The Power of Direct Experience

During my participation in the 2015 Opening Seminar for Eisenhower Fellowships, I had the privilege of attending a leadership seminar by the social scientist Joseph Grenny.  Over the course of three hours, he presented a lot of excellent and thought-provoking concepts, but, for me, none more so than the power of direct experience.

Drawing from his thirty years of observation, Grenny highlighted a couple of examples.  First, he recalled a university call center that was under-performing.  Working at a call center is a difficult job.  It is repetitive, static, numbing, and subject to confrontations with people who don’t want to be solicited at home.  Wages are typically low and turnover high.   

In this particular call center, the university assembled the employees and brought in a young woman of color.  For ten minutes, she talked to the workers about her experience as the first person in her family to get a college education and the difference that had already made in her life. She finished by expressing her thanks to the call center workers because, through their efforts, the university had raised the money for her scholarship, without which she could never have gotten her degree.

Three months later, the university looked at the results from this call center.  Productivity had soared and the amount of money brought in had increased exponentially.

Grenny also noted a seminar for CEOs of some of the world’s largest hospitals. They were there to discuss ways to improve the overall healthcare experience for patients.  The facilitator, Dr. Don Berwick, the former leader of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was afraid that all it would amount to was an intellectual exercise that would result in zero change. So he told the CEOs that he wanted to reconvene them in a month’s time, and that during the intervening month they should pick a patient in their respective hospitals and personally investigate their case.

The following month Dr. Berwick was amazed by the result.  The executives were emotionally connected to the cases they related, and they discussed how illusory many of their patient experience protocols actually were.  They subsequently became much more intent on making real changes to positively affect patient care.

These examples reinforced my ideas about change.  Real change does not come about through laws or policies or systems.  These are all necessary things, but not sufficient. Change happens when we are directly affected, when our empathy is engaged because we personally know someone whose life has been impacted.

This can seem daunting.  How many people must be personally engaged before a critical mass is reached and progress is made?  It becomes all too easy to be discouraged and just accept the status quo.

But we should never underestimate the power of just a few people to dramatically affect the world.  As Joseph Grenny demonstrated in a social science context, a few simple actions can have an outsized impact. Similarly, in the everyday world, the personal and passionate engagement of several individuals – or even one person – can make a consequential impact on the lives of many.

 

The key is not to wait for those others to emerge, but to be one of them yourself.