Rules of Thumb for Change Agents

I received the following comment to this blog entry:

"It is illegal to post, distort and misrepresent Herbert Shepard's copyrighted Rules of Thumb for Change Agents. This is my first warning to urge you to respect Herb's intellectual property as required by U.S., Australian and international laws. A. MartinPartner of the late Herbert Shepard"

I am afraid that prior to this post I was unaware of the existence of Mr Shephard or his work. All I had access to were words under the header "Rules of Thumb For Change Agents" in an A4 set of copied papers obtained some year ago at no doubt some seminar or talk.

I found the material absorbing, challenging and altogether useful.

So I am happy to acknowledge Mr Herbert Shepard's copyrighted "Rules of Thumb for Change Agents" even though I am ashamed to admit I have no idea wher it was published or whether the document I was given contains his materials or not. I assume that it does because of the note received.

I sincerely apologise for this oversight in my blog entry and if A Martin could please advise the relevant source document's location I would be delighted to publish the source as a set of footnotes or in any other fashion which the copyright requires . Equally I would be happy to delete or amend this entire blog entry if any of my coments in any way misuses any content from his documentation.

The paper from which I obtained the headings and any other information used were part of a training course long ago where the author and ownership were not mentioned.

So henceforth let it be known that no disrespect for the late Herbert Shepard is or was intended and I am delighted to ba able to acknowledge both his work and his intellectual property and hope that my use of material through reference to the work will enable more people to be able to find and refer to any other material written by this same author.

With apologies PG

The following are not meant to be 'directions' for change agents. They are merely reflections on my past endeavours and commentary on what worked for me. If a reader finds this useful that's nice. If a reader uses the information to do it differently to suit their own personality and so avoid things that do not work for them - so much the better.

Rule 1: Stay Alive

Under no circumstances should you sacrifice yourself to a cause that you do not want to be your last!

This is of course not to suggest that you should not take a stand when this is required. The
risk should however be carefully evaluated and placed in context.

The best advice that I ever received was from a community development professor of mine (Bob Myers) in the early 1970s. When I came to him with one of the conundrums in which I found myself in his response was, at the time, very surprising. He said to me, "Peter go away and consider the following question: what is the absolute worst possible thing that can happen to you personally if you take the action you have proposed? When you have your answers, and there will be answers that are graduated from the very worst to something less traumatic, bring me the list and we will talk again." So being the obedient student I was at the time, I went off and did what I was told. I developed scenario after scenario in my mind, put it down on paper and then, with a shudder, I obtained another appointment and went back with my list. This time, Bob was even more surprising. He read the list, asked questions to ascertain that I had thought through the whole action set and then said, "Now go away again and this time, make a decision about whether or not you are prepared to accept the risk (in other words the consequences and the likelihood of occurrence - the two dimensions on which risk is measured and evaluated) which you have highlighted. Then come back and talk to me again."

Once again - off I went and eventually decided that I was prepared to accept the risks. When Bob and I met again he asked about what factors I had placed in the decision making mix and how I had evaluated things like the likelihood of occurrence and so on. When he was satisfied that I had thought things through - at least to my satisfaction, he then said, "Now that you are prepared to accept the risk, what do you propose to do to minimise the likelihood of its occurrence and/or what strategies do you have in place to deal with the consequences if they do happen?

I had to admit I was clueless at the time and so once again he sent me off to create what he defined as a 'risk management plan" I needed to find resources in the literature to help me understand what the heck he was talking about, but when I read about it the message was really clear - it was nothing less than a project plan with time frames, milestones, resource allocations etc.

Staying alive simply means:

• staying in touch with your purpose;
• using the skills, emotions, labels, positions, to your advantage rather than being used
  by them;
• not being trapped in other people's games;
• self actualisation (or turning yourself on or off rather than reacting to situations;
• choosing to view consequences and not just the motivating impulse to do something;
• not "going with the flow", but swimming across the current to get to your destination;
• living in multiple worlds at the same time, without being swallowed up by any;
• seeing dilemmas as opportunities for creativity and not as threats;
• greeting absurdity with laughter while trying to unscramble it;
• capturing the moment with a view to the future;
• seeing the environment or the 'big picture' through the eyes of your purpose.

For those living in Australia there is documentation from Standards Australia on the Risk Management Standards AS 4390 in which there is a complete blueprint for best practice in this field. I commend it to those who really want to become professional change agents, as it will serve them well.

Rule 2 - Start where the system is.

Social Workers have always practiced their craft in case work using a technique called - "Get to where your client is at." and of course another process called "Partialise the problem."

What is needed in the community development framework is to extend and extrapolate these case work techniques into the new milieu.

In short one should begin by diagnosing the system. Unfortunately systems do not like being 'diagnosed'. That said, starting where the client is at can be called an Empathy Rule.

To communicate effectively, the change agent needs to understand how the client sees him/herself, the situation and the culture of the system in which the client operates (i.e. the context or the environment). Similarly the client has a right to know all about how the change agent operates, sees him/herself and the framework within which the work is to be carried out.The only caution in using this rule is to continually reality test.

Analysis can be wrong and observations along the way need to be fed into a process called formative evaluation within which the worker continually updates impressions and assessments and re-adjusts the work and/or goals depending on the evaluation results. This provides a level of flexibility that facilitates the work and avoids or at least lessens the chances of unpleasant surprises.

