Deep Change: Chapter 1

So I finished the Harvard Business Review articles and decided to move on to Quinn's Deep Change. Having only read the first chapter, I think I will like this book. Something that struck me rather forcibly about it is that Quinn is preaching Jesus' gospel without Jesus. He could have just as easily started his introduction with Jesus as he could have with Oscar Robertson. Basketball and racial equity are safer topics to allude to, I suppose. In one way that similarity is really amazing, because it shows the deep truth of what Jesus taught us. On the other hand, it's kind of sad because I don't believe that really truly deep change is accomplished by human effort. Ultimately, we have to allow God to change us.

I did highlight a lot of passages, for this first chapter, though, and I am going to copy some of them down. First one:

"We have always been embedded in a dilemma. We have always had to agonize over the choice between making deep change or accepting slow death."

This is the challenge Jesus gave us. God said in Deuteronomy, "I set before you life and death... Choose life." Some people really don't understand this concept, but it meshes well with what Quinn is saying, because the change God calls us to is also deep and agonizing. Quinn doesn't label this death as spiritual, but it might as well be.

"Our capacity to face uncertainty and function in times of stress and anxiety is linked with our self-confidence, and our level of confidence is linked with our sense of increasing integrity."

Quinn made this statement and I find it a bit mysterious. What is it about integrity that creates self-confidence? He doesn't really expand on this concept here, but I hope he does later in the book. This is an area that I'm wrestling with now. Where does my self-confidence come from? It is so easy to have false confidence. Again, from a Christian perspective, our only sure source of confidence is God, but He is big and mysterious. What can we really trust Him to do? If one doesn't have an almighty Father to place one's confidence in, what is the alternative?

There is an Indian movie called The 3 Idiots. It is a really interesting movie about educational culture and change in India that I recommend you watch sometime. The leader of change in the movie gets his confidence in kind of a hokey way, though. He says that when he was a child, the town watchman would cry out "All is well!" and everyone would feel safe, but one day they found out that the watchman was blind, yet through all those years, the town had felt safe because they believed the watchman when he said that all was well. The protagonist says, "Our hearts are easily scared, so we must always tell them, 'All is well.'" He models this behavior throughout the movie.

I can't quite buy that. Really? The courage for change comes from closing one's eyes, lying to oneself, and hoping for the best? And so I go back to this question of our source of confidence again. And I wonder how it relates to integrity. One, tentative idea in this regard is that we need to learn to value what God values. As we challenge the values we've absorbed from the world and replace them with God's values, we become more confident that God will protect our hearts. As the things that are the most important to Him become the most important to us, we have confidence that He will protect those things. I wonder if that is what Quinn means by integrity?

"The deep change effort distorts existing patterns of action and involves taking risks. Deep change means surrendering control."

Again, I wonder how it is possible to surrender control like this without knowing to whom one is surrendering the control...

Social Justice

"Facing an intense global economy, organizations and their members are having to reinvent themselves frequently. This is a top-down process. Pressure for change comes from the outside world, which forces the organization to reinvent itself. Organizational change then builds pressure for personal change. This sequence is assumed in nearly every discussion of organizational change strategy. The accuracy of this top-down model, however, blinds us to an equally accurate but seldom recognized model based on an opposing set of assumptions. It is a model of bottom-up change. It starts with an individual."

I really liked this comment because it reflects my reaction to many of the HBR articles. My intuitive idea is that change does not come from the top. Jesus is my model for change, the model that I think is truly sublime, if you will, and he didn't use John Kotter's eight steps. Jesus said, "Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remain alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit." He was referring to himself, of course, but he is our model in this way, and his model is bottom-up. His model begins by embracing "the least of these" and rejecting spiritual power structures that were not obedient to God--not actual governmental ones. I think this idea of seeds dying is echoed in the example that Quinn gives of Peck's reflections of a psychoanalyst:

"Of all the good and useful rules of psychotherapy that I have been taught, there are very few that I have not chosen to break at one time or another, not out of laziness and lack of discipline but rather in fear and trembling, because my patient's therapy seemed to require that, one way or another, I should step out of the safety of the prescribed analyst's role, be different and risk the unconventional. As I look back on every successful case I have had I can see that at some point or points in each case I had to lay myself on the line. The willingness of the therapist to suffer at such moments is perhaps the essence of therapy, and when perceived by the patient, as it usually is, it is always therapeutic."

Peck is reaffirming Jesus' words. "Unless a seed falls into the ground, it remains alone." God wants us to step away from the comfort of our religious rules to, not because of laziness or lack of self discipline but in fear and trembling because the situation and the people we have responsibility for require it. So often we want to break the rules for the former reasons rather than the latter, but it is our love for the "patient" that guides us.

I think this point is reiterated later by Quinn, but what really gives the concept power is the way Jesus modeled it. If one studies his life, one realizes how revolutionary he was--not in the way people expected, against the Roman government, but against the rules and regulations that even the righteous among them had come to accept. Jesus broke the boxes and suffered the risk needed to bring deep change to the world.

"Excellence, however, never lies within the boxes drawn in the past. To be excellent, the leaders have to step outside the safety net of the company's regulations, just as the therapist had to step outside the safety of the traditionally defined role. To bring deep change, people have to 'suffer' the risks. And to bring about deep change in others, people have to reinvent themselves."

At the end of the chapter, Quinn talks about people who have made deep change a habit. I would really like to learn more about the people because I think that this is such a difficult thing to do. I have experienced my share of deep change, I suppose, but I am still terrified of it. I have really been praying into this recently, that God would help me to challenge my sources of security that block me from being completely obedient to Him. Quinn says of this process, "After a while, terror turns to faith." I hope to get there, but I think it is one of those battles that one wins inches at a time. One might find that one has conquered the terror in one area only to turn and find it still reigning in another. However, the Scriptures do say, "The righteous man lives by faith."