Evolution: A very short story

Prior to the evolution of beings, sentient or otherwise, we had the evolution of energy. First up: geochemical energy. Think water clawing at a volcanic rock to make compounds like hydrogen sulfide and releasing energy, like heat, in the process. Sunlight as a form of energy came next. At the beginning — of the earth anyway — there might have indeed been light, but it wasn’t all that useful, not at first, anyway. But after the light came the beings. First up were molecular beings like RNA, amino acids, and enzymes. From this point on, then, it’s fair to say that energy and beings co-evolved; they shaped each other just as they were shaped by each other. An evolutionary theme, if ever there was one.

Cellular beings, like cyanobacteria that used abundant sunlight for energy, emerged around 3.7 billion years ago. The product of all that sunlight driving chemical reactions in beings like cyanobacteria was oxygen — the third installment of the energy revolution that gave rise (a few billion years later) to perhaps the greatest of (oxidation) events — the Cambrian Explosion. But before that great blast of life mushroomed, single-celled organisms first had to grow a bit. And they did that by, well, eating each other — an energy evolution known as the “flesh” epoch. Grisly, I know. But interestingly, the eukaryotic cells that comprise us humans were, and are, particularly good at ingesting other cells. Mergers and acquisitions, evolution style. Or, the apple doesn’t fall far from the original tree. (I’m resisting the urge to put a smiley-face emoji here.)

The flesh epoch was followed most recently, about 400 million years ago, by the fire epoch. For fire to emerge as a viable source of energy, however, vascular plants (fuel) had to evolve first, and atmospheric oxygen had to build up to about sixteen percent to sustain the blaze. So, there’s that.

Throughout this story there is the specter of survival, not mandatory but generally preferred. Will and Arial Durant, the dynamic duo of historians, suggest that competition is the first biological lesson of history; it is not. Adaptation is. Beneath the veil of competition, there is experimentation via mutation as a means of adapting to the changing environment and hence surviving in that changing environment. And he-she-it who adapts best is generally selected from among his-her-its peers (second biological lesson of history, according to the Durants). It’s not so much survival of the fittest — that bit of triteness is liable to lead the uninitiated down the path of Social Darwinism — so much as it is survival of the best suited — best suited to a particular environment, that is. When we say “fit,” we mean that which fits best (i.e., is best suited).

The best-suited must also be able to replicate themselves; replication, sexual or otherwise, is, alas, necessary. Will and Arial Durant refer to replication as the third biological lesson of history. I would suggest that it is second behind adaptation. Beings that survive must adapt (lesson one), replicate themselves (lesson two), and only then will the environment select them for passage into the next generation (lesson three). And the best suited to replicate are, these days anyway, plural; that is to say, they are superorganisms and consequently super-cooperators, achieving together what they cannot achieve alone. Man, we know, is not an island unto himself but a collection of islands comprised of bacteria (biome), viruses (virome), and fungi (mycobiome), all cooperating that the amalgam — me and you and everyone else — might live well and prosper (i.e., adapt, replicate, and be selected for next-generation status).

At the outset of the origins of life on this planet, survival was perhaps awarded to the best competitor molecule (if we view adaptation as a competition). Since that time, however, the best-suited have also been the best cooperators. But always the superorganism, this collection of constituent parts that comprises the larger and perhaps greater whole, must manage the tension between competition and cooperation, between what is best for the individual (e.g., the individual cell, which in runaway mode can lead to a deadly form of competition like cancer) and what is best for the whole. One might ask how Nature can abide such an abomination as cancer. The answer is that mutations, like those involved in cancer, are ubiquitous. As Nature pursues different strategies for survival in a changing environment, mutation plays a necessary part in the pursuit of variation, or requisite variety — the kind needed to adaptively solve the problems of survival. Most mutations amount to nothing (not at the moment they happen, anyway). Some end up being beneficial. Some, like cancer, are deleterious. But it’s from such failures as cancer that Nature learns. If all the world mutates — if all the world changes — then we should at least learn from said changes. Nature takes that admonition to heart, managing — never perfectly — the tension between competition and cooperation, between self and whole, via aspects of structure, like the roles the individual parts play and the rules they play by.

Driving cooperation or emerging from it, I don’t know, we have compartmentalization (e.g., a cell wall), and with it, we have protection from external vicissitude, perturbation, and disruption. Compartmentalization is necessary for the superorganism status I mentioned above. But compartmentalization does not mean, as we are sometimes wont to assume, that we should cut ourselves off from the world as a means of protecting ourselves from that world. Not totally, anyway. What boundaries we humans perceive between self and others are, at worst, human constructs, and at best, semi-permeable. Compartmentalization still necessitates connection. Between our cells and the extracellular environment and between us and our external environment, there are constant exchanges of energy and information. The connections between part and whole, or whole and world, provide yet another element of structure — relationships. It is along such relationship lines that energy and information flow. Thus, with compartmentalization also came the first forays into information processing — transmitting, receiving, storing, analyzing, and responding to signals in the environment. As Viktor Frankl once said (and I paraphrase), it is in our response, in our ability to give, take, and learn from feedback, that our growth and our autonomy lie. Response, comprised of feedback loops, is thus the fourth element of structure.

Say this with me: feedback is where the magic happens. And what do we humans hate? Feedback. Unless it's glowing. That’s a problem.

Now we have the primary elements of structure: relationships, roles, rules, and responses. From structure, then, comes behavior. Function follows form follows function follows form, ad infinitum. Think of carbon: if it were not structured as it were, with four eager-to-bond (i.e., relate) electrons in its outer shell, it would not behave the way it does. And we, as carbon-based lifeforms, would not be here. That’s how important structure is.

Finally, we have super single-celled organisms like cyanobacteria joining forces to form super multicellular wholes (appearing from 600M to 1.5 B years ago) and the multicellular wholes coming together to form eusocial super-societies (approximately 150M years ago), or systems of super-systems, which all gets mind-bogglingly complex. But the pattern — the basic structure — sustains. For the whole to succeed, it needs to adapt to changing circumstances. It must exploit what works in a given environment, from genes to behavior to technology, and replicate those successes. But the system also needs to explore new ways of working and actively experiment with those ways, those “mutations,” to see if they bear fruit. That is to say, to see if they are selected.

And, of course, the whole, like the formerly independent parts it is comprised of, needs to learn from the inevitable feedback that comes flowing and dancing and marching — and sometimes kicking and screaming — down those relationship lines. Even true sociality in some insect species, like ants, did not always presage good tidings for the future of large-scale cooperative enterprises, like ant colonies. Some insects that adopted the social life in service to, say, a queen de-transitioned back to a solitary life in service to self. This has happened a number of times over the last 150M years: species learn and adjust their behavior (and even their genetic makeup) based on feedback. They come together, divvying up the labor; they learn perhaps a painful lesson, and then they break apart, learn, and come back together again. For insects like ants, bees, and wasps, if they didn’t get it right the first time, they tried and tried again. If at first you don’t succeed …

When the whole is working well, it’s due in no small measure to the fact that its disparate and varied parts build, leverage, and sustain cooperative relationships, again that the whole might achieve together what the parts cannot achieve alone. If heretofore, at the microscopic level, we didn’t see it, we now need to recognize the necessary divisions of labor (roles) and the coordination of such labors, which requires, among other things, strong relationships and relevant, not burdensome, regulation (rules) to help manage the tension between self and whole; and we need feedback loops (those response mechanisms) if we are to keep developing and learning. And, when it comes to human evolution, an emergent “belief” system, like the belief that diversity in its many forms — functional, educational, generational, racial, gender, and cognitive — is good for society or eusociality. Top it off with an advanced language that, like a ligand, helps tie these structural elements together. To put it more succinctly, religion (all of them) and language played outsized roles in the evolution of human societies.

This, then, is the basic story of evolution: energy, information, beings, adaptation, replication, selection, structure, and something like shared beliefs and persuasive language to tie it all up and make a coherent story out of it (but a story that, unlike dogma, holds up time and again to replicability, testability, and falsification, or the elements of the scientific method).

Now we arrive at the inevitable, “So what?” What does it all mean? Why should any of this matter to you and me?

Well, the answer, I suppose, comes in the form of yet another question (always questions!): Can we not get better at all of this? I mean, evolution is cool and all and oh-so complex, but it isn’t rocket science. Can we not replicate its processes right here, right now? Even better, can we not at some point take command of our own evolution — or maybe overcome our own previous evolution? Nature doesn’t give a damn if what’s best suited to a particular environment is also nasty, brutish, petty, and biased? But we can care; we can choose to give a damn.

Perhaps we can’t create energy just yet (thank you, Mr. Mayer), but we could certainly waste less. We could certainly deprive people less of the energy (in the form of motivation) they show up with, and thus sustain and build the meaningfulness they might derive from their labors and the demonstration of their skills (praise be to Katie Bailey and her Seven Deadly Sins). Can we not recognize that the information we have, no matter the amount or quality, is imperfect? And if so, can we not stop forcing our imperfect opinions on others and instead try to integrate the diverse opinions of others? That’s the stuff of innovation, by the way, combining peanut butter-filled ideas with chocolate-filled ideas to come up with something wholly new and tasty. Oh sure, some of our concoctions will invariably taste like mud and look like Frankenstein, but some won’t.

Could we not focus more on cooperating, not only with those who look like us (e.g., kin selection) but even with those who don’t, and less on competing? This is but a step up, strategically anyway, from managing the tension between self and whole to managing the tension — and the relationship — between whole groups or societies and the whole planet. Could we not get really good at what we characteristically do (i.e., the roles we play)? Acquiring and demonstrating real skill requires not that we are created equally — we are not, thankfully, but we are created diversely — but that we are given equal access to opportunity and education.

Could we not reinvigorate and better coordinate our activities in the service of something larger than our own paltry needs (bigger houses, faster cars, more followers)? Can we not recognize the power of the word “relationship” and alter our behavior to strengthen the relationships between and among disparate groups and not degrade them, as is our political custom? (And could we not excise the worst of those divisive cancers?) Could we not devise and continually revise a better set of rules and regulations rather than piling up proclamations, some ancient, that seek only to constrain and punish and facilitate nothing but smugness in those who levy such rules?

