By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

A series of exercises I recently conducted with C-level executives at several universities and conferences validates what readers of this blog already know – we are living in a transformative time. What may surprise some is that we humans have been living in a “Transformative Time” for the past 600 years. What is surprising to this futurist is that even with 600 years of transforming under our belts, most executives feel like this is their first transformation. Many are uncertain about how to lead through the uncertainty of transformation. Another data point surfaced from extensive executive interviews is that in many modern organizations the concepts of “leadership” and “management” has been conflated.  “Leadership” and “management” ARE NOT synonyms. “Management” is all about getting “there”. “Leadership” is all about figuring out where there is. The point of this blog is that we humans have been deciding upon new “theres” for hundreds of years. Isn’t it time that our species started transferring lessons learned in past transformations to the current circumstance? With that in mind I thought I would take a perfunctory stab at identifying some past transformations and enumerating some lessons learned.

One of the greatest and still ongoing transformations in the history of mankind is the eradication of ethnic, gender, religious and life style prejudices.  Transformation lessons associated with this multi-millennial transformation comes from a surprising source – the wonderfully readable Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath.

In a section starting on page 111 they recount the experiment of a school teacher in an all-white Midwestern rural district seeking to make prejudice understandable to a group of third graders. The experiment was precipitated by the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The students were familiar with King but could not understand who would want him dead, or why. King had been designated one of the ‘Heroes of the Month’ two months earlier.

The object of the experiment was to make prejudice tangible to her students. At the start of class, she divided the students into two groups: brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids.

“She then made the shocking announcement: brown-eyed kids were superior to blue-eyed kids – ‘They’re the better people in this room.’  The groups were separated: Blue-eyed kids were forced to sit at the back of the classroom. Brown-eyed kids were told that they were smarter. They were given extra time at recess. The blue-eyed kids had to wear special collars, so that everyone would know their eye color from a distance. The two groups were not allowed to mix at recess.”

The labeling transformed the class environment. “I watched those kids turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating third graders…it was ghastly. “Friendships seemed to dissolve instantly, as brown-eyed children taunted their blue-eyed former friends. One brown-eyed student asked Elliott how she could be the teacher “if you’ve got dem blue eyes.”

At the start of class the following day, Elliott walked in and announced that she had been wrong. It was actually the brown-eyed children who were inferior. This reversal of fortune was embraced instantly. A shout of glee went up from the blue-eyed kids as they ran to place their collars on their lesser, brown-eyed counterparts.

On the day when they were in the inferior group, students described themselves as sad, bad, stupid, and mean. “When we were down,” one boy said, is voice cracking, ‘it felt like everything bad was happening to us.’ When they were on top, the students felt happy, good, and smart.

Even their performance on academic tasks changed. One of the reading exercises was a phonics card pack that the kids were supposed to go through as quickly as possible. The first day, when the blue-eyed kids were on the bottom, it took them 5.5 minutes. On the second day, when they were on top, it took 2.5 minutes. “Why couldn’t you go this fast yesterday?” Elliot asked. One blue-eyed girl aid, “We had those collars on…” Another student chimed in, “We couldn’t stop thinking about those collars.”

This experiment shows the power of a leader – one in a position of authority to influence behavior, identity and performance through labels.