Author Archives: Greg Satell

About Greg Satell

Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His latest book, Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change, is available now. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Leveraging Storytelling for Innovation

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Leveraging Storytelling for Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Some years back I was invited to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Over the years many of the world’s greatest minds have taken up residence there. It was where Einstein worked till his death in 1955. It is a place, for me at least, in which stories permeate from every corner and crevice.

There is a common room in the main building, Fuld Hall, where tea is served every afternoon and, if you know the stories, you can almost hear the din of legends arguing, cajoling and discussing pathbreaking ideas when you enter. That is the power of story. It can imbue even inanimate objects with meaning.

Look at great leaders throughout history, from General George Patton to Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs, and they all used the power of story to anchor an enterprise with a sense of mission and destiny. It was undoubtedly a big part of their success. We need to learn to tell better stories, if we are to give meaning to others and build faith in a common endeavor.

The Structure Of A Story

The first element of any story is its exposition, which is the world you build around the story and includes the setting, the characters and other background information. This often comes at the beginning of the story, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, elements of the setting or details about the characters are leaked out as the plot develops.

The most important aspect of any story is the tension or conflict to be resolved. That’s what keeps the audience’s interest. Will the hero survive? Does the boy end up with the girl? Will justice prevail? It is the uncertainty surrounding the tension that makes a story interesting. A preordained story is a bore.

Finally, the conflict needs to be resolved in some way that is satisfying. That doesn’t mean that the characters in the story end up happy—in fact, often it’s exactly the opposite—but if the main conflict is never resolved the audience will feel cheated. So however the story ends, with a lesson learned, a triumphant hero or a tragic loss, it has to resolve the conflict.

These are the essential elements of a story: exposition, conflict, and resolution. They don’t need to be told in order. In fact, master storytellers often put the conflict first, before we know much about the setting, and then let things develop over time. In a TV streaming environment writers have months or even years to resolve the tension, which allows for greater exploration and deeper storytelling.

Identifying A Meaningful Problem

The key to telling a good story is to identify a source of conflict that your audience cares about. That’s easier said than done. Just because a story is meaningful to you, doesn’t mean it will hit home for others. Yet just because a story doesn’t resonate immediately doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Even finding the right narrative is often trial and error even for the best storytellers.

Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, insists that “early on, all of our movies suck.” In Creativity Inc, he wrote that his company’s initial ideas are “ugly babies” that are “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” “Originality is fragile,” he continues. “Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.”

The reason new stories need protecting is that we experience them differently than our audience. They immediately make sense to us because they are ours. We often lose sight of the fact that others don’t share our particular context. Often, even a slight change in how we shape the details can make a big difference.

The only way to refine a story is by telling it, seeing which parts the audience reacts to and experimenting with different methods of delivery. That’s why big-time comedians spend time in small comedy clubs trying out new material. When I’m writing a book or working on a new conference talk, I always try out different versions in blog posts to see what resonates.

The bottom line is that just because a problem is meaningful to you doesn’t mean it’s meaningful to everyone else. It takes work to identify a story—or an aspect of a story—that connects.

Charting The Hero’s Journey

There are many ways to tell a story. But one of the most common is the hero’s journey. Which involves different variations of a departure, an initiation, and a return. Usually the hero is transformed by the journey in some way, but sometimes the hero transforms the world around him, for better or for worse.

For example, in the original Star Wars, we met Luke Skywalker as a restless boy on Tatooine. The hologram he unlocked in R2D2 kicked off his departure onto the journey, during which he was initiated in the ways of “The Force.” After Luke uses The Force to aim the shot that destroys the Death Star, he and his friends return to the rebel base to a hero’s welcome.

What makes the hero’s journey compelling is not so much the sequence of events, but how the characters are tested and revealed. David Mitchell, author of bestsellers like Cloud Atlas, points out that we find enigmatic characters, like Darth Vader, more interesting than one dimensional caricatures because they lack moral clarity.

It is the uncertainty about how the story will end that keeps the audience interested in it, which is why coming up with interesting tension is so important. It is also what opens up the possibility of leveraging a story into a strategic narrative.

Unlocking The Strategic Narrative

Stories have the power to unite us because their themes are universal. We can all relate to a hero, identify with their struggle and then revel in their triumph or, as is sometimes the case, learn a lesson from their tragedy. By telling a familiar story in an unfamiliar context, we can also gain insight and understanding into the hopes and fears of others.

The only problem with stories, as John Hagel has pointed out, is that they are self-contained—they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Narratives, like Darth Vader, are less clear cut. They are open ended and still to be determined. In other words, a narrative is a story that is still in progress and that we can still participate in and influence.

Narratives can become strategic when they give meaning to a mission. Southwest’s strategic narrative to be “THE low cost airline,” helped it rocket past the competition. Steve Jobs’ insistence on creating products that were “insanely great” helped make Apple the most valuable company on the planet. General Stanley McChrystal’s revelation that “to defeat a network you need to become a network,” turned things around for the US military in Iraq.

That’s what makes the art of storytelling so powerful and so important. When Shakespeare’s King Henry needed his soldiers to fight, he did not offer to raise their pay or threaten them with the stockade, but told a story to inspire them to go “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…”

In the final analysis, we live our lives not for external rewards, but for intrinsic meaning and we determine meaning through the stories we tell, the narratives we adopt and the missions to which we dedicate the best of our talents and energies.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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Are You Preaching the Wrong Change Gospel?

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Are You Preaching the Wrong Change Gospel?

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Today it’s become an article of faith that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Business pundits tell us that we must “innovate or die.” These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Those who doubt the need for change risk being dismissed as out of touch.

This is the change gospel and it is worshiped with almost religious fervor. Yet the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. An even relatively casual examination of relevant data would reveal that, for incumbent businesses at least, the era we live in now is far more stable, less innovative and less productive.

In a nutshell, we are talking about change more, but doing it less. That’s a problem. Managers who want to be seen as change leaders launch too many initiatives. Employees, for their part, get jaded and wait for the newest idea to fail, just as the others before. The result is inevitably innovation theater, rather than meaningful change. We desperately need to fix this.

A VUCA World?

