Small Actions, Big Impact: Catalyzing Change in Groups

Ikonne: How many people have ever wondered to themselves, thought to themselves, if only I had more power, I could make things happen in my group? I've thought about that many times. I have a story to tell about that. In the late 90s, early 2000s, a little bit earlier on in my career, I was part of a team, and I felt like if we made certain changes on that team, we'd just be excellent, we'd be stellar.

My problem was, I was what we might call an IC, or individual contributor. I just thought to myself, there's no way I can do anything that's going to change the outcome, the situation that we find ourselves in. I thought, maybe if I can orchestrate and work myself into a position of being responsible for the team, then yes, I could make things happen. What do you think I did? I worked really hard to do what? To become the one responsible for the team, for the manager. I became the manager of the team, and I was so excited. I said, yes, all the dreams, all the aspirations, all the change I want to cause to happen is now going to happen because I have the power. Was I disappointed? Everything I did failed. The team nearly ran me out of the company. They were so frustrated with me. I learned very early on that power as we often think about it or think of it, is not really what is required to make change happen in groups.

I'm Ebenezer. I work for Cox Automotive. I'm really passionate about joy at work. I'm here to talk to you about how to catalyze change in groups. We're going to talk about a few things that are all connected. Talk about some words, authority and power, that I've already used. We're going to talk about different types of change. Then we're going to talk about things to catalyze change in groups.

Let's start with authority. This is going to be real quick for just definitions. There are many ways to talk and think about authority. There's really one way most of us think about authority, and it's the first definition there, it's formal. Most of us think about authority, and authority is defined really as the right to do something. Most of us think about authority really from a formal perspective. That's the authority that comes from our position in our organization. How many people have formal authority? I'll make this simple, you could theoretically fire somebody. How many people have the authority to change code in a system? How many people thought about the second thing I said as authority? Most people don't see the ability to change software as a right on authority. It's that formal authority based on your position.

Whenever we're hired into an organization, we are given the right to do certain things, and that's the formal authority that comes from the position we occupy. There's another type of authority that we rarely talk about, and that's informal authority, and that's authority that stems from other sources than our position. It might be personal characteristics. Maybe you're a really kind person. It could be your expertise. Maybe you're well versed in a particular set of technologies or knowledge. Whatever the case is, people look to you and people accept what you have to say, because they hold you in high regard. They hold you in esteem. From that you have authority in that situation. We have formal authority and informal authority.

Then we look at power. Power is generally defined as a capacity to get things done. There are many ways of thinking about and talking about power, but two ways of looking at power really speak to me. Mary Parker Follett identified really two basic forms of power: power over and power with. Power over, some have described this as the coercive power. It's telling people to do something in a forceful manner. It's basically using the power that you have to get people to do things. Whereas power with is shared power. It's mutual power. It's everybody bringing their power to the table and saying, how do we move forward? Authority and power, two things we talk about, two things we see in the organizations. Many people believe that they cannot initiate change in groups without formal authority and power over others.

In fact, I was that person. That's why, when I told the story, I said, for me, I thought I needed to be in a position where I had power over people and I had formal authority. I had the right to tell them what to do. I had the right to say, you must change now, because Eb says so. Many people actually believe this. We may not say this, but we believe it. When I talk to a lot of people in my org about why they want to get promoted or why they want to change positions, the number one response I get is, so I can make people do things. Because people believe to make people do things, we need to have positional power, and we need to have the authority. This, to me, is because we assume that change must be coercive. Change must be forced. Change must be pushed on people.

When you work with this basic assumption, then what happens as a result of it is that you're compelled to accumulate as much power as you can. It's a race to the top. I want to accumulate all the power. I want to grow my empire, because I want to be able to make people do what I want them to do. We know that this really doesn't work. What it ends up causing for a lot of people is heartache and pain. That assumption is ultimately wrong.

