The Need for Speed : change need not be a slow business

Simon Black –

Change is very often considered to be a slow and often difficult process, particulalry in wildlife conservation. With human communities there is a particular problem and ‘culture change’ is seen as a long and winding road. Howveer it is not always the barrier that it appears to be – human beings are notable as creatures that have mastered  (or, at least, have developed) the art of adapting. We have changed our knowledge, decisions, behaviour, environment, relationships, societies. It is too easy to think that we ‘don’t like change’. This is simply not the case. We are beings that not only adapt to what is around us, but we often actively choose to change what is around us. After all, it is not uncommon for us to seek to find ways to make things better or different (either for ourselves or, sometimes, others!).

My great-grandfather (who was still around when I was a youngster) was born into the Victorian age in the 1880s when the motor car had not been invented. He was already a young man when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, yet lived to experience flying in jet airliners and even saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon. His life experiences, work and education had to adapt fairly radically, but I imagine it was a fairly natural process – that’s life.

Whilst change should be seen as a ‘natural’ process, for conservation it is a question of moving people towards a desired state and away from an undesied state. This might be about resource use, attitudes to wildlife, cultural norms, business interests. But even these sorts of changes can occur in noticeable timescales; weeks and months not years. Changes should move into short timescales to become noticeable, rather than at barely-observable ‘glacial’ rates. Herrero (2006) goes further, suggesting that if cultural changes cannot be observed in short time-frames, then something is wrong.

  • “Cultural change does NOT need to be a slow and painful long-term affair.” – there is a better way.
  • “Short-term wins CAN represent real change.”  with viral networks which engage many people, small changes can lead to a big impact.

We need to accelerate change by engaging networks of people in making things happen. In a previous post it was suggested that small sets of behavioural changes, taken on and shared by informal groups of people can generate improvements in a non-linear way, as Hererro terms it, a ‘viral’ spread.

To influence others we need to encourage quick, meaningful changes; not just ticking items off the ‘to do’ list, but adopting new behaviours, new ways of thinking, new habits. These things may appear less tangible, but they do have impact, they don’t need to wait for a sign-off by top management and they do allow change to happen much quicker.

It may be a matter of worling with a few people who are open minded, Their experiences may influences others. It is likely to involved continual effort – very unlikely for a one-off intervention to have an impact. The RARE approach tp cultural change is an example of this extended, targetted and influentual approach. It mobilises people within the ecosystems of concern for the benefit of species and landscapes.

This means that when we consider the ecosystems and landscapes of conscern we also need to consider how humans fit as part of that system and how thier behaviours, norms and expectations can be an engine for positive change.

Further reading:

Black S.A. and Copsey J.A. (2014) Does Deming’s ‘System of Profound Knowledge’ Apply to Leaders of Biodiversity Conservation? Open Journal of Leadership  3(2) 53-65. DOI: 10.4236/ojl.2014.32006

Herrero, L. (2006) Viral Change, meetingminds, UK.