Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [58]
A whole corporate organisation doing something different
When we take the Do Something Different approach into organisations wanting behaviour change you won’t be surprised to hear that we do things differently. For a start, people don’t go on courses! One example is a very large corporate who wanted to raise staff awareness of bias and diversity. The usual way in which this is tackled is to ‘educate’ or ‘train’ people. That often means sending them on a course. Or getting them to do some e-learning. We set up ‘Project Open Mind’ in the organisation that called us in, because we decided that ‘Bias and Workshop Training’ was a title that was sure to have staff grabbing their coats and remembering an urgent dental appointment. In Project Open Mind, after people found out about their own habits and their flexibility, we sent them a surprise task to do every day. These were of simple and fun activities. Like ‘Go for a coffee with a member of your team you rarely speak to’, or ‘Ask someone much older, or much younger, than you for advice on something you’re working on’, or ‘Make the effort to connect with someone in your vicinity. Smile and say hello to someone you usually ignore. Speak to people you usually nod at’, or ‘Swap a skill, shortcut or tip with a colleague. Share and learn from him or her too. Pass it on.’ And people did them. Just for fun. And over a couple of weeks things began to change in the organisation. People who had previously been overlooked, or left out (perhaps because of ethnic or gender differences), got included. Managers gained a better understanding of the potential of all of their staff, not just those in their immediate radar. Colleagues connected in new ways that created different dynamics, and some of the old ‘cliques’ just melted away. A project that began as a simple experiment is now a key part of the organisation’s staff experience every year. It brings about growth, cohesion and development. And it’s different too. Because people are having such a good time doing something different they hardly even notice they’re getting ‘training’.
64. Advantages of flex in the social domain
flex is excellent social grease. If we were all to expand our own world a bit with flex and Do Something Different, we would increase the degree to which we share a common world. Many people have an inherent tendency to believe the world exists in the form in which they see it, and as if that is the only way. You will know, however, that life is multi-dimensional. How many times have you seen the same situation from a very different perspective from someone else? Have you ever let children tell you how they perceive things? What they say (and see) is often unimaginable from an adult’s perspective, yet both can be talking about the same thing. The differences between two adult views may be more subtle than that between a small child and a ‘grown-up’, but they are no less different. This is because the world we each inhabit is – to an important degree – unique to each of us. As we grow older our perceptions often narrow more and more and our view of the world gets more particular to us. When we say we share the same planet that does not mean we see things in the same way at all. So, it is important to understand the fundamental fact that our habitual ways and personality constrain and define how things are in the world for each of us to a considerable degree. We do live in different