The question then becomes, can we catalyze change in our groups in the absence of formal authority, in the absence of power over others? I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with formal authority. No, we need that for structure. I'm not saying that power over is wrong as well. Sometimes we need to be able to tell people to do things. When power over and formal authority are the only things we can rely on to cause change to happen in our organizations, then we're going to be in a world of hurt over time. It's not sustainable. That's why I believe, yes, we can.

Let's talk about change. When I do talks, I really like for people to reflect as we go along. How many people here have a change that they wish would happen in the group they're a part of, if there's something you're thinking about right now? If there's nothing, you might want to pinch yourself, make sure you're still awake. Write down that change. What's the change you want to see happen in your group? One or two. Just take a second to write it down right now. Express it. Just write down this change, because I'm going to ask you to continue to refer to that change as we go through this talk. If you have a situation where the status quo is perfect, I really wish I was in your situation. Change, you've written down the change.

Osmer's Heuristic on Change, what's happening? Why is this happening? What do you want to have happen? How do you get there? Why is this happening is in parentheses, because sometimes it doesn't really matter why something is happening. We've had talks about getting to the whys, and whys can be important. Sometimes why something is happening is not as important as we need to do something different, and we need to spend our energies focusing on what do we want to have happen, and how do we get there? What's happening is just an empirical fact. Everyone should be able to look at what's happening and say, this is what's happening. Why this is happening is often a subject of debate. That becomes interpretive. It becomes subjective. What do we want to have happen, then becomes our ideal next state. How do we get there? What you want to have happen is obviously the change that you need.

How do we get there requires differentiating between two kinds of change: first-order change and second-order change. People have described these changes in different ways. This is a very important point, because not all change is the same. We talk about change in generic terms. We talk about change as if all change is the same, as if all ice cream is the same. I'll tell you right now that cookie dough is better than any other form of ice cream on the face of the earth. It's non-negotiable. You cannot argue that with me. It's a fact. You all accept it. No response. Everyone agrees.

First-order change and second-order change, what's the distinction? There's a lot of information on that slide there. I'll boil it down to this, first-order change really means just picking up a new practice. It's really a technical change, maybe doing things differently. Second-order change really begins to get to the way we make sense of the world, our world view, a set of assumptions, the paradigms we hold dear. A first-order change doesn't ask me to change anything about the way I see the world. It might ask me to do things a little bit differently, but it generally fits within my mental constructs as they exist today.

A second-order change says, you need to wake up and look at the world a little bit differently. It's quite often the case that when we want a change to occur, this happens a lot, that we misdiagnose the nature of the change, and we assume that it's a first-order change, because for us, it's very straightforward. I've already, in my mind, made the shift in my paradigm, I just want to go act differently. I believe everybody else should be there alongside with me, but they're not there. They have not made that shift. I'm treating a second-order change for other people as if it's a first-order change, because that's what it is for me. You need to ask yourself, what kind of change is this for the people that I'm trying to get to change in my group? Could be a very straightforward change for me, doesn't make it a straightforward change for everybody else. Contrived examples here.

We're going from VersionOne to Jira. I don't know if that's a great decision. I don't know who would make that kind of a decision. If you've made that decision, I'm sorry. These are tools, ALMs, or however you use them, for tracking software development and things like that. Going from one system to the next might be a very straightforward change. It's something you already come to terms with the fact that you're changing systems. There's no problem with that. You've come to terms with the fact that you are tracking what you do, how you work in an electronic system. No problems with that. It's just implementing a brand-new system, and you're completely comfortable with that. That might be an example of a first-order change in some organization. Could be, it's straightforward.

On the other hand, maybe you're trying to make a transition from solo development where everybody just sits in their corner and pounds out whatever they're trying to pound out together, to saying, let's maybe adopt mob programming or something like that. You have people who really can't accept, or are struggling with accepting a different way of working together. Again, this is not a right or wrong thing, it is simply a shift in the way you're thinking about the world. In the first situation, we're not asking anybody to change their paradigms, but in this situation, we're basically saying we're redefining the way we think about developing software. This might be a second-order change. When you think about change and the change you want to have your group adopt, you have to ask yourself, what kind of change is this? Right now, a number of you wrote down changes that you'd like to see happen.

