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blog/2026-09-03-getting_to_yes/index.qmd

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+---
+title: 'Making Change: What We Learned at the ESIP Session "Bridging Divides and Getting to Yes"'
+author:
+  - name: Erin Robinson
+    orcid: 0000-0001-9998-0114
+  - name: Eli Holmes
+    orcid: 0000-0001-9128-8393
+  - name: Michele Thornton
+    orcid: 0000-0002-6533-6328
+  - name: Michael Liddel
+    orcid: 0009-0007-9035-5647
+  - name: Julie Lowndes
+    orcid: 0000-0003-1682-3872
+date: 2026-09-03
+citation: 
+  url: https://openscapes.org/blog/2026-09-03-getting_to_yes/
+categories: [blog, ESIP, NASA, NOAA]
+image: landscape_boxes.png
+---
+
+*This is a short post about the Hackday we held at NASA User Working Group
+(UWG) Summit, on the heels of the Hackday we led at the 2026 July Meeting! We
+were able to reuse our planning and coordinating process and infrastructure,
+but adapt for a different audience (scientists and support staff from all of
+the NASA Earthdata DAACs), goals, and time constraints. The goal here was to
+gather anyone who’s attending the UWG Summit or from on-site at Goddard, and
+hack on “contributing to open science to make things easier for scientists”
+from policy, social and technical perspectives.*
+
+*Quicklinks:*
+
+- [ESIP Hackday blog post](https://openscapes.org/blog/2026-09-02-esip-hacking-on-ideas/) 
+- [Getting to yes slides on zenodo](https://zenodo.org/me/requests/596f3b2f-73ac-468e-9443-8a96f74a1554#record)  
+- [ESIP Highlight Slide](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13ZAFIAgly2yDH5I7md-STQv2PXSJepBzkRnZu8Gs16g/edit?pli=1&slide=id.g3f6a2cd3f22_2_5#slide=id.g3f6a2cd3f22_2_5)
+
+*Cross-posted at [openscapes.org/blog](https://openscapes.org/blog), [nasa-openscapes.github.io/news](https://nasa-openscapes.github.io/news), [nmfs-openscapes.github.io/blog](https://nmfs-openscapes.github.io/blog)*
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+# **Making Change: What We Learned at the ESIP Session "Bridging Divides and Getting to Yes"**
+
+A vast majority of the work that Openscapes supports is about making change.
+NASA and NOAA mentors work on big changes like federal agencies moving all
+their data to the cloud, and many individuals work on smaller changes like
+making a process a bit more reproducible for future you and future us. However,
+change can seem like a mysterious process. At the July ESIP meeting, in a
+session entitled ‘Bridging Divides and Getting to Yes’, we broke change down
+into bite-sized steps using the [Leading
+Change](https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology/8-steps/) framework (Kotter,
+1996). Kotter identified eight steps to make change:
+
+1. Creating or identifying the urgency  
+2. Building a guiding coalition (collaborators to work together, leaders in your network)  
+3. Forming a vision and  
+4. Communicating that vision  
+5. Removing barriers  
+6. Identifying small or short-term wins  
+7. Building momentum around the change  
+8. Finally, anchoring the change in the organization
+
+
+
+::: {style=""}
+![Figure 1: Our Openscapes landscape with the change framework overlaid](./landscape_boxes.png){fig-alt="Figure 1: Our Openscapes landscape with the change framework overlaid" fig-align="center" width="70%"}
+:::
+
+While these are presented linearly, as we heard in the session and have all
+experienced, we move back and forth through them.
+
+## **Four Vignettes on the “Messy Middle” of Change**
+
+To explore the framework, we heard four vignettes about the path to change from
+Eli Holmes (NOAA), Michele Thornton (NASA), Mike Liddel (NOAA), and Julie
+Lowndes (Openscapes). The speakers were asked to share just a snippet of the
+change and specifically to highlight the parts where it had been messy or
+difficult. Between them, the stories touched four common areas of change: tools
+and technology, people and relationships, resources and funding, and culture
+and policy.
