Change Agents and the Process of Change
April 10, 2006
The change agent paper talks not only about how to identify a change agent through their role, personality and style of leadership, but also how those change agents use thought leadership to change outcomes within their agencies and departments. Achieving change means doing more than just altering the status quo through thought leadership and general action - it often requires influencing long-held mindsets, catalyzing excitement, and galvanizing innovators - a process that in itself can be daunting. It’s a process that we only touched on in the paper.
I ran into a powerful article today on methods that make the vision of a change agent come to life - and in this article, these methods were called patterns. From the article "a pattern is a named strategy for solving a recurring problem. Because each pattern has a name, you can use the names in conversations with other change agents." In essence the authors are proposing a language that change agents can adopt.
Referencing a larger book, Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, this article discussed how a fictional change agent, Jim, was quickly making his idea for change a reality through a number of patterns that allowed him to connect on a fundamental level with other people who could facilitate his change. I was duly impressed with the many of the methods examples of how a simple well known concept presentation method, the brown bag lunch, could turn into a forum based pattern for hearing about possible change and innovation. The example had types of people we all recognize in our government environment, early adopters and innovators, running with small but highly visible trial pieces of the larger change such that others could quickly see and be convinced by results from their peers.
After reading the article, I came to realize that understanding the processes by which change can be tested, evangelized, and achieved are just as important as thinking of the change itself. There is no reason a good change should ever be limited to a thought for lack of means of proliferation - there are always patterns for achieving success just waiting to be used!
Thoughts or reactions? Please send them to us.