The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11Change Is in the Details

Peter Block

Whether in person or virtually, we still attend a lot of meetings. The ones I attend are usually intended to educate, align, enroll, and transform people. It continues to amaze me that most of these meetings are structured in a way that undermines these intentions.

THE ANGEL IN THE DETAILS

The meetings I attend are either public events, at which people from different companies come together to learn and network, or they take place within an organization that is trying to transform its culture or change its way of doing business.

What disturbs me about these meetings is that they are still designed with the same two questions in mind: Who is going to speak, and what are they going to say? Even if the avowed purpose of the meeting is to build community, empowerment, participation, and accountability into the world, the questions remain: “Who is going to speak?” and “What are they going to say?” As long as these remain the critical questions, we are still designing experiences for the sake of the teacher, the leader, and the trainer.

We hold on to the belief that change happens as a result of leaders’ actions or expert wisdom rather than as a result of engagement and grassroots accountability. In our efforts to transform our organizations, we tend to overfocus on the “larger” questions of strategy and scale. We want to know how to impact the greatest number of people in the smallest amount of time. We talk about large system change. ...