Current e-Journal
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October 14, 2025
Small Steps,
BIG Difference
In this week’s Systems Change Newsletter…
- Invitations and Announcements
- Catalytic Thinking Exercise: Small steps, BIG difference
- Resources to Further Your Practice
- One more Thing
If You Are Already a GREAT Consultant, This Is For You
There are just 3 seats left in this class-full-of-insights. This session is for consultants who are already good at what you do, and who are curious about what’s next for your practice. Especially at this crucial time, what does it take to open the door to your clients’ potential? This will be a small group, to ensure discussion. Dive into your own potential here…
Catalytic Thinking Exercise:
Small Steps, BIG Difference
It’s the one-year anniversary of our podcast! And if we’ve gained one lesson from all those episodes, it is that big differences happen not with a huge bang, but as a combination of lots of small steps.
The civil rights movement in the U.S. began when a single woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to sit at the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Just one person, sitting on a bus.
The following Monday began a bus boycott in Montgomery. That boycott is often seen as the kick-off to a movement that changed the law of the land in the whole country.
Was Montgomery the size of Los Angeles or New York? Hardly. At the time, the population was just 120,000 people. (Today the population of the whole metro area is under 400,000.) But that boycott by thousands of Black riders started a chain reaction across the entire U.S. And each of those riders was just one person, joining in with other “just one person”s.
The domino that topples the final domino may be the one that gets all the attention. But there is no final domino without the first domino. And that first domino is almost always a small step.
The important thing is that we see those first steps in context, creating conditions for the next thing to happen, and then the next thing. Just like dominoes.
In this week’s edition of the podcast, two public health workers share stories of how their seemingly small actions are taking those first steps.
The domino that topples the final domino may be the one that gets all the attention. But there is no final domino without the first domino. And that first domino is almost always a small step.
In another episode, an expert on neighborhood health talks about the power of neighborhoods. Not the power of cities and towns; the power of knowing the folks who live alongside you. And when asked what practical things folks can do to take action, a foundation CEO answered with the same thing: get to know the people who live alongside you.
Can we reshape how the economy of an entire nation functions? Not easily. But we can topple that first domino, to show what is possible. We can change how an individual business might operate, or how a campus bookstore functions.
And then there are those who talk about changing ourselves before we can change others. From a renowned scholar of social movements to the head of a national association of foundations; from a zen priest to a capacity building consultant and a community organizer, we hear the message over and over, that those individual changes absolutely radiate out to the world. Small steps create big changes.
Reading to kids in a laundromat. Adding your voice to a coalition. Creating a neighborhood newsletter.
Think globally, act locally. Small steps, big bang. The lessons from our podcast guests – folks who hail from all over the social change ecosystem – echo over and over.
Try this
If you’ve been experimenting with the questions of Catalytic Thinking, you know that those questions are all about turning small steps into big results.
While the framework is most powerful when we consider all the questions together, there is power in asking even just one of those questions, in whatever setting you find yourself.
- Who will be affected by what we’re considering? What will it take for them to be part of this decision?
- What do all those folks who will be affected aspire to? What is important to them?
- What big, hairy, aspirational goal are we aiming to accomplish?
- What conditions (dominoes!) can we put in place, to ensure that goal is achievable?
- Which of those conditions will we seek to affect immediately (small steps)?
- What will our people need in order to accomplish that?
- And what do we have to build upon as we step into that work?
In a community of practice last week, one of the members shared that her own groups are now asking the questions of Catalytic Thinking on their own, when she’s not around. She sees those questions in the minutes of those meetings, and sees the difference it is making in those discussions. She hears them at public hearings at the town council in her rural area. The dominoes she has laid out are creating change, one step at a time.
- Aiming for what is possible.
- Building upon the assets in your community, sharing where you can, reaching for collective care.
- Shifting how your organization works, and the assumptions at the core of that work.
The questions of Catalytic Thinking are simple, powerful steps you can take towards inclusion, focusing on what is possible, building on your strengths. With each of those small steps, you are laying down your own dominoes towards change.
So, Happy One Year Anniversary to our podcast, and thank you to all who have shared their wisdom with all of us.
Here’s to your taking small steps in your own life, to begin creating what is possible in our world.
Resources to Further Your Practice
- LISTEN: The links above are to individual episodes. To subscribe to the podcast and listen to them all, head here…
- READ: “Think Globally, Act Neighborly: 6 Small Steps to Get Big Change.” This article by one of our podcast guests, Seth Kaplan, is a great first step to making a difference. Read it here…
One more thing:
Help the Helpers (and Yourself)
If you are in the U.S., there is so much you can do to fight the authoritarian destruction we are witnessing. Donate to the National Council of Nonprofits. Subscribe to the Chronicle of Philanthropy (it’s only $8 per month!). And then there’s the folks who are fighting the good fight in the courts, like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It’s not just the support that helps; these resources will keep you informed.
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eJournal Archives:
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