Beside that change, do a quick diagnosis. Is that a first-order change? Are you asking people to make a change that fits in with the way they see the world today? Are you asking them to begin to look at the world differently and make behavioral change alongside of it. Make that diagnosis right now and write it beside the change that you just captured. What kind of change is this? Because if it is a second-order change, but you're treating it like a first-order change, then you're going to face a lot of problems. You're not going to take the time to really help people understand and see why you want them to think about the way they're approaching a situation a bit differently. When we think about change, we really need to take the time to analyze the content of the change itself. You need to pause and say, what type of change is this? It is a simple 2×2. You can tell that I did a stint in consulting because it's not completed. There isn't a 2×2.

The 2×2 basically says, are we working with familiar practices or unfamiliar practices, existing paradigms and attitudes, new paradigms and attitudes? When you now analyze a change, depending on how big or small the change is, you might even have different parts of the change that fall in different quadrants, but it's important to take the time to assess the change and really understand the content of the change that you're asking people to go through in any given situation, regardless of your role in your organization. You need to know the change type. That is really important, that you know the change type. Knowing is not enough, you have to do something about it.

We're going to talk about four vital things that I think are really important. Some of these things have actually come up in some of the talks. This is going to be repeating things you've already heard. As they say, repetition deepens the impression. Identify your allies. Invite participation. Change via small bites. Create and keep engagement through storytelling. It's been said that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. My spin on this is, when it comes to group change, if you want to go fast and go far, you must go with others. You can't go it alone.

That means you have to find allies, people that will go with you on this journey. If you don't have any allies, you might want to reconsider the change, because it's probably going to die on the vine. If you don't have any allies, you probably need to think about who or why don't I have any allies? Why isn't there anybody else who is passionate about this thing I think we need to have happen in this group? Even as you wrote down a change right now, who are the allies that you have for that change. If you don't have any allies for that change, do you need to begin to work to create or find allies in your group for that change. You need to spend the time to build the relationships for that change. This is where informal authority is so important. We talked about this earlier.

With formal authority, it's really easy to do things that already exist. You can use your formal authority to ensure that the routines and procedures and policies that have existed are executed. That's pretty straightforward at any role in any level. When you want to cause change to happen, formal authority doesn't really do much for you. It might move things a little bit, but it will not sustain the change. That's when informal authority, that's the authority that comes from other sources, authority that comes from the respect that people have from you, the trust that people place in you, that's when informal authority makes a difference. That's when you find allies. That's how you get allies, through your informal authority. When it comes to group change, if you want to go fast and far, you must go with others. You cannot go alone. You have to identify the folks who are going to be your allies. Organizations are essentially political systems.

A lot of people say, I don't like politics, or, in my organization, I don't want to be a part of politics. If you have an agenda in your organization, then you're part of the whole thing. You're part of the politics. We all engage in one way or the other. Because organizations are political systems, we're all going to have needs. I have needs. You have needs. How we go about satisfying those needs may differ, and that often leads to conflict. When you're bringing in change, you should expect that that's going to generate a level of resistance. It's only through the use of allies that you can find some form of momentum to overcome this resistance. Allies are important. Who are the allies and who can help you with the change that you have?

Second thing is invitation. Invitation over coercion. You want to invite participation into the change that you want to have happen as part of what you're going on. How do you invite people to participate in the change that you have? What do I mean by invitation? Peter Block, who wrote the famous book, "The Empowered Manager", and a number of other books, identified five elements of a great invitation. Five elements of asking people to engage in doing something different. The invitation declares the possibility. It says, this is what we can make happen if we do this. It frames the choice. It makes it very clear what you're asking people to sign up for. It names the hurdle in that it is very honest about the challenges that you might face in the process of trying to make this change. It reinforces the request. It makes it very clear to people why you want them to be part of it, and then it uses the most personal form possible.

