120 Thousand Intentional Acts

A few years ago, I was invited to help a renowned summer camp restore its culture of respect. Enrollments for this technology-free camp had declined sharply and when administrators asked their loyal community of parents why, they were shocked to hear reports of bullying and exclusion. Camp leadership was determined to understand the source of the concerns and reestablish kind, inclusive, and respectful behaviors between campers and counselors.

My colleague and I created a three-year cultural change initiative based on the best available evidence and field-tested practice to be rolled out over a three-year engagement. It was elegant, sophisticated, comprehensive and … completely overwhelming to the counselors who would have to implement it.

Within the first day of our meetings, we realized we would need a different approach. Rather than convincing camp counsellors that our sophisticated, rigorous and evidence-based solution would work, we needed to engage them as partners to create a response that felt realistic and do-able. This is how we re-imagined our program:

 1.    Engage your change agents as partners

The problem we needed to address was escalation of unkind, exclusive behavior among campers during the unstructured transition times between scheduled activities. The best people to interrupt these behaviors were sixteen-, and seventeen-year-old Counselors in Training (CITs), who supervised campers at these times.

The CITs credibility came from their image as the coolest kids in camp and the thought of being caught in the middle of an escalating conflict between campers (even those who were much younger) was paralyzing. So, we needed to find a way for them to effect change without undermining their cool, confident authority.

2.    Use data to make the problem personal and discussable

The turning point in our process came when we asked a room full of CITs how often they saw disrespectful behavior about the camp. Their response? Each of them personally witnessed about ten acts of bullying, teasing or other exclusive behavior every day. The estimates from adult staff members were similar.  When we did the math, we were all shocked to learn that this amounted to 56,000 acts of unkindness over the course of one summer.

 10 acts daily X 100 observers X 8 weeks X 7 days p/wk = 56,000*

It was a sobering moment, but it also encouraged CITs to share stories from their own camp experiences and identify with the challenges for current campers.

3.    Make the first step laughably simple, natural and easy

Research tells you that the first step in changing a culture of disrespect is to disrupt unkind acts as they happen and teach people a simple and more effective way to resolve their disagreements. At first, we offered the CITs a simple, age-appropriate and very effective four-step “change conversation” that takes less than one minute to work through.

The basic structure of this “change conversation” is:
What’s up? | What happened? | What if? | What next?

But even this was met with resistance. Counselors were not confident they would be listened to if they tried to intervene and worried that they would not know what to do if they found themselves in the middle of a public and escalating conflict. So we made things even simpler.

Rather than engaging in an intervention, all we asked CITs and staff members to do in the first year of the program was to disrupt unkind behavior every time they saw it by saying something like … “Hey camper, that’s unkind, we don’t do/say things like that at this camp.”

Recall that, based on our earlier calculations, that would be 56,000 interruptions to bullying, teasing, exclusion, disrespect and other forms of unkind behavior over the course of 8 weeks.*

4.    Observe what happens and take more steps

The results of this micro-intervention were nothing short of miraculous. It turned out that being courageous and sticking up for others had not undermined their authority at all, in fact, they were seen as even cooler and more capable. When we arrived for year two of the program, we found a group of people hungry for more tools and ready to implement most of the interventions they had described as “overwhelming” just the year before.

Camp administrators had positive responses from families during their post-camp follow-up calls but it was the counselors themselves who were enthusiastically driving the change. Together with the CITs, we chose a few more micro-skills from the original tool kit that would be most supportive of the program they now wanted to own and implement.

By the end of the third year, the commitment to restoring kindness and inclusiveness was so complete that they eliminated activities that were part of their celebrated tradition going back three generations because they could now see how these contributed to unhealthy competition and division among the campers.

So What?

This experience flies in the face conventional wisdom that large-scale change is only achievable through complex programs imposed by managers on an unwilling and resistant workforce. Momentum for change was achieved by the universal and willing commitment to one simple act of courage by large numbers of individuals.

Once the first “laughably small” habit (interrupt) had taken root, people were confident that they could successfully confront bigger challenges (intervene) and were open to learning and using the tools they would need to effect lasting change. Somewhat surprisingly, after scaling back to very humble first-steps, the whole elegant, sophisticated, comprehensive program was achieved within the original three-year time horizon, but only after change agents learned to trust the extraordinary power of their own collective action.

Now What?

At the risk of belaboring the point, if you were to engage in one intentional act every work day for a whole year, you would have repeated that one thing about 250 times.

As a leader, that could be 250 warm “Hello’s”; or 250 genuine “Thank You’s” to build a friendlier, more inclusive organization. It could be 250 reminders about the company’s goals or 250 opportunities to reinforce a key organizational value. For individuals, it could be 250 opportunities to practice being on time for the daily huddle, identifying a safety concern, or reaching out to thank a team member.

Granted, it can be challenging to sustain such disciplined practice when you are caught in the whirlwind of daily organizational life. But great outcomes can have humble beginnings, and there are habit-science tools that will help you find “laughably small” actions to drive change and support your people as they practice them.

If you pick the right small behavior and sequence it right,
then you won’t have to motivate yourself to have it grow.
It will just happen naturally, like a good seed planted in a good spot.
BJ Fogg | Stanford University

What intentional act can you commit to today
that will make your organization a better place?

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*If you are wondering how we got from 56,000 to 120,000 intentional acts, research suggests that people in authority only notice about 1/10 acts of unkindness, so it seemed reasonable to assume that the numbers were at least twice those reported (making the “unkindness index” closer to 112,000). Somewhere along the way this number was inflated to 120,000 which must have had a more compelling “ring” to it, so it stuck. Admittedly, the estimation process was rather unscientific, but the aim of the conversation was to generate urgency and a sense of personal responsibility, not to conduct a precise audit.

© Lesley Diaz | Collaborance 2025.

This is a refreshed version of an article I wrote in 2016