Change frameworks text

Intentional Change: Part One
Change Frameworks: Creating a Path to a Purpose

Introduction
Can we really change systems?

Yes, we can. But it isn’t easy. Wanting to change systems is necessary, but not enough.
Because so much of our own behavior is easy to do, we often plan larger, more complex
systems change as though we were deciding to do something with our body. The free, easy flow
of our behavior, and the almost instant connection between decision and action, biases us to
believe that system change should be just as straightforward, albeit more complicated.

It ain’t.

How should we think about changing systems?

We should think about intentional change of a system out there as more like changing our own
behavior when that behavior is driven. Think AA for alcoholism, or any approach to addiction.
An important system is usefully thought of as a dynamic addiction. A system is addicted to
persistence.1

It will take more than your desire to change a real system.

We Swim in a Sea of Systems
Even though we tend to think of systems as “out there”, we operate inside them:
● Economic Systems
● Religious Systems
● Political Systems
● Family Systems
● Plumbing Systems
● Et cetera

We cannot be “objective” about a system when we are inside it. When we decide to change any
of these systems we are in, each change step we take still leaves the seeds of persistence
inside us, as well as throughout the system. That doesn’t mean we can’t change systems. It
DOES mean, in a very real and concrete way, that we change ourselves as we change a
system.
1
Addiction is an ancient method of persistence. See http://bit.ly/elLa8B.

©2011 MDRC: Non-Commercial free use with attribution DRAFT

It also means that we can be easily fooled by the change that actually occurs into believing that
our job is done.

In Many Ways, We Are Controlled by These Systems
A common problem in policy change efforts comes when the change is accepted and you begin
to try to implement it. At once you run into the entire history of past attempts to create policy in
your area of focus. Barriers arise from directions that you never thought were part of the policy
change you wanted to enact. Examples include:
● Standards
● Protocols
● Laws
● Procedures
● Social Expectations
● Et cetera

While it is helpful to know where roadblocks might occur before attempting system change,
you’ll never foresee all of them if you are trying to actually change something important. Instead,
you have to press on, learning as you go, and using your creativity to overcome these barriers.2

Each day, We try to Enlarge the Space of our Self-Determination
Much of this effort to enlarge the the space of our Self-Determination is unconscious, and it is
limited by our personal Network of Constraints, and our personal fears of various kinds of
Changes.

Unconsciously, we try out expansions of possibility against constraints (think of a student in
elementary school), a little bit at a time, pushing the envelope. Also, by becoming more skilled,
we open up time and space to try new things. These personal, largely unconscious efforts to
expand self-determination might be positive for us or negative. These ordinary expansions of
self-determination seldom take into account the larger contexts in which we live.

Collectively, we have also developed community ways of expanding self-determination:
● Personal Actions, and within a collective, like
● Causes
● Advocacy
● Political Campaigns
● Lawsuits
● Et cetera

2
See http://amzn.to/dYGdkC for a discussion of how Internet protocols control information.


In the same sense that our personal unconscious, in trying to expand self-determination may
provoke changes in constraints, so our collective efforts will also produce changes in
constraints. 3

Can We Do Better?
Can we create :
● Broader Scope in our efforts to Change? Our Scope of Change often determines where
unintended consequences will arise, just outside the scope of our Change horizon.
● Deeper Impact in our change actions? Instead of pursuing superficial changes in
appearance, we can alter the infrastructure of our target system, and make our change
more permanent, and more effective.
● A More Refined Focus in our change direction? With a better understanding of the target
system, we can make better use of scarce resources to affect the most important levers
in the system more carefully.
● More Effective Collaboration among our change allies? Instead of pursuing the least
common denominator of our change, we can truly integrate and align our efforts to
dominate the surroundings of the system with a single strategy.
● Et cetera?

We CAN Do Better at Change, if WE Change:
● Our View of Reality: We need a new understanding of the role of belief in our work.
Belief is only secondarily about accuracy. It is primarily about building and maintaining a
community over time.
● Our Understanding of Our Personal Neuropsychology: New information is surfacing daily
about how our central nervous systems work, giving us both strengths and weaknesses.
We need to respect both as we build our change efforts both in ourselves, and in the
targets of our change. For example, intention is a neuropsychological function that has
specific effects on our personal brains.
● Our Understanding of Strategy and Tactics: We tend to be stronger in tactics and
weaker in strategy, seeing successful tactics as a measure of our success. Then we are
disappointed when, in the long run, our successes are undermined and distorted.
● The Way We Organize for Change: We try to build organizations that focus on repeating
successful techniques of change, without understanding that effective change efforts
require constant innovation. We must organize for innovation as our primary outcome,
and that requires very different organizations from the ones we currently create, and
which we understand as “effective”.
● The Way We Plan for Change: Our Change Planning tends to rigid. Planning is only
useful for setting expectations that will be violated once we try to implement the plan.
Planning makes us pay attention to the inevitable unpredictability of real world change.
● How We Understand Systems: We tend to think of systems as objects with an
environment. In fact, we are each a system with an environment, as are all people. Our
efforts to produce intentional change
3
See http://amzn.to/fCw5GJ for day day in, day out, reduction of personal constraint.


