"Radical Change Accidentally" - Can Small Changes Lead to Big Transformations?
When I was finishing grad school, I came across a fascinating article that described how a dying church gradually underwent radical change through a series of seemingly small shifts. The church went from “a silk-stocking church with a decidedly homogeneous racial makeup to a diverse congregation that gained media attention as a haven and advocate for the city’s ‘marginalized’…” (1)
The very short version of this story goes like this.
A city center church (with a racist history) was slowly dying. Despite a solid endowment, the members were older and membership was decreasing. In time the church would have simply died. Several leaders came and went, finally a younger couple took the leadership. They opened the doors that were locked during the week to keep out the homeless in the neighborhood. Then a small group was inspired to start hosting meals for the homeless in the community on Sundays. These seemingly ordinary shifts were followed by others, some less noticeable, some that engendered conflict in the congregation, until the church emerged radically transformed in both the mission and the membership. To transform an organization from a staid, conservative racist past to a diverse, thriving mission-based organization in a few years time is remarkable. Anyone who has attempted to create organizational change (or tried to change patterns within your family!) knows what I mean.
This article always stuck with me. There is a common saying, “one thing led to another, and then before we knew it…” something big has changed. One of the common cognitive errors we humans make is that we project the present onto the future. It’s hard for us to imagine beyond what we know. Modern history is rife with disruptive inventions like the automobile that overturned entire ways of life. Currently the threat is that Artificial Intelligence will be one of those world-turning inventions. (So far, it's just me writing these articles, not a computer based AI.)
My takeaways from this article (cited at the end if you want to read it) are:
1. Don’t underestimate small changes. Sometimes a small change is all you can imagine or have the capacity to do. Imagine you are walking on the beach, perhaps along the edge of the water. Taking one step oriented more towards the land, if the next step is in that same direction, will eventually take you away from the beach and to the land.
2. It’s hard to see radical change when you are in the middle of it. I have some friends who moved back home, not realizing the complexity of their once-familiar-but-now-changed environment would lead them to move again to a completely different (and much nicer) locale than they would have ever imagined before they moved home.
3. Times of instability, such as a church in decline, contain the energy for new possibilities. We often are uncomfortable with decline and failure since those are times of instability. However, hidden in that instability is the energy (and often motivation) needed for something new to emerge.
Taken together, these understandings can make it a bit easier to bear the “messy middle” of change when the way back is lost and the way forward may not be so clear.
Innovation and creativity often emerge not from predictable planned changes but out of uncomfortable and unstable moments in time. I’ve spent over two decades studying and exploring the possibilities of constellation work. It is especially suited to provide insight into the “messy middles” of life, the times when the way forward isn’t clear and we are trying to listen to the deeper currents of life’s river so that we may not drown in the white water of life.
In the upcoming Master Class, I will share some of the key elements of constellation work that are suited to many different applications, from a business attempting to chart a course out of financial trouble to a small family owned business looking for new possibilities for their offerings, and many more complex situations. I hope you will join me. I will not be teaching this course in person again.
(1) Plowman, Baker, Beck, Kulkarni, Solansky, and Travis. Radical Change Accidentally: The Emergence and Amplification of Small Change. Academy of Management Journal. June 2007.
A few quotes from this article:
"Leaders can push organizations to the edge of chaos (Regine & Lewin, 2000) or create regions of complexity (Maguire & McKelvey, 1999) by disrupting existing patterns and ways of doing things."
"Organizational identity refers to how members of any organization perceive and understand who they are and what they stand for (Hatch & Schultz, 2000)."
"Because organizations are made up of people with different goals, needs, and interests, organization members struggle for the values they hold dear (Perrow, 1986), which results in conflict."
