Elena Bondareva is well known to many in the sustainability field. She is author of a new book on how to effect regenerative transformation, Change-maker’s Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Create Meaningful Impact Through Business. Through this new column, she distils 20 years of research and experience in this emerging professional field to equip others tackling the world’s stubborn problems to envision, plan, and execute such change.
My last column busted the myth that transformation hinges on changing hearts and minds. I illustrated why we are better off targeting behaviour change directly.
Does choice even matter? Absolutely.
Let’s pinpoint when choice is a powerful driver of regenerative transformation.
Think about a sustainability transformation. Is it a new 24/7 CFE (carbon-free energy) commitment? A resource recovery mandate? Going up a notch through the building code?
My last column showed that whether people care is superfluous if not an outright waste of time, resources, and goodwill. However, forcing a behaviour does not create sustained change. Agency does. Feeling like a victim of one’s circumstance affects us both psychologically and physiologically while agency fuels the creativity and ownership vital for remaking broken systems.
That said, let’s briefly reflect on the relationship between choices and agency.
You may take pride in how you drive, but you are operating within rigid rules. Similarly, you may enjoy expressing yourself through your wardrobe even though your choices are always extremely limited. Your PJs, beachwear, or gardening attire are unlikely options for a work negotiation. Moreover, we accommodate the demands of our bodies and the limitations of our budgets, passports, and technology.
Drawing on the example from my last article: incandescent light bulbs are no longer an option.
Even when we feel “in control,” we are exercising only marginal choice. Transformation draws attention to the options we no longer have, triggering a defensiveness that can compromise outcomes.
How do we activate agency when decisions are fixed and constraints – rigid?
Agency comes from the freedom to act within those constraints.
As a change-maker, think of yourself as a surgeon. A relaxed – aka empowered, prepared, and supported – patient optimizes good outcomes. You may be deferring to your patients in another context, but when disrupting their lives, you take every opportunity to feel good about choosing to trust your expertise.
Date? Time? Dietary restrictions? Heated blankets? Any questions? Here is the call button. Is there anything else you need? What if people routinely stormed out and otherwise rebelled against medical procedures they required? Or if our hospitals did not honour agency? If doctors withheld what was wrong with patients? If we tricked people into major procedures?
Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian author who died in exile, autobiographically answered this question through Cancer Ward (1966), one of the most powerful books ever written about human agency.
How does thinking of yourself as a surgeon change how you see your current change effort(s)?
I have tested three tactics that activate agency with all its benefits. We cover the first one here and the other two, in the next instalment of A Changemaker’s Toolkit.
- State the non-negotiables.
Those impacted by your transformation want surprise as much as you want to come out of anaesthesia to unexpectedly missing a limb.
Surprises break trust in ways that are too often irreparable.
However, rarely do we treat people as adults through transformation. We judge them for not caring and yet believe them incapable of facing facts.
While it absolutely has its place, expecting the worst often turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think of it as police in full riot gear showing up to an informal gathering in a park. Such a mismatch may trigger the very riot it intended to avoid.
With transformation, you are asking – hoping, even begging – for people to give you a chance; to show up with an open mind, not with Molotov cocktails. As a changemaker, you reciprocate through honesty and curiosity.
Tell people what is happening and why. Importantly, state what is out of their control and what they could tailor. In other words, what is non-negotiable versus what is up for grabs.
For example, for a new 24/7 CFE (carbon-free energy) commitment, tell people when energy usage must be constrained or eliminated because it is impossible or cost-prohibitive to buy credits. What would be the minimums for your resource recovery strategy? What would an update to the building code render no longer unacceptable?
Be very mindful not to create an illusion of control, or they will – rightly! – resent you for it. Overhyping individual control is as problematic as underappreciating it.
Of course, it is not always feasible or appropriate to share everything – but nobody is interested in everything, just in what it means to them! And I have yet to come across non-negotiables that could not be sensitively shared with the people they impacted.
Next, ask, “What do you need in order to be alright with this?” The power of this question cannot be overstated.
What does this mean for your project?
Think to the transformation you target:
- what are the non-negotiables? It is your job to draw the line. To lay the edges of the puzzle
- List them as the Why, What, Who, When, and How
Do better than take people on the journey without a map. Misleading them can set the whole initiative back so far that it would have been better off if you had sat it out.
In the next instalment of this column, we’ll explore additional strategies for activating agency as a building block of transformation. Meanwhile, remember that if you are leading transformation, you’re the surgeon admitting patients. They would not be here if your competence was in question. The outcome now depends on how relaxed and empowered they feel.