How Much Change Would You Settle For? from Harvard Business Review

At the Imagine Solutions conference, the watchword was change. Whether they wanted to bring down the national debt (like Niall Ferguson), reform Washington (like David Walker), halt global climate change (like Carter Roberts), or reinvent health care (like Patch Adams), everyone agreed that the world needed changing, even if they didn't quite agree on the specifics of what that change should look like.

Yet it became clear as the conference progressed that the speakers also disagreed on how much change was enough. When tackling daunting problems in health care, the environment, politics, or the economy, can incremental adjustments make a real difference? Or is anything less than total transformation not even worth the effort?

For the health speakers, the calls for change were mixed. Some, like Dean Ornish, emphasized that even small personal changes (quitting smoking, walking three hours a week) would have a major impact, while others, like Adams — the clown-doctor portrayed by Robin Williams in the eponymous film — called for a full reinvention of the entire health care delivery system.

For the eco-speakers, however, nothing less than transformative change would do. "We've only got one chance to get this right" was a phrase we heard repeatedly from the likes of Roberts, Carter Bales, Sylvia Earle, and Dave Gallo. Yet even there, they were willing to concede that small actions were better than doing nothing. "At the very least," said Bales, the chairman of NewWorld Capital Group, "I ask you to go home and plant a tree."

The political and economic speakers were the most hard-line, whether they were arguing for aggressive deficit reduction or wholesale congressional reform. If the politicians wouldn't "do the right thing" (whatever the "right thing" was), it was incumbent on the people to "kick 'em out." As these speakers urged the audience to hold political leaders accountable, a meme developed around the first three words of The Constitution: "We the People." Chris Hoenig got it rolling by asking the audience to supply the three most radical words in US History. "We the people," murmured the crowd. And after Hoenig invoked the phrase, the other speakers couldn't lay off it.

But I had assumed he meant three different words from that document. The words I muttered were, "More perfect union."

To me, what's truly radical in the US Constitution is its acceptance of the idea that we'll always be getting more perfect(er), but never quite getting there. Compared to the French, who stopped at no amount of guillotining in their quest for utopia, the American revolutionaries were rather tediously pragmatic, building a system that was admittedly imperfect, but was capable of growing more perfect over the ensuing centuries. A system, in other words, of incremental — rather than transformative — change.

I admit, there may be some problems — like a climate gone haywire — where a little bit of reform isn't going to be noticeably different from none at all. And there may be others — like skyrocketing national debt — where small improvements may seem like an imperceptible drop in a vast bucket. And for leaders trying to reform health care, while small changes may indeed yield big results, pointing proudly to tiny tweaks doesn't generally play well on the campaign trail.

But here I must echo the words of my former boss and forever mentor, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman. "I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world," she once wrote. "I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another." And indeed, the second day of the conference featured some (though in my view, not nearly enough) people who are doing just that: social entrepreneurs who are revitalizing the blighted cities of the Rust Belt, creating better jobs for immigrant women in New York, bringing affordable glasses to rural India, and founding boarding schools for poor kids in Washington, DC.

Sure, it's nice to think that you can get a bunch of smart people in a room and ideate solutions to the world's most intractable problems. But despite the burgeoning popularity of shindigs like TED and Aspen, it's easier to call for sweeping change from a stage than drive small changes on the ground.

Of course, if the conference had been called "Imagine Incremental Improvements" or "Grinding Out Solutions Day After Thankless Day," maybe no one would've come.