Engine For Change

People will often forgive you for being wrong when they are right; they will seldom forgive you for being right where they are wrong.” – Peter Kreeft, Philosophy 101 by Socrates

I speak from experience when I say that it will do you no good to point out to people how foolish they’ve been by driving people to change all these years.  They won’t like to hear it and they won’t like you much after they hear it.

Focus your eyes and theirs on the future.  Put the past behind and bury it there.  Today is a new day.  Help them choose to drive change from this day forward.  That choice alone will make a world of difference.

Tomorrow I teach my first Motivation Mapping course.  Maybe, just maybe, I’ll convince ten people to start driving change.  I’ve posted the course handouts at the newly renamed Motivation Mapping page.  E-mail me at the new engineforchange@gmail.com account if you’d like to receive the facilitator notes as well.

Opportunities are those moments when you are presented with a choice, subtle or not, and you can 1) choose to take the opportunity, 2) choose to not take the opportunity, or 3) not choose and lose the opportunity.

In Andrea Shapiro’s Tipping Point model, contact with advocates (e.g., the number and quality of times when someone who believes in the change interacts with someone who is neutral or doesn’t) influences successful organizational change.  You measure contact with advocates as opportunities taken for contact compared to opportunities available.  When organizations recognize (or create) opportunities to connect people with advocates the change happens faster and is more successful.

Since attending Ms. Shapiro’s course in 2005 I have actively looked for opportunities to create the changes I wanted in my professional and personal life. Seeing and taking those opportunities has made all the difference for me.

I’ve noticed three groups of opportunity takers: 1) those that naturally see and take opportunities, 2) those that have practiced at finding and taking opportunities and 3) those that don’t see opportunities for themselves.

I challenge you to take the opportunity to put yourself into one of the groups and consider taking the action I recommend for each group.

If you take the action and it doesn’t do anything for you, feel free to stop back and comment on the flaws in my advice. Or, you can stop back and tell me the story of how great it worked.  Either way  I love the discussion.

The challenge begins now.  Will you choose to act?

1.  If you naturally see opportunities all around you, consider creating opportunities for others around you.  You’ve got a gift that the world can benefit from.  Try finding one opportunity for someone by the end of next week.  Offer them a chance to do something they may never have considered.  What did they say when you offered them the opportunity?  [Note: This is advice targeted at adults dealing with adults.  Children require a different method of seeing, offering and accepting opportunities.]

2. If you have practiced both finding and taking opportunities, choose to tell your story of what creating and taking opportunities has done for you.  Those who hear your story will benefit from your example.  Try telling one person you story by the end of next week.  What did they say once you told them?

3.  If you struggle to see opportunities, find someone who can see them for you.  Look for a person you find yourself saying “Why do they always get the breaks?” about.  Chances are they don’t; they just take the opportunities when they see them.  By the end of next week, ask that person if they’d be willing to share with you, when they find them, opportunities that you could take to get you closer to one or several of your goals.    Were you surprised by the opportunities they found for you?

You can, if you choose, find and take opportunities and change the outcome of your life.

Whenever you’re working at an event, for work, for your kids PTA, for whatever and someone who hasn’t done any of the work for the event decides to come up and tell you all the things you could have done better, here’s a little trick I call the feedback hook you can use that leverages the power of driving change:

Step 1. Validate their idea

Step 2. Offer them an opportunity to make their idea happen, and

Step 3. Remove what obstacles you can between them and the actions required.

Before I give you an example of the feedback hook trick, I’m going to guess at what the typical conversation is when someone offers you feedback at an event you’ve worked hard on without their help.

Tell me if this driving people to change scenario looks familiar.

We’ll call our commenter Pam and you, our diligent, hardworking volunteer will be Brenda.

The Driving People to Change Scenario:

Pam: You know Brenda, what this school carnival could really use is more booths.  I think it would be so much better with more booths, or even with a few clowns maybe, or what about a juggler?

<More booths, clowns and jugglers would make this carnival better.>

Brenda: Uh huh.  We’ll take a look at that.

<She never helps and then she has all kinds of comments.  Who does she think she is?>

Pam: Okay.  Thanks.

<Okay. Thanks.>

How well did that work? Pam gave her input.  Brenda got frustrated and mad at Pam.  Pam walks away.  I’d call that interaction pointless.

Let’s try it again, this time let’s do the feedback hook trick and create a Driving Change Scenario:

Pam: You know Brenda, what this school carnival could really use is more booths.  I think it would be so much better with more booths, or even with a few clowns maybe, or what about a juggler.

<More booths, clowns and jugglers would make this carnival better.>

Brenda: Pam, those are all great ideas.  We need someone with ideas like those on our committee.  We start planning for the carnival in May, but you don’t have to wait until then. The PTA meets every third Thursday at 4 pm in the library.  The time commitment is about two hours a month, until carnival time.  Then we’re working about 3-4 hours a week for the month right before. I’d love to see you at the meeting next Thursday night.

<Those are great ideas.  I’ll need help if I were to even consider making those happen.  Pam should help if they are her ideas.  I’ll invite her to help.  We can use more people. She’ll want to know what she’s signing up for though before she agrees.  I’ll tell her. I hope she attends.>

Pam: You would? I hadn’t thought about getting involved, mostly because I didn’t know how.  Next Thursday would be great.  I’ll see you then.

<I’m going to go. This could be fun.>

Now, admittedly, I’ve tried the Driving Change Scenario only to have the real life Pam run away from the situation.  She wanted to give input, but she didn’t want to do anything.

