3 Essential Questions that Shape our Change-Making

While many of us have a hard time accepting change (especially the variety that asks us to change), humans seem to have an innate inclination to create change.

We invent, we explore, we ask questions, we deem “what is” as not yet good enough. We dabble and experiment and poke around just to find new ways of doing things. While we, to borrow a phrase from ​3 Body Problem​, certainly appreciate a stable system, we also seem to have a built-in desire to really shake things up.

When I was a teenager, I played baseball for my high school and local club teams. And every year, regardless of how well I played the year before, I tinkered with my batting stance, my windup, and the way I fielded ground balls. Even when I had absolutely no reason to do so, I chose the unknown of newness and possibility to the stable and known quantity of the old.

In the words of Ray Bradbury, “Life is trying things to see if they work.”

When we’re in the midst of this messy process of tinkering and change-making – whether it be in our personal lives or in our activism – here are three questions for us to consider:

1. From what to what?

This is the question of clarity: what is our understanding of the current state of things and what is our vision for the future?

What, precisely, is the change we seek to make?

When we don’t take time to think deeply and talk with others about our vision, we can get stuck simply opposing the status quo without becoming imaginative about what comes next. (Hello, Democratic Party. 🙄) Like moving deckchairs around the Titanic, this opens us up to expending all our energy on short-lived actions that fail to move us in the trajectory we wish to go.

The importance here is not having a perfectly crafted outcome we’re holding onto with clenched hands. Instead, it’s to have a vision for what might be possible so that our changework might move us in the trajectory of it.

2. Why?

At my workplace, this tends to be the question we skip over most when considering changes.

It’s not that we never ask it – we just rarely ask it enough. We stay in the shallow-end, asking “why” just enough to confirm the decision we’ve already made.

And, working in education, it’s really easy to do this:

“We should create a new program that does _____.”

“Why?”

“For the kids!”

“Okay – here’s a budget for it!”

But when we’re working to create real, tangible, intentional change, it requires more depth than this.

There’s a protocol I love that helps with this called, appropriately enough, the 5 Whys Method.

Created by Sakichi Toyoda and utilized as one of the core problem-solving protocols within the Toyota production process, it is simply the act of asking “why” five times when faced with a challenge or choice to make.

In our context, we might begin with asking: “Why do I want to be part of creating this change?” And then ask “Why?” four more times, going deeper and deeper as we go.

3. With whom?

When building a new product, designers and marketers often ask the question “Who is this for?” Who is the target audience, who will buy this, who will talk to others about it?

But in this case, “Who is this for?” is a woefully inadequate question to ask.

In changework, paternalistically doing for others is a road to nowhere. Instead of changing much of anything, it tends to double us down in hierarchical thinking, bolstering the divisions between in-groups and out-groups, and keeping communities removed from each other.

I think of almost every food pantry or soup kitchen I’ve ever known: volunteers from predominantly middle and upper class neighborhoods serving food to “people in need,” with few chances for genuine relationships or self-leadership of the folks receiving food. In our societal context, these are vital direct-aid services, but they often lack in imaginative possibility.

Instead, the question “With whom?” centers us in collaboration and community.

Who is being impacted by the status quo? Who be benefiting from the status quo? Who is already engaged in changework? Who do I need to be listening to right now? With whom can I make this change?

This question invites us into seeing community as an essential element of change.