How long does it take to change a culture?

We have ways out that we don't see.

Our whole world is like the scene near the start of the movie Labyrinth where our heroine and a worm are walking down a seemingly endless pathway around the castle, and she finally blurts out "There's no door!" and the worm corrects her and says "Yes, they're everywhere! There's one right there. You're just not seeing them." Then her vision "clicks into place" and she finds the door, no problem.

As they say, "Some things you have to believe to see."

There is hope.

This is the consistent message that various religions of the world have tried to embody, that commerce in the form of "The Toyota Way" or "Making the Impossible Possible" teaches, and that, at last, science is starting to catch up and understand and accept as legitimate, as it gets enough computer power to model the feedback loops involved.

While we tend to think of "culture" as being a huge, almost unchangeable rock or "supertanker we're trying to turn", in point of fact it can change overnight.

Did you ever have this happen to you? There's a person you knew a long time and had pretty fixed view of, and then you find out something you never knew about them or about their life or past, and it changes everything in an instant? Suddenly you realize you'd been misinterpreting them all that time, just to see things "in a new light"?

This, dear friends, is the kind of "new light" that we need to understand the workings of, and get a lot more of.

We tend to rush on by and not pause to realize, "Whoa. That's exactly what I need."

In fact, we need to start manufacturing "new light" bulbs and lay out a power grid for making them shine, or maybe even a wireless broadcast power system would be better -- the cellphone model not land-line model.

Please slow down your reading and "reflect" on this for a moment. I'm not talking about magic or mysticism or "Kum-bay-ya by the fire" here - I'm just talking about exactly the same kind of sudden realization that all of us have had and can relate to.

We could call it a "magic moment", but it is only amazing in impact. We usually spend zero seconds reflecting on exactly how a complete transformation of our thinking can occur in 1 second. It is kind of surprising, isn't it?

What is called "one-time learning" is the same way. We tend to think of learning as something that is hard, requires buying expensive textbooks, going to class, studying for hours or weeks, taking exams, and maybe we get and maybe we don't. But take a 4 year old child somewhere where they get a cookie, and see if they remember that fact the next time they are in that neighborhood. Of course they do. Effortless, one-time learning. No study required. No memorization of facts. It just goes in and stays.

I've heard "true art" described as a way of making a person experience something that has the effect that they never see the world the same way again after that.

Actually, this is pretty much the meaning of the word "repent" in the Christian Bible, to re-think something in a dramatic new way, to re-conceptualize it, to re-frame it, to "turn and be saved." It's not magic or I don't know what, it's just an "Oh, my God!" moment of realization of something that was always there that you were blipping.

And as soon as perception changes, behavior follows along and changes. The "impossible" becomes "possible." Everything is somehow different, in a new light.

If you dig under the covers in "The Toyota Way", it is clear that the end point, the goal of all the fancy tools and techniques, is actually just to get to a new way of seeing things and seeing each other. They use the term "philosophy" and say the whole way is based on it. To me, that word smacks of years of academic study and Ph.D's and makes the concept seem almost impossible.

So, I'm going to apply the Toyota Way to itself, to thinking about the whole process of transforming ourselves to the Toyota Way, and ask "Why do we imagine it should take years or decades of struggle to accomplish?"

I don't think it does.

I think we could do it in an afternoon, if we drill down and figure out what it is that we're not seeing that we need to see, and how to make that a vivid one-time-learning, flash of realization experience - with every camera flash in the whole company going off at the same second.

Flash. Realization. Exact "same" world, and yet, suddenly, in an instant, entirely different.

I mean, Toyota looked at US auto companies struggling to convert assembly lines from one model to another in 6 weeks, and asked "Why can't we do that in 6 minutes?" and realized they could, and now they do. The barrier was all in their heads. Some things you have to believe to see.

Now that we have a whole new technology of incredibly realistic, life-size 3-D simulation virtual worlds, you'd think we should be able to script whatever interactive experience we want someone to have, and do the whole thing in under an hour, tops.

This requires challenging the "common wisdom" that the Toyota Way involves some kind of magic learning that cannot be described and only can be pointed to indirectly that takes years and years of labor to grasp.

Well, that's what some high priests of yoga said about certain physiological control they had learned to do, and it did take them decades, thank you, to do it the old way, but we can do it in 5 minutes with biofeedback now. It's 2007, not 207.

I recall Tony Robbins mentions in one of his self-help books that someone asks him how long it takes to change a deeply embedded belief or behavior, and he responds "How long do you want it to take? We can change that this afternoon."


We don't really have the luxury of taking another generation to turn around the economy of Southeast Michigan. We need something we can do in "months" not "decades". A lot of people need help. A lot of businesses need help. The edge is way too close for comfort.

If we can just focus on how "new light" works, it becomes possible.


Wade

(Image of a self-assembling tower crane adding a new section to its own top as it grows is from "How Science Works"; "Friends forever" image is by the author.)