This is very important in this day and age where we're remote in a lot of places. You don't see people in the hallway maybe as you used to see them before. Invitations need to be as personal as possible. If you can't talk to somebody in person, call them up. Email or Slack or whatever, should be the last form that we use when we're trying to engage people in change. If we're going to engage people in change, we need to use the most personal form possible.

Here's just a contrived example. We can all read it there. Just imagine that you're trying to get people to participate in a change that has to do with how we go about developing software. We want to do it completely different. The way we're doing it today doesn't work. You want to engage people in change through participation. You want to engage people through invitation. You want them to participate. You want to make sure that the invitation is clear. You can see in this invitation, what is possible is that we have the potential to unlock new levels of creativity and effectiveness on our team if we modify how we work. What you have to sign up for is sharing your authentic perspective on how we can improve. You're making it very clear that this is how you're going to engage. We're also honest that adopting a new approach brings challenges.

Too often, we don't want to be honest about the challenge that comes with some of the changes we want to do. You will need to accept, embrace, and work to overcome these challenges. Those are the hurdles, but we'll do it together. Invitation is important when it comes to bringing about change in an organization, change in a group. Look for your allies. If you don't have allies, then invite other people to join you in the change. Who you invite is very important as well. Some of the most influential people in our orgs, in our groups within a team, are the people we least expect.

Sometimes we think that the person with the most formal authority, the person with the most positional power are the most influential people. I know a lot of people in my organization that are highly influential, that positionally are not highly positioned, and are just ICs, but when they speak, for example, everybody listens. When they engage in initiatives, people join them, because they've developed their informal authority so widely in the organization that they are influencers for everybody else. The perceived influencers versus the actual influencers are very important to pay attention to, and to make sure that you know who is an actual influencer versus a perceived influencer in the group.

Small bites, taking small bites. This has to do with being sure that when you're initiating change in the organization, that you take it and increment at a time. One of the mistakes people often make with initiating change in the organization is making the change too big for people to absorb. Another 2×2. This is where you have to think about what is the nature of this change, and where does it fall between high effort, large impact, low effort, small impact. A lot of change lives in the blood, sweat, and tears quadrant.

As a result of it, a result of living in that quadrant never sees the light of day, because it requires too much for people to engage. I'll tell a quick story here. Someone in a department wanted to have their group adopt a Lean practice of identifying waste in a process and making changes to it immediately. When the person thought about having their group pick this up, for them the way they wanted to go about doing this was to make their team actually identify a source of waste, come up with a resolution or a way of addressing this waste, and implement that resolution all at once.

Everybody on the team balked at what they were being asked to do. Why did they balk at it? They balked at it because they were being asked to do too much in one go. This is why small bites is important. When it comes to change, we often spend a lot of time trying to convince people why they should participate in the change. We're better off spending time trying to get people to take a small step in the direction of the change. What's the smallest step I can ask people to take in the direction of the change that I desire? Can I keep it as close to where they are today, so that the resistance, or the barrier to resistance is almost minimal? It's almost non-existent.

I think it's Richard Pascal who said that we are more likely to act our way into new thinking than to think our way into new acting. It just so happens that we spend a lot of time trying to think people into new actions. In fact, that's what a lot of conferences are about: a lot of information. It's important, but people change their thinking through new actions. You need to think, what's the smallest action, what's the smallest thing I can introduce in my group that can get us moving in the direction that we desire to go in? What's the smallest thing I can do?

We started off by saying, you need to find allies. I asked for the change that you want to do. Who are your allies in your group right now? Write them down. If you don't have any allies, then you need to go find allies. You need to invite people to join you. Think about what that invitation is going to look like. Then you're going to have people join you, and you're going to say, we want to do this. What's the smallest thing in the direction of that change that you could have people do right now? That if you said, let's do this right now, you'd get almost zero pushback to it, but it's a step in the right direction. What's the smallest thing you could do? These are things that are available to anybody, regardless of your role, regardless of your position, as long as you use them in the right way.

