 You go to a conference or workshop, you become motivated and inspired. You can't wait to get back to your home unit to apply your new learnings and insights. But by the time you return, you slip right back into your normal actions and routine. Despite your best intentions, no change ever really occurs. Sound familiar? Today, finally, we can do something to prevent this all too familiar immunity to change syndrome. This is of the national managing the unexpected and prescribed fire and fire use operations workshop that focused on high reliability organizing proved it. After three full, stimulating days of absorbing and discussing high reliability organizing concepts, a special duo were featured the fourth and final day. Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy of the Harvard University Graduate School facilitated their unique immunity to change commitment exercise. They recognized organizational psychologists and authors. Keegan and Leahy walked the workshop participants through this challenging pursuit. We would like to basically remind you of this reality that often happens in really good conferences, which is that people get really pumped up to do things differently. If it's really good, if it's worthwhile, you've been introduced to a set of ideas that are new. You can see how they're going to be applicable. You can see how they can get you to a new place. Then, okay, then you leave and now you have to go do something, right? And in many cases, the best of conferences lead to, well, there's just, it's like you don't have that same energy when you go back in a week later. It's like, okay, how are we going to find a way to make this happen? And that's why we want to be focusing right this morning on how to increase the likelihood that you're going to really be able to take this back. What we want to be doing this morning is putting a tool in your hand and giving you a chance to learn it through your own experience that's going to allow you to see one of the forces that we think actually keeps change from happening. And so what Bob is going to do in a moment, I'm going to turn things over to him, is he's going to lead you through a structured exercise this morning. So we're not going to be doing a lot of talking to you. As we said earlier, this is going to be like a lot of work. And it's going to be up to you to really do a kind of delve into what is really important to you. And we're going to give you a chance to have a window into what could be one of the sources that if you see more clearly what may keep you from exercising the change you want to, you're going to be in a better position to actually make it happen. Good morning to you all and listening to Lisa, I'm reminded of an old math problem that you might be familiar with. If seven frogs sat on a log and four of them decided to jump into the water, how many frogs would be left on the log? And the answer is seven, because there's a big difference between deciding and actually doing it. And it's that big gap basically that we're going to have a chance to explore through, as Lisa said, giving you a kind of tool that hopefully we will be building together because in the end what we need is a custom designed version of this tool. You each need your own version kind of of this tool. So we're going to actually have this be really like a workshop. You're actually going to build something, make something that will hopefully be useful to you in closing the gap between the good intentions that can come out of a high powered offset conference and actually being able to bring it about. We're going to need to be able to see more deeply into what are some of the complexities and sort of field forces that we're needing to contend with in order to move from intention to real execution. So what each of you is going to be kind of crafting is a lens that helps you see more deeply into that circumstance. And then not only see it better, but be able now to engage a number of these dimensions which might otherwise have been kind of invisible. We mean for this to be a very direct almost seamless link to what you have been doing and to kind of put some STP into the tank here to kind of help the change processes that you're hoping for. Whatever you're going to enter then in your commitment column drawn from your left most column should feel like it's really true for you that you actually do hold this commitment. You yourself really do want to see whether you can't bring about more of this. It's not just something your mother would be proud to hear about or that somebody else would have liked, but that it really comes from you, it feels like your own. The second is that it's clear to you that the way you're framing this commitment implicates you. It's not really ultimately about, well, if everybody else would just shape up, I would have this commitment accomplished. OK, so you have to be clear. I see you get what I'm saying here. You have to be clear how it puts you on the hook. And in this process, by the way, we've learned that when you're in the listening role, you can serve a very, very important function here that is by checking against these same criteria as a listener. So when you're listening to what your partner tells you, do you get it how this commitment implicates him or her? And the next one is that clearly then there should be room for improvement. This commitment that you're naming is not something that you'd give yourself a 95 percentile ranking on. Remember, we said it was something you thought would probably be hard for you. So it should turn out that you feel there's kind of a gap between what your current capacity to deliver on this commitment is and what you would want it to be. And the last one is that the commitment that you come up with feels very important to you. It would really make a difference that if you were to learn something, even before we go to lunch, about how to have qualitatively greater traction on this commitment, that would make, there would be a big deal because the commitment is important to you. Imagine that you were to call together a group of, a small group of people who know you really well in the context of your work for a perhaps unusual purpose which I'm about to describe. You are asking these people to give some thought to the following question before they come to this little meeting with you. And the question is, if they were to just look you straight in the eye and just name in 30 seconds or less, what they think would be the most optimal area for your own performance enhancement. The thing that they think, if you could get better at this, what they were thinking would make the biggest difference to your being able to add more value to your setting, maybe especially as it applies to helping it become a more high reliability organization. Keeping in mind that these people have no intention to hurt you, they're not saying what they're