Let’s start with the basic premise that the business world has somehow become more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The term first arose in the aftermath of the Cold War, when a relatively stable conflict between two global superpowers fragmented into a multi-polar, multi-ethnic clash of civilizations.

In this new era of conflict, cultural, religious and ethnic identities replaced ideologies as previously subjugated groups sought to be recognized. The Soviet Union broke up, the Balkans disintegrated into war and strife. Despots around the world, now suddenly cut off from their superpower backers, had to confront internal rifts.

In stark contrast to the world of geopolitics, however, the sphere of business and economics moved solidly toward a new orthodoxy known as the Washington Consensus, which preached market fundamentalism and deregulation. Many of these reforms were sorely needed in many places, but policy soon became dogma decoupled from reality.

Today, in part because of lax antitrust enforcement over the past few decades, businesses have become less disruptive, less competitive and less dynamic, while our economy has become less innovative and less productive. The fact that the reality is in such stark contrast to the rhetoric, is more than worrying, it should be a flashing red light.

Disrupting People, Not Industries

Go to just about any industry conference these days and you will likely hear a version of the same story: Traditional firms are under siege. The forces of disruptive innovation, agile startups and technological advancement mean that organizations need to be in a state of perpetual transformation in order to keep up.

The data, however, tell a different story. A report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

A comprehensive 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found two correlated, but countervailing trends: the rise of “superstar” firms and the fall of labor’s share of GDP. Essentially, the typical industry has fewer, but larger players. Their increased bargaining power leads to more profits, but lower wages.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt industries anymore. We disrupt people. Economic data shows that for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Income and wealth inequality remain at historic highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Change Fatigue And The Great Resignation

It is through this prism of increasingly powerful companies and vulnerable employees that every change initiative should be viewed. While leaders often see change initiatives as energizing and exciting, to employees they can seem like just one more burden on top of many others from both inside and outside of the workplace.

Research undertaken by PwC before the pandemic bears this out. In a survey of more than 2,200 executives, managers, and employees located across the globe, it found that 65% of respondents cited change fatigue, and only about half felt their organization had the capabilities to deliver change successfully.

It gets worse. 44% of employees say they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. Perhaps not surprisingly, employees view new transformation initiatives suspiciously, taking a “wait and see” attitude undermining the momentum and leading to a”boomerang effect” in which early progress is reversed when leadership moves on to focus other priorities.

Covid has exacerbated these underlying pressures. Since February 2020, millions of Americans over the age of 55 have left the workforce, driving a major labor shortage. For the first time in decades, workers are seeing a significant increase in their bargaining power and they are leaving in droves. Should anyone be surprised?

Focusing On The Meaningful Problems That Matter

Clearly, every organization needs to drive meaningful change. However, too many initiatives can undermine genuine transformation, leading to change fatigue and innovation theater. We need to make better choices about the projects we pursue. We can’t evaluate each program in a vacuum, but must take into account employee and organizational health.

In Mapping Innovation, I made the point that innovation isn’t about coming with ideas, but solving problems and I think that’s a good place to start when evaluating a transformation project. If successful, would this project solve an important problem? Is there a general consensus that it’s a problem we need to solve? How would solving it impact our business?

One of the things I’ve noticed in helping organizations pursue transformation is that questions like these are rarely considered. In fact, executives are usually surprised when we bring them up at the very beginning of the process. All too often, change is seen as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end.

We need to rethink the change gospel. There’s far too much talk and not nearly enough impact. Change should be an inspiration, not one more burden in an otherwise exhausted workplace. It’s time to refocus our efforts on change that matters. In most organizations, that will mean committing to fewer initiatives, but seeing them through.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

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Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Leaders need to make decisions and we rarely get to choose the context. Most often, we need to take action without all the facts, in a rapidly changing environment and a compressed time frame. We need to do so with the knowledge that if we get it wrong, we will bear the blame and no one else. It will be our mess to clean up.

That’s a hard bridge to cross and many, if not most, are never quite able to get there. I think that’s why we admire great leaders so much, because they have the courage to take responsibility on their backs and be accountable, to inspire confidence even in an atmosphere of confusion and to point the way forward, even if they aren’t sure it’s the right direction.

The truth is that you can never really be certain until you take that step forward. The simple and inescapable truth is that to accomplish anything significant you need to travel on an uncertain journey. It is tautologically true that the well-trod path will take us nowhere new. We can never fully control uncertainty, but we can learn to lead through it.

How Things Get So Complicated And Uncertain

Generally, we prefer to operate with some degree of predictability, which is why we build structure into daily life. On a personal level, we create habits and routines to give us a sense of grounding. On a societal level, we create laws and norms, so that we know what to expect from our interactions with each other.

Yet in Overcomplicated, mathematician Sam Arbesman gives two reasons why uncertainty is, to a great extent, unavoidable. The first is accretion. We build systems, like the Internet or the laws set down in the US Constitution, to perform a limited number of tasks. Yet to scale those systems, we need to build on top of them to expand their initial capabilities. As systems become larger, they get more complex and uncertain.

The second force is interaction. We may love the simplicity of an iPhone, but don’t want to be restricted to its capabilities alone. So we increase its functionality by connecting it to millions of apps. Those apps, in turn, connect to each other as well as to other systems. Every connection increases complexity and makes things harder to predict.

These two forces lead to what Benoit Mandelbrot called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order. Uncertainty, for better or worse, will always be somewhat unavoidable.

The Problem With Simplicity

The most straightforward solution to complexity and uncertainty is to boil things down and make them more simple. Politicians are fond of highlighting the thousands of pages pieces of legislation contain, because complexity is widely seen as a fatal flaw. “If it was thought through clearly, why couldn’t it have been devised more simply?” is the implication.

Yet while we yearn for simple rules, those rules often lead us astray. As Ludwig Wittgenstein explained in his rule following paradox, “no course of action could be determined by a rule because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Simple rules tend to be necessarily vague, which limits their usefulness.

Something similar happens when we try to tame complexity by summarizing it through identifying patterns. Random points of data, if there are enough of them, will always generate patterns as well, so we can never be quite sure if we are revealing an underlying truth or just creating a convincing illusion. To discern between the two is, unfortunately, complex.