● Et cetera

Whew!!

Well-You don’t have to do all of these things at once to be successful. Most of these are
covered in later parts of this training.

Overview of the Change Frameworks
1. The Loosely Coupled, Unknown System: If you shake the System, the big pieces will
come to the top.
2. Story-telling: Communicative Resonance.
3. Subversion: “Stability is Frozen Struggle.” -R. Unger
4. OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
5. Coevolution: The Red Queen.
6. Nucleation: Let Many Flowers Bloom.
7. The GW Continuum: From All Out War to Community.
8. Disruptive Innovation: Replacing Whole Systems.
9. The Forever Fountain: The Generative Ecology:

These are not mutually exclusive frameworks. You can mix and match them according to your
target, your experience, the skills in your change allies, the political environment, or any other
factor you believe to be relevant.

The Loosely Coupled, Unknown System
If you shake the system, the big pieces will come to the top.

You can see this principle in action if you eat cereal that has big and small pieces in it. By the
time you are at the bottom of the box, all the big stuff is gone and only the cereal dust is left. If
you want to keep the big pieces mixed, you have to have a strategy for turning the box upside
down periodically.

Tightly coupled systems (think hand grenade) are notoriously difficult to study when in action.
On the other hand, there will be few, if any, systems that you don’t already know something
about.

This framework is useful for learning about parts of target systems that you don’t understand.

Steps:
1. Poke the system. Try to make the system respond to your action.
2. Does the System Respond or Not?
3. Map the Responses and Non-Responses. Note the parts of the system that respond.
See if there are connections between the different parts that respond.


4. Develop a Strategy. Plan for using as many of the responding parts of the system as
you can.
5. Try it Out
6. Poke Some More4

Story-Telling
Communicative Resonance

For humans, real understanding only comes through a story. Stories are our major way (along
with belief systems) of organizing large amounts of meaning into that state we call
understanding. That is, neurologically, we are set up to capture large amounts of intellectually
and emotionally pertinent information, and turn it into powerful actions, through stories.

Your change effort will need a narrative. A narrative is more than a message. It is more than an
emotional trigger. A narrative for a change effort conveys the need as real people experience it,
and embeds the need in a humanly understandable context. That means that the narrative must
be more than statistics, charts, or message frames. It has to be a personal story, and it has to
be true to your conscious and non-conscious emotional and intellectual understanding of the
need for change.

Story telling requires much practice and the change story should be refined by examining how
people react to it. This means that you should be trying it out with a variety of audiences, and
learning how best to communicate the urgency of your change to your target(s).5

Subversion
Stability is frozen struggle
-Roberto Unger6

In the context of Intentional Change, subversion is the undermining of barriers to self-
determination. Self-determination means more than personal freedom. It also means the control
of the resources necessary to make meaningful choices.

As I said earlier, subversion occurs all the time in all of our lives, as our brains learn and grow. I
use the term micro-subversion, not for this constant effort by our selves to expand our freedom,
but for the personal and collective efforts by marginalized groups to expand their personal and
collective space of self-determination. Examples would be the Recovery Movement and the
Person First self-advocacy groups. Whenever possible, our change effort should have a
community of this kind as its base, growing the change we want from a real community focused
on personal and collective change.

4
Being willing to poke and learn is about taking risks. See Poke the Box at http://bit.ly/fH6Of3
5
Storytelling Resources at http://bit.ly/7Pmllc
6
See http://bit.ly/gOm8yG


Bricolage is a french word that broadly means tinkering. Another way of stating the meaning is
to use materials in your immediate vicinity to solve an immediate problem in a novel way.
Tinkering is a standard way for human beings to make their immediate environment fit their
needs. It always results in the subversion of some larger infrastructure, and the barriers (real or
planned). The best studied example is the changes that line staff make in new big software
systems that are imposed on them. Sometimes, in changing the way the software impacts their
daily work lives, employees completely subvert the purpose of the software. There are a great
many examples that have not been well studied. I think that all employees work to expand a
space of freedom in their work lives, through such acts as gaming policies, and similar creative
acts.7

Passive-Aggression has a bad name. I’m not so sure I completely agree. I see passive-
aggression as a subversive technique, fundamentally creative, used by people who believe they
have no real power. There is no question that passive-aggression is an effective technique of
subversion. I suspect that supporting people to openly and actively pursue successful change is
the best way to “subvert” passive-aggression, and turn such creativity to important social use.

