From the Camp Fire to the Kitchen Table: A six part blog series on leadership and change practice.
In parts 1-4 of this series we established that tomorrow’s leaders will be selfless, flexible and ready to collaborate. We discovered that leadership is about bringing the best of you to the table and about leaving your own ego at the door. We know that we are part of a vast interconnected social network that has more power than we could possibly imagine. We are now ready to join the dance and to influence the network.
How can we influence others? How do we enable change? Unfortunately, “behaviour change” programs are often cringeworthy. We cannot change other people’s behaviour. People change their own behaviour. We can help to create the right conditions for people to change for themselves. To do that, we need to be open to learning, taking advice on our own improvement from others.
People are complex. As we learned last time, what we believe and what we do are shaped by our social networks. But other factors are also at play, including our upbringing, our background, where we work, the weather, when our last meal was, what news we consume, how much battery our phone has left and whether or not we ran over the neighbour’s cat this morning.
In his book “Change or Die”, Alan Deutschman says that there are three ways to enable others to change, and three ways that we know do not work. Deutschman uncovers that neurologically, fear, force and facts do not work. In fact, 87% of facts are made up on the spot (*joke*). It is now well established that when people are provided with facts or information that counter their position, they simply retreat further into their ideological position. People will deny facts, or misread, obfuscate or cherry pick data to suit their worldview. Some even write like this in national newspapers.
Fear can stimulate temporary change, but at the expense of teamwork, confidence and participation.
Force creates enemies and a lot of long term pain.
Neuroscience shows us that what does work is the three R’s: Relate, Reframe, Repeat.
Relate
A master of change will first build respectful relationships. It does not begin like Charlton Heston on the hill. It begins with conversation and connection. With chat and eye contact and body language that gets our mirror neurons firing and makes us feel like we’re around the campfire. And speaking of the campfire, the modern version is the kitchen table and the modern tools are cake, tea, drink, music and the arts. Becoming a master of change requires you to understand and use social lubricants, time, place, fun and conversations.
Social Lubricants
Early in my career, I spent a decade watching and emulating Francis Ryan from Vox Bandicoot using, as the strapline said, a “judicious mix of science, humour, arts and common sense” to bring strangers together with great effect. Frank would talk about how people awkwardly enter a room full of strangers move carefully around the wall watching and sizing up the others. This is an evolutionary trait. Imagine walking into a room in England in 850AD and finding the strangers had beards, axes and horned helmets. You would need to run, and quickly. So when we first enter a room with new people, we are cautious.
Frank called it the “sniffing” phase of a relationship, because the allusion to dogs sniffing each others’ butts made people laugh. With that humour, he could help people who had been strangers laugh together, breaking down the first wall of social awkwardness. He would then hand them a streamer and ask them to throw them together and follow their streamer through the crowd saying hello to people, introducing themselves and sharing stories. Doing this without a streamer is awkward. Doing it with a streamer is fun, engaging and makes people feel like they are back at a kids’ party. The noise level in the room goes up substantially as people begin easily chatting and building relationships. Frank used to say that, “A streamer is a social lubricant for the bedrock of culture: the conversation”. The conversation is where we find common ground, areas of mutual interest, locate people in place, find common interests and build community. Cake is another helpful social lubricant. Tea is a brilliant reason to sit down and chat. Someone playing a guitar is a wonderful connector and a glass of wine can lead to all sorts of fun conversations. I’ve lost count of the number of people I know who put up solar panels only after a cuppa and some cake at the neighbour’s kitchen table whilst discussing power bills, inverters and pay back periods.
Our society doesn’t generally regard these social lubricants seriously. Frank was often accused being “kidsy” by “serious people” or, more commonly, by people who were worried about the potential reaction of serious people. Many times Frank and I were told that the Sustainability Street Approach needed to be more “mature”, despite the fact that ALL communities reduced water and waste and energy by at least 30%, built wonderful local relationships and created fantastic local projects. Other “serious” programs got nowhere near these results. We have become conditioned to regard ties and suits and barren meeting rooms as “serious” and communities meeting in lounge rooms with streamers as “trivial”. What needs to change is our attitude to change. Relationships work because they are powerful at the human scale. Arts and music and cake help bring people together to build relationships and have conversations that lead to change. It is therefore the “serious” who are blocking change. If we do want change, then we need to lighten up and go with what works: human scale.
Time
Many leadership and behaviour change projects are too short. In creating and delivering the Sustainability Street Approach to over 300 communities, we found that community building can take 18 months for a neighbourhood. This is how long it takes to build trust, respect, common ground and to be working together with purpose. Frank created a metaphor to help communities understand for themselves where they were at on their change journey. Clouds, Rain, Rivers and Oceans:
CLOUD communities are forming and nebulous. They don’t really know each other and have a low level of understanding of sustainability and change practice. They need time - an 18 month period of learning and development. They need hand holding and expertise.
RAIN communities are beginning to move. They are starting to organise and plan together. They are learning and growing and enjoying being together. They will be actively involved in planning their own journey, moving towards what they are passionate about.
RIVER communities are flowing together. They know each other, know who they are and what they want and they are going for it. They are creating projects and plans and have purpose. They will tell you what little help they need, be it a contact or a grant or a venue.
OCEAN communities are wave makers. They have completed projects together, have solid relationships built and are now using what they have learned to educate the surrounding community. Oceans can do great things in six months. They just need you to clap your hands and look excited and to say “go for it!”
Once you know which phase your community is in, your community can organise together how to spend your time. Clouds need more education time and Oceans need more gatherings to plan. All groups need to continue to focus on building and maintaining relationships. They all need cake and tea.
Place
Communities who are a local social and geographic unit are much more likely to succeed together than a group invited to the town hall from across a city or region. Sustainability Street worked because people were over the side fence from each other. Relationships, once built, were kept up easily over the watering, the school walk, the local shop walk, bin night and all the other small interactions that happen on a street. Sustainability Street communities reported feeling safer, healthier and more connected than they had been before the program. Each of the Victorian State Government social indicators rose during the projects. Place based relationships were central to success. Conversations happen first and communities come out the other end.
Fun
The good news is that what is required to relate to others is deeply ingrained in our humanity. We’re social animals who love being together. The environmental movement is a people movement. We need to bring people together and get them talking, sharing, experiencing and enjoying each other. The process should be participatory, open ended and fun. Be the Guide Beside rather than the Sage on Stage. We are all teachers and learners. None of us know exactly what ideas will be needed to create a sustainable future. We need to encourage many people and many ideas to emerge. One way to do this is to teach people that common sense and everyday action is as important to the solution as an environmental degree. Another way is to prioritise having fun together. As Frank Ryan said, “If we have fun saving the world, the world will be saved.”
Conversations
Conversations for change are a Frank Ryan special. According to Frank, there are three steps to a conversation for change:
Small talk is big talk: saying hi, smiling, making eye contact and chatting about the weather or the footy tipping is how respectful conversations begin. Mirror neurons begin to fire and we begin with a sense that we have common ground and a shared humanity.
Nobody interrupts the flatterer: just try it. A positive comment about a person’s work or a recent achievement or a recent family event is the way to a person’s heart.
Offer to help: Now you can hone in on what needs to change. This person can enable the change to happen. So mention what it is and offer to help them. You’ll be amazed at the difference this makes.
Relating is Nurturing, not Controlling
Controlled leadership is the brochure and the lecture. These are simple and traditional, have their place, but largely do not work. The behaviour change effect of a brochure is nearly always zero and we are likely to forget much of what is said in a lecture. The Guide is a big step up. The guide walks with learners, having conversations and building relationships. It is harder and deeper to be a Guide. To be a Nurturer is the goal. To nurture someone or a group is complex, messy, risky and powerful. The metaphor is having a baby and bringing it home wondering how you are qualified to look after it and then nurturing like crazy for twenty years after which you have a functioning adult.
Unfortunately, governments tend to fund brochures when they should be funding nurturers. Nurturers use social lubricants, time, place, fun and conversations.
Whom should we Relate to?
Who should we attempt to relate to? Below is a chart showing a bell curve of society with a small group of innovators, a larger group of early adopters, the early majority, late majority, laggards and skeptics. It’s called The Law of Diffusion of Innovation. Many people think that to create change we need to convince the late majority and laggards to change their minds. What we actually need to do is work with the early adopters, or the people who are ready to change. It is the early adopters who have always created change in every social movement throughout history. They inspire the early majority, who pull the late majority along. Work with the purple people below! Skeptics almost never change, but that doesn’t matter in many cases because the world has left them behind. So consider this: We do not have to convert deniers, delayers, lobbyists or Kev at the pub! What we need to do is to have a chat to the smiling person at work who wants to change. Frank would always say: “play to the smilers: they’re the ones who are ready.” It is important to say, alongside talk of values and vulnerability that we should never aim a program at the lowest common denominator: the people who do not want to know or learn. They will not create the change our society needs anyway. Politely ignore them. We want to bring the change agents with us; the early adopters and the front end of mainstream society. Think about this next time someone says “you’re just speaking to the converted”. As Annie Leonard, creator of the ‘Story of Stuff’ once said: “the only way the world has ever changed is when the converted get together and make change happen!”
2. Reframe
Reframing is helping people move from an emotional state to a thoughtful state. Picture an angry Basil Fawlty becoming Rodan’s The Thinker. The best example in popular culture is in Disney’s the Lion King, where Rafiki the wise baboon helps Simba to move from angry and defiant and guilty to thoughtful and purposeful and ready to change. He does this with humour, silliness, by asking questions, and by creating a theatrical journey through a forest to a mirrored pool where he recognises his father in himself. He teaches Simba that the past can hurt, but the best way to deal with it is to learn from it. Simba was then ready to change of his own accord.
Masters of change use stories and support techniques to help people.
Reframing through stories
Reframing in real life takes time. And that starts with conversations. Consider a far right wing politician on energy. They can sometimes think that renewable energy is a hippy, communist, one world government subsidised hoax. That can be easily reframed in their language of “jobs and growth” by telling a story of the local renewable energy jobs and growth that will be created by building a new energy network that is locally owned, everywhere, in real time and online. It’s had to argue with a big exciting new project that will be the economic engine for the next industrial revolution in their electorate. Most electorates do not have fossil fuel jobs anyway. There are fewer and fewer jobs in the old energy system anymore and plenty available in the new.
Helping others Reframe their thinking
The neuroscience of leadership says that in order for people to change we can help them focus on solutions, help them create their own answers and help them stay focused on their own insights. You might have noticed that the ego of the leader must remain at the door. Telling people what you know about the answer is unhelpful. We’ve already established that the Charlton Heston (the mostly old, mostly white, mostly male standing on a hill telling us what to do and think) doesn’t work. The entire process is about the learner and where they are at. With support and encouragement and time, they will reframe their thinking themselves.
Reframing and Community Development
The concept of reframing aligns perfectly with community development processes created in the 1960s. The community development process is to start where the learner is at, to hand over control to them and to make yourself redundant. Once again, your knowledge about the subject is irrelevant. Your knowledge about the process is everything. Northcote Community Development legend Caty Kyne once told me the story of the jug and the mug. The jug, filled with all of the knowledge, pours it into the poor mug, the empty vessel who must sit there on the table and take it. This is the opposite of community development. As a leader your job is to nurture people as they go on their own journey and to pull back when they are ready to step up. As the anonymous quote goes, you walk with them and then you watch them dance. You may have lots of hand holding and encouraging at first or you may not. Depending on where they are at, you may be able to make yourself redundant in a day, week, a year or a decade. This cartoon perfectly reflect this leadership journey:
Ultimately, if the education is relevant to people and they have control over the process and the outcomes they will make it fly. Helping others reframe their thinking means asking them questions, not providing answers.
“when the people create the program, then you get action.”
3. Repeat
Practice, Repetition and Priming
Have you ever seen a three year old wanting to read the same book again and again? Or balancing a stone on the wall again and again? How about a musician practising for a decade before joining a symphony orchestra? Or the Beatles playing ten hours a day in Hamburg? Thomas Edison tried over 2000 times before a light bulb lit up. The more you practice the more you see answers. Frank Ryan used to call this phenomenon the Blue Volxwagon theory. If you owned a blue Volxy, you saw other Blue Volxys everywhere. If you didn’t own one, you never saw them. In neuroscience language it’s called Priming. Our minds can be primed with a small number of subjects uppermost in our consciousness and if we see something related to these subjects in the world, they jump out at us and are noticed. If you want the answers to being a leader in the sustainability movement, then lift sustainability up in your consciousness by thinking a lot, practicing a lot, trying a lot. When you’re done trying: repeat.
Practice hardwires change
Neuroscience tells us exactly what is going on in the brain and how important repetition is for change. The first time you discover something new its exciting. You have a moment of insight. This is sometimes called an “AHA!” moment. You have probably had lots of them: at conferences, at school, at work in a meeting, on the way home or in the shower. In the brain, there is a high energy burst and connections form across the brain. It feels great. But only practice hardwires the change. In other words, if you pick up a tennis racquet for the first time and hit a few balls and then don’t do it again, your brain will forget how to play and you’ll be a beginner again next time. But if you practice again the next day and the one after that, the links in your brain become hardwired. In an expert, a chemical called myelin has formed a sheath around neurological connections associated with the expertise, hardwiring them in and allowing them to travel 10,000 times faster than a beginner. If you can match practise with talent, you’re more likely to be a star.
“Concentrating attention on your mental experience, whether a thought, an insight, a picture in your mind’s eye, or a fear, maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. Over time, paying enough attention to any specific brain connection keeps the relevant circuitry open and dynamically alive. These circuits can then eventually become not just chemical links but stable, physical changes in the brain’s structure.”
Time enables the contemplation that leads to mastery
Repetition as a change process is also important because change is not a linear process over time. the beginning is slowest. A learner must first decide to change, then try the new behaviour out. After they have tried for a while they enter a period of deep thought. How have I been going? How could I improve? What should I try next? There is then a time of trying and thinking some more. Only after much trial and testing and thinking and effort do we reach a moment of mastery. And only after that can you take your learning and create something new.
In conclusion …
To influence others we can build deep relationships, build community and create the space for others to think imaginatively and critically and to try, fail, practice, learn and to grow for themselves over time. To influence others we need be a nurturer who is there for the long haul. Frank Ryan would say that a nurturer is an expert on tap, not on top. A tap can be turned on by others when they need it. He often said that when you are a nurturer, the camera is never off, meaning that what you do and what you say is always being watched and is therefore always important. What can you do today to nurture someone you know?
Here endeth Part 5 in this Leadership and Change Blog Series. Next time we’ll complete the journey from the Campfire to the Kitchen Table, with some words on what is possible when we come together in community in local places, with purpose, to build a better future.
