Who is changing the world?
Sasha Dichter writes about “modern, techno-optimistic” solutions to important problems, as characterized by the quick-fix phrase “I’ve just heard about a great new ______ that will solve the ______ problem!”
Worth reading. Especially the article’s conclusion:
“Indeed, everyone I know who is changing the world is in the long-haul business.”
—Sasha Dichter, The Long Haul
Image attribution: Unknown—if it’s yours, let me know!
Stay open to change!
Toward the end of my participative techniques workshop at RCMA EMERGE 2015, I ran a plus/delta evaluation of the entire workshop. Here, as best as I can reconstruct it, is one man’s feedback:
“I’m 83 years old and have been managing our events for 59 years. I reckon I have a couple more years left before I retire. My community’s events are stale; we’re not getting the kind of engagement we used to. This workshop has opened my eyes to simple and effective ways to improve our events. I’ve experienced some really good techniques here and we’re going to change some things we do.”
Wow! I hope I can stay as open when I’m 83 and for the rest of my life.
I hope you can stay open to change too.
Change is a verb, not a noun.
To make something change, we need to act.
Yes grammar wonks, “change” can be a noun. But change(-noun) is about the past or the future. “He dyed his hair!” or “I’m determined to lose a few pounds!” When we use “change” as a noun, we’re passive observers, noticing change without being a part of it.
Change(-noun) is static.
Change(-verb) involves us. “Her entire demeanor changed in a flash.” or “When I stopped talking for five days, my whole attitude to eating changed forever.”
We can notice, wish for, or announce we’re in favor of change until we’re blue in the face. Yes, noticing is a good start. But no action is required.
The change that matters is a verb.
Photo attribution: Flickr user odolphie
What is a human catalyst?
cat·a·lyst
/ˈkatl-ist/
noun
a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.
Nearly 200,000 people include the word catalyst in their LinkedIn profile. A catalyst is something that causes a change without changing itself. For example, a gas or diesel car’s exhaust system uses a catalytic converter to reduce air pollution. The core catalytic components of the converter do not get altered or used up as they do their job.
In the competitive world of consulting, the word catalyst has become a synonym for change. Catalyst sounds sexy, mysterious, and—scientific! Not surprising then that it’s a common marketing term for consultants. “Idea Catalysts”, “Strategic Catalysts”, “Creativity Catalysts”, “Innovation Catalysts”, and “Marketing Catalysts” abound.
But can you be a genuine catalyst—a person who facilitates change of some sort but stays unchanged in the process?
I don’t think so.
If you set yourself up as an unchangeable teacher or trainer who flies in, runs your box of processes to change others in some way, and leaves unaltered, you are someone who is closed to learning while simultaneously advocating it to others. This is not congruent behavior.
I attempt to be open to learning as much as I can. I wrote my first book about participant-driven and participation-rich conference design after seventeen years of refining the process first used in 1992. Four years later, I published an update that included many important improvements I’d learned from feedback and my own observations. Every conference I facilitate leads to more ideas. There will always be refinements to the Conferences That Work format for as long as I’m convening events.
In fact, if I ever run an event and feel that I haven’t learned something from it and change in the process, that will be a sign that I’m losing my effectiveness and should consider doing something different.
I’m not sure that you can facilitate change effectively without changing yourself—or, at the very least, being open to the reality that you may change.
So if you’re planning to work with someone who calls themselves a human catalyst, be cautious. They may be using the term as a synonym for change (like my friend Thom Singer who is certainly open to being changed himself). But alternatively, they may believe that they are true catalysts—they “have the answer”. The wisest and most interesting individuals I know are, despite their obvious expertise and experience, always open to learn from anyone and change in the process. These are the people with whom you may want to spend your time.
Photo attribution: Flickr user rustychainsaw
Sometimes an experience is worth a million words.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
Photo attribution: Flickr user victius
Here’s a magical question to ask when someone says “I don’t know“.
One of the most common answers to a question is I don’t know. (I’m not saying it’s especially common, just more common than “cheddar”, “42”, and “in the second drawer on the left”.) Generally, I don’t know is a good answer because it’s likely to be an honest one. After all, it’s when someone confidently answers a question about which they really haven’t a clue that all kinds of trouble can follow.
But occasionally someone—let’s call him Paul—answers with I don’t know after a pause, perhaps in a hesitant manner, that makes you wonder if perhaps he does have an interesting answer “at the back of his mind”. Here’s a magical follow-up question that often leads to a more specific, useful response.
Let’s suppose that a specific problem has been identified and described by Paul and you ask him:
“What would the solution look like?”
Paul, after a pause, says hesitantly:
“I don’t know.”
Here’s the magical follow-up question, asked in an even tone:
“If you did know, what do you think the solution would look like?”
Now stay quiet and wait for an answer.
You may get another, puzzled, I don’t know, but more often than not, this reframing of your original question will evoke a specific answer to your question.
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that this follow-up question works because we don’t consciously know everything we know. The “if you did know” addition gives Paul temporary permission to ignore his stated lack of knowledge and potentially tap his experience and expertise at an unconscious level.
Note that if Paul appears confident that he doesn’t know, this is not the right question to ask. Also, if you have a hunch that the magical question might work, don’t ask it in a condescending way, i.e. implying that you know Paul knows the answer but he doesn’t.