Can we not reshape our belief systems in light of what we know to be true (like the earth is a bit older than 6000 years) and not just what we feel to be true? Can we not reshape our value systems to reflect less emphasis on entertainment skills (e.g., acting, pro sports, politics) and more on sustainment skills (education, science, humanism)? Rather than malign, impugn, degrade, or disinform, could we not hone our language skills such that our words are used predominantly to build stronger relationships based on mutual respect and care and to weave together diverse perspectives and methods that we might creatively solve the problems of survival that confront not only us but every other denizen on this planet?

Effecting our future evolution means that we take responsibility for constructing an environment, a network of external niches, that fundamentally feeds back into and reinforces internally who we want to be as a people. These are the final forces of evolution — that we know of anyway — externalization and internalization. Build the niche, and then allow that niche to shape us in our own image. It’s not rocket science, like I said. But pulling it off isn’t easy, either. Who so taketh the easy way, however, rarely journeys toward anything meaningful.

From Evolution to Revolution: How Our Past Might Influence Our Future was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Author’s note: My thanks to Leen Gorissen for introducing The Change Leaders to the story of whales. If this interests you, because there is much more to the story, I wholeheartedly recommend her excellent book, Natural Intelligence: Building the Future of Innovation on Millions of Years of Natural Intelligence.

I think it’s safe to assume that we all admire earth’s mightiest denizens — the great whales. Some of us pay exorbitant fees to go whale-watching, and for good reason: whales are pretty cool. But those whales also need to eat — a lot. And because they tend to gorge themselves on fish and krill, it was once believed that if we reduced the whale population, the fish and krill populations would come soaring back. So, whaling quickened, and the global population of whales declined (a linear relationship). Today, there are an estimated one million whales (of all species) in the world’s oceans, down from an estimated five million over a century ago. Funny thing, though, as the whale population decreased, so did the population of their prey — the fish and the krill. That is not a linear relationship. In fact, at first blush it doesn’t make sense. How can a prey species decline when its predator species declines? Well, as it turns out, there are other actors in this roundabout, complex system, namely, a bazillion phytoplankton. And a sun.

Phytoplankton serve as the primary food source for the fish and krill that the whales feast on. So, the whales eat the fish and the krill, and the latter eat the phytoplankton. Except … shit happens. I mean that literally: whales poop — a lot. All the ocean is a poo-ground for them, and these “poo-namis” as they are called, are flush with nitrogen and iron that nourish the phytoplankton. On top of their prodigious poops, whales also “pump” minerals and other nutrients, like phosphorus, from the deep ocean to the upper photic zone where the phytoplankton live and reproduce. Basically, the whales help regenerate their food supply through this circular economy (aka bio-logical, or the logic of regeneration); there is little to no waste. In fact, if nature lacks for a particular relationship, it’s a relationship to waste. Very little is wasted in nature; whereas, over ninety percent of what we humans produce winds up as waste. Our economies, like our organizations and our reasoning, are linear, not circular. As a result, much of our efforts go to waste — literally. That is a painful admission.

And it doesn’t stop there. When those itsy-bitsy greenish phytoplankton get too hot because the sun burns too brightly, they release a chemical (dimethyl sulfide) that serves as an attractor for water molecules — the plankton version of a “calling all water molecules” announcement. In effect, sweaty phytoplankton create clouds or marine layers that reflect the sun’s light into the heavens, thus cooling off their local oceanic neighborhood. Pretty cool — literally. And finally, those little but plentiful buggers absorb what? You guessed it: they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And when they die, they take their carbon dioxide with them to the bottom of the ocean, where the CO2 is forever sequestered.

Whales, fish, krill, phytoplankton — that’s a system or a coarse-grained ecosystem rather. But which species is the ecosystem architect in all this? Who manages the relationships — the hidden structure in the system? Answer: they all do. Relationship management or ecosystem sustainment is a collective function. Because of the mutual interconnections and interdependencies that exist between and among them (i.e., the mutual relationships), no one of them is more important than any other. However, at various times one species, particularly the mighty whales, might be more influential than the others.

But what if we were to remove one of those architectural “cogs” from the “machine”? What would happen? Would the machine break down? If you answered “yes,” congratulations: you are guilty of linear, mechanistic thinking, and you’d make a fine human. Join the club. But the ocean is not a machine. Neither is a human. And neither are our organizations, although we tend to treat them as such. If we remove a cog from a machine, the machine will indeed get really noisy and then break down. But if we remove the phytoplankton-cogs from the ecosystem, what would happen? Well, no one can say for sure; that is to say, no one could provide the exact details of the new pattern of behavior that might emerge from the myriad interactions of the fish, krill, whales, and the rest of the ocean’s band of merry critters. There are simply too many variables influencing the ecosystem to make any sort of prediction. The ocean would change — that much we know; it would adapt to the loss of one of its diverse actors. But in what way? No se. I don’t know. Although I strongly suspect that whatever new pattern emerged, it would not be good for humans or humpbacks.

The time has come to change how we humans think about the world we inhabit. Indeed, the time has come to think more like a whale.

Through a Lens Complexly was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“What are the skills today’s leaders need to know to thrive in the world of 2030 and 2040?” This was a question posed to Bill Gates during a speaking engagement at his high school alma mater in Seattle, Washington.

Bill Gates stressed the critical importance of curiosity as a framework for acquiring knowledge. “A growth mindset as the foundation and drive to stay curious and keep learning,” said Gates, “will help prepare today’s and future workers for the immense changes that will take place.”

If you are naturally a curious person like myself, that is a perfect match. Now, how much of that curiosity do you invest in your team members, your peers, your boss? Let’s be honest, most of us prefer to talk first and listen (if at all) later. The reality is, we learn little about the other person by talking about ourselves and how we perceive the world around us.

Philosopher and psychologist William James (1899) called curiosity “the impulse towards better cognition.” Meaning, we seek to understand that which we do not. Curiosity is innate, yet some individuals show more and some less. Some lose it over time.

If you desire to be an impactful leader, irrespective of your role and responsibility level, be curious — about your business, your market, your peers, boss, team members, and more.

There are tools to increase your curiosity in a simple manner with effective results. Learn to ask powerful questions. Learn to listen actively. Learn to communicate directly. You will be surprised at the impact your curiosity can have on the world around you.

If you would like to improve your impact on your team, peers, and managers you can contact Sonja at sonja@prime.coaching.space, or visit www.prime-coaching.space to discover more about her offerings.

The Leader’s Diary: Curiosity was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is about a Gentleman who visited my house in Muscat, Oman 35 years ago. Then, I was a young, 28-year-old bank manager.

This gentleman’s daughter and son-in-law were my neighbors and used to live next door to me and my bank branch. The daughter was called Rita. One day she said, “My father is here from India and wants to visit your house with some sweets.”

I said, “Most welcome.” They came, and we had tea and cakes. I kept on bragging about my bank and its progress to him. His name was Mr. Prem Nazir.

He did not say anything about what was his profession.

We had tea, and after that, they said they would leave. My staircase was behind my apartment on the first floor, and the bank branch was on the ground floor. When we were walking down the staircase, I saw 100 people with pen and autograph papers in their hands, to take Mr. Prem Nazir’s autograph.

I asked Rita, “What does your father do that so many people want his autograph?”

She said, he is a film actor.

We then walked a little further and she said he holds four top awards in acting. Two in the Guinness Book of World Records and two in the global film industry.

“The first award,” she said, “is because he is the number one actor who has acted in 524 movies as a hero. Second, he acted in 110 movies as a hero opposite the same heroine. Third, he has released 30 movies in a single year. Fourth, is that he …”

By the time Rita finished her talk, I was blushing red. As I in my own rush of chemicals was only telling him about the heroic acts I was doing in the banking world. And here he was, a humble man who broke most of the film industry’s top records, being very still, quiet and humble.

This is my real-life experience on humility in practice. I hope you all enjoyed it.

While writing this, I am still blushing.

Humility In Practice was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Thea Hazel-Stals

This is a story of how a group of friends became excited about an emerging idea of making people more aware of the importance and vulnerability of water.

In the Autumn of 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, an American, a Swiss-German, a Danish and a Dutch, who had been friends for some time, participated in an e-conference on the Art of Change, organized by the Change Leaders, an international community of practitioners engaged in the field of consulting and coaching for change. Part of the e-conference was to set up a small art project to experiment with the art of change.

These four friends decided to form a team.

Being inspired by one of the speakers, Klaus Fruchtnis, they decided to focus on participatory art as a vehicle for social change and to focus it on awareness of the importance of water, thus having a social and sustainability focus.

One of the team members had a vision: having a thousand people aligned on a beach, with their feet in the water, each of them holding a vessel. Then one by one they would take water from the sea with the vessel, as in a wave, until they all had taken the water. Then in a wave back through the line of people, one by one they would give back the water to the sea, to symbolize the importance of giving back to nature. And drones would film the whole performance.

The team got excited and they decided to move along with this vision. The group presented the idea back to the conference and received positive feedback.

Every few days the team met to talk about the project. They used a collaborative tool, Miro, to share their ideas, using text, pictures, articles and video. They spoke about their ideas and started dreaming together of how it would look like and what would be needed. As such the idea further evolved in a creative, collaborative and enthusiastic manner.

They built on the original idea of having a thousand people stand in the ocean and wanted to make it more feasible (having less than a thousand people) and extend it at the same time by imagining multiple groups, small and large, all over the world, comprised of kids, families, co-workers and retirees, each performing this wave in the water. As such, more and more people could start thinking about their relationship to water. And it could all come together in a website or other online tool where people would share the videos of this wave and their reflections of the performance.

The team got more and more excited about the project and imagined that it might even happen. Two of them tried it out on a small scale: one by herself and the other with a team of enthusiastic people in Switzerland. Those small experiments further raised their enthusiasm.

One day they decided to report back to the community of the Change Leaders. So, they took the Miro, carefully managed time to make sure they could show everything, and they even did a small rehearsal. It was very well managed and as structured as possible.

Somehow, that didn’t go well. The presentation did not at all bring across the spontaneity and creativity and fun that they had experienced during all these emerging conversations. The team received a lot of questions about how exactly it would work, what the rules and regulations were, who was responsible and in charge, how to mitigate potential liabilities, what the purpose was, the target group, the project plan, and so on.

People just didn’t get it.