There is no guarantee that subversion will be positive. It is often negative especially for the
person’s immediate environment, and the people in that environment. This failure of subversion
is largely due to the Law of Unintended Consequences. When a system tries to enlarge its
space of self-determination, it usually focuses on undermining immediate barriers (what are
called first tier interactions). The rest of the environment (second tier and higher interactions)
are assumed to be stable “objects” that can be ignored. If this assumption is wrong (and it
almost always is), then the higher order tiers will change in response to the subversion and
spread change throughout the larger environment. That larger change will feedback to the
person initiating the change, and may well produce an intensification of the initial barrier or a
new one.

A common example occurs when there are communities with great emotion and energy on both
sides of a policy issue. Public action by one side to promote their view of what should be a
policy consensus mobilizes the other side to do the same. Thus, public action can and mostly
does produce stalemate over high profile issues.8

OODA
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

This framework was developed by John Boyd for use in battles by fighter pilots. It is a cycle, in
which you observe the results of action and start again. Its lesson for intentional change is that,
just like fighter pilot, if you execute the cycle faster than your opponent, you will more than likely
win.

7
More about tinkering with systems at http://amzn.to/f5Ntjb
8
See http://amzn.to/hVO5hK.


Change organizations seldom have the resources (financial, experience, networks) of their
targets. For that reason, change organizations must make use of speed. This use of speed as a
strategic tool will not happen automatically. You must constantly watch out for encroaching
bureaucracy-in particular, any bureaucracy that slows down decision making.

Don’t take from this that a single person should make all the decisions. Important decisions
must be participative across the change team. Your task must be to make that participation both
effective and quick. Build habits of participation and decision making so that you can use your
advantage of speed against your target.9

Coevolution
The Red Queen

The Red Queen Effect (you have to go faster and faster just to keep up) describes Coevolution
well. Two interacting parties change and stabilize each other over time. This framework is
perhaps the most common one used by change teams. It is at the base of competitive games,
the Cold War, hunter-prey relations, teacher-student conflict, etc.10

When I began work at Michigan Protection and Advocacy in 1981, most of my work was
advocating for students around issues of special education supports and services. At that time,
schools were still only vaguely aware of what special education law required of them, and our
speed in research and our ability to focus on special education issues gave us a tremendous
edge in the advocacy “competition”. It was such a large edge, and we had so few requests for
advocacy initially that it was easy to handle the issues ourselves and almost always get the
supports and services which the student needed. Personally, very gratifying.

Over a period of about 4 years, through the process of coevolution, the relationship between
advocates and schools changed. The schools grew in their understanding of special education
rules and regulations, and stopped making newbie mistakes, and the advocacy cases became
more complex and harder to win. As word of our advocacy success got out, we got more and
more requests for advocacy. Because it had been easier to simply solve the problems for the
family rather than helping them to build their advocacy skills, we also had the same people
coming back to us each year to deal with the next round of conflict. (See OODA for some
insight-our cycle slowed down, at the same time that the school’s was speeding up)

There came a point where there was not enough time to handle all the demands of all the
requests for advocacy help. At that point, MPAS had to make a decision about how to handle
the demand. One possibility was to become a community organizing effort, in which our role
would change to training local groups to be effective advocacy hubs for their community. The
other was to become a centralized I&R system with only a small number of direct advocacy and
lawsuit cases out of the thousands of request that came in. This was a true and demanding
9
See Wikipedia at http://bit.ly/1V0eNa for more information.
10
See an evolutionary take on the RQ effect at http://bit.ly/dqVtEO


strategic dilemma. And it arose because of coevolution. Largely because of the authorizing
legislation for Protection and Advocacy Services and the depth of experience in the existing
staff, we chose to be come a centralized I&R system with smaller legal and policy impact efforts.

This example illustrates many of the strengths and weaknesses of coevolution as a change
framework. A coevolutionary race will eventually stabilize when one of the parties runs into a
resource limit. Often the stabilization will require the party who reached the resource limit to
completely change the way they do business. Their written mission may not change, but their
practical mission will.