In Why Information Grows, MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo explains that it is through emergent complexity that we create value. To understand what he means, let’s take another look at an iPhone. Its simple design belies incredible complexity, not only in the technology it contains, but in what it connects to, a complex ecosystem of apps, servers and data.

Steve Jobs didn’t intend to create an App Store, because he wanted to keep the iPhone simple. However, eventually he was convinced that by limiting complexity he was curtailing the potential value of his creation and, ultimately, he relented. It is through managing complexity, not avoiding it, that we can most effectively impact the world.

Narrowing Scope And Limiting Variables

The Franciscan friar William of Occam is best remembered for Occam’s razor, which he didn’t exactly invent, but did much to popularize. The technique, which is often mischaracterized as “the simplest solution is often the best,” actually had a lot more to do with variables and assumptions, which he advises to keep to a minimum.

It’s an interesting distinction that makes a big difference. William wasn’t advising us to ignore complexity, but to avoid increasing it by injecting things that don’t need to be there. We can acknowledge the messiness of the world and still tidy up our little corner of it, by narrowing our scope and limiting the variables we deal with.

Steve Blank advises startups to develop minimum viable products to test assumptions, rather than investing resources into a full-featured prototype. The idea is by narrowing scope you can get a better idea of the marketplace and then increase complexity from there. In our work helping organizations drive transformation, we advise our clients to start out with a keystone change, rather than rolling out everything all at once.

Whatever strategy you use, the key, as William of Occam pointed out long ago, is to limit variables where you can, while still recognizing that the universe is far more complex than our scaled down model of it. Or, as the statistician George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Innovation Is Exploration

The truth is that uncertainty is only a problem if you try to control it. The framers of the US Constitution designed it to be a guide, not a blueprint. That’s been the key to its success. They recognized it would have to evolve and grow over time and designed a system of checks and balances to curb the human potential for malice.

We need to start thinking less like engineers, designing just the right combination of levers and pulleys to account for every eventuality, and more like gardeners, seeding and nurturing ecosystems, pruning as we go. Gardeners don’t need to know the exact outcome of everything they plant, but can seek to improve the harvest each season.

In a world driven by networks and ecosystems, we can no longer treat strategy as if it were a game of chess, planning out each move with near perfect precision and foresight. The world moves far too fast for that. By the time we’ve put the final touches on the master plan, the assumptions upon which it was made are often no longer true.

Rather, we must constantly explore, widening and deepening connections to ecosystems of talent, technology and information. That’s how we uncover new paths that are often unseen from our usual perch and leverage complexity to our advantage. Breakthrough innovations arise out of unexpected encounters.

The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Today, competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Stop Doubling Down on Bad Ideas

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Stop Doubling Down On Bad Ideas

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to lead a number of organizations and each one involved a series of steep learning curves. Even the most successful operations do some things poorly, so managing an enterprise involves constant improvement. You always want to figure out where you can do things better.

One way to do that is to identify other organizations that do something well and adopt best practices. Copying what others do won’t make you world class, but it will get you started on the right road. Over time, you can learn which practices are a good fit for your organization and which are not. As you progress, you can begin to develop your own capabilities.

What you don’t want to do is to take bad ideas that have failed try and force them through, yet it happens all the time. Business pundits and consultants don’t stop selling zombie ideas just because they don’t work and people don’t stop getting taken in by slick sales jobs. We need to be much more discerning about the ideas we adopt. Here are some to watch out for.

The War On Talent

When some McKinsey consultants came up with the idea of a war for talent in 1998, it made a lot of sense. In a knowledge economy, your people are your greatest resource. Creating a culture of excellence, rewarding top employees and pruning out the laggards just seemed like such an obvious formula for success that few questioned it.

However, even early on some began to see flaws. Just a few years after McKinsey launched the concept, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer explained how study after study refuted the “War for Talent” hypothesis. He found that firms who followed the “talent war mind set” ended up actually undermining their people and overemphasizing recruiting from outside.

Even worse, McKinsey’s approach often creates a corrosive culture. By valuing individual accomplishment over teamwork, leaders set up a competitive dynamic that discourages collaboration while sabotaging the knowledge transfer that promotes learning new skills and improves performance. In a New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell explained how that kind of competitive dynamic contributed to Enron’s downfall.

The truth is that you don’t need the best people, you need the best teams and that requires a very different approach. Fostering collaboration requires an environment of psychological safety, not a series of performance review cage matches. Talent isn’t something you attract and bid for, it is something you build.

The Cult Of Disruption

It’s become fashionable to say that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). The term first arose in the aftermath of the Cold War, when a relatively stable conflict between two global superpowers fragmented into a multipolar multiethnic clash of civilizations. Today, however, it has become so firmly entrenched in the business lexicon that nobody even thinks to question it. Change has become gospel.

If you see the world in turmoil, the only sensible strategy is to constantly change and adapt. Perhaps just as importantly, in a corporate setting you need to be seen as changing and adapting. In this environment, managers have significant incentives to launch multiple initiatives aimed at transforming every aspect of the enterprise.

Yet do businesses really face a VUCA environment? The evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. A Brookings report showed that business has become less dynamic, with less churn among industry leaders and fewer new entrants. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found decreased competitive environments. A report from the IMF also suggests that these trends have worsened during the pandemic.

Make no mistake, all of the happy talk about change has a real cost. A study undertaken by PwC found that 65% of executives surveyed complained about change fatigue, and only about half felt their organization could deliver change successfully. 44% said that they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it found that most people have come to view new transformation initiatives suspiciously, taking a “wait and see” attitude undermining the momentum and leading to a”boomerang effect” in which early progress is reversed when leadership moves on to focus other priorities. In other words, we’re basically talking change to death.

Marching On Washington

The March on Washington remains one of the most iconic moments in American history. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech continues to inspire people around the world. The events of that day surely contributed to the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and made the world a better place.

So it’s no wonder that it seems like every time someone has an idea for change they plan a march. Yet the most salient aspect of over 100 years of marches on Washington is that none, except that one in 1963, have really accomplished much. In fact the very first one, in support of women’s suffrage in 1913, was a full blown disaster.