Because of that the team became disillusioned and completely lost all energy for the project. Even in break-out rooms during the session, the energy was gone. Only one group, looking at how the art project could be used in schools, could imagine some use for it.

Because of that the original team was not as engaged anymore and only the people involved in the break-out room for application in school continued: two of the original team and two new people. They started using a new tool, Padlet, to make the project applicable for schools. With this new focus and the addition of new people, this ‘schools’ team got energized and they evolved the project even further. They moved away from applying rules and regulation. It became more practical, while still containing the energy, fun and emerging experiential elements.

The ‘schools’ team had agreed to report back to the community of the Change Leaders in a final presentation and so they did. They decided to focus on the fun piece and make it clear that this is an evolving project, where co-creation is key, where it’s about the experience of experimentation, about having fun and about learning by making sense of the fun art performance of doing the wave. And they made an open invitation to anyone in the community to contribute. People responded enthusiastically, but not much happened.

Until finally, after a WhatsApp summary of the session, one community member reached out to the team: she wanted to connect the team to people in Pakistan who might benefit from the project. Another person reached out that he wanted to connect them to a water company. Then another said that he wanted to see how he could support the project. And then a whole lot of other people became involved. As they learned about the project, people became inspired by the purpose of raising awareness of the importance of water and the organic and open setup of the project. And they all loved the elements of having fun during the art performance of doing the wave in the water and making sense of it on a personal and group level. They could really see this happening and they loved how it would unite people. Then, in February 2021, after some exciting conversations, a pilot was done in Pakistan.

The whole team, everyone involved both in Pakistan and throughout the world, was moved to tears when they saw the first footage of the art performance Life=H2O. It was a dream come true.

And now? How does the story continue? We have yet to find out. New ideas for further expansion of the project pop up every week and more people get connected to the project every week. It turns out that the end presentation to the community of the Change Leaders was just the start and we have no idea as to where it may end. But one thing’s for sure: Life=H2O is evolving organically and is bringing fun, energy, experimentation, learning and increased awareness about the importance of water to everyone who’s involved.

Let’s have a glass of water to reflect on that.

A story of a project called Life=H2O was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

Recently, a group within the U.S. Government shared a paper entitled: How Culture Change Happens: A Roadmap of What Works. With a bold title like that, it’s no wonder a group of change experts wouldn’t consume it and offer a humble critique in response. Change at any scale is often a complex undertaking, and anyone who attempts to plot a course toward positive change is alright by us, even though we might disagree at points. Yet the points (that we arrive at through a sometimes-dangerous process of deconstruction or reduction) are not so important as the whole. And it is on the whole that a model will be judged: is it useful? If so, to what degree? George Box, the English statistician, offers us a truly profound statement on the issue of usefulness: “All models are false,” he said. “Some models are useful.” How useful this “roadmap” is will not be up to us, but only to those who might wield it. With that, we offer what we hope is constructive debate such that those who might put this model (message, demonstrate, align, action, sustain) to work derive even more usefulness from it.

The purpose of How Culture Change Happens, so stated, is to provide a brief explanation of an effective change pathway — the one we noted above. The authors, who seem eminently credible, suggest that we readers will stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from their experiences that we might chart a similar culture-change course. Using their insights as lily pads, perhaps (our words not theirs), we will hop across a tumultuous and often perilous sea of change.

At first blush, this all seems reasonable: delineate a pathway to positive change that works. Then again, owing to our optic of complex systems, words the authors use in the title and elsewhere, like “blueprint” and “roadmap” and “pathway,” tend to give us pause. What’s the fuss, you ask? None of us is a stranger to the well-worn paths of this world, right? Well, that’s the point. Blueprints and roadmaps are linear constructs that take us down a well-traveled road. To get from A to C, you have to go through B — all points we’ve been to before. But change, often, is anything but linear, and safe harbor in the change-port of our choosing is anything but guaranteed. Likewise with pathways: while they are important — they reflect patterns — when it comes to change initiatives they are generally only known in hindsight. The pathway one charts at the outset of a change journey will not likely be the pathway one walked at the end.

Thank the Japanese for their term, Kotodama, which essentially means “word spirit.” In essence, it means that our words are imbued with spirit and have the power to alter reality. For instance, Russian speakers have different words for the color blue that influence their perception: “goluboy” for light blue and “siniy” for dark blue. In effect, they see blue differently than non-Russian speakers. Similarly, Eskimos have numerous words for snow, and as such, they experience snow differently than those who don’t possess such a spirited vocabulary. This is not to say that language determines reality, but it does shape how we perceive reality. And that’s noteworthy. So much so that we are reminded to choose our words carefully when constructing a change narrative, lest we lead people to believe that positive change is indeed a series of well-defined steps we take to arrive at the promised land. Change is decidedly not so straightforward.

We might suggest the language of evolutionary biology when talking about change, not the language of engineering. Words like evolve, adapt, enhance, learn, grow, emerge, interact, and become (resilient). These are terms that are themselves imbued with uncertainty, as is change. But uncertainty also heralds possibility.

The Why: What is Culture and Why Does It Matter?

“Why focus on culture?” the authors ask. Because “culture is the system,” said one interviewee. Ah, now they’re speaking our language — the language of systems. Particularly complex systems, or complex adaptive systems if you like, where words like emergence and its associated phenomenon both confound and delight. But is culture the entire system? Well, no.

No matter how you define it, whether as an anthropologist, biologist, psychologist, sociologist, organizational scholar, or some combination thereof, culture emerges from the system. That is to say, a culture emerges from a diverse group of mutually-dependent actors, all of whom can change and adapt. Now, whether they exercise that capability is another story. But culture is not, per se, the system. Instead, it is a pattern of behavior that emerges from a group as its members interact in the process of performing a particular task or solving a particular problem. Culture operationalized is work: what do we believe about it; what do we value about it; how are the problems solved; and how does the work get done?

What kind of task, you ask? Pick one; it doesn’t matter. If we put people together in a group and hand them a task, a culture will emerge over time — and a relatively short time at that. Culture happens. This fact is neither good nor bad in itself, it just is.

Taking our culture-talk a step further, reflect that different groups of actors perform different tasks, even inside a single organization (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). With that, we might recognize that culture is not a single thing, as we are so often led to believe. Slight variations in culture exist within a single organization because different people perform different tasks in different parts of the company. Culture is thus more like a mosaic, a network of colorful but related tiles (subcultures) that, like the people who comprise them, are mutually-dependent and capable of changing and adapting. Often, one’s mission isn’t so much to change the culture, to bend it to our will, as it is to align those colorful, disparate, task-interdependent tiles to a central task or mission — and thereby reduce complexity in the process, we might add.

If culture is not a single thing, then it’s best not to treat it as such. Again, language matters. Is it change we seek, or is it alignment? While these questions are, to a degree, related, they are not the same.

The Why and What of Culture

In the why and what of culture, the authors suggest that leaders must vigorously communicate culture change. Formal leaders, they contend, should explain why the change is both necessary and good. Reform must be rendered understandable and digestible.

We agree. In part.

Communication, as presented throughout the article, is a rather lopsided, one-way affair. It’s what we call “megaphoning”: assume a lofty perch and shout down to the minions all the reasons why the change will be good for them. Shout louder if necessary. Combine the roles of cheerleader and serious debater into one. And if formal leaders should see in the crowd of followers influential people nodding their heads, whether they have a title or not, or real authority or not, they should coopt them at once. Bring them into the fold, as these people will prove invaluable when it comes to carrying the message and converting their peers.

Hmm …

Effective communication is multi-faceted, and telling, or evangelizing, is only a tiny aspect of it. We don’t want to convert people so much as have them join the initiative, perhaps even shape the initiative. As such, a change narrative is indeed vital. But that narrative, both a script and an act, creeds and deeds, should be constructed from diverse perspectives. A healthy narrative not only achieves a dynamic balance between advocacy (of one’s point of view) and inquiry (into the points of view of others), it also integrates those diverse perspectives to create solutions that are more creative, more colorful, and more powerful than anything a single person or small executive team can conjure. By seeking diverse perspectives, even the disagreeable kind, we increase the probability for buy-in at various scales and, in so doing, invite readiness for change.

In this section, the authors also note efforts by Bob Iger (former CEO of Disney) and others to align their troops using some simple priorities. Bravo! But while focusing disparate groups on common themes is a necessary task, particularly to reduce complexity, the practice is not always synonymous with change (as noted in the previous section). Understand, when one talks about culture change, one is essentially talking about a change in social DNA. Alignment, while related, is not the same as change. Alignment can and should happen with or without a change in culture.

The Who of Change

Here, the authors suggest that change has to be envisioned and lived at the top of the organization and that informal leaders, once conscripted or turned, also have to model the change. Commitment to change, they say, starts at the top. From there, one needs to cultivate change ambassadors, presumably from among those who are influential and who get it.

These are interesting comments. And not entirely wrong but perhaps short-sighted. Forest fires, for instance, don’t start at the tops of trees, unless that treetop is struck by lightning (tantamount to the boss being struck by an idea, which isn’t unheard of). Change can start in any number of places in an organization. Thinking in hierarchical terms, as the authors of this paper do, change often starts at rock bottom, when a person or group of people find a way to successfully solve a problem presented by their environment. What the authors espouse through their case studies is a leader-centric approach to change, albeit one that includes informal leaders “who get it.” Turn them, and they’ll turn the others — that seems to be the sentiment.

Again, this is a lopsided, top-down approach that might only be successful in lopsided, top-down organizations designed to heed orders and accept almost without question a forced compliance model. In such organizations, members often sign contracts and can’t up and quit in the face of toxic or incompetent leadership or a toxic culture. Even if they could up and leave, there’s no other place for them to go. It’s not as if an American submariner or fighter pilot can say, “I’m done here. I’m going to go work for the Russian team because they are more inclusive.” A leader-centric approach is not destined to fail, but it certainly is not destined to succeed, either. Organizations that compete for talent and want to hang on to their talented people, or who value nurturing talent, might want to consider adding elements of a follower-centric approach. Invite opinions — even dissenting ones. Invite co-creation. Invite participation. Invite autonomy. And invite engagement.

