Here is an excerpt from Michele Martin’s Bamboo Blog. Her comments capture my experiences in facilitating a group of youthworkers in a workshop titled “Expanding Your Personal Toolkit“. I had a difficult time setting up the environment and conditions to reflect on how work was being done and what can you as a staff do differently to improve your work. I think some of the reasons for my difficult time ties into what Michele describes below. Creating new ways to facilitate staff to think outside the box and put aside for a minutes their long list of reasons why “you can’t do things like that in my work” is the most important step in designing this type of workshop.

One of my most consistent experiences in working with staff is
dealing with this resistance to change, which they readily see in other
people, but not in themselves. In their minds, change is something that
happens outside of themselves–it’s changes in management, in policies,
etc., rather than changes in individual professional practice that
could take place. My challenge, always, is to get them to see the
places where they can do things differently on their own, regardless of
what other people are doing. I have to help them see that it’s the
accumulation of their individual practices that creates change,
regardless of what’s happening around them. They can wait for the
“system” to change (and there are plenty of things in the system to
change), but they have to realize that they are part of the system.
Even if everything else operated differently, if they don’t start
making some different choices about their individual behavior, the
system isn’t moving anywhere. Read more…….

Brent Uncategorized Organizations, resistance change