Transformation Triple Point: 3 Essential Elements of Change
Everyone seems to be mad about Mars.
I am no exception.
I recently started reading a fascinating book on interplanetary exploration called, “The Sirens of Mars” by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Not long after I began, NASA rover Perseverance landed on Mars and took pictures of the mysterious red planet.
Early in the book, a group of scientists are at work in a simulated Martian environment as they attempt to replicate the six millibars of pressure that is just past the triple point for water. The term "Triple point” is the almost otherworldly combination of conditions where an substance exists as a solid, liquid, and vapor AT THE SAME TIME.
While running experiments in the Mars Surface Wind Tunnel at NASA Ames, a small glass of water was placed on the edge of a viewing window in the control room. As the air was removed from the chamber, the water began to boil, then splash. After the boiling and splashing, ice began to form in the boiling water.
BOIL = Vapor
SPLASHING = Liquid
ICE = Solid
The author writes, “I understood what was happening. I’d read abut the heat of vaporization in my textbooks, how a substance will cool as it evaporates, even as it boils into a near vacuum. But no amount of physics could remove the spell that I was under.”
Seeing these 3 elements coexisting seemed to be some sort of a Martian Magic trick performed here on the blue planet. Change, whether organizationally, individually, or systemically can also seem as elusive as an illusion.
And when change does occur, the next question is: “Will it last?”
Throughout most of last year as the inhabitants of planet earth were wrestling with the multidimensional effects of coronavirus, there was another virus, attacking the earth. While longer lasting and much more deadly than Covid-19, many were coming to grips with for the very first time:
Racism.
After the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubrey, Daniel Prude, and the shooting of Jacob Blake books on racism, racial inequality, systemic injustice flew off social distanced shelves.
Online behemoth Amazon sold out of books like The New Jim Crow, I’m Still Here, and How to be an Anti-Racist . Movies and documentaries on racism were streamed like never before.
Zoom discussions, online forums, and social media “Live” sessions were exploding everywhere. Corporations made declarative statements about how Black lives mattered and how racism was absolutely unacceptable in their organizations.
But after all of that….”Now What? Where are we now? Where do we go from here?”
The reason why some of the movements have stalled, and after much ado it feels more like nothing than something, is because learning (books, movies, documentaries, etc) is only one of the essential elements of change. Our learning allowed us to wrestle with the concepts and theories of injustice, but conceptual and theoretical change can’t change anything.
For more sustainable change, we must employ all all three. For the sake of our conversation, we will call them the 3 Circles of Change.
Circle One: LEARNING: We have to expand our thinking
Circle Two: LIVING: We have to expand our relationships
Circle Three: LEADERSHIP: As we expand our thinking & relationships, we will expand our leadership influence.
Change is never easy and the work that change requires is hard. As author Robin Sharma says, “Change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.”
In order for true change to be sticky, sustainable, and substantive we must navigate the 3 circles effectively. By using the three elements of the Transformation Triple Point: Learning + Living + Leadership we move from conceptual to operational and build momentum to bring organizational, individual, or systemic transformation.
When we consistently live what we learned, we authenticate our leadership. Though this is hard work, messy work, if we press through the end can be gorgeous. And that’s even cooler than an interstellar mission to Mars.