Act your way into a new way of thinking

Denise Kalos, our VP of Corporate Solutions, recently sent around to the O’Reilly senior management team a fabulous quote from Richard Pascale’s book Delivering Results: “People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than think their way into a new way of acting.”

How true. We like to believe that we think, we analyze, we decide, we change, but in fact, so much of our thought is a response to what we do and experience. While Pascale was writing in an HR/business management context, his insight is perhaps even more important in the context of social change. It reminds me of another great line, which my wife likes to quote, from Buckminster Fuller: “Don’t change the man. Change his environment.”

You can see in so many ways how our environment — both physical and social — changes who we are. To give only one small example, people growing up in the age of computers are as different from their merely literate predecessors as they were different in turn from people in pre-literate societies. The interesting question is when the changes reach enough of a tipping point to become truly transformational.

P.S. Very cool to be able to find the original source for the first quote via Google book search. As it came to me, it was simply labeled “Richard Pascale, Stanford Business School.” (Unfortunately, couldn’t find the original of the second one.)