Turn on your light - an excerpt (by Ben Okri)

The new era is already here:
Here the new time begins anew.
The new era happens every day,
Every day is a new world,
A new calendar.
All great moments, all great eras,
Are just every moment
And every day writ large.
Thousands of years of loving, failing, killing,
Creating, surprising, oppressing,
And thinking ought now to start
To bear fruit, to deliver their rich harvest.  

Will you be at the harvest,
Among the gatherers of new fruits?
Then you must begin today to remake
Your mental and spiritual world,
And join the warriors and celebrants
Of freedom, realisers of great dreams.  

You can’t remake the world
Without remaking yourself.
Each new era begins within.
It is an inward event,
With unsuspected possibilities
For inner liberation.
We could use it to turn on
Our inward lights.
We could use it to use even the dark
And negative things positively.
We could use the new era
To clean our eyes,
To see the world differently,
To see ourselves more clearly.
Only free people can make a free world.
Infect the world with your light.
Help fulfill the golden prophecies.
Press forward the human genius.
Our future is greater than our past.  

© Ben Okri, 1999.
Found in Ben Okri, Mental Fight, Phoenix House: London, 1999  

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I got a bit above my station this week.  Reading a blog post called “Five Tips for Leading Change” by the excellent Harvard Business SchoolProfessor, Elizabeth Moss Kanter, I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own.

You can read Elizabeth’s inital post here and my comments below.

Dear Rosabeth.

Thank you for an interesting post – relevant for both organisational and social change efforts. Resonant of much from “Nudge” (Thaler& Sunstein), “Tipping Point” (Gladwell) and the lovely ‘Persuasion’ chapter in Prof R Wiseman’s excellent “59 Seconds”.

While recognising the length of the article has somewhat curtailed what can be covered I do think there are a range of points in addition to these five that must be considered some of which commentators above have picked up on.

Motivation:

Strong messaging and narrative are important of course but equally if not more important are how those messages are delivered both in terms of appropriate channels and also who is delivering – Gladwell’s Tipping Point teaches us that certain individuals and groups can have a disproportionately effective influence in spreading messages/encouraging the adoption of new behaviours. This is relevant also in any consideration of a “coalition” particularly when identifying early adopters/key influence-rs who can provide early momentum and authenticity (the latter being particularly vital)

One of the challenges of large scale change programs is the risk of the “bystander effect” and so a consideration of how to personalise/localise messages/calls to action is fundamental to initiate desired behaviour. Increased sophistication in direct marketing communication technologies (e.g. PURLs) – used in the private sector increasingly – should be more widely adopted to personalise social “change campaigns”. As Keller suggests in his wonderful, yet simple, ARCS model, both Attention and Relevance are key drivers of human motivation when it comes to learning/adopting new behaviours. In turn, personalising/localising mass change campaigns can assure audience attention and relevance.

Linked to motivation must be basic human evolutionary considerations of reward/recognition and or censure/denial. We – as individuals and groups – still largely act in our own interest or the interests of those we most closely associate ourselves with. The notion of Schein’s “survival anxiety” as a potential driver in social/corporate change programs is, I believe a fascinating one. Either we must reduce the level of anxiety associated with change to the extent that it is easily embraced or we must drive survival anxiety up to the extent that it subsumes the anxiety associated with the change itself. Obviously the former approach is desirable but it also requires more time and sophistication – not something often possible in many programs for change.

Capability:

Your point re “action nudges” is vital and good to see this recognised – timely reinforcement/ encouragement of desired behaviours is key. But we must also be clear what it is we want people to do precisely and then provide them with the opportunities/skills/direction/support/tools for them to do so. Change programs – Government or Corporate – must create the necessary “enabling context” for participants to engage and experience early successes in their own personal change experience (however small). This leads to both Confidence and Satisfaction (the final two elements in Keller’s Model) which are both vital to sustain changes in behaviour. This must not be overlooked.

I think looking at this from the individual’s perspective is vital and so in all of this I urge all of us involved in this area to ensure that those communities and individuals we wish to persuade to change in some way must be both motivated and capable of doing so.

Anyway – thanks again for the post on a subject of importance. I hope these brief reflections are useful.

The Harvard Business Review rarely lets me down but today they strayed into the business of “stating  the bloody obvious”:

http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=051010

I mean what next: Joseph Ratzinger outed as a Catholic and a bear found “taking a break” in the woods? I hope they got reduced rates from McKinsey on this one!!

