What conditions are you creating? Part 3 of 3
At the end of my tenure at Malvern, one teacher asked me, “When you arrived five years ago, had you already made up your mind about what you intended to change?”
No, I said. I had spent the first three months of my tenure interviewing faculty and staff about their vision for the future of the school. Most of them expressed enthusiasm for the school’s recently completed strategic plan and the change that it entailed.
But before long I realized that, in contrast to their words, many harbored quite different attitudes about change.
Unfortunately, I lacked the experience to realize that. More importantly, I lacked a mental model for how change happens. Unsurprisingly, my first two years of trying to foster change were exceedingly difficult.
I wish I had known back then that creating change begins with creating the conditions for change.
In Part 1, we talked about the first precondition: the social infrastructure.
In Part 2, we talked about the second precondition: the social incentives.
The third precondition is the social attitude.
But how do you shape social attitudes?
Like many dimensions of organizational change, we can’t shape attitudes directly, because they are predicated on what we believe is possible and desirable.
And we only believe in that we see.
And we only see what and whom we have chosen to include in our communities—and we fail to see what and whom we have chosen to exclude.
This connection between what we see and what we believe presents a major stumbling block to change. As the folks at Farnam Street have written, “A creative society must be diverse and tolerant. People must be open to new ideas and outré individuals. They must not only be willing to consider fresh ideas from within their own society but also happy to take inspiration from (or to outright steal) those coming from elsewhere.”
This is first and foremost a question of attitudes:
Do we believe that diversity “dilutes the culture” or “enriches” it?
Do we believe that new ideas are “dangerous” or “exciting”?
Do we believe that outré individuals “threaten” our identity or “expand” our sense of self?
If we only do what we’ve always done, then we’ll always get the same results.
And if we only see what we’ve always seen, then we’ll always believe what we’ve always believed.
And if we only believe what we’ve always believed, then change will seem impossible or even hostile.
On the other hand…
If we change what people see—for example, through small experiments that provide quick results—then we can change attitudes about what is possible and desirable.
So if enabling new social attitudes is a precondition for change, then what new things are your people seeing that will change their beliefs?
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