John Hamerlinck

Learning from Small Numbers

I am not a big fan of inferential statistics. In the USA, where I live, I believe that the widespread reporting of survey results is the second greatest contributor to the deterioration of democracy (the infusion of obscene amounts of money into the political process being #1). People hear or read that candidate A, or ballot question Y, has a double-digit lead in opinion polls, and little by little they begin to disengage from the process. The inferential statistic is treated like a big data pronouncement of a political inevitability.

There are times, however, when small bits of data representing a full data set, can serve as reminders that you need to check your own assumptions on a periodic basis. Take this website for example. My experience in writing about the concepts and ideas explored here is limited to my perspective as an American. This site’s analytics regarding the country of origin of its visitors, provide a good case for small, but complete sets of numbers.

In 2015, non-U.S. readers compromised 30% of the visitors to this site. So far in 2016, 59% of my readers have been from outside the United States of America. The U.K, Romania, and Brazil, are obviously very different places. They are also three countries with a high representation in my readership. Unless all of these readers are simply interested in analyzing leadership, and change agentry in the U.S., my paying attention to the universality of the strategies that I recommend is probably a good idea.

I am well aware that leading social change is tied intimately to the realities of local culture, and to place-based historical context. If you are a non-U.S. reader of these pages, please feel welcome to share your realities, along with your wisdom, and your questions, in the comments of this blog.

Change Happens at the Center

We tend to think of change as something that happens at the margins. That’s why people use phrases like “the leading edge,” or “pushing the envelope.” If we are deliberately acting to make social change, however, that change happens at the center. Experienced community organizers know this. It’s why they spend time with people in the middle. Let me illustrate how this works.

Take any issue; polarizing or mundane. We are led to believe that there are two sides: for and against; us and them; red state blue state; you get the picture. Painting this less complex picture is easier for both zealous advocates, and lazy reporters. It makes for good drama. When it comes to change, you will rarely get the people deeply rooted in the “them” side to flip 180 degrees to the “us” side (or vice-versa).

We know for a fact that this is not a complete picture. There are many people who are, in fact, neutral. They may simply be unaware of an issue. They may be conflicted and ambivalent, or they could just be apathetic.

There are also individuals who are passive in their support for us, and people who passively support them. The people in this category fall in a continuum of varying levels of commitment as well.

The key to creating the change that you want to happen, is to spend less time where there is little return on the investment of your time — hurling verbal bombs at the folks who will never change their minds. What you want to focus on is moving people over just one position on the chart, beginning with the people who passively support your cause. The smallest of things can move pieces of the middle.

People’s personal experience guides their opinions. Their experience also defines their self-interest. If you understand this , and organize around this principle, eventually, a tipping point of sorts makes the movement toward change unstoppable.

A Few Very Important Things To Remember About Leadership And Change

If you take away nothing else from this blog; I hope that you will at least remember these ideas.

If you are passionate about changing something in the world, or in your community, or in your neighborhood, and you know even one other person who shares your vision, you can lead efforts to make that change a reality.

Forget about titles (or lack thereof). Leadership is not a designation. In fact, it is not even positional most of the time. The world is not simply divided into leaders and followers. Everyone leads and follows on a daily basis.

Every day throughout the history of the world, people have locked arms with like-minded folks with some sort of plan to improve the quality of life where they live. They have learned from their mistakes, as well as from their successes. They have been temporarily derailed by disagreements, but did not let those differences distract them from their common desire to right the wrongs that they had witnessed.

If you can imagine things being different, then you can choose to act to make that transformation a reality. Choosing to act is always the first step toward leadership, and the first step toward change.

Small Accomplishments Are Important

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”
– Helen Keller

You want to change the world. Your goal is transformative change around important, complex social problems like economic inequality, or human rights. Your line in the sand can seem as big as the Grand Canyon. During those times when things seem to be moving slowly, if at all, it is important to appreciate and celebrate your little victories.

Think back to where you started. Identify small, but important events. Don’t do it for the sake of nostalgia. Use the opportunity to reflect not only on what worked, but why it worked. Can you create that kind of energy and excitement again? It’s like finding out in chapter 27 of a mystery that a throwaway line in chapter 2 turned out to be a critical clue; and then correctly solving the mystery before the author’s reveal.

Seemingly innocuous or unimportant accomplishments add up in ways that we cannot always know. Celebrating small wins keeps us motivated. It reminds us that we are making progress toward a goal. Also, as I have mentioned many times before, it is during those small battles that collaborators build those immeasurable things like trust and passion.