Again, who are your allies? Who are you inviting? What's the smallest thing we can do to create the flywheel effect? Because once people do something and see something positive from it, they are more likely to be receptive to adding to it. That's the way we all function. When I start introducing a new habit into my life, and I begin to see it yield results, then I'm more motivated to build upon that habit. That's just the way we work. That's the way we're wired to work. We want to reduce the barrier to entry for people when it comes to change. We don't want to make the change big that it's so overwhelming that when we talk about it, people are like, no, I don't want to engage. You want to find the smallest thing, again, you can do to help people move along. I spent some time on that point because I think that's one of the biggest things I see whenever I talk with people about change.

The change that they bring to the team, the thing they want the team to do is so radically different from what they're doing today that everyone is like, no way we're going to do that. Find a small thing that moves you in that direction, and build upon it. When you think about change, if you want change to stick and last, you have to think about it as a long game. I know this runs counter to the way we tend to operate, which is why change doesn't stick in many places, because we're thinking about immediate. It's the microwave age. We want it done now and quickly. Change takes time. For it to stick and for it to really be embedded in our groups, it takes time.

Last thing I'm going to leave us with, as we talk about this, is storytelling. Throughout this talk, I've shared a number of stories. It's because storytelling and stories are so integral to the way we operate in the world. As much as we like to think we're rational people, the fact is, we are emotional first then rational. I think the previous talk talked about motivated reasoning, which is, we have an emotional commitment to something, and then we come up with a whole bunch of reasons to support why we want to operate in a certain way. Stories actually speak to our emotions quite a bit. Storytelling is extremely important. Storytelling is important in engaging people in any change. Storytelling is also very important in keeping people in a change. When you think about change and how you ensure that it sticks within your group and that you're catalyzing it, you want to make sure that you continue to tell the story of what the change is doing within the group.

Every single win, every single positive experience that comes out from that change is something that needs to be shared and needs to be celebrated, and is something that needs to be told to others. It's something that you want to keep front and center of any type of change initiative. When you think about elements of a great story, the acronym CRIS is something that you think about. They're clear. They're relevant. They're inspiring. They're simple. Clear in the sense that when the story is told, you should be able to leave the room as a hearer and tell that story to somebody else. If the story is so convoluted that when you leave the room you've completely forgotten what the story was about, then it's a bad story. If you tell a story, you can't remember the story you told, it's a bad story too. You need to be able to remember the story, and it should be straightforward. It should be relevant.

The story should be focused on what you're trying to accomplish. It should be inspiring. It should speak to our emotions. It should motivate us to want to do something. It should be simple. All good stories have those attributes. All of us can tell stories. I think people sometimes think that some people are good at telling stories, and others are not good at telling stories. If you've ever had a conversation with somebody else in your life, then you know how to tell a story. Anyone who hasn't had a conversation with somebody else? We've all had conversations, so we know how to tell stories. We need to make storytelling part of how we contribute and motivate change in our groups. Again, these are things that are accessible to all of us. It doesn't really matter whether you're vice president or this is your second day on the job. These are things that any one of us can do, and we can bring to the table.

When we think about catalyzing change in groups, we want to attract and invite people towards the change. The assumption that change must be pushed upon people, change must be coercive, and as a result, I need to have the power to make people do the things I want them to do, to force them to do what I want them to do, is not a mode that we need to operate from. We can attract and invite people towards the change. Does it take time? Does it take effort? Yes. That's what leads to long lasting change. You need to know the type of change desired. Am I asking people to fundamentally change the way they make sense of this world?

If that's the case, then I really need to take the time to work with them and understand that for some people, it might take a minute. Or am I just asking people to adopt a new practice that fits the way they operate today, and all they need is just my support and my encouragement? I need to find allies, and this is where our networks are extremely important. Who are the allies? Who are the people on my team that can really help me move forward with this change? Remember, if I want to go far and fast, I need to go with people. I have to use the power of my network. I have to have allies. I need to engage and inspire through storytelling. Let it be clear, relevant, inspiring, and simple. Start with small, impactful actions. Find the smallest thing that will not cause much of a resistance that people can engage in so that they can act their way into new thinking.

