Laura’s Winning Ideas

There are two elements necessary for a change activity.

True Story: I was changing planes in Atlanta, and when I arrived at the gate, a line had formed for boarding passes. Naturally, a straight line was formed from the desk of the gate agent, and the agent was checking in passengers.

However, the line extended beyond the waiting area for that gate. By the time I arrived, it was spanning half the width of the concourse (hallway) which was busy with people walking to other gates. Almost immediately, the line extended to span most of the concourse, and through traffic was having to dodge stationary line dwellers to pass by.

The fellow in front of me looked at the traffic jam with dismay, then looked forward to the gate agent, anticipating some authoritarian intervention. None was forthcoming. The agent was alone and rushing to get passengers boarding passes. Since she was the only person who could do this, it was her very appropriate contribution to solving the problem.

I nodded at him and said, “We can do this in three steps.” As the passenger at the head of the line was finished, and the line moved forward one space, I stepped to the side of this gentleman instead of forward. The fellow behind me, not wanting to look like he was trying to cut in front of me, stepped forward and to the side.

As the entire line moved one step, they all followed suit, with the line slightly skewed to one side.

At the next step, I again moved to the side. The entire line followed suit, with side steps. At this point, everyone noticed that the through traffic was now flowing around the end of our line instead of through it.

Next, I took another step to the side. Since everyone had noticed the traffic flowing through without having to step over our luggage and break the line, they were now willing to take more steps to swing the line completely around to the side.

New people had joined the line as this change was taking place, and had no problem following the pattern of the group.

What I was teaching here are two principles required for successful change action/servant leadership/community creation.

1) The change agent must be correctly positioned to lead the change. Someone more forward would not have the opportunity to make this change so easily, no matter how brilliant they are at seeing the needed action. This is why senior management is so often hobbled in leading change initiatives. They are too close to the head of the line. You often need someone farther down in the organization to be incented, whispered to, or (best of all) modeling behavior to be the change agent.

2) The initial steps do not require huge effort to follow. The guys at the back of the line had to move much more than the folks closer to the head of the line. If you ask for big action before they have the opportunity to notice the solution for themselves, you’ll spend time and energy using authority, argument and logic to convince. Instead you could be engaging everyone’s inspiration to adopt the change because they figured out the solution.

Nobody put me in charge, but it was fun to make a change and create an instant team. The fellow in front of me said, “I don’t believe it. How did you do that?”

If you are thinking this sounds like fun, look around for your own opportunities to target a change, break down the steps toward that change, model it for the group by taking the first few steps toward the change, and keep moving into the change as soon as some of them begin to model the change back to you. Want more ideas of how to start?

If you are a manager reading this, make sure you aren’t a manager who would walk in and first say, “Who did this? What for?” until you’ve watched and noticed why the change was adopted by the group. How open do you need to be to change agents in your midst? It’s worth millions to you to find out.

Inspiration for this piece came from Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah linked to a piece by Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Creating a Community and wrote about Community Cultivation in his blog and outlined some details from the book, Cultivating Communities of Practice:

“one diagram shows 3 concentric circles. I don’t have the book in front of me, but it suggests that 15% or participants are active (with about 5% as core organizers) and the other 85% are watching, learning, and evaluating. This is important for companies to realize, as all of their online activities in blogs, forums, and other converational tools are part of the decision making process.”

I would add that the small number of core organizers don’t need to be the “leaders” of the group. Many change agents work quietly. Core organizers, or change agents will be doing something entirely different from helping check in passengers (the core mission), and their contribution may be very worthwhile and worthy of your support.