The trouble is, the kind of diversity that fosters creative solutions to shared problems, including issues of change, also fosters conflict, which is the paradox of diversity. Top-down organizations are not set up to harness such conflict — to make it a resource rather than a thing to be shunned and avoided. Authoritarian cultures tend to rely on compliance as an easy button for change. Feedback is unneeded and unnecessary. Ironically, one downside to the top-down approach is the lack of alignment it produces. People drag their feet or, in some cases, actively work against the change initiative. To be honest, this can happen in any organization but is more likely in hierarchical ones because employees fail to understand the extent of their collective power. The fact that we don’t see resistance in this paper is because it presents only success stories; it’s an aspirational approach that is fine if read as such. Enjoy. But we should not assume that the model applies generally. Seeing some failures or even hiccups would have been helpful. But we don’t get to see those, which proves to be a significant limitation of the article.

To their credit, the authors do trot out John Hart, former General Manager of the Cleveland Indians, a professional baseball team in the U.S. Hart, we are told, prized cognitive diversity and suggested that leaders should recognize their limitations and seek diverse perspectives. And Iger’s success at Disney, at least in part, was due to his practiced humility. “Here here!” we say. Humility as an act is a powerful form of communication. It sends at least two precise quanta of information: “You can trust me,” and, “I am someone with whom you can work.” In a group, the details are smoother, less noticeable, because the scale is larger. But they are still there, these quanta, saying to those who come in contact with the group, “We are trustworthy,” and, “We work best together.”

But we should be circumspect when talking about individual qualities. Because we humans generally lack a nuanced understanding of interdependencies (which leads to complexity), we tend to focus on attributes or qualities — the things we can see and measure, like IQ. While some attributes are indeed important, relationships between and among people and groups are far more important. In looking to qualities, then, we suggest you look for those that lend themselves to fostering strong relationships built on mutual respect and an active show of care and concern. Humility is chief among those attributes, but so is an openness to feedback (central to the long-term success of all complex systems to include cultures) and a willingness to share experiences, particularly those where we failed or came up short (i.e., vulnerability). And don’t just espouse strong values like egalitarianism and toleration (open-mindedness), do as Einstein suggested and live them. This is something the authors note as well. Don’t be shy: reward these “behavioral” attributes in others, even your bosses, be they Admirals or Igers. And if it’s labels or titles you require, we suggest “learner.” It’s the only one that matters. The rest are for show.

Lastly, as it relates to the who of culture, the authors note the value of moral courage. Trusted leaders, they contend, need to muster the courage to speak up. Loyalty is not found in keeping quiet but in stepping up and speaking out. We agree.

Indeed, courage goes beyond value to recognized virtue, the practice of which can lead over time to virtuosity: we become the things we practice. So why not practice being virtuous? For evidence of this mantra (we become the things we practice), we can tout modern neuroscience or Aristotle. Pick one. But even more important than courage is fostering a work environment where courage is less necessary, where people feel free to speak up and don’t have to muster some superhero-level of courage. This is the realm of feedback, both giving and receiving, and as far as complex systems are concerned, this is where the magic happens. This is where behavioral patterns, like culture, take root. Positive cultures are not a function of positive feedback, per se, just as negative cultures are not a function of negative feedback. Positive cultures are a function of feedback, period. Negative cultures are often a function of its absence. If someone is behaving poorly, even the boss, but never gets that feedback, guess what you will see more of — the poor behavior. Not providing feedback for poor behavior is the same as rewarding that behavior. You will see more of it.

But beware, when you succeed at creating such an environment, one where feedback is welcome, you will hear things you don’t like or agree with or that frustrate the team’s efforts, which presents us with the diversity paradox noted above: diversity is the answer to our challenging problems, but it is also the primary cause of conflict. This article fails to mention the importance of listening to conflicting opinions, much less integrating those diverse — and differing — opinions into creative, inclusive decisions. It suggests only that data should be used to quash such opinions. Ah, that humans could be moved by evidence alone. Alas, such is not the case. If it were, we’d all be evolutionary biologists. Easier in some organizations, then, to push the compliance button. Less conflict. Less mess. And in the world of real change, we contend that you will find less success, too.

The How-To of Culture Change

To successfully change a culture, we are told, one must align values, behaviors, processes, and rewards. Ok, we see the value of this kind of alignment, which the authors call “strategic alignment.” These components, or parameters of an organization (i.e., a complex system), are indeed important. In the complex systems world, we say that systems are known by their behaviors — and so are people (humans are super-systems unto themselves). It makes sense, then, to have as little daylight as possible between the things we say we value and the behaviors we exhibit and incentivize. No hypocrisy. Only those with integrity, or a willingness to learn to become so, need apply.

While the authors are vague on how to foment this alignment, they are not vague on what to do with those who won’t align: get rid of them. That’s certainly one way to create change. But it might not be the best way. For one, we’d like to know why some people resist aligning. There might be something in their stances worth knowing, like the whole team (of lemmings) is headed for the cliff. But they’d rather not say because it’s not their place, or their concerns were not only disregarded in the past but were degraded. Since little or no diversity of opinion will be brooked in some organizations, the non-conformists are seen as antagonists and summarily executed rather than included.

For one second, consider the phenomenon of burnout. We tend to think of it as entirely an individual condition. The individual (often doctors, nurses, and other frontline healthcare workers) cannot cope with the effects of prolonged stress — the individual’s mind is not conforming to the norms of wellbeing. But if we back up a bit and open our aperture, we see that the system they are a part of often fails to set or sustain the conditions or create the environment that would allow the individual to be successful and thrive. Again, because we lack a nuanced understanding of interdependencies — in this case, between the individual and the system of which he or she is a part — the effects of negative (and positive) relationships in the environment escape us. And so we point instead to individuals and their qualities or lack thereof, the things we can readily measure. Instead of saying, “We’re part of the problem,” we say, “You’re the problem.” And we get rid of you.

Just a thought.

One thing we enjoyed in this section, however, was how the authors debunked the tripe about “if everyone is responsible, no one is accountable.” Tell that poppycock to a group of high performers who not only embody shared value and shared experience but shared responsibility and accountability as well. That means shared responsibility for their failures as well as their successes, and for their poor behavior as well as their stellar behavior. This is ownership, humble ownership at that, and depriving people of it, by depriving them of a tangible sense of responsibility and accountability, deprives them in no small part of the meaning they might attach to their jobs. People tolerate poor behavior in their peers, subordinates, and superiors not only because they learned to live with it or like it, or because it’s the only thing they know, as is noted in the article, but because they’ve been led to believe that intervening and giving critical feedback to anyone not directly under them is decidedly not their responsibility. It’s not in their wheelhouse. Only formal leaders have the authority to address poor behavior. And by consequence, only the formal leader’s position is meaningful. The rest of us are here for economic reasons only, while we hold out hope that the dream job falls into our laps or that we survive until retirement age.

This is a pattern of behavior (i.e., part of the culture) seen in outdated, hierarchical organizations where formal leaders believe that they alone must have all the answers. This is one reason, perhaps, why they spend the majority of their time parroting the why instead of spending equal time asking “why not?” Regardless, they see themselves as the ultimate owners of responsibility and accountability. Success is theirs alone, but so, too, is failure (not always, as some bureaucrats are adept at sidestepping responsibility for failure and wouldn’t dream of holding themselves accountable). If this isn’t a recipe for risk aversion, we don’t know what is. Sadly, it’s also a recipe for interpersonal, intra-team, and inter-team competition. This kind of competition, where people compete to be ranked higher than their peers, doesn’t just degrade meaning and purpose but adds heaps of stress on the system (and the people) and decrements resiliency in the process. In such environments, and regardless of what formal leaders might say, failure is almost always treated as bad, learning is stunted, and innovation is forced.

The authors refer to this dribble — if everyone is responsible, no one is accountable — as the pathology of bureaucracies. We might only suggest that it is a pathology of bureaucracies, as there are others, not the least of which is an inability to solve complex problems creatively. This happens for several reasons, one of which is a tendency, conscious or otherwise, to focus on the individual. What does one have to do around here to stay out of trouble and accumulate formal authority and status? Such a focus on the primacy of the individual is far less noted in high-performing teams and cultures, where the focus is on the primacy of the shared problem. These teams ask themselves, “What matters most?” And the answers they collectively come up with are rarely if ever, “I matter most.” Of course, hierarchies still exist in such groups, but they emerge from skill and character, not formal authority — or not only formal authority. He or she with the requisite knowledge, skill, experience, character, and wasta is expected to step up and share in the responsibility, accountability, ownership, and, yes, leadership.

If you want to create positive change and have others join you in it, maybe start with a look at your own accountability system. If you find you have strong peer-to-peer accountability, which is about quality relationships, it’s likely you have a strong, high-performing culture as well.

The Importance of Data in Effecting Change

Continuing with the how-to, the authors point to the importance of using objective, widely available data to create an environment of shared accountability and effect change. Here, we join Karl Popper, the late, great philosopher of science, in removing the term “objective” from all human enterprise. Even if data seem wholly objective, how they were collected and ultimately interpreted is not.

Data can certainly be binary. Take, for instance, the nicotine metabolites found in the blood of non-smoking sailors on U.S. submarines (proponents of change in the article wanted to do away with such smoking and used that data to inform their narrative). Pretty straightforward: nicotine is somehow showing up in the blood of those submariners who do not smoke. Solution: create a healthy environment where they do not have to breathe in someone else’s second-hand smoke. In the follow-up blood tests, if the metabolites are no longer there, you have succeeded. Take a victory lap. And that’s what the U.S. Navy did. Bravo.

While not part of the article, the opposite of binary data is complex data. Consider New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, whereby any policeman could stop, question, and search any person suspected of carrying a weapon or other “contraband.” In a binary fashion, did the number of searches lead to better policing and a safer city? The answer is a resounding “no.” But it did lead to a lot of young black men being singled out for their skin color. This example of complex data hints at a truism in complex systems: that the world is multiply caused, and that diverse interpretations of data abound and must be taken into account. In other words, bias has to be taken into account.

