How Do We Incite Change?

For the month of April, we’ve been considering what it means to incite change at in our personal work lives. This could be considering the ways in which we interact with people in an email, to designing experiences for people with differing abilities, or spreading the labor across a team in an equitable way.

At Apt-122, we know that the experiential industry can struggle to disrupt the status quo, which is why challenging conventions through diverse teams is part of our mission! 

To dig deeper into the idea of work-based change, we sought help from this article published by Harvard Business Review, in which author Debra Meyerson coins the term ‘tempered radicals’. In her eyes, a tempered radical is someone who works “quietly to challenge prevailing wisdom and gently provoke their organizational cultures to adapt… they work to effect significant changes in moderate ways.” Sound familiar?

Meyerson divides these methods of change into four categories:

The first is disruptive self-expression, which could be evidenced by displaying posters for environmental justice in your office, or wearing a badge promoting a particular cause.

Verbal jujitsu, the second method, uses words to redirect the conversation in a way that calls out problematic language.

Variable-term opportunists “spot, create, and capitalize on short-and-long-term opportunities for change”, which could mean anything from double-sided printing to save paper, to changing the way a team is managed to be collaborative rather than dictatorial.

Lastly, strategic alliance building allows individuals to work together to achieve change at a larger scale.

Through these methods, change can happen at different paces, in different contexts, at different scales. Work-based microactivism isn’t the only form that matters, but it can be used as a model to incite change one step at a time.