It Starts With One Person. It Always Has.
by Dr. Kristen Liesch, based on an interview with Ian Case
We tend to talk about change at the scale of systems. Policy shifts, institutional reform, cultural transformation. And those things matter. They shape the conditions we live and work within. But if you spend enough time close to the work itself, inside organizations, inside decisions, inside the quiet moments where something could go one way or another, you start to notice something else. Change rarely begins at scale. It begins with a person.
When I reflect on my own experiences over the past several years, names come to mind: Elly Chapple, Vic Whitehouse, Helen Rigg, Ian Jones… but these are stories for another day.
A while back, I was speaking with Ian Case, a Certified Equity Sequence® Trainer working in the arts and cultural sector. His career spans theatre production, public sector leadership, and community-based programming. He has spent years working with people from vastly different backgrounds—across literacy levels, cultures, and life circumstances. When I asked him what kind of impact he hoped to have with his certification, he didn’t reach for systems language. He said, “If I can encourage one person… if I can get one person to adopt the Equity Sequence® and it changes the way that they work, I’ll feel like that will have done some good.”
There is a kind of clarity in that answer. It resists the instinct to overstate, and it resists the pressure to scale too quickly. It starts with one person.
We don’t tend to value that kind of change. In most organizations, impact is measured in numbers: reach, participation, growth curves. But as Ian put it, with a kind of quiet insistence, “Numbers are not people.”
When we prioritize numbers over people, we often lose sight of what decisions are actually doing, who they are shaping, who they are leaving out, and who they were never designed to consider in the first place.
What became clear in our conversation is that change doesn’t move the way we often imagine it does.
It doesn’t arrive fully formed, and it doesn’t cascade neatly from strategy to implementation. It spreads unevenly and relationally. Ian described it as a ripple: “Once people sort of get a hold of it, understand it, use it and go, ‘Oh, this is really beneficial,’ then more and more people will start to think about using it.” There is no guarantee in that, no linear progression, but there is momentum, and, importantly, there is ownership.
This is where many approaches to equity work falter. They assume that if you introduce the right framework or deliver the right training, change will follow. But frameworks don’t make decisions. People do. And people make decisions within real constraints: time pressure, institutional norms, unspoken hierarchies, and habits that have been reinforced over years, if not decades. What shifts those decisions is often much smaller than we expect. Ian described one of those shifts like this: “It’s made me more mindful… perhaps it’s time to pump the brakes and expand the people that are involved in making decisions.” That’s not a structural overhaul. It’s a pause. A recognition that the default approach – fast, individual, efficient – is not neutral. It carries assumptions about who gets to decide and whose perspectives are considered necessary. And sometimes, the most meaningful intervention is simply to interrupt that default.
There is also something else happening here, something harder to measure: confidence. Not the kind that comes from mastery, but the kind that comes from familiarity. Ian didn’t describe a single defining breakthrough or a dramatic moment of transformation. Instead, he described a gradual shift.
“It was sort of like… the magic door. When you go from observing to being.”
From understanding the work conceptually to inhabiting it. From watching to doing. And then, shortly after, “Okay. I can do this.” That moment matters more than we tend to acknowledge, because once someone believes they can do this work, they begin to act differently within it.
In the arts and cultural sector, where Ian is focusing his efforts, this shift is particularly visible. There has been a sustained push over the past decade to move away from colonial models and toward more inclusive practices. But as he noted, intention alone hasn’t been enough. “Organizations have really worked to be more equitable… but have struggled with how to appropriately navigate those relationships and decision-making processes.” This is where the work becomes less about values and more about practice. Not whether equity matters, but how it shows up when decisions are made: who is consulted, who is trusted, who is missing, and whether those patterns are questioned at all.
There is a tendency, especially in complex or polarized environments, to frame equity work as confrontational: something that disrupts, challenges, and pushes back. There are moments when that is necessary. But Ian pointed to something different, a quieter entry point. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had more perspectives involved in the decision-making process?” It is a disarming question, almost disarmingly simple. But it does something important. It opens a door without forcing someone through it. And in many contexts, that is what allows the conversation to begin at all.
Near the end of our conversation, Ian described the kind of world he hopes this work contributes to:
“Do we want to live in a world where we respect each other… where we look after each other… where everybody gets a part of what we’re doing?”
It is the kind of statement that risks being dismissed as idealistic, but it also points to something deeply practical. Every system we rely on, whether transportation, education, healthcare, or the arts, was built through a series of decisions, and those decisions were made by people, often a very narrow group of people. To change the system, we don’t start with the system. We start with the decisions. And to change decisions, we start with the person making them.
This is the part that doesn’t scale neatly. There is no shortcut for it, no way to bypass the moment where someone pauses and considers that the way they’ve always done something might not be the only way. But once that moment happens – once someone begins to see differently – it rarely stays contained. It moves through conversations, through relationships, through choices that shape other choices.
And so we come back to where we started. Not with a system, but with a person. Someone who asks a different question, who brings someone else into the room, who decides, even briefly, to do things differently. It doesn’t look like much at first. But it rarely stays that way. It starts with one person. It always has.
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Learn more about the Certified Equity Sequence® Training Program here.