+
+Eli Holmes, NOAA Fisheries Open Science Lead, described getting GitHub
+Enterprise adopted across NOAA Fisheries, a tools change that turned out to be
+a culture and policy change. Her team formed a coalition and spent four months
+writing a vision even though they half-believed it might never come to
+fruition. GitHub Enterprise required permission. There was a bright spot: a
+science center that already had GitHub Enterprise, but when Eli pointed to it,
+the response was no because it was not on the approved list. How do you get it
+on the list? IT did not know. Eli continued to investigate how to get on the
+list and found out that the person who could actually decide was not someone
+she could email directly. However, during a chance meeting, Eli found herself
+on a call with that person. While she couldn't email this person, she could
+speak up. At the end of the call, she said: "Hey, I have an unrelated
+question." That question unlocked everything. It took vision, persistence,
+being in the right room, and the courage to ask to add GitHub Enterprise to the
+approved list. (Eli's slides from the January 2025 ESIP meeting: [The GitHub
+Story at NOAA
+Fisheries](https://openscapes.org/blog/2025-01-30-esip-winter-2025/))
+
+Michele Thornton, ORNL DAAC Manager, opened with a familiar slog: enormous
+amounts of downloaded data instead moving into cloud-native solutions, and the
+thought “there has to be a better way”. A conversation with the right person
+surfaced an approach for cloud-native publication, and then her excitement met
+resistance. The solution didn't come from winning the argument; it came from
+relationships: getting the right people in the room with each other and by
+imparting the right technical vision, the needed collaborations were built to
+execute the solution together. Because that workflow existed, her team could
+publish and analyze data in near real-time during the 2024 LA fires. That's the
+payoff of a change made before the urgency arrives. Michele is the one who
+named the session's shadow title: sometimes getting to yes is not accepting no.
+
+Mike Liddel, Acting Assistant Chief Data Officer for NOAA Fisheries, told a
+story of one change laying the foundation for the next. Starting an Open
+Science Community of Practice at NOAA several years ago took vision and real
+effort, building a coalition of the eager (an important distinction from the
+willing) around open, collaborative work. He anchored this community in the
+organization. So when a new directive to move to the cloud came with no
+additional time or money, supplying the urgency required for change, the
+community was ready. The coalition of the eager could support many more in the
+migration to the cloud.
+
+Julie Lowndes, Openscapes Founder and Director, brought the
+resources-and-funding story about making the change to become a small business.
+In the early days of Openscapes, she was working full-time but paid half-time
+to stretch the support at the university. However, the university couldn't
+accept payments in the configurations federal teams needed, which meant teams
+of feds and contractors who wanted to participate together could not do so.
+Universities can also be slow to vendor outside organizations. This did not
+align with Openscapes' values of wanting to pay people quickly and easily for
+their work. Julie decided to become a small-business owner to overcome those
+procurement challenges. It let her accept two payments so whole teams could
+join, and it made payments faster. The path to business owner has not been
+easy, and sometimes it is very lonely. From this, she offered the approach she
+reaches for when change gets hard: Pause (take a beat), Fork (what have you
+seen before? who has attempted this?), and Do — ask for help. You don't have to
+do it alone.
+
+## **The Interactive Change Lab**
+
+Listening to these stories, it's easy to see the framework shine through. We
+know that we learn by doing, and we wanted to activate this learning in real
+time. We took an experimental approach that Erin Robinson designed and called
+the Interactive Change Lab. The confines of the 30-minute lab provided the
+urgency that normally kicks off a change cycle. As participants arrived at the
+start of the session, we used the attendance list in the ESIP agenda doc as a
+first step to prompt them to consider a change they wanted to make. The changes
+the participants named fell into the same buckets as the vignettes (tools,
+people, resources, culture) and ranged from federal data infrastructure to
+giving yourself permission to pivot careers. 