It’s not just social revolutionaries that make this mistake. Corporate change advocates have their own version of marching on Washington. They set up a big kickoff event to “create a sense of urgency” around change and use stark language like “innovate or die” and “burning platform” to make change seem inevitable.

The problem is that if a change is important and has real potential to impact what people believe and what they do, there will always be those who will hate it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Creating a lot of noise at the beginning of an initiative, before any real progress has been made, just gives your opposition a head start in their efforts to kill it off.

Closing The Knowing-Doing Gap

Business today moves fast. So we like simple statements that speak to larger truths. It always seems that if we can find a simple rule of thumb—or maybe 3 to 5 bullet points for the really big picture stuff—managing a business would be much easier. Whenever a decision needs to be made, we could simply refer to the rule and go on with our day.

Unfortunately, that often leads to cartoonish slogans rather than genuine managerial wisdom. Catchy ideas like “the war for talent,” “a VUCA world” and “creating a sense of urgency around change” end up taking the place of thorough analysis and good sense. When that happens, we’re in big trouble.

The problem is, as Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, “no course of action can be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Rules often appear to make sense on the surface, but when we try to apply them in the real world we run into trouble. We live in a complex universe and oversimplifying it leads us astray.

We need to stop worshiping the cult of ideas and start focusing on the problems we need to solve. The truth is that the real world is a confusing place. We have little choice but to walk the earth, pick things up along the way and make the best judgments we can. The decisions we make are highly situational and defy hard and fast rules. There is no algorithm for life. You have to actually live it, see what happens and learn from your mistakes.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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The Changemaker Mindset

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The Changemaker Mindset

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Every time I speak to a group of executives, they complain that their organizations desperately need to change, but that the bosses are hostile to it. And every time I speak to a group of leaders, they say that change is their highest priority, but can’t seem to align the rank-and-file behind transformational initiatives.

The truth is that everybody loves their own brand of change, it’s other people’s ideas and initiatives that they don’t like. We all have things that we want to be different. But the status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. To want change is one thing, but to change ourselves, well… that’s another story.

What I’ve found in both my research and my practice is that people who bring about transformational, even historic, change start out no differently than anyone else. In fact, early versions of them are often decidedly unimpressive. The difference between them and everyone else is that somewhere along the way they learn to adopt a changemaker mindset.

A Problem They Couldn’t Look Away From

As a young man, Mohandis Gandhi wasn’t the type of person anyone would notice. Impulsive and undisciplined, he was also so shy as a young lawyer that he could hardly bring himself to speak in open court. With his law career failing, he accepted an offer to represent the cousin of a wealthy muslim merchant in South Africa.

Upon his arrival, Gandhi was subjected to humiliation on a train and it changed him. His sense of dignity offended, he decided to fight back. He found his voice, built the almost superhuman discipline he became famous for and successfully campaigned for the rights of Indians in South Africa. He returned to India 21 years later as the “Mahatma,” or “holy man.”

The truth is that revolutions don’t begin with a slogan, they begin with a cause. Martin Luther King Jr., as eloquent as he was, didn’t start with words. It was his personal experiences with racism that helped him find his words. It was his devotion to the cause that gave those words meaning, not the other way around.

Steve Jobs didn’t look for ideas, he looked for products that sucked. Computers sucked. Music players sucked. Mobile phones sucked. His passion was to make them “insanely great.” Every breakthrough product or invention, a laser printer, a quantum computer or even a life-saving cure like cancer immunotherapy, always starts out with a problem someone couldn’t look away from.

Identifying A Keystone Change

Every change effort, if it is to be successful, needs to identify a Keystone Change to bridge the gap between the initial grievance about the world as it is and the vision for how the world could be. You can’t get there in a single step. This is a lesson that even a legendary changemaker like Gandhi had to learn the hard way.

In 1919, five years after his return to India, Gandhi called for a nationwide series of strikes and boycotts in response to the Rowlatt Acts, which restricted Indian rights. These protests were successful at first, but soon spun wildly out of control and eventually led to the massacre at Amritsar, in which British soldiers left hundreds dead and more than a thousand wounded.

A decade later, when the Indian National Congress asked Gandhi to design a campaign of civil disobedience in support of independence, he proceeded more cautiously. Rather than rashly calling for national action, he set out with 70 or 80 of his closest disciples to protest unjust salt laws. Their nonviolent discipline inspired the nation and the world.

Today, the Salt March is known as Gandhi’s greatest triumph. It was the first time that the British was forced to negotiate with the Indians and, because it demonstrated that the Raj could be defied, helped lead to Indian independence in 1947. Yet without that earlier failure, which Gandhi would call his Himalayan miscalculation, it would not have been possible.

Gandhi is, of course, a legendary historical figure. But other, more pedestrian, changemakers learned the same thing. A lean manufacturing transformation at Wyeth Pharmaceutical started with a single change with a single team, but quickly spread to 17,000 employees. A healthcare revolution began with just six quality practices. When the CIO of Experian set out to move his organization to the cloud, he began with internal API’s and just a few teams.

To make change real, you need to get out of the business of selling an idea and into the business of selling a success. You do that with a Keystone Change.

Empowering A Movement

We revere legendary change leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and others not just for their ideas, but because of how they empowered others to take ownership of their cause. Those who followed them did so not in their names, but for themselves. The struggle was collective, not one of subservience.

That’s what makes building a movement different from traditional change models they often teach in business schools. A snazzy internal communication program and a training regimen may help an organization adopt new software or gear up to support a new product line, but it won’t change how people fundamentally think or act.

Movement leaders focus on empowerment, not persuasion. Gandhi didn’t need to convince his countrymen about the daily humiliations and injustices suffered under the British Raj. King did not have to explain to black Americans that racism was wrong. Mandela did not have to persuade black South Africans about the evils of Apartheid. They empowered them to make a difference. That’s what makes movements so compelling and effective.

