People who are passionate about change usually start with answers. They have a solution to a problem they are enthusiastic about and are excited to implement it. Questions usually revolve around communication. They want to make people aware of their idea and give them the knowledge and understanding to make good use of it.
That’s why change management consultants tell us to to start by building awareness, desire and knowledge before moving on to training to provide people with the ability to implement change. They assume that if people just understand the idea, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true and it usually doesn’t end well.
The truth is that a big awareness campaign is likely to trigger those who hate the idea to immediately start working to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in order to kill it before it even starts. To bring genuine transformation about you need to see the world as it really is and ask yourself hard questions. Here are three that you’ll want to start with:
It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT launched in November 2022, just two and a half years ago. In that short span, AI has become deeply embedded in our personal and professional lives, often serving as a constant companion: answering questions, offering feedback, and sometimes even pointing us in new directions.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that many are asking what it all means for the future. Are we heading toward a utopia of super-productive machines and widespread abundance? Or are we hurtling inevitably toward a Matrix-like dystopian nightmare in which we are subjugated by machines and the oligarchs who control them?
History is long and varied, so there are plenty of examples to support both the utopian and dystopian view. The future is unknowable. Yet by this point, we know a lot about innovation so we have some good models to make judgements. When it comes to technology, jobs and the economy, we need to look at three effects: displacement, productivity and reinstatement.
read more…
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. As humans we evolved to make split-second decisions in life-or-death situations. Our slow-moving rational minds don’t automatically engage unless we deliberately focus.
Cal Newport, in his new book Slow Productivity, makes a similar point about work. In our hectic modern lives, we need to optimize tasks, such as returning emails, dropping off kids and managing schedules, to keep things moving. We need to do this quickly, because there are other people depending on us to get things done.
Yet there is also a different mode of working. Often, this type of activity is not pursued with a specific goal in mind, but rather as an exploration. There are stops and starts, dead ends and blind alleys, as well as long fallow periods that can span months or even years. This, however, is the kind of work that makes significant impacts on the world. Not all who wander are lost.
read more…
One observation I’ve made is that countries tend to have their preferred season for rising up. In Ukraine, quite maddeningly, it is the dead of winter. I still remember freezing with so many others on Kyiv’s Maidan during the Orange Revolution in November 2004, then seeing so many of my friends freezing the same way on the same place a decade later.
We Americans, at least in this one respect, are far more sensible. We protest when it’s warm. From the first signing of the Declaration of Independence and Freedom Summer to the Stonewall Uprising and Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington, we wait till the weather heats up to go out into the streets.
With tensions in the country running high we can expect our fair share of unrest this summer. Unfortunately, most of these will have more passion than good sense. Protestors rarely learn from those who preceded them, which is a shame. There is no shortage of accumulated wisdom. With that in mind, here are 17 books that are worth learning from.
read more…
Anybody who’s ever pursued significant change of any kind knows that some of the opposition can be absolutely nuts, with no rational basis at all. Change consultants often suggest we look for a “root cause,” but that’s often a fool’s errand. You’ll not only drive yourself crazy running in circles, you’re also likely to lend credibility to their attacks.
Consider the Semmelweis effect,, the human tendency to reject new evidence because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms. It gets its name from Ignaz Semmelweis, a young doctor who discovered that hand washing at hospitals could prevent infections and was driven literally insane for his trouble.
The simple truth is that when you are trying to get people to change things that they think or do, many won’t be ready to hear you. Some will never accept what you are trying to achieve and will actively work to undermine you. But by better understanding irrational resistance, we can develop strategies to overcome it. Semmelweis’s story is a great place to start.
read more…
During the 15 years I spent in Eastern Europe, I saw more than my share of upheaval. When I arrived in Poland in 1997, there were monuments to dysfunction everywhere you looked. In Warsaw, Stalin’s horrid Palace of Culture dominated the skyline. In Krakow, the abandoned frame of the Szkieletor building stood frozen since the 1970s.
I was there during the 1998 Ruble crisis that shook the former Soviet Union and, two years later, the dotcom crash rippled throughout the world bringing down former corporate juggernauts such as Enron and Worldcom. During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I saw first-hand how a society could turn itself inside out and come out the other side a better, more hopeful place.
Yet I’ve never seen anything like this. I think what’s different now is that America is seen as a primary source of disruption, instead of a source of stability. We’ve made terrible mistakes before, such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but we never lost the world’s trust like we have today. This time, the problem is us and we need to understand how we got here.
read more…
Breakthrough innovation typically comes from the edges. Albert Einstein had published his miracle year papers when he was an obscure 26 year-old Swiss patent clerk. Some of McDonald’s most popular products, such as the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin, originated with franchisees before getting adopted nationally.
That’s why a lot of management experts advise leaders to spend time on the edges of their enterprise and some, Walmart’s Sam Walton comes to mind, can do that effectively. Most, however, cannot. The problem is that the time spent “out on the edge” has to come from other priorities, such as product development, culture, customers, investor relations and so on.
Often a more viable alternative is to empower the edges to advocate for themselves. Over the years, I have worked with dozens of organizations and I’ve never seen one that lacked ideas nor leaders who want to leverage them. The real challenge is that ideas stay hidden, because few middle or junior employees know how to build traction and move them forward.
read more…
In the 1950s, a number of researchers began exploring how innovations spread. Why do some ideas catch on while others fizzle out? And why do certain ideas gain quick acceptance in some places but struggle in others? To find out, they studied successful innovations like hybrid corn and tetracycline.
What they found was that innovative ideas tend to come from outside the community, with early adopters being those most connected to the outside world. The first farmers to adopt hybrid corn were also the ones who often traveled to the city, doctors who read medical journals and attended out of town conferences tended to be those who first prescribed tetracycline.
From there, things followed a distinct pattern, often described as an s-curve. While most ignore the idea—and some show downright hostility to it—those early explorers begin to experiment with it and it is their success that determines whether it will spread. That’s why to successfully lead change, you need to identify, nurture and empower those early few.
read more…
When Portuguese colonists first came across manioc in South America, they were a bit perplexed by the elaborate, multi-day process the indigenous people followed before consuming it. Some steps, like boiling the raw tuber to eliminate its bitterness and prevent digestive issues, appeared practical. Others, however, seemed more driven by superstition than anything else.
So when they transferred the crop to West Africa they streamlined the process. Yet, as Joseph Henrich explains in The Secret of our Success, the original ritual was more practical than it seemed. As it turns out, manioc, if not properly processed, has low levels of cyanide, which accumulate over time and cause chronic poisoning.
What the Portuguese didn’t realize was that they were seeing survivors—those who had inherited the knowledge to process manioc safely. Others who ignored these practices had died out. This same dynamic plays out in business. Leaders often see long-standing practices as outdated inefficiencies—when in reality, they may serve a critical, unseen function.”
read more…
In the 1990s, newly minted Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen began studying why good companies fail. What he found was surprising: They weren’t failing because they lost their way, but because they were following time-honored principles taught at institutions like his own. They listened to customers, invested in R&D and improved their products.
As he researched further he realized that, under certain circumstances, a market becomes over-served, the basis of competition changes and firms become vulnerable to a new type of competitor. In his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive technology to describe what he saw.
It was an idea whose time had come. The book became a bestseller and Christensen a global business icon. Yet many began to see disruption as more than a special case, but a mantra, an end in itself rather than a means to an end and, at this point, things have gone horribly wrong. We need to abandon the disruption mindset and focus on what really matters.
read more…
