incremental design refinements.
Change is attractive if the new situation has advantages
Each change in the design of the British roundabout created advantages for the builders (less expensive), environment (less space wasted at intersections), and users (more space to negotiate the intersection). While the promise of an improved outcome does not guarantee that a change will occur, it certainly can’t hurt.
Different cultures can have very different approaches to change
If you’re not British, your experience of roundabouts will be different; you may not even know what a roundabout is! In the United States, roundabouts only started appearing in the 1990’s (rotaries and traffic circles employ different rules). Other European countries have their own roundabout designs and unique histories of introduction. Don’t assume that a change that has worked for one culture will be acceptable to another. (A corollary to this lesson is that exploring other cultures is a wonderful way to have your eyes opened to aspects of your culture that you take for granted.)
Are there other lessons we can learn from the British roundabout? What other design evolutions can you think of that teach lessons about facilitating change?
In my keynote at Blend Abu Dhabi, the inaugural meeting industry conference at the new 
There are some things that the meeting industry doesn’t like to talk about in public. For example:
