Small is Powerful

"Our lives are but specks of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives." - Socrates

We like to talk about how HSD sets conditions for massive transformation in organizations and communities. Those stories are good and true, but they never tell the whole story. Complex Adaptive Systems teach us that personal, local change is the engine that drives change at a systemic, global scale. Each shift, no matter how trivial it might seem in the moment, contributes to the growing tension. Over time, tension accumulates, and ultimately it shifts patterns at every level of the human system. Like an avalanche, a lifetime of love, or a violent society, every whole-scale transformation emerges from the many tiny ones that came before.

I had a touching reminder of this process earlier this week. We are working with an organization to re-vision the services they provide to children and families. As a part of that process, we are holding stakeholder meetings to assess current assets and needs and explore opportunities for the future. At the second and final stakeholder meeting, one child care worker, let’s call her Eve, told a story of cascading change. She reminded me what this work of complex change is all about.

A member of Eve’s team chose to move out of her group and into another one. Her first response was anger and defensiveness. “What is she trying to say? What is the matter with her? With me? Why is she putting me and the kids through this unnecessary disruption?” Eve had never thought of herself as an angry or spiteful person, but she noticed those patterns in herself in that moment. The HSD Rules of Inquiry came to mind as she was steaming about the change and noticing her reaction to it.

We had shared the Rules of Inquiry as a foundation for our work together in the Stakeholder Team. Our support team recognizes how our rules of inquiry can set conditions for transformation throughout the project and across the organization, but we hadn’t made a big deal of them in the meeting. They were posted on the wall, and we had mentioned them in passing:

• Turn judgement into curiosity
• Turn conflict into shared exploration
• Turn defensiveness into self-reflection
• Turn assumptions into questions

Eve remembered the rules and wondered what would happen if she turned her assumptions into questions—real questions, rather that the “blaming and shaming” questions she had heard herself ask initially. As she did, she found a way to engage with her teammate to consider, “What will she contribute to the other group? What might the new person contribute to my group?” Suddenly, she told me, she was over her anger, and ready to move on. 

I said, “Oh, that is great. I’m so glad the  . . . “ but she interrupted me with, “That isn’t all.” She realized that the rest of her team would be angry and hurt, so she taught them the Rules of Inquiry, and they strategized together about how to make the most of the situation.

I started to congratulate her again, but she went on to say how the shift in their perspectives had affected the children, and how the children affected their parents. And so, the avalanche continued. The questions and tension that are often disruptive when staff changes occur in a child care setting shifted to become questions about how to create success and learning for everyone involved.

So are the days of our lives in managing complex change.