Frat Camp

I spent the weekend at what many dub "Frat Camp". It's a 2 1/2 day workshop aimed at helping Miami University's Fraternity & Sorority community advance their community. Over 100 chapter presidents and council officers came to the workshop. My role was as a small group facilitator -- one in which I have been happy to be for the last three years.

Much of the content was about how to make change in the chapters on campus. Participants are required to read Heifetz and Linsky's "Leading With An Open Heart." Much of Heifetz and Linsky's article centers on "technical" vs. "adaptive" change. Technical change relates to concrete, tangible ways to make change, such as rules, procedures, or policies. Adaptive changes, on the other hand, are changes in thoughts, relationships, and ways of knowing. In their words, "An adaptive challenge is not like technical work, in which you can prescribe a solution that doesn't require people to change. To take a medical example, when you give someone penicillin for an infection, she is cured. She doesn't have to change how she lives. But when you unclog the plumbing in someone's heart, that plumbing will stay open only if he changes his life -- changes how he eats; stops smoking; gets more exercise; learns to manage stress."

Much of my weekend was spent helping undergraduates see their leadership in terms of adaptive and technical change. What a task.

Undergraduates, like most Americans, want quick, tangible, easy to understand, and almost immediate change. We like to believe that fad diets will work, because we don't want to change our lifestyles. We want our public school systems to change for the better because we've instituted new accountability standards. We want to toughen laws on hazing to eradicate it from our sports teams, Greek organizations, and military organizations. But these measures rarely work, and it's because human behavior cannot be controlled.

It can only be influenced.

So, in short, I expended much of my facilitating energy challenging students' thinking that "organizing an all-Greek social" or "making an all-Greek t-shirt" would be the end-all, cure-all to strained Greek relations within the community.

I hope I was able to help them see that real, lasting change comes from the adaptive side, not purely from the technical. A hefty task in only 3 days. But, I hope I was able to not only plant some seeds, but provide a little water for them as well.