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Switch – How to change things when change is hard

Chip & Dan Heath

This is a curious book. Its strength is its collection of wonderful stories, clearly and simply told. They are drawn from politics, organisations and individuals – something to appeal to everybody.

And there is much to cheer those of us who have been taking a solutions-focused (SF) view of change, with a great deal of the book consisting of the Heaths’ efforts to put familiar concepts, tools and techniques into snappier, stickier language (with varying degrees of joy).

Rachel West is the engineer who became a clown who became a facilitator.

At the AMED Writers’ Workshop, she showed us how a bit of skill, dressed up as performance, can be very impressive to an audience. 

There's a Stanley Kubrick exhibition at my local museum. It's been on for several weeks and continues for several more.  I knew I wanted to see it, and for no particular reason I went there today.  I hadn't any plan to go until I was walking past and reminded myself it was on.

The World Cup approaches, very strictly structured and tightly organised on the pitch – yet certain to provoke controversy when decisions in matches are seen as unfair.  When football began – with spontaneous kicking of a pig’s bladder, there were no rules.  Well, maybe a few – first remove the pig, for example.  Then we had the crucial game-defining concept of two teams facing each other, aiming for the goals at each end.  Then probably limits on acceptable levels of violence.

I've been studying more and less successful networks to identify what works well.  These seem to be some of the characteristics:

Conversation is the link between such disparate professional disciplines as coaching, facilitating, training, negotiating and selling.

What differentiates each of these activities is their contexts.  Each has a different structure,  a discrete set of rules – in other words, each is a different ‘Game’.

A neat way of raising the profile of Applied Improvisation is to notice examples in the world around us, then name them and claim them.  So if you see an individual or an organisation succeeding by tackling something improvisationally, you can point it out.  Likewise, if they seem stuck in a script that no longer serves them well, you might comment on how improvisation might be a more useful response.