+
+The lab started with each person receiving a blank 5x8 notecard and writing
+down a change they wanted to make. It turned out it was shockingly hard to
+write down a change you want to make on the spot, even for the facilitators.
+That act of writing on the notecard alone was clarifying. We then passed the
+cards around, shuffled, and responded to four prompts, one per round:
+
+1. Build the coalition: Who could help, champion, or unblock this?  
+2. Communicate the vision: What would make someone say yes to this?  
+3. Remove barriers: What are the objections? Suggest a counter.  
+4. Generate a short-term win: What's a near-term action? What could make it
+   smaller or faster? What's the 15% version?
+
+After each prompt, we shuffled again, so every card collected input from four
+different people who had no idea whose problem they were holding. 
+
+At the end, cards returned to their owners, and we ran a quick 1-4-All
+(modified [Liberating Structure](https://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-2-4-all)) 
+to digest the input. By and large, there was something useful on every card,
+and people were genuinely surprised how valuable anonymous feedback from someone 
+outside their context turned out to be.
+
+::: {style=""}
+![Figure 2. Folks discussing the input on their cards](./workshop.png){fig-alt="Figure 2. Folks discussing the input on their cards" fig-align="center" width="70%"}
+:::
+
+## **Strategies We Synthesized**
+
+At the close, we harvested strategies from the cards and the room onto the
+whiteboard:
+
+- Write it down. Naming the change is harder and more clarifying than it sounds.  
+- Reframe the problem. Many people said the most valuable thing they received was a reframe. Refine and test how you define the problem. Ask: what is this problem like, and how has that been solved before?  
+- Surround yourself with a smart, diverse team, and do the work of translating the technical problem so they can help.  
+- Get to the small yes. Find one person to say yes, then let momentum (and a little FOMO) work on the rest.  
+- Make the case in their terms. Show how the change benefits the person saying yes and their organization: metrics, demos, the 15% version they can see working.  
+- Look at lots of solutions before narrowing down.  
+- Take a step. Any step. And sometimes, take a step back and evaluate where you are.
+
+## **Make Your Own Change** 
+
+This **Interactive Change Lab** format is completely reusable for a team
+meeting, a working group, or even just yourself:
+
+1. Write down a change you want to make. (Expect this to be hard.)  
+2. Answer the four prompts (coalition, vision, barriers, short-term win) yourself, or better, hand your card to people who don't know your context.  
+3. Ask "why now?" If you can't answer it, that might be the first thing to work on.  
+4. And as Julie said: Pause, fork, do: take a beat, look for who has done something like this before, and then act: this is often asking for help.
+
+Beyond this short activity, the [Openscapes’ Approach
+Guide](https://openscapes.github.io/approach-guide/) has many resources that
+your group might find helpful to make change. The Openscapes Champions
+[pathways template](https://openscapes.github.io/series/pathways.html) (drawn
+from Lowndes et al., 2017\) is an excellent resource for mapping out the vision
+and steps for your change and collaborating on them with your team. The
+[Reflections program](https://openscapes.github.io/approach-guide/reflections/)
+also provides a quick three-week scaffold to kick-start change. 
+
+Good ideas don't become reality on their own. But as our four speakers and
+dozens of notecards showed us, coalitions can be built before you need them,
+and a no is often the easiest first position. And sometimes getting to yes
+means persistently not taking no. 
+
+Finally, thank you to our speakers — Eli Holmes, Michele Thornton, Mike Liddel,
+and Julie Lowndes — for sharing the messy middle of making change, and to
+everyone in the room (and online) who brought real changes to the table and
+generous feedback to each other's cards. Thank you Erin Robinson for designing
+and leading the session, the Interactive Change Lab was so valuable and we’re
+excited to see where people reuse it. This session only worked because of
+everyone’s contributions. Thank you!
+