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Find/Replace

An Irregular Column on Sustainability, Innovation, and Global Affairs

by Alan AtKisson

21 April 2004

Watch Out! Here Comes the Amoeba!

So there I was, attending yet another sustainability conference, in a big hotel, by a huge freeway, at the edge of an enormous shopping mall.

I wish I could tell you that such ironies have not been a frequent occurrence in my life. In fact, I was starting to wonder whether my capacity for irony had finally worn out, and I might just break down in sobs at some point.

Then something wonderful happened. Enough to make me tear up a bit, but for much better reasons.

It started with a presentation by Julie Weiss, who works for the City of Palo Alto, California. Back in 1999, she explained, "Sustainability was known as 'the S-word'" in the City offices. "We literally weren't allowed to use it in any official communication."

Five years later, the City of Palo Alto has a Sustainability program, a Sustainability Policy, an annual Sustainability Report ... and the City administration itself has been certified as a "Green Business", the first city in the country to be so recognized. Everybody from the janitorial staff to the computer and IT specialists has been engaged.

They've cut energy use by 17%. Begun a switch to biodiesel in their heavy equipment (up to 20% already). Switched to low- or non-toxic cleaners, pest control systems, printing chemicals. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have already been saved.

What changed? How did Palo Alto go from "S-Word" to S-Champion? "The first thing," said Julie, "was getting the right people on board." She started talking about Innovators with new ideas, and Change Agents who are good at spreading ideas, and finding Transformers who help legitimate the ideas in the eyes of the mainstream -- all of which sounded quite familiar. And then she put up a diagram to explain this strategy: The Amoeba of Cultural Change. "I'm glad I have the citation on the slide," she said, "since Alan AtKisson is sitting in the audience."

What mostly warmed my heart, there in the middle of America's unsustainable mega-infrastructure, was seeing once again that change was possible. That committed people, thinking strategically and working over the long-term, could take a good idea and intelligently spread it from person to person, transforming both behavior and culture in the process. And lightening humanity's load on an overburdened planet.

But it also tickled me to know that this little Amoeba might have contributed in some small way. Created back in 1990, building off of ideas from Robert Gilman ("Culture is like an amoeba ...") and Everett Rogers (father of Innovation Diffusion Theory), the amoeba is the heart of a training exercise and planning aid for strategic change agentry. It's been said all over the world, by UN training programs, corporations, NGOs ... and cities like Palo Alto, of course.

But back in 1990, I had just made it up, with brainstorm help from a friend (Duane Fickeisen, now a Unitarian minister), in response to an invitation to create a workshop. The occasion was the landmark "Earth and Spirit" conference in Seattle, which drew 1,200 people and helped start many green balls rolling. Some of those balls became projects, organizations, whole careers.

For example, among the attendees of that conference were Dick and Jeanne Roy, founders of Northwest Earth Institute (NWEI) in Portland, Oregon. Back then, Dick was one of the top corporate lawyers in Portland, but he and Jeanne were getting more and more deeply concerned about environmental issues. So they went to "Earth and Spirit," and while there, they attended my first-ever Amoeba workshop. It was then known as the "Innovation Diffusion Game."

The Roys went home inspired and immediately convened a meeting of all the conference attendees from Portland. Every single person showed up.

Out of that meeting grew more meetings, and out of those meetings grew the idea of starting a Portland non-profit that would organize voluntary discussion courses, in the workplace, over lunch, on environmental topics.

The program has been so successful that is has now spread to all 50 U.S. states. Many thousands of people have participated in NWEI's self-facilitated discussion courses. And a surprising number of those people have been motivated to start making changes within their organizations or communities.

"Whenever I think about cultural change," Dick Roy wrote to me recently, "I think of the Amoeba." And it shows: among the many wonderful things that Northwest Earth Institute exemplifies is smart cultural change strategy -- the Amoeba in action. When you are informed by Innovation Diffusion Theory, you understand -- in practical as well as theoretical terms -- what it takes to move an idea from zero to broad acceptance.

While Amoeba is now a more developed training and planning framework, Dick and Jeanne Roy were part of the first group to experience the Amoeba in the form of a roleplaying  game, which demonstrates the process of introducing a new (and sustainable) idea, and figuring out how to get it adopted, one person at a time. Among other lessons, participants learn that the idea must be packaged right, and introduced by people with good credibility and communication skills (regardless of who actually invented it). Such people are called Change Agents, and they understand that an idea is more likely to succeed if it links up with people's other perceived needs.

Most important, Change Agents quickly learn, is to whom the idea gets presented: if you try to interest the apathetic, or convert the opposition, you are in for frustration and perhaps failure. But if you quietly attract the curious and the open-minded, and those hungry for something that addresses a nagging worry they have, you will start building critical mass. And that critical mass will tug the rest of the "Amoeba" – your organization, community, or society at large -- in a new direction.

The strategy of seeding little self-study discussion groups all over Oregon, which was NWEI's starting point, was a very smart innovation diffusion strategy. It pulled in the "early adopters" (a term from Innovation Diffusion Theory, one that marketers especially know) and awakened no opposition from reactionary vested interests. In other words, it looked harmless. But today, Oregon is a global hotbed of sustainability work -- and a surprising number of the people who have led the change have been affected by NWEI in some way.

Julie Weiss summed up the Palo Alto diffusion strategy in a few succinct points. Leverage your project by linking it to people's existing interests. Present new goals that align with those interests. And then be ready to adjust your "social marketing" of the ideas on the fly, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.

NWEI has also done all of these things, and now the NWEI model itself has spread nationally -- the diffusion of an innovation that itself promotes the diffusion of (sustainability) innovation! Now we're talking "meta-diffusion," a truly accelerated cultural change strategy.

NWEI and the City of Palo Alto are just two stories, but they reflect hundreds of others where good change strategy -- which doesn't require an Amoeba, of course! --has turned somebody's good idea into a major company-wide, city-wide, or even global shift, often in just a few years.

Processes like this are the actual and real building blocks of transformation. Think about it this way: Everything -- literally, everything -- around us that constitutes human culture was once an innovation, somebody's bright idea. With the help of effective Change agents in the key early stages, the successful ideas spread, faster and farther, until they became "normal life" -- often shoving aside older, less effective ideas in the process.

That's what's happening with sustainability, right now.

Aren't you glad you're a part of it?

A version of this article was originally commissioned by Earth Matters, the newsletter of the Northwest Earth Institute. See www.nwei.org.

Alan AtKisson is a consultant and writer on strategic sustainability. For more information on the Amoeba of Cultural Change, see Chapter 9 of his book Believing  Cassandra: An Optimist Looks at a Pessimist's World, by Alan AtKisson (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1999); or visit www.AtKisson.com.

"Find/Replace"  focuses on innovation for sustainability:  finding what's wrong, replacing it with something better. For permission to reprint, please contact us.

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