The May 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review has a great article titled “Your Company’s Secret Change Agents,” by Richard Tanner Pascale and Jerry Sternin. It points out that all organizations have small pockets of people who are actually doing things better, more efficiently, more effectively, etc., before it has become the norm. Instead of forever attempting to copy “best practices” put forth by (gasp!) a consultant, how about finding what is working the best in your own organization and doing more of that! This is fundamentally the same argument made in the “appreciative inquiry” field.
They call their thesis “positive deviance,” and I support it entirely. The article provides a list of principles to guide you in implementing the ideas. But one idea really stood out for me. When they compare the “traditional” approach to change to their positive deviance approach, they note that the former is logic driven, while the latter is learning driven.
More specifically, traditional change invites people in organizations to “think their way to a new way of acting,” while the positive deviance approach invites people to “act their way to a new way of thinking. This is big. I am starting to become aware of the power of the “old” paradigm in which I was raised. If we can just think enough, we can figure it out. This is the “left-brain” world that Dan Pink writes about in A Whole New Mind, and it’s time for a new approach.
There is nothing wrong with thinking, but the model of being able to stop the world in order to think long enough to devise an answer is anachronistic. Acting and learning from our actions works faster, but it is not how most of us were trained. The next time you get that exasperated feeling that you’ll never be able to succeed given all the negatives and constraints in your organization. Stop and look around to see who is succeeding anyway, despite the constraints. Talk to them about how they do it, and simply try some new things. And tell me what kind of results you get.
I have not read the article about which you write, but I would strongly challenge the notion that traditional change is based on a “think your way to new action” approach. Quite frankly, if it were, I believe we would have made more progress in our organizations by now. I think the whole focus on so-called “best practices” is evidence of our bias for taking action in order to understand the dynamics of change. Unfortunately, I think it is often well-intentioned effort that is wasted.
With that said, I don’t think it is an either/or choice. I believe we must be able to devote time and attention to the important task of thinking creatively about the underlying beliefs that drive the work of our organizations. Once those beliefs are recognized and agreed to by key stakeholders, they can be tested through action, with the ultimate goal of identifying the right beliefs that will help us achieve the strategy we set out for the association. I do not believe, however, that all learning or even the best learning is accomplished purely through an “act your way to new thinking” approach. But I will definitely read the article and possibly post more thoughts. Thanks!
I definitely agree it’s not either/or (and so would the authors), and I don’t think they (or I) are quite arguing that acting your way to new thinking is the “best,” way, but I think it is definitely an overlooked way, so that’s why I like it. The authors trash “best practices,” too, so maybe you agree more than you think! They cite examples where people have basically thought their way into hopelessness or a pattern of ineffectiveness. In those cases, thinking your way out can be a challenge. And remember, acting still requires new thinking. It’s not just action, action, action. Let me know what you think of the article.