Notice in the driving change scenario that Brenda didn’t agree to do anything, didn’t take on any burden.  She validated Pam’s suggestion and offered Pam an opportunity to make it happen. She offered to hook her into the group to make her feedback happen.  All you can do is offer.  That’s the first step.

That’s what you’re doing when you’re driving change: motivating yourself to act and offering others the opportunity to act with you.

By quickly explaining where the PTA meets and how much time the PTA takes, Brenda took two obstacles out of Pam’s way so she could more easily agree to attend.

If you don’t believe me that the feedback hook works, try it next time and see for yourself. Even if the constant commenter doesn’t bite on your offer, you don’t end up any the worse for trying.

So, why not try?

Now, get out there and drive change!

An idea is not true merely because it occurs to us or because we wish it to be true; sometimes we are wrong.” – David Harriman, The Logical Leap

Admit what you know.

Admit what you don’t know.

Be ready for someone to bring you something you’ve never thought of. That’s okay.

As one of my good friends says, “Be rigidly committed to always being flexible.”

Yet, never stop driving change.

Tonight I read to my children from a collection of Aesop’s fables.  We ended the night by reading, The North Wind and the Sun.  If you’re not familiar with this fable, here’s how it goes (borrowing from wikipedia):

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.

They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.

Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him;

and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.

And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

The moral of the story has been offered several ways through history. The moral I prefer is: Persuasion is better than force.

You might be thinking that now I’m going to encourage you to use persuasion (driving change) instead of force (driving people to change).  Yes, I am, but that’s not why I wrote this post.

Instead–okay, maybe in addition–I’d rather you consider being a sun in your own life and allowing yourself to see potential and the warmth in trying something new (say, like driving change or making a career change or investing in your strengths).

Stop being your own north wind, who’s constantly beating yourself up for not being smart enough, fast enough, brave enough–you pick–to have chosen long ago to drive change (or learn a foreign language, or whatever you’d like to do and haven’t done yet).

Let your sun shine, take off your coat and get to work driving change or whatever it is you want to do.

Sometimes I learn interesting things because I’m married to a lawyer.

One of the interesting things I’ve learned is that in some criminal cases a lawyer must prove the defendant did the crime and had a guilty mind (in Latin, their mens rea).  Hence, a defendant can plead not guilty by reason of insanity not because they didn’t commit the crime, but because they claim they didn’t have the guilty mind.

How does this apply to driving change?

When your boss (or whoever) is driving you to change, I think most of us assume that the boss (or whoever) knows they are doing something wrong and chooses to do it anyway.  We know they’ve committed the crime, and we assume they have the guilty mind too.  Do they?

In reality, I’ve found that most bosses (or whoever) don’t realize that there is another option, besides driving people, for creating change.  Without them knowing of something better (driving change perhaps) how can we try and convict the bosses or whomever? How can we prove they had the guilty mind. We can’t.

May I suggest that you:

1. Assume they don’t know there is a better way.

2. Share this blog with them or have a discussion with them about driving change instead of driving people.  Describe what it would look like and what it would feel like if they were driving change.

3.  Mention that they’ll getter better outcomes and they’ll get the outcomes faster if they try this new way of making change happen.

4.  Tell them again, or better yet show them again, since they probably didn’t listen to you the first time.

5.  Repeat until it works.

If driving change were obvious everyone would be doing it.  If it isn’t obvious and most bosses or whoever need to be shown driving change first, then give them the benefit of the doubt until you show them, share with them and help them be more successful.

Now to an area I know, Newton’s laws of motion: a body in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force.

Be that outside force.

Nudge them into driving change.

Why not try?

Tomorrow I’ll have the privilege to facilitate a team through a strengths discussion.  I’m playing to my strengths when I’m talking a group through realizing that they have powerful strengths which they so desperately need to leverage for their own sakes and for the sake of their organizations.

As I drove home today, my mind wandered back to December 2009, when a group of strengths zealots and I started down this strengths journey.  Back then, on my other blog, I wrote:

I’m on what can only be called a strengths kick.  I’m simply, positively obsessed at the moment with helping others discover their strengths.  In 2005 I took an online test, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder, which told me my top five strengths (really talents that if I practiced at them would become strengths).  Boy, did I practice.  I designed my work (as much as I could) around my strengths and practiced and practiced and practiced.  In November 2009 I took the Strengths Finder 2.0 test and]now I’d say I know pretty well how to–and work hard to–use my top nine strengths every day:

• Maximizer (working to get the best out of everyone)
• Strategic (seeing patterns in random events)
• Arranger (putting the pieces in the right places)
• Learner (searching for new ideas)
• Activator (easy for me to start something)
• Woo (winning others over)
• Achiever (claiming successes energizes me)
• Relator (creating relationships with people)
• Self-Assurance (belief that I can accomplish what I want to accomplish)

Recently I’ve had the opportunity at work to help others take the test and discover their strengths.  Just today, with a team, I got to plan how we’re going to provide more strengths training opportunities to people across our organization.  I’m so energized it’s hard for me to stay in my seat.

Since December 2009 the zealots and I have helped nearly 1,000 people discover their strengths and discuss how to leverage those strengths for their benefit and for the benefit of their organizations.

If you haven’t taken Gallup’s Strengths Finder 2.0 test or watched Marcus Buckingham’s Trombone Player Wanted DVD, buy them today. Then take the online StrengthsFinder test. Then watch the DVD.

You’ll be glad you didn’t wait even one more day. Playing to your strengths puts fuel in your tank, energizing you to drive change.

[Note: If you work with me, contact me at work and I'll let you know how to get into the sessions we're offering there.  You don't have to buy your own book or DVD.  We've got them both for you.]

Bonus option: Post your five strengths and what you’ve done with them in the comments.