"Auntie Sylvie, Auntie Sylvie! We caught a frog! Come and see, quickly!" By the time I reach the lakes edge, I see three small blond heads huddled together peering over a sand bucket filled with water and there it is, a big green frog. They are so excited - this is a big deal to them. Back from where they come from, Australia, the frogs are exotic, often poisonous, creatures that live in the rain forest.
My niece and nephews, ranging in age from 6 to 2 years old, have come from to visit us with their parents for a month. They have spent much of that time at the family cottage by the lake and they are gloriously happy. They revel in the nature around them.
Every day, several times a day, one of them will squeal with delight when they see a chipmunk and they all start racing after it, spotting a few more and coming back to the adults to report on the result of their Canadian safari. A family of ducks spotted on the lake or the sight of a small school of fish in the water elicits the same kind of excitement and glee.
The oldest loves to scour the bottom of the lake to find "sea shells". "Look what I found Auntie Sylvie!" he says with a proud smile on his face as he hands me a very ordinary looking snail shell. At the edge of the dock there are eight other shells lined up - his growing collection. I look at it amused because I remember how excited I was collecting "real" sea shells along the beaches of Australia like conch shells and bits of coral and sand dollars. To him, swimming in a lake is a welcomed novelty. To me, the turquoise water of the ocean and the white sand beaches was my novelty. When confronted to a new situation we see with different eyes: we are curious, observant, pleasantly surprised and grateful.
This reminds me of the story of the green frog that I tell my clients as a metaphor for culture change. If you take a frog and drop it into boiling water it will jump out, of course. But if you put the frog in a pot of cold water it will swim happily around. If you turn on the heat slowly it will adapt to the warmth: "This is getting warmer than I am comfortable with but I can deal with this." The frog will "deal with it" until the water is boiling and it is a boiled frog.
Many of us are boiled frogs in our workplaces. We work harder and longer hours to try to extinguish the growing number of fires popping up around us. Some of us have become cynical - we do not believe that things will change so we just keep our head low and do our job. Some of us have given up and are counting the days till retirement. Some of us have burnt out...
It could be different if we just took the time to listen to the green frogs in our workplace - the new employees, the young employees, the external stakeholders - people who are looking at our work culture with fresh eyes and are saying: "We see another way."
A funny thing happened as I was spending time with my Australian niece and nephews, I started noticing and appreciating things again, things that I had been taking for granted in my surroundings like the chipmunks, the ducks on the water and the frogs. If we humbly acknowledge that our ability to truly "SEE" diminishes proportionally with the length of time we have spent in the same situation we would pay more attention to how a visitor sees our world.
Ideally, we may get to the point where we seek out new eyes on a regular basis to help tune up our vision of the world we live in. New eyes allow us to see you new possibilities. New possibilities revive our optimism and resolve to move forward.
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