You are in this pursuit for the long haul. Doing and recognizing the everyday efforts of people is important. Member of Congress and civil rights leader John Lewis put it this way:

“I am prepared to take the long, hard road, knowing it may not happen today or tomorrow, but ultimately, eventually, it will happen. That’s what faith is all about. That’s the definition of commitment – patience and persistence. People who are like fireworks, popping off right and left with lots of sound and sizzle, can capture a crowd, capture a lot of attention for a time, but I always have to ask, where will they be in the end? Some battles are long and hard, and you have to have staying power. Firecrackers go off in a flash, then leave nothing but ashes. I prefer a pilot light – the flame is nothing flashy, but once it is lit, it doesn’t go out. It burns steadily, and it burns forever.” (source)

As a leader, you aren’t always required to provide the fireworks. Your greatest contribution just may be making sure that all the pilot lights remain lit.

(This is a companion piece to an earlier post, Learning and Leadership: the Importance of Reflection)

Disagreements Among Friends

“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

Just because you have the same goals, doesn’t mean that you will agree with like-minded people about everything. People with shared values are going to disagree from time to time. These conflicts are not often about “deal breaker” issues. They are frequently based on cultural differences.

We have different communication styles. Some groups have different ways that people come to know things, or different attitudes towards disclosure. Not everyone prefers the same decision-making processes. Leaders have to be aware of these differences, and help figure out a way to choose effective strategies even if they differ from their own preferences.

Obviously, we can’t know all things about all cultures. There are no universal intercultural problem-solving methods. There are things, however, that are pretty universal:

People from all backgrounds want to be listened to and understood.
In every culture people respond to respect and disrespect.

Getting to a state where this becomes easier requires active listening, honesty and honest sharing. This may mean postponing an action or project until compromises have been negotiated.

Delays can be frustrating, but ultimately, the trust that has developed by taking the time to iron out disagreements now, will pay big dividends in the future.

All of this is easy if you keep a sense of humor. It’s amazing how a little self-deprecating humor can ease tensions when people are anxious over disagreements.

You Don’t Need a Leadership Course in Order to Lead

“Real leadership comes from the quiet nudging of an inner voice. It comes from realizing that the time has come to move beyond waiting to doing”
– Madeleine Albright

To get things done in this world you don’t need a credential, or a badge that says “leader.” If the world’s greatest writer wrote a book illustrated by the world’s greatest artist titled, How to Ride a Bicycle, it would be a poor substitute for sitting on a bike, finding your center of balance, and pushing on the pedals. We learn by doing. Leadership is no different.

Every time that you: A) imagine something being different, or being better than it is; B) decide to do something about it, either alone or with others; and C) act to make that change happen – YOU ARE DEMONSTRATING LEADERSHIP.

Leadership doesn’t require great scale. It doesn’t have to be obvious to everyone. Leadership is collaborative or distributed more often than it is positional. It doesn’t need to be heroic; it just needs to effectively move you toward a goal. You lead anytime you do things like:

have the courage to challenge someone’s racist or sexist joke;
accept responsibility for (and learn from) your failures;
do what is right, rather than what is easy (to paraphrase Dumbledore);
see the gifts and talents of others, and acknowledge them; or
listen with the goal of understanding – even when someone’s views or values conflict with your own.

Anyone who has a vision for something different and the desire to make that change happen can be a leader.

Quit Putting People in Boxes

“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.”
– Igor Stravinsky

Even though many of the pieces on this site feature tables that compare and contrast ideas or traits while putting them in boxes, I do not, in principle, believe in the practice of categorizing people by putting them in boxes. I know that assigning qualities or attributes to individuals based on things like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is popular with some organizations, but I don’t believe that it is important at all when organizing for change.

I’m not the only one out there who questions the value of such practices. In an article in Psychology Today, titled “Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won’t Die,” Dr. Adam Grant, author of the bestselling book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, writes:

“. . . in the MBTI, thinking and feeling are opposite poles of a continuum. In reality, they’re independent: we have three decades of evidence that if you like ideas and data, you can also like people and emotions. (In fact, more often than not, they go hand in hand: research shows that people with stronger thinking and reasoning skills are also better at recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions.)”

For a fairly concise academic article that looks at the scientific validity of MBTI, see “Measuring the MBTI… And Coming Up Short” by David J. Pittenger. One of the conclusions Pittenger comes to is:

“The MBTI reminds us of the obvious truth that all people are not alike, but then claims that every person can be fit neatly into one of 16 boxes. I believe that MBTI attempts to force the complexities of human personality into an artificial and limiting classification scheme. The focus on the “typing” of people reduces the attention paid to the unique qualities and potential of each individual.”

