One person with a good idea can cause change

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped" - Robert F. Kennedy

November 18, 2009
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News (Guam)

An inspiring quote by Mahatma Gandhi, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world," makes many feel hopeful, even feel empowered.

If change is inevitable, do we allow the change to emerge without our input, which puts us at risk of being destroyed by it, or do we take action to affect the change we would like to see?

Today, I'd like to write about how to lead change. I'm drawing from bestselling author, entrepreneur and blogger Seth Godin's observations. He has interesting ideas about how to foment change. I think each of us can see things around us that we know are wrong or that could be better. Our instincts tell us we should do something, but we don't. We're busy, someone else will take care of it. This is where Seth Godin comes in: how change occurs. His theory of tribes dovetails nicely with the political socialization model I've written of over the years.

Starting with factories, Godin asserts that the industrial age offered a significant opportunity to create real change. The assembly line, instituted first by Henry Ford, was the catalyst for tremendous social change: Goods were produced faster and with greater efficiency; the wage scale for the skilled workers who manned the line changed their living standard.

As more and more goods were produced, there grew a need to market them. Cultural change began to be sparked by mass media, through which advertising was blasted to the masses. We might have thought we were immune to the cacophony of calls to buy one product over another, or a deluge of things we didn't need; the fact is we all are subject to the subliminal pull of repeated entreaties to buy, buy, buy. And so the marketplace changed our culture.

The nature of tribes

Godin says we now have moved to a larger stage, thanks in part to communications tools, when change -- for good or ill -- is more easily undertaken. We are at a time in history where one person truly can make a difference because of the nature of tribes, says Godin.

He defines a tribe as an association of people with a common interest. Each of us is potentially a member of many tribes. We're members of a church, pagoda, mosque group, we volunteer for Meals on Wheels, we're members of a golf club, a mountain biking group. We work in an office. We teach in a school. Each of these intentional or accidental associations becomes a tribal association of common interest.

Godin says great change, a movement, is created when these tribal circles intersect, overlap, and expand their connectivity to larger numbers of people. This is how momentous change occurs. Godin proposes that one person can galvanize a tribe. Change, he says, comes from leading and connecting people and ideas.

Examples

Godin offers examples of people unknown to most of us who have seen a wrong and worked to right it by gathering like-minded people together behind the same good idea: the San Francisco City ASPCA, which became the first ASPCA affiliate in the world to successfully implement a "no-kill" policy for the animals it sheltered. Led by a single determined individual, the people in the city who cared about animals rallied behind the concept in spite of official opposition, and won. Godin recalls the young man who started a movement that supplies shoes for children who have none; an architect who started a green building movement by communicating with those who have similar interests across the nation. A single person with a good idea who took the lead started movements.

Godin suggests that action can come from each of us asking ourselves three questions: Who are you upsetting? (If you're not upsetting someone, you're not changing the status quo.) Who are you connecting? Who are you leading?

Leaders, he says, challenge the status quo. They have curiosity. They ask questions. They build a culture with small common symbols that give the new tribe an identity. But most importantly, leaders commit. They commit to working to make the change. The tribe that spreads the message promotes the change exponentially, and a movement is created around one good idea. Leaders are charismatic, says Godin, but here's the secret: They are charismatic because they are leaders, because they commit, because they take a good idea and share it and share it and share it again and again and again until it catches fire and ignites a conflagration that changes what had seemed unchangeable.

No action, no result

Which brings us back to Gandhi. "You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing, there will be no result." To hear Godin, an optimist, is to believe that the power to instigate a movement is within the grasp of most of us. Surely the communications tools at our fingertips offer us the opportunity to reach a wide audience -- potential tribe members -- relatively easily. Surely, these same tools can be used for ill as for good, but that's a discussion for another day.

For now, the point is, change is not an abstract. It is not something for someone else to do. It is something you can make happen with a good idea, energy, commitment, and connection to a tribe. Any one of us can become that leader who made a great and positive difference with determination to communicate and implement one good idea. Have the courage to go after your goals rather than feel overwhelmed by them.

As Robert F. Kennedy said, "It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped."

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com