As I walked down the hall after my meeting, she came out of the room from a different meeting, and said to me: “I have just pulled the pin and tossed the grenade into the room. Now they will have to deal with the issue. It may take time, but they must come to a solution.”
I stopped, gathered myself together, and said to her. “Well, that’s a pretty violent metaphor. I don’t think I would use it given the current world we live in. Still, I know your goal was to solve an issue and to create clarity around a sensitive and complex problem. I just think one could approach it from a different angle.”
“Okay,” she said. “What metaphor would you have used? What way would you have approached this level of work?”
“I would have started by focusing on the critical yeast, a bread baking metaphor, more than change by grenade at the critical mass level,” I responded.
“Tell me more,” she replied.
My response was based on something I had read by John Paul Lederach in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art And Soul Of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005). As he explained, “The idea of critical mass floated over [from nuclear physics] into the social sciences given its natural applications to a wide variety of topics. People asked: How do social ideas make their way from inception to becoming widely accepted by society? The point at which enough people believe it and the social ethos changes is the point of a critical mass…. But in the process of applying the concept of critical mass, we actually may have missed the original key insight. Creating self-sustained processes of social change is not about numbers in a sequential formula. The critical mass in fact was asking what initial, even small things made exponentially greater things possible. In nuclear physics [where the concept of critical mass came from], the focus was on the quality of the catalyst, not the numbers that followed.” As he continued, “Focus on quantity distracted from focus on quality and on the space needed to generate and sustain change…. What’s missing is not critical mass. The missing ingredient is the critical yeast.”
As we stood in the hallway, I explained the difference between forcing a group to make a decision and the idea from bread baking of using critical yeast. As Lederach noted, “the principal of yeast is this: A few strategically connected people have greater potential for creating social growth of an idea or process than large number of people who think alike.”
Furthermore, Lederach’s work reminds me of something Jim Collins wrote in his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. . . and Others Don't (HarperBusiness, 2001). Collins talked about “First Who… Then What.” As he explained, “The good-to-great leaders began the transformation by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it…. The key point of this chapter is not just the idea of getting the right people on the team. The key point is that "who" questions come before "what" decisions - before vision, before strategy, before organization structure, before tactics. First who, then what - as a rigorous discipline, consistently applied.” When we force a group to deal with an issue, we often do not have the right people involved and the environment for communications is not always safe.
As a long term bread baker, I know that yeast needs needs warmth, moisture, and a touch of honey or sugar to grow. With the right preparation, yeast will transform the flour and water into bread. Following the same principals with people, Lederach explains “Social change requires careful attention to the way people in their environment mix in relational spaces that provide a warm, initially somewhat separate, and therefore safe space to bring together what has not usually brought together with enough sweetness to make the space conducive for the growth of those merged.”
In bread baking, the yeast in combination with thorough mixing, which is called kneading, of the other ingredients such as flour gives the mixture the capacity to rise again and again. “Yeast is defined principally by this capacity to be resilient,” writes Lederach.
Building on the bread making metaphor, Lederach notes, “The place where the critical mass and critical yeast meet in reference to social change is not in the number of people involved but rather in creating the quality of the platform that makes exponential growth strong and possible, and then finding ways to sustain that platform.”
As I walked her through this line of thinking and the difference between pulling the pin and adding the critical yeast, she nodded. “I don’t always measure well when I make bread. It still comes out OK in the end. At times, bread is more forgiving than people.”
I smiled and agreed. “It might be good to reconvene the group, and take the metaphorical grenade off the table. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Then, after careful, safe, and thoughtful listening and sharing, you can discern who needs to be involved in solving the problem. People always notice the difference between working in safe spaces for growth vs confrontational spaces for immediate change.”
As we continued walking down the hallway together, I thought to myself, “I could use a really good slice of sourdough bread with some nice homemade maple apple pear butter on it.” On my way home, I picked up a fresh baked loaf, knowing I already had the maple apple pear butter in a jar in our pantry.
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