Nevertheless, we wholeheartedly agree that data are essential, as is information in general. Access to information (or data) doesn’t just enable informed dialogue, it invites it. At a deeper level, perhaps, data speaks to our purpose. At every scale, from the tiny atom to the enormity of the known universe, there are pieces of pertinent information that are vital to our understanding of the world, including the world of change and culture. But those bits and pieces of information — of data — are not embedded in our prodigious brains. We are not born precognitive. To learn, to crystalize the data and make sense of it, we have to engage with the wider world and do so at various scales. At some level, then, engagement is our purpose. And the data we might glean from that multi-scale engagement is manifold. So, too, is the knowledge and understanding we might create from that data.

Data, used well, can also help us temper the specter of uncertainty — or our relationship to that specter, we should say — enabling us to not only set the conditions for a stronger, more vibrant culture to emerge but a more resilient one as well. A resilient culture is one that cannot only bounce back from a shock (self-regulate), it can also reinvent or rebirth itself if necessary (i.e., self-organize or change). This kind of change is tough to comprehend because it does not require a “Dear Leader,” or a head designer, or even a set of committed leaders (as noted in the article) to orchestrate. This kind of change requires only interaction — engagement — with each other and with the outside world. And feedback — can’t forget the feedback. But beware because the sort of culture, or pattern of behavior, that emerges from the interaction is not always predictable, nor will it necessarily conform to the way we think the culture should be. None of this is to suggest, however, that we cannot shape or influence such change. It doesn’t mean we can’t “lead” change. We certainly can. We just urge mindfulness and a degree of reflexivity — to be aware of our biases when we interact with data; that is, to be aware of our relationship to data, especially complex data.

As the authors note, while data can be used to point fingers and place blame, it’s used best (at least in the negative sense) when it indicts the system and not the person. In the positive, data both precedes [and is a product of] discernible, corrective action. Again, in this we agree. Data used wisely is data used well.

Recommendations for Change

“Change-at-scale doesn’t just happen,” the authors tell us. It takes a committed group of leaders to effect change. From their lofty perches, they must message their “why,” using pertinent data to support their position (step 1). But they can’t just pay lip service to the proposed change; they have to demonstrate the change and live it every day (step 2). They have to align people and their behaviors to the organization’s values and key processes or get rid of them (step 3). Next, they must make relevant data and metrics accessible to render change actionable (step 4). Finally, top leaders have to saddle-up for the long haul because sustaining change takes patience (step 5). Along the way, keep pointing out metrics that show progress and ensure accountability. Now, our lily pads are rendered whole and imbued with meaning: message, demonstrate, align, action, and sustain.

Well, as we pointed out above, change in complex systems can and does just happen. Patterns of behavior, like culture, emerge when people interact. No head designer is required, and, again, what emerges from the welter often defies prediction and won’t necessarily conform to our human-made notions of how the world should be or how we thought it was going to be. This is emergence — the fundamental nature of change that underpins the evolution of complex systems and points to built-in limitations to what we humans can know. However … had the authors stated that change in a stable culture (or environment) doesn’t just happen, then we’d readily give our assent.

If you wish to change a stable culture, presumably a toxic or flagging one, you have your work cut out for you. It is no less difficult to change an adult human by altering the expression of his or her DNA than it is to change the organizational culture(s). And since culture is an established pattern (of behavior), it has a past. And it comes with baggage. In effect, culture is the past carried forward — with all that expensive luggage — to the present. And because it’s stable and predictable, it will be there tomorrow, too. Or so we like to believe. We humans love predictability, and, by consequence, we almost universally dis-love change because it is so … well, unpredictable.

To change culture, then, effectively means to change the past. That’s no casual undertaking, but it is possible. In a narrative sense, we can reframe the past and tell a different version of the old story. In an epigenetic sense (the study of how gene expression is modified without altering the genetic code itself), or that of its social science equivalent (how behavior is modified without altering the humans themselves), we understand that while we might not succeed in altering the cultural genes themselves, we can undoubtedly change what gets expressed and what gets rewarded by the cultural environment. We can become natural selectors.

Think of it this way: change requires heat. We want things to start moving around a bit, bumping into each other and glancing off. When such interactions occur, a spark is sometimes produced, a hungry one because then that spark wants to eat. It consumes fuel, which draws in oxygen and generates even more heat, which triggers the flame to consume even more fuel and oxygen. And so the fire morphs and spreads. This is change rendered as a positive feedback loop, where more equals more. In place of the heat, a steady supply of resources — like time, energy, and money, or a spirited narrative — can also propel a single act or spark to repeat stardom. These things, feedback loops, resources, and narratives, can also combine their strengths and work in tandem or in triplet to foster change. And, lest we forget, the earth herself can effect change with the hurling of avalanches and earthquakes, metaphorical and real alike, like market crashes and pandemics that rock us equally. The external environment can also send invasive species in the form of disruptive technologies and new ways of working. Competitors can move in on our territory. Our cash cow can up and die. The environment can offer up myriad variables that can, in turn, combine and interact in ways that leave us, on the one hand, completely unaware of the changes taking place, like aging gracefully (if there is such a thing), and on the other, send us face-first to the canvas in a heartbeat.

So, change does just happen — and at all scales, too. The world is deeply ordered in places, like cultures: ordered arrangements of people — of beliefs, values, and assumptions that then influence and at times determine our behavior. It’s just that no one necessarily needs to do the ordering. And no one necessarily re-orders it either. But we can influence that order. Even if we don’t consciously produce the spark, we can still shape and channel and fan the flames of change.

You know this story …

We see a black woman who refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. We see behind her, in the shadows — at least initially — a group of committed people, some with status and influence and some without, drawing attention and heat to the event, to that which matters. We see them expending resources like money, but also time and energy, and passion. Especially time, energy, and passion. We see them building and sustaining a narrative and acting it out as they create the future. Here and there they run, fanning the nascent flames of change, investing more time and energy, organizing and gaining cooperation and buy-in, not only by “megaphoning” but by listening, not only by offering informed perspective but by inviting it, too, and influencing and shaping, always.

In such a way, lasting movements, like the civil rights movement in the U.S., are born and sustained. Change requires hard work. It requires — and generates — resiliency. And it demands clarity: what matters at what scale. That’s it. No other lily pads needed.

Conclusions (Ours)

Once again, we applaud anyone brave enough to tackle this subject and to share with us their experiences in making sense of change. Why? Because it generates dialogue and engagement, and therein lies the grist. We have suggested that the grist supplied by this article is in the form of aspirational stories and is likely meant for a particular audience — those that are more authoritarian or hierarchical or both. We are not so sure it will prove successful outside of those environments. As with the results of an action research project, even a good one, the findings are difficult to generalize to a broader population. But there is still only one way to find out, and that’s put the “roadmap” to the test.

The paper also comes with some bias. At the very least, we noted a hindsight bias and an outcome bias. The examples, or case studies, used were all successful efforts, which could have been sheer luck, we don’t know. But the authors then look back at the revealed pathway (the roadmap) and lead us to believe that everything was done properly — all the lily pads were touched — en route to achieving the desired results. That’s just highly unlikely. Also, there seems to be a bit of a halo effect going on: the authors look up to the interviewees, perhaps, because of their success and their status, and as such reveal them in a flattering way. We wish they had interviewed the beat cops and the sailors and the ballplayers and the Disney employees. We wish the authors had gotten their feedback. That would be interesting, we feel.

We also objected to the language the authors used, like “roadmap.” We prefer the language of evolutionary biology (a bias of ours). But if that doesn’t suit, then borrow from the culinary arts. We also talk in terms of ingredients and recipes. The ingredients we might include in a recipe for culture change (e.g., inviting participation and dialogue, balancing advocacy with inquiry, modeling and incentivizing behaviors, practicing humility, etc.), whether in a rigid, hierarchical organization or a flat, egalitarian one, are the same. However, the degree to which we might use them — a teaspoon here a handful there — will vary. Try it out and taste it for yourself, we say.

What perplexed us most, however, was not what was in the article but what wasn’t in it: the word “cooperation.” Our understanding of the role of cooperation in human evolution, or evolution in general — or change specifically — is substantially greater than it was even a generation ago. As a strategy for survival, cooperation proves far more important than competition. We solve our most challenging problems, including those of survival and culture change, not through competition but cooperation. Yet cooperation is not mentioned once in this paper, and that is a significant limitation. Work from the top down to create compliance if you must, but work together, from the inside out and the outside in, to create meaningful change.

As a final thought, Brian Arthur, economist, and long-time Santa Fe Institute (SFI) faculty member gave us the only change model we might need. We are not sure he even intended this as a change model, but, like science, it works. And it’s useful. Starting with your “roadmap,” which using the “Arthurian model” would likely be a blank sheet of paper, make sense of what’s going on in your world. Write it all down. Then, explore your options. Gather available data. Maybe conduct some pre-mortems: assume failure and then imagine all the reasons why you failed. Take steps to address those future shortcomings a priori. Next, conduct experiments to gather real-time, context-relevant data. Then, finally, take a deep breath, lower your chin, set your jaw, and prepare to adjust constantly. That means, prepare to change.

As you explore and experiment, you’ll fill in the details of your “roadmap,” replete with wrong turns and surprise destinations. While we do not want to be cavalier about such offramps and misdirections (i.e., failures), on occasion those “mutations” prove to be the best thing that could have happened to us on our journey. Speaking of which, one can journey on one’s own — a solo venture of sorts. But such trips are best taken as a team, we believe, even as a family — change isn’t just good for business. Harness diversity together, we say, en route to creating the conditions for meaningful change to emerge.

How Culture Change Happens: A Humble Critique was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Rebecca Hill

I was recently invited to participate in an online discussion focusing on burnout in the time of COVID-19. As a burnout survivor, I am conscious of what’s going on in the world around us. Many are struggling with life, work, and relationships due to COVID-19. Parts of our communities are particularly vulnerable to feeling overloaded and overwhelmed, and those feelings can quickly lead to burnout.

While there’s a growing awareness of burnout as a condition, it remains ill-defined. As a result, there is not much reliable and credible advice available for sufferers. What guidance is available focuses mainly on managing one’s resilience and setting firm boundaries, and for those with more severe cases, potential drug and or talk therapies are recommended.

My story of burnout is fairly classic. As a predominantly Type-A personality in a high-pressured, demanding work environment coinciding — and competing — with being a mature parent of a young child and the wife of a busy man in the throes of starting his own business, I, too, stumbled along a path that led me to burnout. My struggle led me to an intense path of investigation, which included reading many books and articles, speaking to quite a few professionals (including doctors and therapists, some weird and some wonderful), as well as burnout survivors, and of course, trying a whole range of remedies to aid in my recovery.

