Making a difference

Some of the most powerful moments in drama are concerned with peoples' need to feel they are making a difference. Consider the famous "Band of brothers" speech in Shakespeare's Henry V

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or the dark and moving "Battle of the line" speech from the cult SF TV and film series "Babylon 5"

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But how do we make a difference? The desire does not guarantee the result.

There's a saying I can't track down, that one invariably achieves much less than one hopes in a single year, but on the other hand one often achieves much more than one could imagine in five years. This rings true for me. Last week we as churchwardens wrote down what we hoped to have achieved after 12 months. All I could hope for was to have made a start on my key objective. But in five years it is possible that the accumulated systematic effect of steady application might make a difference.

I think it is easy to get distracted by the modern cult of performance targets and measurement. The Hawthorne effect claims to account for much measured performance improvement as arising simply from the effect of people being studied, rather than the intrinsic merits of any particular change. Thus one can form the impression that alterations in strategy, variations in detail, reorganizations of structure, all provably lead to dramatic measurable improvements after definite and quite short periods of time - and then be continually disappointed when these changes do not translate into effective change in one's own experience. All because the measured changes arose from the good effects of extra attention being paid to the subjects of the original experiment, not at all from the technological innovation. (It's only fair to note that the wikipedia reference above says that the existence of the Hawthorne effect is hotly disputed by certain social scientists. Fair enough, but also reasonable to note the vested interest; such people would tend to dispute it, wouldn't they ...) 

Personally I lean to the view that what makes the difference is personal relationships.  When people feel valued, when they notice that they are being attended to, when they are convinced that what they are doing is worth while, will make a difference, then they are prepared to make extraordinary efforts over long periods of time. And all these prerequisites are delivered in the currency of careful personal relationships, and nurtured over substantial periods in which consistent attention is paid to the things that really matter.

What have I got to prove this? It's all anecdotal of course, but I recall the six or so years I spent in Hull as an ordinary member of a church there, and seeing how it took most of that time for many people to learn to trust an incoming southerner and decide I might not after all be some transient who would inflict bright ideas on them and then shoot off somewhere else, leaving them to pick up the pieces. Or the twenty years I have spent in my present department, and noticing how the leadership when I arrived was determined to trust people to do the best they could, and how that has over the decades built a community committed to excellence - not just individually but corporately too.

If you want to make a difference, then sometimes the way to make the difference is to spend the time, the days, the years, even the decades, consistently focussed on building trust and cooperation. In the language of mathematics, big changes come from small perturbations directed towards the same end over a long period of time. Bit of a moral there, not just for a churchwarden fortunate enough already to be serving a wonderful community, but also for people wanting to make a difference at work, or when joining a church, or when contributing to a more general enterprise ...