Tiny nudges could add up to major movements for change.
A Quick Comment During Climate Week Event
In making the case for small actions, I’ll start with a story. One event I attended for #ClimateWeekNYC presented an interesting opportunity. What I thought was a “listen and learn” style event turned out to be more of a focus group. No problem there for me! I prefer dialogue over lectures. As we got going, I realized the facilitators (sidenote, all white men) were designing a survey on how CTOs, CIOs, and corporate sustainability leaders should collaborate. I’ve written about research before – questioning whether necessary information is missing or whether project leads are delaying a tough conversation on what needs to be done.
I made one additive comment and then sat back. My skeptic angel on my shoulder told me, ride this one out. They won’t use your ideas anyway. It didn’t take long for the activist angel on my other shoulder to start jumping up and down. Not today! You made it here to this room. Say something. Words matter. I offered up some more good ideas (cough cough) and closed with “the biggest risk you have is writing a survey that reports they’re not collaborating enough. We already know that.” Boom. Teeny tiny boom that maybe only I heard, but still. I said the thing out loud. I felt an energy shift around me in the room. Five seconds of airtime-- but it had an impact.
Learning From a Negative Force, the Now Well-known Microaggressions
Microaggressions have been around for way too long, but in the last four years have become more widely understood in corporate America. Death by one thousand cuts is not how anyone wants to work. It’s a good thing we recognize it’s wrong to advise brushing things off because they’re individually small. The reverse of microaggressions could be also true. The concept can apply to expressing something positive over and over. Finally recognizing the impact of microaggressions, why don’t we turn around armed with that knowledge and deploy the effect of 1,000 reminders of what we could be doing to take action. The stacking effect which hurtfully breaks someone down could also build up a movement.
Other Uses of the Micro and the Butterfly Effect
Belief in the effect of the small is all around us. The 80s classic movie Back to the Future’s Marty McFly could travel through time, but couldn’t mess up the course of his own life. The butterfly effect usually has a halo over it, encouraging acts of kindness with the belief the ripples go much further than the moment. The definition of the butterfly effect is more expansive-- break off one branch and the whole universe changes. Regardless, the popular belief in the butterfly effect proves it holds potential for the spread of changemaking actions.
I’m inspired by a few other uses of micro actions from other fields. Micro-learning breaks down concepts into chewable chunks. While it might be a sign that in modern days we can’t focus, they’ve proven it aids in retention of the information. Micro-habits clicked for me after reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits 2-minute rule: break your desired behavior down into a 2-minute action. Micro-finance broke the pattern of banks only making large, profitable loans. Thinking smaller allowed a whole new market to grow over the past couple decades that has changed millions of lives.
Big Strategies vs. Small Nudges
The majority of us changemakers work on complicated strategies that try to get to the root of the problem. Systems change. baby! Professionalizing changemaking has added lots of rigor to choosing what to do by predicting the result. Then, data (my favorite!) has entered the picture as a tool to see if the vision becomes reality. Tiny nudges leave most elements of strategic changemaking behind. Especially tricky is that there would be no way to measure micro moments of changemaking. It’s ridiculous to imagine every employee in a company logging when they point out the lack of diversity in a meeting, for example. Observing how major sustainability strategies, efforts to scale organizations, and massive multilateral agreements (COP29) have largely failed, I’d even go so far to say the most important thing we, each and every changemaker, does are daily acts of micro-courage – pushing the envelope in more and more and more of our interactions. Anytime you feel the energy shift, you know you’re on the right track.