Given my recent experience talking about burnout publicly and realising the impending potential magnitude of this issue, I thought it could help share a few insights based on the information I gathered and my personal experience on the burnout journey.

1) Burnout is absolutely individual to each person. There is no one common set of symptoms, and therefore no one course of action works for most sufferers. What was interesting in much of what I gleaned was how burnout survivors would often advocate for one particular solution (usually the solution that worked for them). It requires diligent detective work by the sufferer to piece together a coherent set of symptoms, which can help build an approach to recovery. This is a real problem as time is the one thing sufferers lack. Even keeping a simple diary and writing down daily one’s experiences in a few words can help build a picture of recovery.

2) Burnout is a catch-22. It is neither just a mental nor just a physical condition. However, most available support for burnout sufferers focuses on either the mental (the preference of the medical establishment in the UK) or the physical. Little regard is paid to the fact that it is likely a blend of both mental and physical symptoms for most sufferers. Unknown to me at the time of my struggles with burnout, I was also going through a severe case of early-onset perimenopause, which meant my hormonal health greatly contributed to my anxiety and insomnia symptoms. The result was a bone-deep weariness and brain fog that contributed to and confused my burnout diagnosis. Whereas before, I would have been able to handle the high levels of cortisol and adrenaline (due to stress)*, I literally found myself unable to cope with the added effects brought on by the adrenaline/cortisol roller coaster. When I mentioned this to my GP, she instantly dismissed it. Through painstaking detective work, I was able to better understand how the physical symptoms contributed to the mental symptoms and vice versa and ascertain what I could do from a root cause perspective to address these symptoms.

3) Burnout is an expensive business in so many ways, not the least of which is financial. To access good support costs money. However, sufferers can enact small changes that make a difference and come at a minimal cost. Pay attention to the basics: watch what you eat and drink (especially alcohol and caffeine), prioritise sleep, establish routines above all else, and get really good at saying no. By turning as many of your activities into routines, you’re reducing the sheer number of decisions you have to make and therefore removing stress from the equation. Finding respite in nature: walking, gardening, or just sitting outside if that’s all you can manage is critical. Too many of us live our lives inside, stuck behind screens that sap our precious resources. Additionally, prioritise gentle exercise, preferably outdoors, until you start feeling better. In the meantime, avoid the high impact indoor workouts (like gym visits) at all costs.

4) Surround yourself with supportive professionals to help you on your journey. Money may be tight so investigate if possible, with your GP’s support if you are so fortunate, what you can access for free, or at a reduced cost. My GP was hopeless, and it was a hard lesson to learn. Fortunately, I was able to access support through a friend for low-cost mindfulness classes, and through health insurance, a specific type of osteopathy. Additionally, I paid out of pocket for various nutritional experts to help me with my recovery.

5) Burnout remains an “Achilles” heel for most sufferers. Particularly if you have had severe burnout. Most survivors I spoke to talked about needing to manage themselves and their sensitivity to burnout on an ongoing basis, and I can sympathise with that. In my case, my burnout led me to totally re-evaluate my work and my approach to it. I’m now crafting my work and my life in a way that gives me much more purpose and joy. It still has its ups and downs, and this year has given all of us many of those, but my bone aching exhaustion and extreme levels of anxiety are in the past. I remain vigilant.

In my Wise Sherpa coaching work, burnout is still a taboo subject to a great degree. There is a tendency for sufferers to downplay symptoms as “feeling a bit tired” or “run down.” The stigma of burnout for many, particularly in the workplace, married with the desire not to worry nearest and dearest, leads many sufferers to suffer in silence. My belief is, if we can talk about burnout, not just as part of the mental health debate but also as a psychological and physical condition, and do so in as many spaces as possible, it will be easier for sufferers to ask for help. This collective effort, I believe, will enable professionals to better understand the scale of this condition and the need for their quality support. My hope is that sharing my personal experiences through this post will help others open up further by engaging in the conversation and chipping away at the stigma and misunderstanding surrounding burnout.

PS If you’re interested, I’m working on a longer blog/article on the A-Z of burnout — a practical guide. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what we should include.Rebecca Hill www.wisesherpa.co.uk rebecca@wisesherpa.co.uk

Originally published at https://medium.com on October 26, 2020.

“Being in power makes me permanently suspicious of myself”

Vaclav Havel, Speech 1991

Vaclav Havel has been a role model for me since the early 1990’s. I was enamored with the politically romantic story of a playwright becoming president of Czechoslovakia. I often wondered if he thought about how absurd it all was. It could have been a scene from one of his absurdist plays.

Havel scared many people while in office. On the surface he appeared without portfolio. No prior official political background or experience. He was soft spoken but a good listener to other people. What was there to fear in this small, chain smoking man? After all, he was just a writer.

His hidden talent was observing the human condition of his fellow Czechs living under the rule of communism and then giving voice to that condition in his plays. Havel also trusted his own lived experience as an informant of his inner condition. Vaclav Havel was a skilled practitioner of self-reflection. He was masterful at attending to both the head and the heart. I believe it was his capacity to get on the balcony and witness the world, make some interpretations and hypotheses and then return to the political arena and lead. He moved back and forth.

Arena — Balcony — Arena — Balcony — Repeat

During this pandemic, we are witnessing many political leaders effectively working the dance floor and the arena. Most of them are women. A roll call:

Mette Fridreisksen, Prime Minister of Denmark, who has guided her country through the pandemic with wisdom and compassion and astute political moves.

Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, has been tested hard before we heard of Covid19. She has dealt with a housing crisis, child poverty and social inequity. While hard stuff, it could not have prepared her for the Christchurch mosque shootings. Then came the virus. Ardern has used all her collaboration skills to keep building the community that is New Zealand. She is political without being highly partisan. She seems to spend just enough time on the balcony to take the temperature of her country and its place in the world. Her missteps have been few.

Other leaders who have stood out during the pandemic include Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, Silveria Jacobs of Sint Maartens, and Sanna Marin of Finland.

Then there is Angela Merkel. Often dubbed the most powerful woman in the world, Merkel has been reminding the world that each Covid19 death represents someone’s father or mother; someone’s grandfather or grandmother. She often reflects and speaks on what life was like for her growing up in East Germany and that she and her country are better for reunification. She is a master at slowing the work down, reflecting and then intervening. She has not been perfect but she stays in her practice of leading with humility, modesty, intelligence and compassion.

There is never high performance without feedback. Getting on the balcony is a feedback platform. It is a place to gather data from the arena and a time to self-reflect. Some questions a leader can use in their self-reflection practice:

1. What is going on in the organization from which I can learn how to lead?
2. What is my contribution to the mess I am trying to solve?
3. Or any other open ended question that produces a pause in the action and provides a view of the arena

I used to soft sell the essential work of a self-reflection practice. No more. Self-reflection takes discipline and self-candor. I believe it requires two elements:

1. Journaling. Every day write down your reflections from your work in the arena. Do this everyday for two months. Then decide if you want to stop. I doubt you will do that.
2. Read your journal. Do this every other week at a minimum. If you do this work, you will see patterns in your behavior that support your leadership efforts and patterns that work against you. You are unlikely to argue against your own handwritten data. You are also more likely to make changes that support your leadership.

Our absurd Havelian world is asking more people to choose to lead. Those who raise their hand and lead will do well to remember that no one arrives at the door in a snowstorm without leaving footprints. Self-reflective leaders understand the impact of their footprints on their organizations and adapt.

Originally published at https://medium.com on June 11, 2020.

The Balcony was originally published in The Change Leaders on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Richard Torseth

“Being in power makes me permanently suspicious of myself”

Vaclav Havel, Speech 1991

Vaclav Havel has been a role model for me since the early 1990’s. I was enamored with the politically romantic story of a playwright becoming president of Czechoslovakia. I often wondered if he thought about how absurd it all was. It could have been a scene from one of his absurdist plays.

Havel scared many people while in office. On the surface he appeared without portfolio. No prior official political background or experience. He was soft spoken but a good listener to other people. What was there to fear in this small, chain smoking man? After all, he was just a writer.

His hidden talent was observing the human condition of his fellow Czechs living under the rule of communism and then giving voice to that condition in his plays. Havel also trusted his own lived experience as an informant of his inner condition. Vaclav Havel was a skilled practitioner of self-reflection. He was masterful at attending to both the head and the heart. I believe it was his capacity to get on the balcony and witness the world, make some interpretations and hypotheses and then return to the political arena and lead. He moved back and forth.

Arena — Balcony — Arena — Balcony — Repeat

During this pandemic, we are witnessing many political leaders effectively working the dance floor and the arena. Most of them are women. A roll call:

Mette Fridreisksen, Prime Minister of Denmark, who has guided her country through the pandemic with wisdom and compassion and astute political moves.

Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, has been tested hard before we heard of Covid19. She has dealt with a housing crisis, child poverty and social inequity. While hard stuff, it could not have prepared her for the Christchurch mosque shootings. Then came the virus. Ardern has used all her collaboration skills to keep building the community that is New Zealand. She is political without being highly partisan. She seems to spend just enough time on the balcony to take the temperature of her country and its place in the world. Her missteps have been few.

Other leaders who have stood out during the pandemic include Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, Silveria Jacobs of Sint Maartens, and Sanna Marin of Finland.

Then there is Angela Merkel. Often dubbed the most powerful woman in the world, Merkel has been reminding the world that each Covid19 death represents someone’s father or mother; someone’s grandfather or grandmother. She often reflects and speaks on what life was like for her growing up in East Germany and that she and her country are better for reunification. She is a master at slowing the work down, reflecting and then intervening. She has not been perfect but she stays in her practice of leading with humility, modesty, intelligence and compassion.

