Mirroring my own feelings, Sister Helen told me one of her favorite stories about her own lack of readiness involving a movie production meeting with director Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. They were discussing characterization for various movie roles when Tim surmised: “Clearly, the nun is in over her head.”
“And I was!” Sister Helen laughed.
It was cathartic for me to hear that Sister Helen and I shared so many of the same emotions in our respective journeys. I too felt ill equipped and unprepared for what lay ahead once I agreed to help the death penalty defense team change the way they did things. “If this is fate,” I once told a crowd, “she could not have picked worse.”
I did not want to get involved—in anything. I had made a pretty conscious decision to hide from the world, not fight one of its most menacing demons. But something pulled me in, or maybe I jumped. I like to think I yearned to make a difference, but maybe I knew it might just save my life.
In the early days, I kept asking, “What if we try this?” while spit-balling strategies to fight the death penalty.
Experienced experts kept saying, “It’s never been done, but let’s try it.”
It was nerve-racking. Even though I was confident, it never escaped me that lives were on the line. I shared my fears by reminding the team, constantly, that I was only there by mistake.
“Or luck,” someone said.
Either way, I felt like I did not belong. Over time, I grew into the task, and we were enormously successful. Death penalty defense has changed. So have I. My broader ideas about managing and leading change have been tested and refined, and now I want to share them with you. If you face a change challenge, whether you have sought it or it has fallen to you, I think you will find the ideas in this book useful.
No matter the size of the job, or how intractable the problems may seem, you can change the ways thing are.
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Out of respect for the families of the victims, names and other identifying details in several of the cases have been changed.
This book is about leading change by creating and enacting new narratives. The simplest and broadest conceptualization of change is moving from the old way of doing things to a new way of doing things. Although this is easily said, making these changes entails understanding many subtle processes that we rarely examine. To lead transformational change, we need to devote attention to two main processes. The first—the most overlooked aspect of change in both our theories and practices—is overcoming or resisting pressures to keep doing things the same way we have “always” done things. The second is enacting change, bringing new ideas and vision into the real world. My method calls for creating and enacting narratives.
Narratives are central to change and overlap conceptually with change. Almost all change models describe several stages, beginning with a current state, describing actions that move or change things, and establishing a new future state.1 Similarly, the basic form of a narrative begins with an original state of affairs, describes actions or events as they unfold, and leads to a new state of affairs.2 Narratives tell a story about what happened, or what should happen; they represent our understanding of reality, the way things are, or the way we would like things to be.3
Much of what we know is stored in narrative form—stories about why things are the way they are. Narratives plot events and draw relationships between them, implying both motives and causes. Narratives are ordered representations of our cognitive schema, the way we think. How do we attain this order? To make sense of our experience and arrive at explanations of “what happened,” we create coherent stories about what happened and why. Existing narratives offer an explanation of what happened by looking back on events, but narratives also lay out guidelines for “what to do” when facing future events with similar circumstances. When we construct narratives out of our experience, we are crafting a response to a situation that can become a routine response.
Much of our cultural knowledge and values reside in and are shared via stories, such as “ ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” which establishes a norm that we should not lie. Narratives are repositories of our knowledge, telling us how to act in certain situations. Our shared values are carried in popular narratives that outline the way things are, how they should be, and how we should act. Once we learn these narratives, they shape our understanding of events, and we use them to determine what we should do or how we should act in certain situations. Narratives condition us to see the world in particular ways, and how we see things determines how we act or respond. Applying an existing narrative determines our response. We do as the narrative directs us.
The cultural narrative “If you want something done right, do it yourself” entails values of rugged individualism and self-reliance. Narratives often contain causal logics that set our expectations: in this case, doing something all by yourself is the only way to accomplish anything. Seeking help is discouraged. Many of our most popular success stories are about individuals who have “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps,” improving their lives by getting out of bad circumstances without help. These stories socialize us to believe that success by our own efforts goes beyond assuming that you can do something by yourself to believing that you should do everything by yourself. The downside of this narrative is that it discourages us from asking for help when we need it. This is a significant downside, as you will see, because narratives control our behavior.
Narratives are the products of our collective sensemaking.4 When we produce a narrative, we generate some view of the world.5 If narratives become widely shared in a culture, they establish particular assumptions about how things should be, positing cause-and-effect logics that lead to some value-laden end. In addition to defining how things should be done, existing narratives serve as interpretive schema that we use to make sense of everyday events. We don’t know what to think about a situation until we apply a narrative as an interpretive tool. All experience is filtered through narratives. We use narratives to define the situation—whether the event is good or bad in our culture—then use other narratives to guide our decisions about what to do.
We search our minds for narratives that tell us what to think and what to do in every situation we encounter. For example, I lived abroad on several occasions, and I encountered a unique cultural narrative to explain this event: When a bird poops on you, it is considered good luck! I do not know if I ever adopted the logic of this popular narrative (the logic of narratives often remains implicit or unspoken); I did not linger under building ledges hoping to be hit with some bird luck, but it did help me accept a few ill-timed pigeon droppings with a smile and a shrug. This particular narrative directs those who accept it to respond positively to something that otherwise may seem like a negative event. At the very least, people in those cultures have a grin and bear it attitude compared to my worldview, in which bird poop dropping on you could ruin your day. As we apply the same narratives to guide us through various experiences time and time again, they become so entrenched and widely accepted that they are taken for granted and never questioned. I don’t know if I could be convinced of the logic statement that bird poop is good luck, but the assumption seems impervious to criticism: It’s just good luck! In all cultures, some widespread narratives have a history that gives them this privileged status—they are unquestionable and beyond reproach. Some are so ingrained that even questioning them violates norms, but that is exactly what must happen if we are to pursue narrative change.
Challenging or changing entrenched narratives can be difficult, but it is also true that we create new narratives all the time. All narratives were created by us (where else could they come from?), and there is no reason to think we have suddenly stopped creating