Changemakers of all kinds can do the same. At Experian, the CIO set up an “API Center of Excellence” to help product managers who wanted to build out cloud-based features. To power the quality movement in healthcare, activists created “change kits” to guide hospital staff who were on board and wanted to bring their colleagues along. Change can only succeed if you equip those who believe in it to drive it forward.

Building Empathy, Even For Your Enemies

People who believe in change want to believe that if everyone understood it, they’d want it to happen. That’s why “change management” gurus focus on communication and persuasion. They think that if you explain your idea for change in just the right way, others will see the light. For many change consultants, transformation is primarily a messaging problem.

Yet anyone who has ever been married or had kids knows how hard it can be to convince even a single person of something. Persuading hundreds, if not thousands—or even an entire society—that they should drop what they’re thinking and doing to adopt your idea and help drive it forward is a tall order. The simple truth is that no one is really that charming.

Make no mistake. If your idea is important, if it has real potential to affect how people think and how they act, there will always be those who will hate it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. That’s just a simple fact of life that every potential changemaker needs to learn to internalize and accept.

Yet adopting a changemaker mindset means that you understand that change is always built on common ground and that you need to build empathy, even for your most ardent adversaries, because that is how you identify shared values and move things forward. It is by listening to your opposition and internalizing its logic that you can learn how to discredit it, or even better, inspire those hostile to change to discredit themselves.

That is the changemaker mindset: To understand that change is hard, even unlikely, but to remain clear-eyed, hard-nosed and opportunity focused. To know that through shared values and shared purpose, radical, transformational change is not only possible, but ultimately inevitable.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife

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A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The physicist Max Planck made many historic breakthroughs, including a discovery that led to quantum theory. Still, he lamented that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Clearly, that’s not only true for scientific truths. Every generation rejects some notions of their elders, explores things on their own and adopts new ideas. Some of those ideas will survive, but others will ultimately be rejected, which always causes some acrimony. Even Aristotle complained about the “exalted notions” of the youth.

Yet this time is different. Because the Boomer generation was so large, and Generation X so small, those who came of age in the 1960s essentially ruled for two epochs. The rising Millennial generation, which is now the largest, holds starkly different values than Boomers. Over the next decade, as Millennials come to predominate, we can expect tensions to rise.

Revamping The Workplace

I still remember one incident early in my career. I had taken a job in national radio sales and the first few months were devoted to an intensive training course. One day that featured particularly nice weather, my fellow trainees and I decided that, instead of bringing our lunch back to the office, we would eat it in the park.

Our Boomer bosses were irate and insulted. The problem wasn’t that we took too much time for lunch, but rather that we took too much pleasure in it which, in their eyes at least, violated the social contract. As trainees, we were supposed to “pay our dues,” not to enjoy ourselves and our brief respite from the daily grind was seen as something akin to insubordination.

Millennials won’t stand for that kind of treatment. As this article in Harvard Business Review explains, they require a better work-life balance, more flexible schedules and constructive feedback. They demand to be respected and chafe at hierarchy. The younger generations of today don’t expect to “pay dues,” they seek a greater purpose.

Businesses that do not heed the Millennial’s demands are finding it difficult to compete. Millions of Boomers retired early during the pandemic, which led to severe labor shortage and the Great Resignation. Over the next few decades, as the younger generations take charge, we can expect a very different workplace.

Rethinking Economics

In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a radical idea. He argued that corporate CEOs should not take into account the interests of the communities they serve, but that their only social responsibility was to increase shareholder value. While ridiculed by many at the time, by the 1980s Friedman’s idea became accepted doctrine.

It wasn’t just Friedman, either. As the Boomer counterculture of the 60s and 70s gave way to the Yuppie culture of the 80s a new engineering mindset took hold. Much like the success of business was boiled down to its stock price, the success of a society was boiled down to GDP. “You manage what you measure” became an article of faith.

It has become clear that approach has failed. In fact, since Friedman’s essay the American economy has become markedly less productive. Our economy has become less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric you can think of, our well-being has declined since the 1970s.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the younger generations have rebelled. While the Boomers remember the Reagan years of the 1980s fondly, Millennials and Zoomers only see a record of failure. From the Great Recession to the Great Resignation, they see a dire need to change course and will not be assuaged by rosy economic statistics. They want a better quality of life.

Reshaping Society

When the Boomers came of age in the 60s it was an era of rising prosperity. Perhaps not surprisingly, many prioritized self-actualization and sought to “find themselves.” The scandals of the 1970s made them suspicious of the establishment and the Reagan years, along with the fall of the Soviet Union, reinforced their faith in individual agency.

Millennials have seen this ideology fail. Besides the lack of productivity growth and stagnation in wages, they have seen 9/11 traumatize the nation and pave the path for an ill-considered war on terror that cost trillions and devastated America’s standing in the world. Many carry significant educational debt and had their careers derailed by the Great Recession.

Research from Pew finds other important differences. While the Millennial generation is the most educated in history, with almost 40% holding a 4-year degree, they are worse off financially than their predecessors. Many continued to live with their parents as adults and delayed getting married and starting families. They are also far more multicultural than previous generations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Millennials have rejected the 1980s “greed is good” ethos of the Boomers and tend to focus on experiences rather than materialistic signaling. Also, while the younger generation’s passion for inclusivity is often overstated, they have grown up in a world far more accustomed to seeing marginalized groups in powerful positions.

Brace Yourself for a Tumultuous Decade

The almost seismic shift in values that the transition from Boomer to Millennial dominance represents would be enough to set the stage for conflict. What will make this decade even more difficult is that the demographic impact is hitting at the same time as other important shifts in technology, resources and migration patterns. The last time society has endured this much of a pressure cooker was the 1920s, and that ended badly.

We are already feeling the effects. The mismanaged “War of Terror,” the Great Recession and then the Covid pandemic undermined faith in institutions and paved the way for the rise of popular authoritarianism and the decline of democratic institutions. The battle for the liberal world order is being fought in, of all places, Ukraine, as I write this.

What I think should be most salient about our situation at this point in history is that we are here because of choices that were made. Yes, there were cultural and economic forces at play, but the Boomer generation chose to value the individual over the community, shareholders over other stakeholders and to embrace GDP as a proxy for the overall health of society.