There is never high performance without feedback. Getting on the balcony is a feedback platform. It is a place to gather data from the arena and a time to self-reflect. Some questions a leader can use in their self-reflection practice:

1. What is going on in the organization from which I can learn how to lead?
2. What is my contribution to the mess I am trying to solve?
3. Or any other open ended question that produces a pause in the action and provides a view of the arena

I used to soft sell the essential work of a self-reflection practice. No more. Self-reflection takes discipline and self-candor. I believe it requires two elements:

1. Journaling. Every day write down your reflections from your work in the arena. Do this everyday for two months. Then decide if you want to stop. I doubt you will do that.
2. Read your journal. Do this every other week at a minimum. If you do this work, you will see patterns in your behavior that support your leadership efforts and patterns that work against you. You are unlikely to argue against your own handwritten data. You are also more likely to make changes that support your leadership.

Our absurd Havelian world is asking more people to choose to lead. Those who raise their hand and lead will do well to remember that no one arrives at the door in a snowstorm without leaving footprints. Self-reflective leaders understand the impact of their footprints on their organizations and adapt.

Originally published at https://medium.com on June 11, 2020.

An old joke in 2030 goes, “What does the change industry have to offer in a pandemic?”

“Everything! Just a month after it was needed.”

The emails broke in Hokusai-like waves.[2] Bombardments of leadership advice landed on shores lacking leadership. Change champions failed to staunch the austere and populist tides of institution-gutting; promulgated a fascination with eddying narrative at the expense of the lunar tides of systems; created enough TED heroes to stock a surfer movie; published stay-at-home advice after the virus had already spread, issued “how to work from home” blogs after people had figured it out; ushered in Zoom fatigue at the speed of Zoom (another team meeting, yoga or salsa, anyone?); watched the belated beach landing of online retail through binoculars; and applauded from balconies as citizens adapted personal habits to distance.

Those of us in the business of change have questions to ponder about missing the boat. Lacking herd immunity while possessing herd mentality, the change industry veered from topic to topic, paddling not too far behind the edge of chaos.[3] Management consultancies and MBA schools whitecapped us in the salty spray of reassuring reports. At this late hour, three million cases into the pandemic [4], I add to this pile of missed trends my work about change afoot in transforming cities. I thought we might look at:

1. Cities after the Great Infection

2. Change models in the works

3. Useful tools and perspectives

Summary: How will cities respond to the novel coronavirus? In the two-year near-term pandemic rescue and three-to-five-year human and financial disruption recuperation, dramatic changes will come about in cities administering scant resources to resilience, sustainability, and adaptability.

In an environment of constrained budgets and economic dislocation, resilience comes at the expense of creating cities of culture, thereby reducing attention to urban quality of life amenities. [5]

In the medium (2030) to long-term (2050), cities hope to return to existing plans and trajectories, with emphasis on resilience and public health, with re-imagined economies and infrastructure to support it. Still, amid the crisis, public pressure to re-negotiate the social compact is not yet cresting the horizon, from the point of view of entities that drive change in cities.

Cities on the Cusp of Change

Since the 1980s, medium-sized post-industrial cities that had suffered deindustrialization began to come back to Europe and North America.[6] These cities share common characteristics and recovery strategies. The takeaway is that interdependent economic development and quality of life factors catalyzed change. “Eds and meds” and technology drive economic transformation in these cities, while quality of life bundles improvements in city lifestyle, culture, and city functions.

An everyday example exists in recruiting the best scientists to build a world-class College of Computer Science. Carnegie Mellon University shows off the historic city park and greenhouse across the street from campus. To coin an algorithm, technology plus park equals economy and quality of life in sync. Synergies attract talent that leads to spinoffs and tens of thousands of new technology jobs, sometimes in industries that did not exist. [7]

Change Leaders will be familiar with the physics beneath the structural steel, the models underpinning sectoral change: the human side of adaptive change leadership, systems analysis, the structures of power, adaptive leadership models, and participatory methods.

To understand large-scale systemic change such as in cities and nations [8], look back 35 years and ahead thirty-five years; connect a host of broad and deep interdependent factors; facilitate complexity thinking regarding the complex adaptive living systems that comprise all human orders, and lean on the pillar of adaptive leadership. The heart of this work is helping cities envision long-term futures, then building adaptive frameworks to help get work in motion that delivers on vision. The task of cities emerging from Covid19’s human and economic damage is to jujitsu one’s town from infection to inflection.

After Covid19: Resilience Elbows Arts & Culture

In the wake of Covid19, quality of life drivers (nascent city lifestyles of walkable, clean, and green functional cities with excellent transit and downtown cultural attractions) will be de-emphasized while, at the same time, resilience is emphasized [9]as city-development focal points.

Cities will shift gears [10] from creating great cities of culture towards building resilient cities. Resilience means enhancing cities’ ability to withstand shocks. City budgets are getting knocked by about 20% this year at the time of this article. [11] In the short-term, hard choices must be made. Large events, festivals and concerts, and improvements to theater districts are not possible until the waves of Coronavirus recede. This makes for a somewhat rapid shift from arts and culture to resilience. With devastating effects to arts institutions and artists, civic and philanthropic organizations are racing to soften the arts’ landing.

Resilience efforts underway since 2012’s Hurricane Sandy have helped cities respond to Covid19 [12], just as other great cities, like Miami, New Orleans, and Houston, turned to resilience after a disaster, after being shocked into action to survive and thrive. With roots in climate change, research has revealed that cities have to likewise prepare for economic, conflict, human health, and demographic shocks. [13]

City visions to develop arts, culture, and entertainment will contract in the face of higher priorities than food for the foodies, beer for the beery, and constant entertainment for the weary. A sustained contraction in arts and culture, dragging in museums and theaters, is inevitable under weakened financial models, small gatherings spaced more widely, and a shift in focus to essential life and work functions until financials recover in about five years. This is bad news for efforts to make cities cool for youth to remain, and for parks, concerts, and downtown theater districts.

Sustainability shifts to being subsidiary to resilience: lower energy use, more attention to climate change, and more training for people for adaptive careers that may shift more often than desired.

Spending more in one area at a time, budgets have been hammered by 20% or more, leading to the de-emphasis of other efforts, like culture. Models of touristic cities of learning built around large events and iconic destinations, a staple of city transformation since Bilbao’s resurgence under the Guggenheim Museum, will suffer. Big events are going to be difficult to host.

City design shift from amenities (new sports stadium? — not likely) to fundamentals implies transit that is inclusive, multi-functional, and healthy. This suggests nuance and subtlety, with stronger transit links to shifting work patterns in a work-at-home era. Staggered work shifts suggest cramming fewer people into disease containers at rush hours.

The indictment of the density drop is premature [14] and may serve as a distraction from pressing socio-economic factors of poverty, not density. Instead, density will be rethought to give space as well as proximity. Complexity thinking suggests designing for more than single-statistic arguments. Washington (comprehensive, underfunded, unreliable Metro) and New York (serving more passengers than any US city) leave a lot to be desired in cleanliness, peak times, and connection to airports.

What breathes life into these efforts to tackle urban complexity? Systems, power, resources, and policy. City work requires deep dives into the human data of functional systems, citizen sentiment in political and other forms of power, competition for scrambled financial resources, and details of public policy and advocacy. These factors interact to regulate the level of successful response and to cap change.

Cities adjust efforts to build “eds and meds” and technology economies

The health and fates of cities are subject to every change afoot in health, education, new technologies, existing economies, and social change. As such, cities offer a set of lenses to examine and poke multiple, interconnected, non-linear factors associated with complex adaptive living systems, and the adaptive behaviors and leadership actions needed to adjust and thrive. [15] In the complex adaptive living systems that are cities and nations, ripeness leads to over-ripeness for change, which arrives in concentrated or accelerated bursts — rotting fruit and all, to extend the metaphor — as we have seen in New York’s struggle with the Covid19 pandemic.

In US cities, medicine has driven transformation in essential post-industrial cities. In the wake of Covid19, cities that depend on research hospitals will advocate boosting federal medical research. Funded figures will fall off from fatigue and forgetfulness around 2025. [16]

My thirty years working in national and metropolitan regions demonstrate that domestic governance matters in national health; government performance differs dramatically in broad categories that affect medical research and readiness. Part of our work involves helping cities perceive their critical relationships with federal entities. Whatever happens, we will see reshaping international affairs and influence that inevitably shape the fortunes of metropolitan regions. In terms of health transformations, anti-science populists will face a popular and electoral backlash in Washington and abroad. [17] Populists will damage medical research should they endure. National authoritarians will weaken as the case for control weakens [18]; Petro-authoritarian states will emerge with weaker health systems while demand for oil remains low. [19]

The years of living large and easy on campus are in question as “eds” encounter challenges to campus, business, and financial models. US universities built up in the heyday of growth replaced declining numbers of American students by attracting full-fee international students primarily from South and East Asia and the Middle East. Little future planning was done for a restrictive US immigration stance (university presidents spoke up months after plans were known and implemented), and none for a disease that restricts student travel. This convergence of factors prompts uncertain remote learning and financing models. The consolidation underway among weaker, smaller, outlying schools in rural areas will accelerate. “Eds” rely on research largesse in STEM [20], which has been comparatively easy to come by and may see reductions in coming years should anti-science positions endure at the federal level, which provides most research funds.

How to Fail: Short millions of PPE? Crowdfund. Medical systems strained to collapse? Applaud at 7PM. Leadership in crisis? Advise how to “lead in a crisis.”

“Murphology,” The Study of Failure, as in a Tolstoy novel, one boring way to succeed is outmatched by unlimited dazzling ways to fail. In the “One-Shot” Olympic Moment, the archer let’s fly: Hit the target or fail after years of training. Some things are an all-or-nothing proposition. While creativity is required in unprecedented times, a pandemic is too fraught to risk failure by flirting with ill-fated ideas.

A Change Agent’s Multiple Lenses

Oxford and HEC Paris Consulting and Coaching for Change Program (CCC) provides multiple lenses to apply to cities facing epochal, dramatic, and sudden change. In selecting from an ecosystem of change paradigms, my projects employ various systems approaches gleaned from my time in CCC, the Change Leaders alumni group, Adaptive Leadership at the Kennedy School, and five specific deep plunges in the experiential ocean since 1985. [21]

Confirmation bias. We are guilty of seeing things the way we’d like to see them. The thoughtful insist climate must be attended while the thoughtless plow ahead. Those who see pent-up demand for change in capitalism are convinced capitalism will depart or be dispatched, never fixed. Vegetarians, meat. Feminists, paternalism. Atheists see god in trouble this time, while the faithful pray harder. Analysts point to factors, post-facto explaining away what just happened to us and why they did not see it coming. The inept point the finger. Those inclined to kindness see kindness rewarded, in the hope of cruelty being banished. Everybody seems to have a bad pet they would abandon on the highway.