Rule 3 - Don't build hills as you go

When you have chosen a direction to go in under no circumstances should you actively or inadvertently build resistance to what you are trying to do. One of the most obvious examples to avoid or mitigate is where the work involves getting support from one group and seriously alienating another group which is both influential or powerful.

Rule 4 - Don't argue when you can't win

This rule seems to be the 'bleeding obvious', but many people simply seem incapable of learning it. In the event that there is an argument or a point of view which is rejected by the people who have hired you - arguing that you are right and they are wrong will achieve nothing beyond the end of the work. A more useful technique is to try and uncover the reasons for the rejection of what you consider to be a common sense approach to something. Again Rule 2 comes into play here. Understanding the views perceptions etc of the client and/or other stakeholders is a wonderful way of testing and re-testing assumptions.

Rule 5 - Innovation requires a good idea, initiative and a few friends

Change agents by definition have to be pretty autonomous, self motivating and self actualising. This does NOT mean working alone. It means developing and maintaining a network of people that are part and parcel of the holistic process. Some people are resources of information, some are resources of skills, some are support structures, some are mirrors and devils advocate, some are people with ideas that are radically different from yours who enable a new paradigm to be seen. Without them the change agent is less powerful and less effective. Networking is an essential ingredient to getting things done.

What is even more useful is to get your network to meet and get to know each other and then 'leverage' the resulting outcomes from their interactions. In part this simply leverages the Hawthorne Effect.

Rule 6 - Look across silos

Most people work within operational and system based silos. Activities in the community are also usually compartmentalised - this is simply because people are given roles, duties, responsibilities, delegations (where appropriate) and so on. A change agent needs to look across silos and see the field rather than a single blade of grass.Perhaps a more telling example is to look at something as simply as acne. Treating the symptoms does nothing to really deal with the underlying causes. In the case of teenagers they are usually fortunate and grow out of the problem. Organisations, and communities rarely if ever grow out of the root causes that express themselves in the perceived problems. A change agent to be effective looks across silos and operational environments and tries to find inter-connectivities, confluences of interest, things in common etc so that the holistic picture which emerges from such a process is an enabler for potential solutions that would otherwise remain invisible.

Rule 7 - Paradigm shifting

One of the most interesting experiences which is taught by De Bono is paradigm shifting. It is a technique for seeing what is 'invisible' yet in plain sight. Social workers actually have several techniques which are useful in this context. One of them is called 're-framing'. It is where a particular direction of work is proving to be unsuccessful and so the social worker tries to get back to the beginning of the case and/or diagnosis and by deliberately blocking what is already known tries to find a different explanation of what is going on.

A more useful technique however is scenario planning. When contemplating an intervention I usually start by exploring different ways of looking at the presenting problem. It's a little like trying to figure out the combinations and permutations of a Rubik's Cube. At first the technique is really difficult to do. With practice it gets a little easier. What I try and do is to create a framework within which all of the known information fits and then come up with a solution. I record both the framework within which I have found the solution and the solution itself. Then I put this in a safe place and pretend that I have found nothing and start from scratch. I keep doing this until I run out of ideas, frameworks from within which I can analyse the problem and hence solutions. Then I bring all of the frameworks and the solutions to the table and explore them through reality testing, SWOT analysis and other techniques available for this kind of work and draw up a list of the pros and cons of the solutions and of their consequences. Then, having ascertained my preferred option and now being in possession of information which I can share with my client I seek to engage the client to review my 'facts' the analyses I have undertaken and look at the potential solutions with all of their risks clearly identified. Since the client is the person who is ultimately 'responsible' for the selection of the course of action to be taken the ownership is clear and my role as a change agent is clarified yet again. All people at one time or another get caught up in self destructive loops. Within the family counselling medium of social work the best example of this is in the Milan Family Therapy model. I will not bore the reader with a glib overview of this technique and process. Suffice it to say that it is systems based and so applicable to almost any type of human interaction types in virtually any setting. It contains notions like that of 'stuckness' where people who are actors in their own dramas find themselves repeating a solution to a problem which is simply not working and then blaming themselves for the negative outcomes on the grounds that it is their own ineffectiveness that results in the negative outcome. In short the solution is right but the individual applying it is wrong or doing it the wrong way. This analysis almost always creates an ineffective and pathologically dangerous situation which can be assisted with re-framing and paradigm shifts. Since we all live in communities within which these types of behaviour are endemic it is always useful to have a set of techniques for discovering and dealing with what one finds.

Rule 8 - Keep an optimistic bias

In the 1970s there was a popular bumper sticker along the lines of "S*^T happens". When you are a change agent this 'rule of thumb' seems inevitable. Murphy's Law, will be a companion most of the time. People stereotype each other, there are outlooks based on culture, religion, political perspective, what our parents and peers taught us, our own limited life experiences and so on. Each of these frameworks represent both a lens through which we view the world and a set of blinkers that only allow us to see what is out there through our biases. My reaction to the adversities which befall me and my projects and practice are based on the lessons learned by others over the eons, - things like "Laughter is the best medicine" Patch Williams knows what he is doing when he clowns around the hospitals of the USA. In short by laughing at adversity I manage to keep a my perspective and see the funny side of almost any disaster. This rule does not advocate ignoring the negatives and destructive forces. It's positive spin is for the change agent to look for and find the constructive forces which are often masked and suppressed in a problem oriented and envious culture. People have as great an innate capacity for joy as they do for resentment. Resentment causes them to overlook opportunities. Keeping an optimistic bias and sharing it is one of the best tools a change agent can have.