We can, as Ukraine has been doing for the past twenty years, make different choices. We can choose our communities over ourselves, resilience over optimization, and to nurture rather than to dominate. Most of all, we need to invest to increase the productive, environmental and human potentials of our society so that we can better face the challenges ahead.

Make no mistake. This will be a struggle, as all worthy things are.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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What Separates Truly Revolutionary Leaders from Everyone Else

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What Separates Truly Revolutionary Leaders From Everyone Else

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1919, Mahatma Gandhi, who had long established himself as a revolutionary leader of uncommon strategic acumen, called for a general strike throughout India to protest unjust laws levied on his people by the British. It was, at least at first, an enormous success. In Mumbai, for example, 80% of shops closed their doors.

Yet things soon got out of hand. What began as peaceful protests against oppression turned violent. Riots broke out. The moral high ground that Gandhi so coveted—and relied on to accomplish his objectives—would crumble under his feat. Things ended with a horrible massacre at Amritsar. Gandhi would later call it his Himalayan miscalculation.

Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. Not by a long shot. He not only admitted his mistake, he vowed to learn from it. Ten years later, when the opportunity presented itself, he took a very different tack, which led to the Salt March and became his greatest triumph. It is often the ability to learn from mistakes that makes the difference between success and failure.

A Flash Of Insight That Would Overthrow A Dictator

One day in 1998, a group of five friends met in a cafe in Belgrade. Although still in their 20s, they were already experienced activists and most of what they experienced was failure. In 1992, they had taken part in student protests to protest the war in Bosnia. Yet much like the #Occupy protests that would later spread across the world, they never amounted to much.

In 1996, they took to the streets to support Zajedno, a coalition of opposition parties aligned against Slobodan Milošević. Although the ruling party clearly lost at the polls, the Serbian dictator annulled the election. Massive protests broke out, but unfortunately, the opposition coalition was unable to maintain unity and it was all for basically naught.

It was these defeats that they began to examine in 1998. They took a hard look at what had worked and what didn’t. They knew that they could get people to the polls and they knew that if people went to the polls they could win the Presidential election coming up in 2000. They also knew, from bitter experience, that if Milošević lost the election he would try to steal it.

So that’s what they planned for. They created a movement called Otpor that was steeped in patriotic imagery from the World War II resistance. It grew slowly at first, amounting to only a few hundred members after a year. But by the time the elections came around in 2000, Otpor’s ranks swelled to 70,000 and had grown into a potent political force.

When the Serbian strongman tried to falsify the election results massive protests, now known as the Bulldozer Revolution broke out. This time Otpor was able to enforce unity among the opposition parties, having lost the confidence of the military and police forces, Milošević was forced to give in. He would later be extradited to The Hague and die in his prison cell.

The Epiphany That Would Lead To The Lean Startup

In 1999, the day before his eighth startup went public, Steve Blank decided to retire at the age of 45. With time to reflect, he sat in a ski lodge and began to write a memoir with a “lessons learned” section at the end of each chapter. “In hindsight, it was a catharsis of moving from one part of my life to another,” he told me.

What he realized was that the idea a business started with was always wrong. Sometimes it was off by a little, sometimes it was off by a lot, but it was always wrong. The key to success was not a better idea, necessarily, but identifying and fixing its flaws before you ran out of money. To do that you needed to go and talk to customers.

“I was 80 pages in when I realized there was a pattern. When I sat inside the building things didn’t go very well, but when I got outside the building things turned around and got much better,” he remembers. Pursuing customer development even before product development was the essential insight behind the Lean Startup movement.

Today, lean startup methods have gone beyond startups been proven useful for large corporations, scientific institutions and even government agencies. The essential epiphany that made it possible came not from divine enlightenment, but rather through hard examination of two decades of mistakes and the will to change tack.

The Unmasking Of The Most Deadly Disease

In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case, in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, the young doctor purposely infected a tumor on his patient’s neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished and the patient remained cancer free even five years later.

Looking to repeat his success, he created a special brew of toxins designed to jump-start the immune system. Unfortunately, he was never able to replicate his initial results consistently. His idea was met with skepticism by the medical community and, when radiation therapy was developed in the early 20th century, Coley’s research was largely forgotten.

Yet his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, kept the dream alive. With a $2000 grant from Nelson Rockefeller she founded the Cancer Research Institute in 1953 to study immunological approaches to cancer. While mostly dismissed by the medical community, it did inspire a small cadre of devotees to keep looking, albeit mostly in vain.

A breakthrough came in 1996, when a researcher named Jim Allison published a landmark paper that added a new twist to the mystery. Allison had a hunch that Coley’s initial insight that our immune system can fight cancer was correct. However, he had discovered a “switch” that would shut off the immune response and believed that he could switch it back on.

As it turned out, Allison got it right and would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cancer immunotherapy. Coley’s initial idea wasn’t wrong, exactly, just incomplete. He had a piece of the puzzle, but not all of it. What he failed to see was the diabolical nature of the disease itself, some forms of which, “learned” to outwit our immune system by switching it off.

Unfortunately, we can be proved “right” in the end, and still fail. Every idea is flawed in some way, it’s just that sometimes those flaws are more disabling than others.

To Change The World, You Must First Conquer Yourself

There’s nothing quite like the rapture of an epiphany, that initial flash of insight which is still pure and innocent, before the harsh realities of the world muck it up with a bunch of inconvenient facts, corollaries and exceptions. That’s when we can give ourselves to it wholeheartedly, without equivocation or bearing the burden of creeping doubt.

Yet our ideas never turn out like we think they will. To succeed, they must grow and adapt to the world around them. Gandhi, fresh off stunning victories gaining rights for Indians in South Africa, didn’t realize how his methods could go so horribly awry. The Otpor activists, Steve Blank, William Coley and so many others had similar blind spots.

What I’ve found in my research of revolutionary changemakers is that what makes the difference between success or failure isn’t necessarily the brilliance of the initial idea or even the passion and diligence of those who work to bring it about, but their ability to learn things along the way. They didn’t merely stay the course, they corrected it as many times as they had to until they won.

