A bird so attuned to the ways of planet and ocean … that it is possible to see in its whole being an intelligence different from but scarcely less than ours.
Adam Nicolson The Seabird’s Cry[i]
Big doors swing on little hinges. Pay attention to the small things
W Clement Stone
The fulmar in flight is impressive: constantly adjusting each wing edge to optimise its use of air currents; its powerful tail a precision rudder; soaring, diving, gliding, and landing with mastery. It thrives on strong winds rather than calm - consuming perhaps ten times as much energy in calm. Its bill has developed to catch squid, and its large dark eyes to spot them and other food. From the nest, fourteen-day round trips of around 3,000 miles using different routes out and back in response to changing conditions have been recorded.
Like all life on earth, climate change threatens the fulmar, though the days of St Kilda residents eating 12,000 of them annually are long gone. However, the fulmar is threatened by something very small and of which we’ve become belatedly aware: microplastics[1]. A 2023 study of an admittedly small number of dead fulmars found 88% had plastic in their stomachs, with an average of 24.5 pieces of microplastic per bird. 54 % of the birds had plastic pellets in their stomach.
Fulmars’ stomachs contain an oil in which many plastics dissolve, releasing toxic additives. Because fulmars don’t regurgitate swallowed hard objects but grind these down, the scope for damage to their health from plastics is increased. Microplastics damage (and kill) fulmars in four ways:
- Blocking their digestive systems
- Reducing nutrient absorption
- Poisoning through leached additives
- Impacting their young to whom regurgitated food is fed.
So, the remarkable fulmar is undone not just by big things obvious to us (wind turbines, climate warming), but also by tiny things we’ve scarcely been aware of until recently and continue to fail to address adequately.
Isn’t it also that way with barriers to change? We’re pretty good at identifying large factors that inhibit change (lack of understanding, lack of equipping, no vision, change fatigue) and often address them at least adequately. We ‘know’ to focus on these large challenges – not to sweat the small stuff.
But with our clients we’re becoming increasingly aware of the small things that can get in the way of change adoption, things like:
- Unfamiliar terminology on an IT application (eg ‘time card’ & ‘schedule’ when everyone says 'timesheet' and 'roster')
- A fridge not working at a front-line location
- The constant stream of changes in cloud apps (eg the OneDrive logo has suddenly changed)
- Unthinking rudeness on the part of a leader to someone in the middle of process change (though managerial behaviours are, of course, a big thing in the context of change)
- Train cancellations on the way to training sessions that offer no biscuits.
I suspect some of us consider these examples as too small to be real problems – hmmm, like microplastic for the fulmar, I guess. But we’re finding that factors like these, individually and cumulatively, do:
- Block change, halting implementations in their tracks
- Slow adoption, with repeated initiatives required to embed change
- Contribute to the development of a toxic environment in which change is so much more difficult
- Spread through an organisation or ecosystem, reducing change capacity.
What can we do? There are too many small things to list individually, so here are some principles we look to adopt:
- Take as a mantra that people pay more attention to the small things we do than to the big things we say
- Invest at the outset in building relationships with those impacted by change, so we have a sense of what small things distract them – rather than starting with awareness campaigns, narratives and impact assessments
- Explore the use of tools that tailor user interfaces, so that language used is familiar to users and unused options aren’t available. One of our partners, Future IT, does this well using WalkMe.
- Pay attention to hygiene factors, as underpinning a hierarchy of needs: I’ll guarantee that if there’s no working fridge then adoption of change will be sub-optimal.
- Work hard at listening, not just casting vision and informing: that way you’ll hear about the small things.
Just like W Clement Stone says: Big doors swing on little hinges. Pay attention to the small things. What small things have you seen derail change?
[1] Plastic debris breaks down into very small pieces rather than decomposing, taking 500-1,000 years to break down completely (if it ever does). Microplastics are particles less than 5mm in size, usually created as part of this break down process, sometimes manufactured at that size as microbeads in personal care products. There are estimated to be ~50-75 trillion microplastic particles in our seas and oceans, and an additional 400 million tons of plastic (potentially growing to >1 billion within 25 years) go into the oceans every year.
[i] Information re the fulmar from (the wonderful) Adam Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry, William Collins, London, 2017, pp25-52. For information on the fulmar and on microplastics, see here, here, here, here, here, or here.