saying to do anything but be helpful and respond to this unusual request that you have made of them. So now you have two commitments in your commitment column. And I want you to just circle the one which if you could learn something in the next couple hours about how to have dramatic improvement on that commitment, which is the one you'd like to focus on now for the rest of the morning. Keeping in mind, first of all, they might be the same so you have no problem, but also keeping in mind that the one you don't circle doesn't have to be utterly ignored. You can use the tool you're going to build here in application to that one also on your own time. But right now we're going to pick which of these two is the one you want to focus on here for the rest of the morning and build your tool around. The purpose of this inquiry is not to embarrass us. It's not to make it all our fault. We're going to see that if we're willing to dig down a little bit into the bedrock that surrounds the commitment, we're going to learn a little bit more about why it is so difficult to move from intention to execution. So the more you're willing to tell on yourself and be just very, very honest about the things I do or imagine I'll do that work against this, the things that I won't do or don't do that work against this, the more powerful kind of tool you're going to create for yourself. These first two big steps we've taken identifying a clear goal that really personalizes what moving toward HRO would mean for you and then identifying some of the barriers or things that would get in the way should be not all that unfamiliar steps. I mean, in most kinds of improvement processes individually or organizationally, we've got to get clear about the goal. We've got to get clear about the barriers to the goal. What generally follows from that is plans or our plans and strategies to eliminate these barriers. And we call these the equivalent of New Year's resolutions in the work context. And the reason we call them New Year's resolutions is that they have the two most familiar features of New Year's resolutions. The first is that they are sincere. When I resolve to exercise more or call my mother in Minnesota, I really mean it. And any of those things we resolve around New Year's we really mean. So sincerity is a clear feature of any plans you would come up with to eliminate those second column barriers so you could better realize your first column commitment. The other very common feature of New Year's resolutions I probably don't have to tell you is, yeah, exactly, really insufficient, unspectacular results for most people. We're going to do something that might seem very odd. We are not going to move next to good strategic plans for eliminating the barriers. That's what you've been doing. Rather, we're going to actually invent a different kind of tool or technology that is hopefully going to move us beyond just the sincere intentions to eliminate these barriers, the New Year's resolutions, and actually enable us to bring about more of what we intend. Now we come to kind of the biggest leap of the morning and the thing which if we are successful is going to turn this process from sort of a kind of semi-dutiful filling in of columns to actually beginning to get a picture of something that is more kind of alive on the page and not just a set of entries but that the whole thing starts to come into view a little bit like when you're developing a photograph in a dark room that moment where the contact paper starts to show you a kind of picture and that picture that we're looking for is a deeper seeing into some of the kind of forces that can make it hard for us to actually bring about what we intend and what we might leave a workshop like this one hoping for. We have found though with a little work and help from our partners that we can usually get enough of a grasp of this even in a first try to begin to get a hold of kind of the bigger ideas that we're going for here. Most people find that something of much greater power results when we can take a more active relationship to the worry that is to consider the possibility I might not just have this concern. I might actually have a kind of commitment to trying to make absolutely sure that that thing I'm worried about does not occur, okay? The kind of commitment we're trying to go for next is a commitment to preventing the thing that you're worried about. The purpose of this is not just to gaze at our navels and kind of think about ourselves but actually as we're going to see before we're done to have a more powerful tool for actually not just intending what's in that first column but actually bringing it about. This is not an easy thing to do because you are actually trying to move something from invisible to visible. You're naming a kind of commitment that might be powerfully at work for you that you haven't been all that aware of up till now. So what we're getting a picture of here is a dynamic equilibrium, a system, a kind of contradictory system. We call it an immune system because it creates a kind of immunity to change. And it is overcoming that immunity that we think will be one of the things that would best equip you to actually move from an intention to bringing it about. We use the metaphor of immunity quite intentionally to evoke the notions that an immune system is a powerful system at work in nature that is beautiful and that most of the time exists to save our lives. But sometimes an immune system by its rejection of tissue or content externally or internally will put us at great risk. Our immune systems most of the time work beautifully. The immune system you're getting a glimpse of is working beautifully for you. You are all successful people. And in part, your success has been accomplished with this immune system. It works very well on behalf of a whole host of intentions and desires. But what we're coming to is the way that that immune system might actually have some limitations with respect to bringing about more of what you're hoping for. So our big assumptions give us a very deceiving sense of certainty that this is how the world is. And we each hold some big assumption that keeps this whole immune system in place. We've come to the end of our part of the day with you but we can't end without, you know, first of all thanking you for your willingness to kind of share at this level with complete strangers. I think Lisa and I, for most of you strangers, your willingness to kind of share your work and dig into kind of the bedrock here. And then hopefully you see how this is potentially a kind of support to Karl and Kathleen's good ideas about a high reliability in ways that you can take from the conference. Not only these kinds of intentions but maybe also a kind of a tool that can help you see some of the more often hidden dimensions that will work against your carrying forward in these intentions.