Unfortunately, most never learn that simple lesson. They would rather make a point than make a difference and wear their failures like a badge of honor. After all, who but the most righteous could inspire such opposition? And who but the most pure could continue to persevere in the face of such constant defeat?

That’s the really tough thing about change. To truly bring it about, we first must change ourselves.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Four Deadly Business Myths

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Four Deadly Business Myths

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The unicorn is perhaps unique among myths in that the creature doesn’t appear in the mythology of any culture. The ancient Greeks, for all of their centaurs, hydras and medusae, never had any stories of unicorns, they simply thought that some existed somewhere. Of course, nobody had ever seen one, but they believed others had.

Beliefs are amazing things. We don’t need any evidence or rational basis to believe something to be true. In fact, research has shown that, when confronted with scientific evidence which conflicts with preexisting views, people tend to question the objectivity of the research rather than revisit their beliefs. Also, as Sam Arbesman has explained, our notions of the facts themselves change over time.

George Soros and others have noted that information has a reflexive quality. We can’t possibly verify every proposition, so we tend to take cues from those around us, especially when they are reinforced by authority figures, like consultants and media personalities. Over time, the zeitgeist diverges further from reality and myths evolve into established doctrine.

Myth #1: We Live In A VUCA Business Environment

Today it seems that every business pundit is talking about how we operate in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. It’s not hard to see the attraction. Conjuring almost apocalyptic images of continuous industrial disruption creates demand for consulting and advisory services. It’s easier to sell aspirin than vitamins.

The data, however, tell a different story. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

The recent great resignation, when people began leaving their jobs in droves, helps tell this story. Should anyone be surprised? We’ve been working longer hours, constantly tethered to the office even as we work remotely, under increasing levels of stress. Yes, things change. They always have and always will. We need to adapt, but all of the VUCA talk is killing us.

Myth #2: Empathy Is Absolution

Another favorite buzzword today is empathy. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective. As noted above, there’s far too much talk about disruption and uncertainty and not nearly enough about stability and well-being.

Still, the one-dimensional use of empathy is misleading. When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, it seems like a “nice to have,” rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned living overseas for 15 years is that it is incredibly important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

Learning that not everyone thinks alike is one of life’s most valuable lessons. Yes, coercion is often a viable strategy in the short-term. But to build something that lasts, it’s much better if people do things for their own reasons, even if those reasons are different than yours. To achieve that, you have to understand their motivations.

Myth #3: Diversity Equity And Inclusion Is About Enforcing Rules

In recent years corporate America has pushed to implement policies for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Society for Human Resource Management even offers a diversity toolkit on its website firms can adopt, complete with guidelines, best practices and even form letters.

Many organizations have incorporated diversity awareness training for employees to learn about things like unconscious bias, microaggressions and cultural awareness. There are often strict codes of conduct with serious repercussions for violations. Those who step out of line can be terminated and see their careers derailed.

Unfortunately, these efforts can backfire, especially if diversity efforts rely to heavily on a disciplinary regime. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out long ago, strict rules-based approaches are problematic because they inevitably lead to logical contradictions. What starts out as a well-meaning effort can quickly become a capricious workplace dominated by fear.

Cultural competency is much better understood as a set of skills than a set of rules. While the prospect of getting fired for saying the wrong thing can be chilling, who wouldn’t want to be a more effective communicator, able to collaborate more effectively with colleagues who have different viewpoints, skills and perspectives?

To bring about real transformation, you need to attract. You can’t bully or overpower. Promoting inclusion should be about understanding, not intimidation.

Myth #4: People Are Best Motivated Through Carrots And Sticks

One of the things we’ve noticed when we advise organizations on transformation initiatives is that executives tend to default towards incentive structures. They quickly conjure up a Rube Goldberg-like system of bonuses and penalties designed to incentivize people to exhibit the desired behaviors. This is almost always a mistake.

If you feel the need to bribe and bully people to get what you want, you are signaling from the outset that there is something undesirable about what you’re asking for. In fact, we’ve known for decades that financial incentives often prove to be problematic.

Instead of trying to get people to do what you want, you’re much better off identifying people who want what you want and empowering them to succeed. As they prosper, they can bring others in who can attract others still. That’s how you build a movement that people feel a sense of ownership of, rather than mandate that they feel subjugated by.

The trick is that you always want to start with a majority, even if it’s three people in a room of five. The biggest influence on what we do and think is what the people around us do and think. That’s why it’s always easy to expand a majority out, but as soon as you are in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback.

We need to stop trying to engineer behavior, as if humans are assemblages of buttons and levers that we push and pull to get the results we want. Effective leaders are more like gardeners, nurturing, growing and shaping the ecosystems in which they operate, uniting others with a sense of shared identity and shared purpose.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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The Breakthrough Lifecycle

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The Breakthrough Lifecycle

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Many experts suspect that the COVID crisis is receding into the background. It is, of course, hard to know for sure. There will continue to be debate and we will still need to have some mitigating measures in place. Still, for the most part, people are back at work, kids are in school, and relatively normal routines have returned.

Generations from now, historians will most likely still question what lessons are to be gleaned from the past few years. Should we strengthen our multilateral institutions or have they become so sclerotic that they need to be dismantled? Is the rise of populist nationalism a harbinger for the future or a flash in the pan?

One thing I don’t expect to be hotly debated, in fact seems perfectly clear even now, is that science saved us. Untold thousands, working mostly anonymously in labs around the world, created a vaccine of astonishing efficacy in record time. It is these types of breakthroughs that change the course of history and, if we can embrace their power, lead us to a better future.

A Seemingly Useless Idea

The MRNA technology that led to the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have the potential to revolutionize medical science. It can rapidly reprogram the machinery in our cells to manufacture things that can potentially cure or prevent a wide range of diseases, from cancer to malaria, vastly more efficiently than anything we’ve ever seen before.

Yet while revolutionary, it is not at all a new idea. In fact Katalin Karikó, who pioneered the approach, published her first paper on mRNA-based therapy way back in 1990. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to win grants to fund her work and, by 1995, things came to a head. She was told that she could either direct her energies in a different way, or be demoted.

