Your Company's Secret Change Agents

I loved this article on change through the good that is already happening inside your group, or for religious people, through "what the Spirit is already doing." This is not a method I always use, but have used in the past, and think is a good method particularly in environments suspicious of experts and 'strong leaders.'

Pascale and Sternin describe the "Positive Deviant" approach to change in their article, "Your Company's Secret Change Agents." Traditional change management involves uncovering root causes, hiring experts or importing best practises, and assigning leaders to champion change. The Positive Deviant approach seeks indigenous sources of change - those who are already doing things in a radically better way. The isolated success strategies of such people are brought into the mainstream. The key is to engage the members of the community that need to change in the process of discovery, making them "evangelists of their own conversion experience."

The authors show how this approach has worked, both in some of the largest and most intractable change problems on the planet, and in corporate settings. The model involves 6 steps: 1) Make the group the guru, 2) Reframe through facts, 3) Make it safe to learn, 4) Make the problem concrete, 5) Leverage social proof, and 6) Confound the immune defence response.

They believe that such internally developed solutions circumvent transplant rejection, since the change agents share the same DNA and the host. The classic KAP - knowledge, attitude, practise approach is turned upside down. This approach seeks to identify positive deviant practises and then change people's attitudes through action, because people are much more likely to "act their way into a new way of thinking that to think their way into a new way of acting."

This requires something of a role reversal for leaders because leaders become followers, teachers become students, and experts become learners.

This is a cheeky method of change, and bears consideration... I hope you enjoy it.

By the way, if you can think of anyone who would enjoy a weekly article on leadership and/or organizational change, please point them to this blog. And while you are here, if you have time, click on a few ads, because I benefit financially each time you do!

Blessings
Bethan

Pascale, R., & Sternin, J. (2005, May). YOUR COMPANY'S Secret CHANGE AGENTS. Harvard Business Review, 83(5), 72-81. Retrieved November 30, 2008, from http://www.nogaps.nl/pdf/changeagents.pdf