 Affecting change has become a modern specialty. Change management experts are now hired by administrative managers to identify and implement improvements in management. This is not in accord with scientific knowledge of management. It arises where administrative management treats improvement as a task to be assigned to a specialist. Modern administrative authorities do not approach improvement as something to be accomplished in the running of the organization, not having authority over the resources of the business. Even the most skilled improvement efforts are likely to fail in performance. They get good press, but only half-hearted support for implementation. We do have an expertise in change, but it is in performance management. The purpose is getting something done, accomplishing the improvement through direction of resources. The expertise of a performance engineer is technical support for those who have something to accomplish through the efforts of subordinates. In this course, we the people have something to accomplish. The information in this lesson is technical support for accomplishing beneficial change. People resist change. It is always treated as a cost. The benefits to be accomplished have to be great enough to overcome the cost for 80 percent of the people, or we the people will not come to agreement on making that change. We have also the lesson of exception management, that it is not our job to operate our government. We hire public officers to do that in our name. We are to assume exception management over government operation. We can do this through reviewing and approving the use of public resources, through approving personnel actions, and through managing or applying discipline as seems appropriate. For that reason, it is always desirable to work through assigned purpose, through enlisting the hired leadership of public officers to implement the changes on which we can agree. An additional concept is the regular practice of this course in coming to agreement with others, a matter for giving voice to we the people, on what we mandate to our leadership for action. Leaders are also people. They also have families to raise and value freedom and prosperity. They will be part of the people who come to agree. Being human, they are also subject to the same challenges. They have like resistance to change. They must be provided with such an understanding of the benefit that it is sufficient to overcome their resistance to change. In their case, they operate in a subgroup society that threatens to punish individual change efforts. It is clear that 80% agreement in the larger population will simply direct the changes on which people agree, and the leadership will go along with it out of necessity. The effort to get 80% of the people of the United States to so agree, and to know that they are in agreement, is a very high bar, and even the most valued changes are unlikely to be able to get that result in any reasonable amount of time. It is here that our sampling understanding comes into play. It is to have sufficient agreement in the sampling of we the people, so that, like a class of students, it can indicate a like potential for agreement in the larger group of people. Once that is established, we are able to tap into the weakness of us and them thinking that might be an opposition. There is incredible potency for any elected leader in leading what 80% of the public wants to happen. There is great cost in refusing to lead where the people might see it as intentionally representing some other group of people. Another potent application concept is that there is no us and them in a mandate. There is only us. If there is a real potential for mandate, it would take an intentional effort to find a bias group of people. Any sampling that is not intentionally biased will either support or fail to support a proposed change. You as a class of students are intentionally biased. You are gathered in our reasonably uniform group by age and position in life. The group most potent for addressing change to leaders is a sampling of potential voters in the representative voting districts. If the sampling indicates 80% agreement, it is very likely to indicate that any publication of the sample will initiate agreement in fact. The agreement in the sample becomes a leverage for enlisting the leader to manage the change on behalf of the public. It is here that we the people who elect some specific representative can represent the voting public. It is, as to that sampling, greater representation than the elected leader is able to even claim to have as a basis for being in office. The citizens who have run the sample that indicates mandate have potential power in representing the public. The public leader has to receive it or face the consequences of having his or her rejection published instead of his or her leadership. The public leader is to be enlisted to lead the change, noting that he has to support the public in making the change, and you as the ones bringing it forward are demonstrating by your doing so that the people are willing to take action to enlist and support the leader who answers to the voice of the public. The threat, of course, is that the same people would work to take the office away from the leader who refuses to serve the public. This is not to be accomplished with the power of the office, but with the greater power of the people as they are agreed. The true value for the leader that overcomes the social benefit of being part of the ruling elite is that power of the people in agreement, and it is absolute. One other leaders will go along, accepting the leadership of the one who already has 80% public support. John and Sue develop a paper to convert the state's real property ownership management from regulation that the people have to meet into service that the state provides to keep track of taxpayer responsibility. It would have the county officers record property transfers and issue deeds as a county service. They go into three neighborhoods and go door to door, sampling the public with sufficient data to indicate potential mandate and to carry this to Ellery, their state representative. What does Ellery do? There are already more than 100 households that know about this effort and they consistently support making the change. Trying to lead this effort is not going to be well received by other leaders, but he does not have any reason to refuse. If he is able to enlist the public to active support, he can make it happen. Ellery will avoid open refusal, but may try to delay it, minimizing what he has to do to keep the support that put him in office. John and Sue promise to publish his reaction, accepting or not, and his willingness to actively pursue the matter in accord with the sampling document. Ellery is then in a bind. Leading this change will take a great deal of effort on his part. Then again, the cost of refusal may well be the loss of public office and hostility among the people who could support him. Quite simply, the rule is that the officers who do things in the name of the public are not in charge of the public. They have to answer sooner or later to that same public. Sue and John have just initiated the change effort. This enlistment is a start, an effective assignment of responsibility for Ellery to lead the change. We can now address administrative public management over that effort. This is accomplished by establishing the management feedback to the public by resourcing the effort and by indicating a willingness to gather the public to handle any challenges that arise in implementing the will of the people. John notes to Ellery that the people will be willing to take an active role in seeing to what the people value. This includes things like talking to their families, friends and neighbors to enlighten the rest of the public to the state of the change and the public support it has. He has just provided a new level of access to the public, the ultimate source of all public authority to help do what the public wants done. The question to Ellery is, what do you need from us? You're based to make this happen. Now Ellery is committing himself to the effort. He has to come up with some sort of plan or direction that he is indicating he will pursue. What is he to do to make this happen? It is most likely that Ellery will start to negotiate with John and Sue. If this can be done, then I can do this. The result of such an effort is a plan of action. And John and Sue can identify things that should be published to Ellery's voting public to mark his progress, to enlist the active efforts of the public where needed. The result is a management plan for Ellery. And it is also an executive management plan for we the people. This is a lot of work for John and Sue and they have promised to do even more in support of Ellery's plan direction. Change is not easy, but it is possible. What sort of things can be so important to people that they are willing to support the change action? This is part of the importance of publishing the sample agreement to the public so that we the people are aware of our high level of agreement. That is information that the amount of work demanded will be shared by a wider public base. The change effort supported by any one citizen is likely to be minor. Even as this is empowerment of the people, it is minimizing the effort that has to be committed by both the leader and the individual citizen. We also have a source of potency in the almost universal damage that non-representative government has accomplished. As with Sue and John's situation, a government process of regulation so severe that we have to hire experts just to get the public service provides a potent base for agreement. Government is to serve and there is value in serving instead of being burnt. Spending on public institutions that deliver nothing to the public can be a point of agreement. Consider the federal Department of Education which now doesn't even pretend to deliver anything to the taxpayer. There is a potential to fund online public education all the way through graduate school for those professions where there is recognized public need. The potential for producing what people value is there instead of programs designed to benefit those who do not pay for it. Instead of grade school costing $10,000 per student per year, it might be $1,000 or less. That is the difference between sovereign government mandating what people do and a representative government delivering service. So what change might bring this about? How about no longer committing public dollars to any educational program that does not deliver value to the taxpayers? That has been the very purpose of this course. It is an educational experience in coming together to find agreement on what we the people can value. As from the beginning of this course of study, it is our attempt to divide ourselves and take sides on issues that makes us weak and ineffective. It is our agreement that binds us into a people who have a purpose. It is our agreements that have importance to being a powerful people. It is only as our public officers represent us as a powerful people that they become powerful leaders and only as we are powerful that our nation becomes powerful. The question for you is what you should do now? How will you find agreements that will empower us all as a people?