Rene Rodriguez, Rapid Change Technologies, on the power of the human brain

Create a revolution of change in your company in two days? Rene Rodriguez, CEO of Rapid Change Technologies Inc. in Bloomington, claims it can be done. Using practices developed by his mother, company founder, former nun and social activist Magaly Rodriguez, the company works to transform the attitudes of employees. He says a group can move from hostile to productive in 48 hours.

Rodriguez’s own company is going through painful, but he says necessary, changes.  Up to $6 million in revenue at one point, with about 25 employees, he and his mother decided to cut back to the original mission. “It was getting beyond what the dream was,” Rodriguez says. The company is now just the two of them.

“My mother was born in Cuba and left right before the Cuban revolution. In Cuba, she saw that if you use the methods of violence to bring change, the only tool you have is a gun. She learned, one, that a culturally Catholic country could convert to communism in a matter of months. Two, if you don’t practice what you want in the end you won’t get it.

She thought, I could use that to do positive things in the world.

Her mission was global peace and community, so she thought the best way to do that was to be a nun. She spent five to six years in a contemplative order, mostly in silence. She decided to leave, and that’s my favorite part of the story, because now I’m here. She went to work with migrant farm workers in southern Florida. That was slavery without the chains. She learned that no matter how good your ideas are, if people are depressed they won’t change. She wrote a document, ‘You can’t free the slaves; the slaves have to free themselves.’

There’s a lot of that mentality in business today. You look at shop floor environments or mill environments. For example, 80 percent of a facility in the deep South was African American — 80 percent of the union was white and the Ku Klux Klan was there, yet people stayed.

You think of a petri dish. A biologist was trying to study a certain fungus; it was hard to find. He was asked, ‘How do you find it?’ He said, ‘I just make the environment and it shows up.’ You can create the environment to allow people to be who they can be.

Back to the farm workers and cracking the code of depression. What she found was, cultural things, like music, dance, clowns, jugglers — she’d bring those things into the camps and it’s energizing. It’s simple and free. And also, the brain is free, and we’re all under-using our brains. She learned a lot of lessons there on what makes for change.

Now right next to the farm camp you’ve got the Air Force base. She brought over the generals for a tour, and a general said, ‘I get the message, but what can I do?’ She didn’t have an answer. She realized she was focusing on fighting a problem, not finding a solution.

In 1986 she was asked to do work with depressed secretaries. She said, ‘No, I work in the community.’ But she went. She found the same issues in the community as in corporate America. You have someone on the shop floor and you give them a memo. They’re not going to read it. There’s no communication between bosses and the workers.

She was always called into situations where there was no time. She put together a workshop called the fundamentals of rapid change. It’s an umbrella of tools that allows for rapid change.

You raise the level of energy. You give people understanding of how powerful the brain is. You give tools to deal with conflict. You show how to boost creativity. The idea is to create an arsenal of things that go into creating change.

Think about the concept of a big ship with huge rudders. It takes 10 men to move it. Someone came up with a concept of a trim tab, a small rudder that one person can move. What are the trim tabs for corporate behavior? Human emotions and values.

Here’s a picture of the brain. The reptilian brain is in charge of all the automatic functions. You can’t get anyone to care if they’re scared. To create change, first leaders have to ensure people that they’re safe.

Second question: You have to know you’re cared about. Then you’re accessing the limbic system, with emotion, values and memory. So leaders must show they value employees.

Then you’re in the neocortex, the logic part, everything you’re hired to do. This part of the brain asks, ‘Am I interested?’ Our task as leaders is to get them engaged.

The fourth part is the prefrontal lobe. It’s the CEO of our brain. It wants to be inspired. Are you inspiring those employees?

Here’s one example of an exercise we do to create rapid change. It’s called four feelings on the floor. We’ll ask a group of angry employees, ‘What’s your biggest issue?’ Say it’s random drug testing. We’ll say, ‘Stand where you feel, and the floor is divided into quarters, for mad, scared, sad and glad.’ We’ll then say, ‘OK, why? Sell us on how you feel.’ Then we’ll say, ‘What would make your bridge to glad? Write down those things.’ The leader comes back, he’s got a list to create consensus.

I look at these tools and I feel there’s a lot of application for this in schools, for married couples. It’s a crime to hold onto it without telling people about it. When you see how people change  it’s like a drug. You want to take that to as many people as you can.”

— As told to Beth Ewen