THE CHANGEMAKER AS AGENT:
REDIRECTING CHANNELS
REDIRECTING CHANNELS
To make the abstract notion of a changemaker more concrete, let’s turn to Kurt Lewin’s famous metaphor for diverting the flow of one of the Mississippi River.
“Basically, the river meanders through its last several hundred miles before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico in a general course that could not be altered by any event of less than cataclysmic proportion. But its local course is subject to drastic alteration by remarkably trivial events. A person with a shovel can, at the right place, start a small cut that gets bigger and bigger until the whole river flows through the new channel and an entire curve of the river is obliterated.”
The changemaker is that “person with a shovel.”
“Basically, the river meanders through its last several hundred miles before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico in a general course that could not be altered by any event of less than cataclysmic proportion. But its local course is subject to drastic alteration by remarkably trivial events. A person with a shovel can, at the right place, start a small cut that gets bigger and bigger until the whole river flows through the new channel and an entire curve of the river is obliterated.”
The changemaker is that “person with a shovel.”