What will you immediately put into practice today? Everyone took a few minutes to write down a change that they want to see, a change they would like to see in their group, your organization, whatever the case may be, what are you going to put into practice? What are you going to take and apply in this moment? Is it finding allies? Is it incorporating storytelling? Is it rethinking the change? That's up to you. What will you put into practice immediately?

Lichtensteiger: It can be really challenging trying to make a change when you feel you're fighting the lonely fight. You talk about the social network and allies, and some of us, myself included, especially in a new organization where I have to make change, find it socially difficult to find those allies. Any tips?

Ikonne: Find those allies.

Lichtensteiger: How?

Ikonne: It's really important to spend time building the relationships that you need to build, finding the allies, because that's how you win at the long game. If you want the change to stick, if you want people to thrive and flourish with the change as well, then you have to spend the time working to find allies and developing that in your org.

Lichtensteiger: Just get better at finding allies.

Ikonne: Yes, make the investment.

Participant 1: What would be one of the tips that you have for encouraging your team member, the people that are in your org, that small changes are something that you appreciate and actually induce that change into them, like have a culture that emphasize small changes. You can do it. I encourage you to do it. What would the tip be? What is the tip to encourage your team member to induce changes?

Ikonne: I think it's celebrating those changes, talking about it. It's said that where energy goes, attention flows. It's said the other way as well. When you pay attention to small changes, celebrate small changes, people begin to see that that type of thing matters. One of the things that plagues us in our orgs is that mixed messaging abounds. People will say, we really appreciate the small change, but the thing that's ever only celebrated is the big change. That's the only thing that's ever recognized. As a result, people are like, you can't say you really appreciate small changes, and then the only thing we ever talk about more broadly is the big change. I think it's very important to talk about it, focus on it, celebrate it, show it, repeat it. Ask people, what's the smallest change you've made today? Make that part of your organizational discourse. What you talk about repeatedly is eventually what begins to happen.

Participant 2: I just wonder what things you could think of to motivate people to actually make change.

Ikonne: What things you can think about to motivate people to make change? The status quo is often very strong. When the status quo has been successful, it really can be challenging to get people to have the desire to make change. When you think about the invitation, the situation needs to be very clear about why if we don't make this change, things are not going to be as good as they can be. That needs to be the conversation. Not everybody is going to make change. That's definitely true. I've also seen that we're often not as clear on why this change matters, why it's important. We don't take the time to share that.

One of the things, as a leader and somebody who has done this is, very often leaders or people in positions or the supervisory type of positions, they've had the opportunity to process the change. They've had the opportunity to understand where we are, but they're bringing it to people who haven't had the opportunity to go through that journey, and they expect them to get on board immediately, when you've had months, maybe, to prepare yourself. In the same way you've had time to prepare yourself, you should also be willing to have some time with people to come along as well.

Lichtensteiger: It's telling the story of the why.

Ikonne: Tell the story of the why.

Participant 3: You talked about, you thought you needed power over people, and you thought you had to have the authority over people, but you come here with an entirely different story, what is needed. What was it for you to recognize the change you had to make yourself to be where you are right now?

Ikonne: The fear of being fired caused me to pause and say, time out. What's going on here? Then to do some soul searching and say, is there another way of approaching the way I want to lead here? There have been people who have coercively pushed change on people. I've experienced it. A number have probably experienced it. It's not long lasting. Many of us don't want to stay in those places for a long time, and that's not the kind of environment you want to create as well. Eventually, as I began to think about, what would an environment be where I'd want to be part of that, and have people really commit to the change we want to do, and also initiate change. Because if you find yourself as the only person kicking off change in your environment, then there's a problem as well. If you don't have people saying, let's do things differently, it's probably a sign that there's something going on that needs to be looked at more broadly.

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