“Change Comes from the Edges”

Mark Twain always has exactly the right word for everything.

In the quote that is the title of this post, Twain was talking about how change rarely comes because Congress legislates it. Instead, it comes from the people changing their behaviors. For example, the portrayal of Jim in Huckleberry Finn – as a human being with feelings and fears and hopes, and a deep unabating love of his family, someone relatable to Huck, deserving of Huck’s compassion – shifted Euro-American perceptions of African Americans from the edges. That the reading of his (still considered subversive in some communities) book, by everyday people -- people who weren’t attracted to “literature” and were seduced by Twain’s storytelling and humor -- opened them up to a new idea about people who they had fixed ideas about before. When the center eventually shifted, it shifted because the edges had already thrown it off balance.

In my mind, I picture a band of asteroids, held together by gravity into a huge sphere, gently spinning. Shifting the asteroid in the middle of this sphere is hard – it’s surrounded by all these others, there isn’t much place to go. But if you can loosen up the edges where there’s room and the gravity isn’t as tight, maybe nudge them a little bit one way or the other, you can throw off the balance, and eventually the whole mass will shift.

This can be true on a personal level. Some of us have the urge to change something huge in our lives. But the idea of making that happen seems overwhelming – we don’t know where to start, where we want to end up, we just know we want to change. If we nibble away at the edges, changing little things in our lives, we can sometimes free up the ability to change in a larger way. Invite change into your life, by changing little things, and change will come into your life.

This is also true in organizational change. When the power at the center decides to hand down an edict, Thou Shalt Improve Diversity, for example, it’s not enough to shift the mass. Gravity is holding the organization too tightly spinning in the usual orbit. But if you can get to the individual people at the edges, get them to start to change, eventually you can throw the spinning off-balance and shift the whole mass.

So how do you do this? By reaching one person at a time. Storytelling works well for this. Stories from the leader, about how this change will make the company stronger. Early adopters talking about how they made it work. Public recognition of people who made the change. Reinforcing stories that help individuals see how it is possible. Conversion stories by skeptics who made the leap.

Storytelling is powerful because it gets inside you, it captures your emotions. Emotions motivate. Logic is all well and good, but it can’t compete with a powerful emotion.

Several years ago, we needed to move a whole constellation of employees. Employees that were set in their way, in their definition of what their jobs were, of what their product was, of what they had to offer. The challenge was that we were about to drop a new product on them, a product that would redefine what they did and what their product was. And, unfortunately, we couldn’t tell them about this ahead of time, ease them into it like we usually did with big change, because, for competitive reasons, the product had to remain a complete secret until the public press release. So what did we do? How could we prepare them for this? The L&D team, using holiday sales potential as a reason, reintroduced a course on selling skills, leveraging what they already knew but also laying the groundwork for the new product. And my team started a series of dialogues, leveraging the senior leadership blog that we managed, where we asked what they thought could make us more competitive in the marketplace, and reinforcing the ideas that aligned with the new product. Posts reflected what they were telling us about the importance of agility and what they were hearing from customers, who were asking for the new product, and their wish to contend with their competitors. These columns created a buzz in the stores, laid the groundwork for the change that was coming, so that, when it finally arrived, it would be greeted as a solution rather than a problem.

Meanwhile, we worked behind the scenes with the product owners for the new product, making the launch operations as seamless as possible because we knew that we only had one chance to make a first impression and that the customer would expect our people to have all the answers about a press release that would have been the first our folks had heard of it. We also set up a method for collecting, responding to, reporting on questions, ideas, and feedback, to give our employees a fast way to get answers and feel in control of a situation that was going to change rapidly once it hit the public sphere. These questions, which started as a cry for more information – because when you are expected to be the expert and know nothing, you feel it deeply – eventually began to influence the product designers and gave us the ability to tailor the product toward our core customer, who embraced it with gusto. In all of this, we captured the determination of our team members, the optimism and competitive spirit that had always been their greatest strength, along with their desire to take something that was designed by experts and make it better for real customers.

It’s important to tap into the right emotion in your storytelling. Some leaders lack the power to inspire and fall back on fear. Fear is a powerful emotion but it doesn’t motivate people to act. In fact, many studies – and there are many out there now – find that fear causes people to become more conservative, to hang on tightly to what they already believe, what they already have, and to patterns of behavior that they have always followed before. If you want people to change, telling them that they have to “change or else” will not get the lasting results that you want.

I will never forget encountering an employee who stood frozen in the middle of the store where he worked. When I asked why, he said he had been told that he couldn’t do the work he had always done, work that had seemed empowering to him because he knew it so well, and he “didn’t know” how to do the new work that his job description had transformed to require. It turns out he was on the death-knell of a performance development plan for not doing the new work. But he “couldn’t” do it, so he stood, literally rooted in one spot, frozen.

His manager, a caring, compassionate person who was trying to create a better, stronger, more lasting store, was very frustrated with his inability to change. I could understand that.

And still I asked myself, how could she and I have reached this young man? What tools rested in our toolbox that could have helped him overcome his fear and change his behavior?

I recognize that you cannot change others – all you can do, as Tim Ferris wrote in a column I read this weekend about getting his elderly father to change his eating habits of a lifetime – is create an opportunity for them to change and reinforce any small toe-dips in the waters of change that they take.

But I still wonder: if we had helped this young man bridge that icy river, how big an advocate could he have been for his peers who might be struggling with the same thing?

Could he have been the tipping point for shifting the center toward the future we needed to create?