What does all of this have to do with leadership? Leaders who believe that they can create an effective team by making sure that they have people of every profile “type” are setting themselves up for missed opportunities resulting from the failure to uncover the hidden assets in the people with whom they are collaborating. Thinking that people fit some imaginary profile might lead to limiting expectations.

Preconceived notions of what people can do, and how they can grow and develop will keep things from happening, not make them happen. It is the systematic marginalization of people. This is the opposite of what a leader should do. Leaders see people at the sidelines, and invite them in as full participants in an endeavor.

Asset Mapping: a Better Option

Test-determined categorization should not be confused with asset mapping. Asset mapping is not categorizing and labeling people by “type.” Asset mapping looks at people who may have been told that they have limited value based on their type, and finds the value in their unique contradictions, their failure to fit molds, their creativity, and the exceptional perspectives that they bring to the table.

Since mobilizing people around asset mapping is based on discovery, social capital, and relationship development, it flourishes in a culture of blurred lines. It takes people out of boxes and explores the energy and creativity that emerges from not having to be the type of person you were artificially designated to be.

For more on asset-based approaches and asset mapping see the posts, Asset-Focused Leadership, and Asset-Focused Leadership Part II: the Importance of Associations.

Numerous Posts Updated

I have recently added new content to a number of posts including the following:

Please don’t hesitate to share your ideas, additions, general comments, or suggestions for future topics. Use the comments section or contact me directly.

Getting Beyond Either/Or

(This post is adapted from a piece I recently published at Medium.com.)

“The reality today is that we are all interdependent and have to co-exist on this small planet. Therefore, the only sensible and intelligent way of resolving differences and clashes of interests, whether between individuals or nations, is through dialogue.”
– The Dalai Lama

We too frequently fall into the trap of dividing the world into simplistic, either/or categories. Things are either good or bad. Ideas are either liberal or conservative. Forget about purple; states are either red or blue, right?

Don’t imagine that the same person could be simultaneously progressive, liberal or conservative depending on the particular concern under consideration. Don’t imagine that a deeper analysis of an issue might expose degrees of political belief, or of good and bad. A world of absolutes is just so much easier – so much more convenient.

Letting everyone know that you have some sort of ideologically pure path to get to the mythical outcome, seems more important than understanding what that outcome might actually mean. As Albert Einstein put it, “Perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age.”

What makes people interesting, are their contradictions. We all know people who are both introverts and extroverts, or both humble and egotistical. There is a long list of personal traits that bear out the fact that we live along multiple continuums of belief and behavior. Why then can we not seem to recognize this reality when it comes to questions around ideology and values?

The roots of either/or perspectives might lie in zero-sum thinking, meaning that you believe that one side wins only if the other side loses. It is a narrow framework that despises constructive dialogue, and compromise.

This distorted winner-take-all perspective leads to fear-driven decisions. It breeds fear, xenophobia, racism, and a boatload of other paranoia. Emotion and rumor trump logic and evidence. People build walls and draw lines in the sand.

We can get past the either/or trap by concentrating just a little effort on our communication skills. Consider the shift from adversarial, to dialogic communication outlined in the table below.

Based on a table in:
Escobar, Oliver. The dialogic turn: dialogue for deliberation. In_Spire Journal of Law, Politics and Societies (Vol. 4, No. 2 – 2009)

If we hope to effectively address the multitude of problems facing our world, it is clear that we are going to need less “either/or” and more “both/and.” As Wendell Berry said, “If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.” It is, however, possible. Here are a few simple tips to get started:

Find a safe space for private, one-on-one conversations with people whose positions on issues differ from your own.
Do not enter these conversations as if they are contests.
Listen carefully and avoid constructing your own argument in your head while they are talking.
Ask clarifying questions.
Don’t take disagreements personally.
Focus on sharing ideas and creating new ones informed by your common, as well as your competing values.
Be open to changing your mind.

A Few Words About Vision

“When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
–Audre Lorde

There seems to be a frightening lack of vision in the world. People want things to be different, but they are unable, or more likely, unwilling to imagine what that different world looks like. Or maybe, they have a good understanding of their own values, and have developed a personal vision, and are simply not sharing it with other like-minded people. Nothing will ever change without a shared vision of how things could be.

Image: Minnesota Design Team

The image above is an important concept for leaders to understand and appreciate. If you look at the number of arrows in each of the three sections, you will notice that they decrease as you move from “no vision” to “shared vision.” Movements and campaigns do not start out on a large scale. A shared vision is the result of people in small groups sharing their values with others. It is through the understanding of their common values that people begin to create a shared vision.

Your vision should be:

reflective of shared values;
explained in the least complex way possible;
realistically achievable;
and it should motivate people to act, moving them to look beyond their limitations.