The only realistic way to deal with the profound limits of such a situation is to completely re-
conceptualize your mission in regard to the target(s). Especially if the change team has been
successful with their past model of change, this can be extremely difficult.

A second example will illustrate some more subtlety about coevolution. There was a near
universal ritual among Artic Inuit groups to initiate caribou hunts by heating the shoulder blade
of a previously killed caribou over a fire until cracks appeared in the bone. Then the bone was
oriented to the group’s hunting territory and the cracks were interpreted as the paths of caribou
herds. The question was why this practice continued over time when there was no relationship
between the cracks and the caribou.

Two things come to mind. One is that this was a far faster way of deciding where to start hunting
than, say, a modern staff meeting. The second is that the use of the ritual maintained an
element of randomness in the relationship between caribou and hunting group that prevented
the caribou from developing strategies of evasion based on the method that the Inuit group used
to determine where to start hunting.11

Nucleation
Let Many Flowers Bloom

Nucleation is a change framework in which many change initiatives are started in different
locations, each with a local focus. It is a variation on community organizing strategies.

One advantage of having multiple change sites is that resistance to change will tend to be
related to local perception of threat, and will be mounted locally. A broader response is hard to
justify because it is seen as an over-response, consuming scarce resources which will tehn not
be available for other uses. This also means that any one initiative will face less resistance than
if the change initiative was seen as a broad , say, statewide effort.

Another advantage is that leadership, organizing, and planning skills are developed across a
broader network, with each nucleus having all the responsibilities of a change initiative instead
of just a few. This will create a redundancy in leadership as well, always a good thing.

11
See http://amzn.to/gZuIoi.


If some of the nuclei fail, you can reinforce the ones that succeed. Also, many nuclei can try
many solutions creating a kind of evolutionary testing. Success can also be shared across
nuclei. If real sharing of information is supported, resources can be allocated more usefully.

You should brand each nucleus locally, to reinforce the sense of community around the change
initiative.

The GW Continuum
From War to Community

The GW Continuum originally started out as a description of generations of warfare (hence GW)
over the course of history, producing 3 generations. When the community surrounding GW
began to try to put modern insurgencies (4th generation), and the possibility of subversion of a
target without combat (5th Generation), some theorists put forth the idea of a continuum without
the necessity of history. Kind of a buffet running from violence to community change
approaches. 12

When we do advocacy, we make choices about the degree of combativeness we will participate
in. Sometimes we pretend that we are forced into some level of combativeness by the behavior
of the target. Any large scale important issue will provoke advocacy by a wide range of actors,
and different groups will choose different levels of combativeness as part of their advocacy
strategy. In climate advocacy, for example, different groups have chosen on a continuum
ranging from sabotage to education.

I think of such a range of advocacy strategies as a kind of advocacy ecology in which different
strategies “compete” for change success. I don’t believe that there is any way to tell before hand
what strategy or combination of strategies will be most effective. While climate, for example,
might seem to be a single coherent target, change in views or laws about climate constitute
many targets, and different strategies from a continuum will have different impacts on various
audiences and change targets. My sense is that it is a waste of precious resources, like time
and emotional energy, to criticize different groups for not using “our” tactics.

So, I say, let a 100 flowers bloom, and focus on producing the kind of change through the kind
of advocacy that interests you and those in your advocacy community. Learn from your
experience and that of other members of the ecology, and adjust your strategy.

Disruptive Innovation
Replacing Whole Systems

12
See http://bit.ly/5cRLBF to get the full implications.


Clayton Christenson created a change framework called Disruptive Innovation to explain why
newcomers in a mature technology had such great business advantages over the successful
members of the mature industry in bringing our new technologies.

His basic premise is that mature companies who are leaders in their field can only create
improvements that sustain their current advantages. Of course, he called these improvements
sustaining innovations.

Because new comers had no investment in the current technology, they were able to come up
with innovations that dramatically revised the entire industry, and literally put the mature
competitors out of business. The way the newcomers did this is a framework usable for social
justice advocacy. It demands a very different way of thinking about advocacy and change, and it
requires a lot of hard work. Of course, our current ways of producing change, largely
unsuccessful, also require a lot of work.

The newcomers introduced disruptive innovation rather than sustaining innovation. They
marketed new capabilities, often crude by comparison to the mature industry’s standards, at a
much lower price to customers who had never been able to participate in the market before. The
classic example is the personal computer-it wasn’t capable of any of the things a microcomputer
could do, it wasn’t initially aimed at business, and compared to a microcomputer, it was dirt
cheap. In the end it replaced the entire microcomputer business and eliminated or seriously
down-sized the businesses who were sure that the PC was a fad.13

The first step in building a disruptive innovation is to identify a market that the current system
either ignores entirely or makes it’s products barely available to. For social justice advocacy
groups, the market is easy-the most marginalized and resource scarce groups in our society.