Revolution is rapid evolution. Things continue the same, only more so. We see sudden breakthroughs in those things which were long overripe for change: remote medicine and learning, remote work, business, and retail catalyzed. Change processes are accelerated, not altered, unless things fall apart, which countenances consequences of upheaval no responsible person would seek. This meets the true definition of a catalyst, which accelerates but does not alter a chemical reaction.

Systems and organizations. Transformation is a time to think less about ourselves and more about systems. Change still happens in organizations. The organization is the entry point. From the organization, we may strategically work up to assemblages of organizations and systems, and handily work down to individuals in the organization. The change agent seeks out the places where system nodes interact.

Creativity. When doing something over and over the same way, follow a procedure to perfection. When doing something often, with variations, resort to a checklist. When doing something for the first time, be creative. Creative solutions, opening systems, trying new things, asking for ideas, listening to new voices — all are needed in an unprecedented pandemic. Calibrating creativity and failure hang in the balance.

Conflating individual and organizational. Ask people what changes they wish to see, and personal wishes emerge. Ask people what they are doing for those changes, and we see a gap in talents applied to organizations and systems. Organizations — city and state governments, business associations, and the like — are rocketing ahead, planning recovery, priorities, budgets, and projects. The change agent not in those conversations is not in the change. One option is to get political. Politics, after all, is the legitimate art of competing and debating for resources, priorities, and policies. Those in the fray are where it’s at.

Think politically. We are called to be profoundly political and lightly partisan. Agents of change who wish to be at the nodes where change happens, learn how to navigate power and politics. Work in systems implies understanding all of the levers, including power. Moreover, systems that gain higher quantitative and qualitative participation perform better, not least in civic and government spheres, as well as in business.

Plausible futures. The exponential advance of disease is the essence of non-linearity and uncertainty. Proper situational assessment starts with listening, learning, and perceiving. Subject matter expertise matters in recovery. Facing a sheer blank wall of a future, cities are tempted to respond in programmatic mode. Preparing for several plausible futures via scenario development is of value. Variations in drivers of economic upset, public health danger, and scale of potential social disruption suggest at least eight scenarios developed and examined for reasonableness, with preparation for at least three plausible future stories using methods we have learned from the leaders of the Oxford Scenarios Program, generously updated for the time of corona at https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers/developing-initial-set-scenarios-frugally-response-covid-19.

Power analysis. Where does power lie in institutions? Where are the six categories of resources available? Looking at business recovery, for example, I hear no single clue that business wants to move on low-cost labor. The organizational definition of inertia is that the future will continue as the past unless and until acted upon by an organized force. That organized force would be labor, pressing to nudge the giant boulder of business from its downhill path.

Collaboration over go-it-alone leaders. Time to trim the feathers of those who would wing it, tame the biome of the “gut” reflex, and park the moon shot. Complex crises call for collaborative responses that fully acknowledge complexity. To be useful in a pandemic, the individual takes a backseat, and collaboration takes over.

Decision Cats over Data Cowards. City fascination with data and metrics will continue with different emphasis. Purveyors of the Smart City somehow convinced cities that technology is the solution, yet still can’t organize beyond a prosaic Beta traffic light test. The shift towards Big Data sets in health, nutrition, and public access to resources will continue. Data cowards are those who insist on waiting for incontrovertible proof via clear evaluation metrics before making any decision. The Covid19 crisis is likely to demonstrate the benefit of an 80/20 rule, to act once data makes 80% certain, as long as the do-no-harm rule is applied too. Applying gumption, guts, and grit, decision cats get on with it and get to effective action. Here we see health care workers, first responders, dynamic mayors, and governors leading in cities in crisis. Where exponential curves are too steep to surf, these citizens, managers, and leaders revert to what they know best, tried-and-true strategic planning. The difference is rapid iteration and regular adjustment to the updated situation. It is as if decision cats lay short classic linear project-management tangents on the curve. Iterated decisions quickly re-lay a new linear tangent to simulate adaptively surfing the exponential curve of change.

A Change Agent’s Assets

One can’t escape the self-help article without a handy list of tools and to-dos. I succumb.

On the arts. All of the arts are relevant for complex, intractable, and unknown challenges.

Only the poets know it. Who can really know all the dimensions of a city? Only the poets have come close.

Literature. Tom Gilmore shared the unknown through a Salman Rushdie novel at CCC. An architect at work in organizational psychology taught literature of a threatened fiction writer from India, persuasive of the multiplicity of change paradigms required for new, unknown phenomena. A medical doctor’s undergraduate literature and medicine course covers pandemic novels from Ibsen through Camus’ “Le Peste.” [22]

Photography. Without documentary and street photography, we would not understand the city. Photographing the city opens the person to wonder and spirit that can become a form of enlightenment. [23]

The Art of Conversation from two meters away is in resurgence. [24]

The city demands to be walked. To be effective, one must know the city intimately, care for it, love it, over many years, and walk it to know it. Talk with others who love it. See its history in its bones and remnants.

Breakthrough: We are experiencing punctuated equilibrium in complex adaptive natural living systems — our cities.

· Punctuated equilibrium happens under a unique nexus of change conditions.

· Punctuated equilibrium happens after a long period of pressure for change.

· Like fruit too long on the vine, pressure for change without change over a long time implies not only ripeness for change, but over-ripeness for change: things have been too long without change. Good healthcare, decent wages, a stuck minimum wage, a venture-capital system of investing in wants over needs, a concentration of wealth at the top versus the erosion of ownership of companies among those who produce the wealth, an exploitative innovation ecosystem that — by purpose, design, and profit objectives — squeezes the earnings of those who do the work.

· An over-ripeness example is an overdue comeuppance for irresponsible politics

· Efficiency starves redundancies needed for resilience

· Believe in government; pay your taxes (we invest in us)

· Punctuated equilibrium: the cap on a turbulent system, bursts. POP! That’s where we are now.

If you read this far, you made it over the dune and down the sandy slip-face of the change-agent coast in a community that favors a reread over a quick read. The sweat of your experience and mettle can contribute to cities forging futures for all. Please let me know what you are doing. I invite you to take and use what’s here, and to share your perspectives and tools.

We invite you to contribute. Send us your piece on change to editors@thechangeleaders.com

Footnotes:

[1] Bob Dylan lyric about the pain and agony of change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PGfm6KE_pg. I wish I coined “The Great Infection,” but unearthed citations for this pandemic, Hookworm, and a 1683 reference to the plague.

[2] Hokusai’s The Wave https://www.artic.edu/artworks/24645/under-the-wave-off-kanagawa-kanagawa-oki-nami-ura-also-known-as-the-great-wave-from-the-series-thirty-six-views-of-mount-fuji-fugaku-sanjurokkei

[3]With respect to “Surfing the Edge of Chaos” by Pascale, Milleman and Gioja https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/127153/surfing-the-edge-of-chaos-by-richard-t-pascale-mark-millemann-and-linda-gioja/

[4] 3,292,966, according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ on April 30, 2020.

[5] Where are our ideas? More than fifty Change Leader members and mentors have written for our community and the public

[6] Among many excellent books on city transformations, Don Carter’s Remaking Post-Industrial Cities offers comparative case studies of Bilbao, Buffalo, Detroit, Liverpool, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Rotterdam, Ruhr Region, Turin. Routledge, 2016. https://www.routledge.com/Remaking-Post-Industrial-Cities-Lessons-from-North-America-and-Europe/Carter/p/book/9781138899292

[7] Prof. Luis Von Ahn was recruited from Guatemala in a worldwide competition for talent. He created ReCaptcha and DuoLingo — tech companies that employ well over 1000 computer scientists.

[8] I founded the City50 Project to help cities in transformation share experiences in planning for adaptive futures. I devise and employ tools from our common backgrounds in complexity, adaptive methods, and civic participation. [9] This is a description of what is occurring, not advocacy for this shift of emphasis.

[10] “Gears” are classic project management topics of people, time, and money: this is how city governments are built to react. Municipal governments keep the public safe, pick up the trash, and pave streets.

[11] Consolidating notes of news articles covering city budgets.

[12] Sandy prompted the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org to launch the Resilient Cities Initiative. https://www.100resilientcities.org

[13] New York has endured recent shocks in each category: conflict, economy, climate, and public health: 9/11, the Great Recession, Hurricane Sandy, and global Covid19 pandemic epicenter, respectively.

[14] https://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/urban-density-not-enemy-coronavirus-fight-evidence-china, among papers defending density, and “coronavirus has caused some to question the validity and safety of population density and transit. But the real culprits lie in crowding, poverty, pollution, and other socioeconomic factors.”

[15] My change practice is in the “breakthrough” of equilibrium in the complex adaptive living systems that are cities and nations. The scope and underpinnings of those concepts are beyond this paper and are limited to the description in this paragraph.

[16] An arguable point. Debate is welcome. When will attention fade? This is my WAG based on work in large systems.

[17] not least Brasilia, Ankara, Budapest, Beijing, Belgrade, London, elsewhere

[18] Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, sad to include the Administration in Washington among authoritarians by behavior, underway at the time of this article. See Freedom House https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states on the erosion of US democratic institutions.

[19] For background on the dynamics of petro-authoritarianism and oil prices, numerous articles at the Journal of Democracy https://www.journalofdemocracy.org and Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com. Both sources may be held up to debate: the journal for its unabashed pro-democracy and human rights stance; and Foreign Affairs for a long-standing pro-US editorial policy and a pro-establishment emphasis. Arabian Gulf capitals, Moscow and Caracas, Lagos rose on rising oil prices. Their fortunes decline with the fortunes of oil, although their futures are not linked in a direct time relationship to oil futures.

[20] Science Technology Engineering and Math

[21] Change agent asset “Murphology” was brought to the Change Leaders by Jerry Ravetz circa 2012.

[22] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-plague-perfectly-captures-the-risk-in-returning-to-normal

[23] https://medium.com/@NickTurpin/street-photography-feel-the-force-339cabd6edbc

[24] a la Theodore Zeldin who has engaged CCC and the Change Leaders over two decades

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