A vision isn’t just a dream. It’s a dream and a plan. When stakeholders share similar values, they can begin to develop a shared vision by asking these three questions:

What is?
What could be?
What events could affect that change?

Simply put, shared values lead to a shared vision, which leads to shared ownership of creating change, and ultimately shared benefits for all stakeholders.

(For more on values see, Narrowing The Gap Between Our Ideal And Our Real Values)

When You’re Ready To Move From Talk To Action

“The world is changed by your example, not your opinion.”
– Paulo Coelho

Mahatma Gandhi once said that “action expresses priorities.” We can be outraged and upset about something, but unless we choose to act to change it, we are telling the rest of the world that it isn’t really that important after all. Advocacy and educating people about issues is important. It gets peoples’ attention, and may rock some boats, but advocacy alone is not enough. You need to organize.

If you have a group of people who all agree that “A” is unacceptable, and that what they really want is “Z,” you have a common vision, but there are countless paths and countless acts between that vision and realizing change. You need to organize.

Organizing can be complex. It is so dependent upon personal relationships and personal politics, that we sometimes forget about some of the other factors that are crucial in creating change.

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”
– Confucius

The popular and widely-used organizing tool below is from a chapter titled “A Framework for Thinking About Systems Change” by Timothy P. Knoster, Richard A. Villa, and Jacqueline S. Thousand, in the book, Restructuring for Caring and Effective Education: Piecing the Puzzle Together . It was adapted from the work of Delores Ambrose. The matrix serves both as prescription and as a diagnostic tool when groups seeking change meet challenges in their pursuit.

Having all the pieces doesn’t mean that your work is done, that you automatically go from A to Z. They get you from A to B (then celebrate briefly, and reflect on what you learned), and then from B to C (celebrate and reflect), and so on, until you reach your long-term goal.

This chart also reinforces the importance of asset-mapping. That’s how you know if you have the required skills or resources to carry out your plans. Passionate, caring, and motivated people still need the missing pieces. Leaders find those pieces.

More on the importance of organizing to come.

The Leaders and Followers Myth

“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
– Ralph Nader

The leadership industry overstates the importance of leaders. They have to; that’s where the money is. The stubborn persistence of positional leadership exists to a great degree, to perpetuate a dualistic notion that some people are better, or more worthy than others. Those with the “leader” moniker assume entitlement. In this model, leaders exist on some higher plane, and followers are considered subordinates. This is all part of a facade that equilibrium and stability are present, and that is supposed to be comforting, I guess.

The world is not simply made up of leaders and followers. Attributes generally attributed to leaders, such as critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and diplomacy, are not solely leadership traits. They are the things that make us human — all of us, “leaders” and “followers.” In most human endeavors, work, commitment, and inspiration by followers dwarfs the contributions of leaders.

When you see evidence that positive change has occurred anywhere in the world, it is usually the result of people who might usually be identified as followers, locking arms with other passionate people, and collaboratively making that change happen. You can’t put “followers” in a box.

In a 2007 article in the Harvard Business Review, Barbara Kellerman suggested a new typology for looking at followers. She categorizes followers based to a certain degree, on how they act in ways that demonstrate “leadership” abilities. Kellerman’s followers are divided into five groups: isolates, bystanders, participants, activists, and diehards. When you get beyond the isolates and the bystanders, you find people who are engaged to varying degrees, in activities that look a lot like what I think of as leadership. These people still strongly support their leaders, but at the same time they aren’t sitting around waiting for marching orders to come down from the next level on an org chart.

Jeffrey Nielsen’s 2004 book, The Myth of Leadership, says that the traditional notion of leaders and followers creates a rank-based culture, with the following assumptions:

According to Nielsen, the implications of the peer principle require that the following values be recognized, respected, and implemented:

Openness with information-as opposed to the secrecy allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.
Transparency in the decision-making process, which requires greater participation of all affected parties-as opposed to the top-down and behind closed door decision-making allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.
Cooperation and sharing of management roles and responsibilities, which requires the exercise of power-in-common-as opposed to the command and control nature of the exercise of power-over allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.

Commitment to peer deliberation as the legitimate exercise of authority-as opposed to the rank-based exercise of coercive, manipulative, or even persuasive authority allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.

“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”
– Peter Drucker

The myth of leaders versus followers is closely related to the concepts we examined in, Leaders Versus Managers. The idea of maintaining strict control by keeping those around you on a “short leash” works well for cult leaders and dictators, but not for grassroots social change organizing.

The idea of not equating leadership and control is also a primary difference between leading for change, and leading an organization, be it a business, an NGO, or anything else set up to be an institution. You don’t want people to follow you; you want them to follow a common vision for a better future.