The second step is much tougher. We have to create an advocacy “product” that meets the
criteria of a disruptive innovation. There are many candidate ones, but none with the disruptive
capability of a PC-yet:

● micro-lending
● micro-enterprise
● time-banking
● democratic organizations
● social enterprises
● natural supports
● alternate currencies
● meta-currencies
● resilient communities

The third step is to get really good at the disruptive innovation-in effect, to take away that part of
the market from the mature system.

13
See Key Concepts at http://bit.ly/9Ra5Ci.


Finally, with an established disruptive innovation, go after the next bottom of the target product’s
pyramid, and take that away. Evolve “upmarket” and eventually replace the entire system.14

Generative Ecology
The Forever Fountain

Every once in a while, a cluster of near simultaneous processes begin to interact in a way that
produces something genuinely new from the threads of the present. I call such a confluence a
Generative Ecology. The clearest recent example is the conversion of various community based
musical threads into the juggernaut that is rock.

Primitive recording technology was cheap enough to allow the blossoming of radio music, and
exposed people nationally in the United States to types of music they had never heard before.
Both children and musicians internalized new genres over time and gradually incorported parts
of various musics into their brains and music. Over time, the technology of recording and
distributing music also became less expensive. With Elvis Presley, all the threads became a
cultural phenomenon in the US. TV and the Beatles made rock global.

The rock ecology has been cranking out novelty for over a half century, through massive
technology changes, distribution changes, and globalization.

Ask yourself what could possibly replace the current rock ecology. You would almost certainly
be wrong in your guess. Yet, on it goes.

It isn’t practical to create such an ecology pointed toward some specific large scale change.
There are too many threads to see, and weavings to imagine. But if you see one coming, you
can hitch a ride on it to support the change you see needed.

These Frameworks are Just a Beginning
You can discover more

Begin by keeping a Journal, online or offline. Focus on your current change goals or work that
you already do. Don’t worry about the quality of the ideas. View them as seeds. Review them
once every couple of months, and jot down extensions, or questions, or new ideas that pop into
you head. Over time, they WILL evolve and become useful.15

14
For many ideas, see http://bit.ly/h3job6.
15
For Review of online apps, see http://bit.ly/eBLZpF.


Scan for change ideas. Build a way (RSS reader, conferences, Twitter searches, magazines,
whatever) to rapidly review a lot of territory, stopping only when something catches your
attention. Copy it or what it triggered into your journal.16

Share what you discover. Other people will be interested in your ideas and may respond by
triggering new ideas in you. Use the Usual suspects like Twitter and Facebook.

And keep on changing yourself.

Your Presenter
Norm DeLisle

I have had a long term experience with severe depression, and a more recent one with PTSD
and substance abuse. I began working in the disability community in 1970 after I returned from
the war in Vietnam. I am married and have a daughter, grandson, and two dogs.

I am currently the Executive Director of MDRC, and I’ve had many jobs supporting people with
many different disability characteristics. I did my greatest learning while working for Michigan
Protection and Advocacy Service, where I experienced first-hand the discrimination and
marginalization that are so much a part of the experience of the disability community. By
representing hundreds of people as a personal advocate, I learned a great deal about the
“system” and how it works, and also became interested in how it might be changed.

Currently, I’m working on building a new organization focused on change, called Leverage, Inc.
It will provide short contracts to people in Michigan’s disability community for pay.

My Twitter: http://twitter.com/#mdrcngd

My Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/disability.norm

MDRC Facebook: http://on.fb.me/fzvbeR

Blogs: I have several active blogs. All new items are posted on twitter.

Recovery Michigan: http://recoverymi.posterous.com/
Long Term Care Reform: http://ltcreform.posterous.com
Journey of Change: http://normdelisle.posterous.com
After We’re Gone: http://awg.posterous.com

You Can Email Me: ndelisle@prosynergy.org

16
See http://bit.ly/i6vHkt for scanning and other techniques.


Last Thoughts
“Don’t Let yesterday eat up too much of today.”
-Cherokee Saying

“Leadership is when the people say, We have done this ourselves.”
-Lao Tzu

“Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.”
-Robert H. Schuller

“Do, or do not. There is no try.”
-Yoda

“Create a society in which it is easier to be good.”
-Peter Maurin

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
-Bob Dylan

Thanks for Participating
Any Questions?


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