I’ve used this magical question judiciously with good results. Have you? How did it work out? Share your experience in the comments!
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
Photo attribution: Flickr user cowbite
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.
Many notice these opportunities.
Few act on them.
Why? Here’s the indomitable Seth Godin (who is really good at making new choices):
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.
Alas, taking the fork is even more difficult than seeing it.
—Seth Godin, The fork in the road offers only two difficulties…
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.
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 various aspects of facilitating individual and group change. In this post, we’ll explore two ways to handle a major obstacle to change.
One of the reasons it’s so hard to change is because so much of what we “know” is tacit. Tacit knowledge is that which cannot be easily shared verbally or in writing—as Michael Polanyi says, “…we can know more than we can tell.” A simple example of tacit knowledge is how to ride a bicycle.
Not only is tacit knowledge hard to transmit, we are often not even aware that we know it ourselves. We all possess unexamined and/or unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that can limit our ability to see, question, or act on desirable change in our life and work.
It’s hard enough when we don’t know what we know. But what happens when some of our tacit knowledge is incorrect or inaccurate? Here’s what Chief of Confusion John Seely Brown says:
It turns out that this learning to unlearn may be a lot trickier than a lot of us at first think. Because if you look at knowledge, and look at least two different dimensions of knowledge, the explicit dimension and the tacit dimension, the explicit dimension probably represents a tiny fraction of what we really do know, the explicit being the concept, the facts, the theories, the explicit things that live in our head. And the tacit turns out to be much more the practices that we actually use to get things done with…
…Now the problem is that an awful lot of the learning that we need to do is obviously building up this body of knowledge, but even more so the unlearning that we need to do has to do with challenging the tacit. The problem is that most of us can’t easily get a grip on. It is very hard to reflect on the tacit because you don’t even know that you know. And in fact, what you do know is often just dead wrong. And it is almost impossible to change your beliefs about something that is in the tacit and is different from what you happen to think.
—John Seely Brown, Storytelling: Scientist’s Perspective
Tacit knowledge acts like an invisible force that guides and constrains our potential choices and actions. This makes unlearning incorrect or inaccurate tacit knowledge seem like a hopeless task.
Surprisingly, there are tools available that allow us to become aware of and work with our tacit knowledge. The key insight: we can overcome our inability to reflect on our tacit knowledge, by working with others!
While it’s common to think of knowledge as being something an individual possesses, in reality, knowledge is socially constructed with others. (Remember Socrates in ancient Greece, pursuing knowledge through dialog?) This leads us to the first tool to free ourselves from the limitations arising from what we don’t know we know: conversation with others. Other people can see our blind spots and share with us what they see. By reflecting and gently challenging the beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that form our tacit knowledge, they can help us see what we cannot and provide us an opening to, at least, become aware of what was formerly invisible to us.
The second tool available to us is one of the most powerful ways to see and process the boundaries and consequences of our tacit knowledge: storytelling.
We can explore our tacit knowledge via storytelling in two ways:
Conversation and stories create frameworks that can help us transcend some of the barriers to change imposed by our tacit knowledge. I think it’s fitting that we need to connect and engage with others to do this important work.
Photo attribution: John Seely Brown
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change. Today, we’ll explore what happens when you confuse your product with your business
At any point in time, our businesses have a range of products and services available to customers. We have worked hard to develop and market these products. We’ve struggled to create something unique that can be distinguished from those of our competition.
There is a trap that’s easy to fall into, a trap baited with a simple truth about human nature.
We fall in love with what we create.
When we’re in love, we want everything to stay the same forever. Times are good, we have created something wonderful and we want it to last.
But in business (and life too) nothing stays the same. Our competitors see what we have done. If it’s successful, they copy it and work to co-opt, improve on, or commodify what was once uniquely ours.
Just as the best human relationships are those that provide the possibility for each person involved to challenge the others to grow, the most functional and successful businesses are those that are able to challenge the current status quo they have made and build something new, even at the cost of moving on over time from what they once created and loved.
Consider Apple, the maker of the iPod, the most successful music player. Did Apple, having defined and owned the category, focus on building better and better music players? No; they made incremental improvements while pouring energy into the development of the iPhone, a whole new product area that, while eventually cannibalizing Apple’s iPod sales, made far greater profits than if they had stayed with what they first built.
The same lesson holds in the world of consulting. As my mentor Jerry Weinberg puts it: “Give away your best ideas.” Novice consultants are often fearful of losing the secret sauce they have concocted. Veteran consultants—and there are many novice consultants who never become veterans—have learned that when you teach your clients to handle future similar problems themselves, they’ll appreciate your generosity and are more likely to give you further work or favorable word-of-mouth.
Since 1998, Microsoft put its resources into incremental improvement of its cash cow products, to the expense of its efforts to create innovative new products. The result—a stock price that has not changed significantly over the last fourteen years. (Apple, whose stock price has increased 50x over the same time period, will suffer the same fate if the company doesn’t continue to innovate.)
If you want to be successful in the long term don’t confuse your product with your business. Fall in love with what you do not what you create, and you will be able to move on from the successes of your past to the successes in your future.
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore why change is hard and various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.