Employee engagement in change programs has long been known to be a critical success factor in any effort at organisational change so no idea why this was worthy of “Daily Stat” release today or any other day.

I’ll forgive them this time…but something inside me died a little…

Someone actually asked me for an opinion the other day. Its been a while since I actually had to think so it took me a little by surprise but nonetheless it was flattering.

What did I make of David Cameron‘s rather unexpected and I have to say, slightly uncharacteristic, attack on Gordon Brown the man/politician than Gordon Brown the leader of the Labour Party, calling him a “secretive, power-hoarding, controlling” character.
I think it simply meant two things.

First, the ideological dividing lines in this election are so fine to be almost entirely non-existent. When some of the bigger bones of contention include how many years we should take to cut the national deficit (and even then itsa debate separated by 2 years!) and the recognition of marriage within the tax system, we can say for certain that there’s been a whole lot of political cross dressing going on down in Whitehall and some-one’s going to get injured in the trample for centre ground.

Twenty years on from “there is no such thing as Society”, the party of Margaret Thatcher are positioning themselves as the party of social inclusion, ready to pull out the band aids and mend our ‘Broken Britain’ while Red Gordon skirts around the edges of financial reform, hankering still, one suspects, for the maintenance of a loosely regulated free market economy (and not just in the City) but across Government service provision. Stange times indeed.

In short, if Labour lose this election it won’t be on the basis of policy or ideology, it will be because voters will simply have grown tired of the personalities implementing these policies. Same game, new faces. Anyone watching Nick Robinson on his recent travelling ballot box series will recognise what I mean….not once have I heard anyone identify an issue of policy which distinguishes Conservative from Labour. But I do hear a lot of…well, “Labour have had their chance, it’s time for a change”. (As an aside – worryingly for Labour that’s a harder tide to turn than one based on a consiered and informed policy debate ironically).

I don’t think this homogenisation of politics is necessarily a bad thing however. The fate of an entire nation or nations(s) and their people shouldn’t be a hostage to a political system of two extremes for the sake of maintaining tradition.  A considered, centralist approach to our problems is a good thing – whether that be in hues of Red or Blue. But it is making for a dull pre-election campaign and so Cameron went personal. He said very little really, but it spoke volumes for our politics today.

Secondly, it told me that in the week he launched such a personal attack on Gordon Brown he probably needed to more be careful about interfering in local Conservative Party business to re-establish the CCHQ status quo i.e. this week’s rather shabby Conservative Party Westminster North candidate row where “DC” intervened quite clearly to ensure that his favored candidate Joanne Cash got what she felt she needed to run (at some cost to others long standing in the party BC (if you’ll indulge me) it is alleged) as the Party’s elected candidate for that seat. 

For if he wants to stand in front of some very bored (and I have to say – incongruously petitioned it seemed) students railing against Gordon Brown’s dark and stifling instinct for control, secrecy and omnipotence and have us believe that his leadership style – allegedly democratic, open, devolved – will in fact be that and as such, represent one of the few distinctions between his party and that of Her Majesty’s Government he will have to do better, for it smacked just a little too much of those characteristics he had just finished railing against – “secretive, power-hoarding, controlling”. Careful David, that was naughty naughty naughty.

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It’s all an overreation, an anti John Terry conspiracy you see – driven by our quaint ‘anglo-saxon’ media apparatus apparently.

The man is beyond cringe-worthy. He’s just offensive and not fit for high office.

How can the man who is supposed to represent the world’s favorite sport get it so badly wrong so often? I don’t care what he personally gets up to and nor do I claim to be any sort of saint but in his role as head of Soccer’s World Governing body how can he suggest that sleeping with your close friend and team-mates ex-wife (mother to their child) while married yourself, then pay for her to abort your love child (all allegedly of course) before (allegedly) paying her not to sell her story to be a cause for applause anywhere at any time?

Leaving aside that the whole thing is a moral cesspit in any walk of life, at a time when soccer is pushing it’s Respect and Fair Play campaigns here in the UK surely the irony of the lack of respect, loyalty, team-ethic and fair play cannot be lost on him.

He’s an insult to those so badly hurt by this tawdry affair, the game itself, his profession and not least to the Latin American people.

Forget the wet fish I asked for in my last Sepp Batter inspired entry. Just bring me a blunt instument and let the real applause rain down.

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