This type of thing is not unusual. Jim Allison, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on cancer immunotherapy, had a very similar experience when he had his breakthrough, despite having already become a prominent leader in the field. “It was depressing,” he told me. “I knew this discovery could make a difference, but nobody wanted to invest in it.”

The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Things that really change the world always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet.

Overcoming Resistance

Humans tend to see things in a linear fashion. It is easier for us to imagine a clear line of cause and effect, like a row of dominoes falling into each other, rather than a series of complex interactions and feedback loops. So it shouldn’t be surprising that, in hindsight, breakthrough ideas seem so obvious that only the most dim-witted would deny their utility.

When we think of something like, say, electricity, we often just assume that it was immediately adopted and the world simply changed overnight. After all, who could deny the superiority of an efficient electric motor over a big, noisy steam engine? Yet as the economist Paul David explained in a famous paper, it took 40 years for it to really take hold.

There are a few reasons why this is the case. The first is switching costs. A new technology almost always has to replace something that already does the job. Another problem involves establishing a learning curve. People need to figure out how to unlock the potential of the new technology. To bring about any significant change you first have to overcome resistance.

With electricity, the transition happened slowly. It wouldn’t have made sense to immediately tear down steam-powered factories and replace them. At first, only new plants used the electricity. Yet it wasn’t so much the technology itself, but how people learned to use it to re-imagine how factories functioned that unlocked a revolution in productivity gains.

In the case of mRNA technology, no one had seen a mRNA vaccine work, so many favored more traditional methods. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, for example, used a more traditional DNA-based approach using adenoviruses that was much better understood, rather than take a chance on a newer, unproven approach.

We seem to be at a similar point now with mRNA and other technologies, such as CRISPR. They’ve been proven to be viable, but we really don’t understand them well enough yet to unlock their full potential.

Building Out The Ecosystem

When we look back through history, we see a series of inventions. It seems obvious to us that things like the internal combustion engine and electricity would change the world. Still, as late as 1920, roughly 40 years after they were invented, most American’s lives remained unchanged. For practical purposes, the impact of those two breakthroughs were negligible.

What made the difference wasn’t so much the inventions themselves, but the ecosystems that form around them. For internal combustion engines it took a separate networks to supply oil, to build roads, manufacture cars and ships and so on. For electricity, entire industries based on secondary inventions, such as household appliances and radios, needed to form to fully realize the potential of the underlying technology.

Much of what came after could scarcely have been dreamed of. Who could have seen how transportation would transform retail? Or how communications technologies would revolutionize warfare? Do you really think anybody looked at an IBM mainframe in the 1960s and said, “Gee, this will be a real problem for newspapers some day?”

We can expect something similar to happen with mRNA technology. Once penicillin hit the market in 1946, a “golden age” of antibiotics ensued, resulting in revolutionary new drugs being introduced every year between 1950 and 1970. We’ve seen a similar bonanza in cancer immunotherapies since Jim Allison’s breakthrough.

In marked contrast to Katalin Karikó’s earlier difficulty in winning grants for her work, the floodgates have now opened as pharma companies are now racing to develop mRNA approaches for a myriad of diseases and maladies.

The Paradox Of New Paradigms

The global activist Srdja Popović once told me that when a revolution is successful, it’s difficult to explain the previous order, because it comes to be seen as unbelievable. Just as it’s hard to imagine a world without electricity, internal combustion or antibiotics today, it will be difficult to explain our lives today to future generations.

In much the same way, we cannot understand the future through linear extrapolation. We can, of course, look at today’s breakthroughs in things like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing, but what we don’t see is the second or third order effects, how they will shape societies and how societies will choose to shape them.

Looking at Edison’s lightbulb would tell you nothing about radios, rock music and the counterculture of the 60s, much like taking a ride in Ford’s “Model T” would offer little insight into the suburbs and shopping malls his machine would make possible. Ecosystems are, by definition, chaotic and non-linear.

What is important is that we allow for the unexpected. It was not obvious to anyone that Katalin Karikó could ever get her idea to work, but she shouldn’t have had to risk her career to make a go of it. We’re enormously lucky that she didn’t, as so many others would have, taken an easier path. It is, in the final analysis, that one brave decision that we have to thank for what promises to be brighter days ahead.

All who wander are not lost.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Moments and Movements Are Not the Same Thing

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

On September 17th, 2011, protesters began to flood into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Declaring “We are the 99%” they planned to #Occupy Wall Street for as long as it took to make their voice heard. Similar protests soon spread like wildfire across 951 cities in 82 countries. It seemed to be a massive global movement of historic proportions.

But it wasn’t a movement. It was merely a moment. Within a few months, the streets and parks were cleared. The protesters went home and nothing much changed. #Occupy was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly, no tangible aim was accomplished.

Failure has costs. Thousands of people for hours a day across several months adds up to billions of dollars worth of man-hours that could have been put to some useful purpose. Make no mistake. Creating positive change in the world takes far more than mobilization. You need a vision and a strategy, guided by values, designed to accomplish clear objectives.

Getting Beyond Grievance

Every change effort starts with a grievance. There’s something that people don’t like and they want it to be different. In a social or political movement that may be a corrupt leader or a glaring injustice. In an organizational context, the problem is usually something like falling sales, unhappy customers, low employee morale or technological disruption.

Whatever the case may be, the first step toward bringing change about is to understand that getting mired in grievance won’t get you anywhere. You can’t just complain about things you don’t like. You need to come up with an affirmative vision for how you would want things to be different and better.

The best place to start is by asking yourself, “if I had the power to change anything, what would it look like?” Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for the civil rights movement was for a Beloved Community. Bill Gates’s vision for Microsoft was for a “computer on every desk and in every home.” A good vision should be aspirational. It should inspire.

One of the things I found in my research is that successful change leaders don’t try to move from grievance to vision in one step, but rather identify a Keystone Change, which focuses on a clear and tangible goal, includes multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change, to bridge the gap.

For King, the Keystone Change was voting rights. For Gates it was an easy-to-use operating system. For your vision, it will undoubtedly be something different. The salient point here is that every successful transformation I have come across started out with a Keystone Change, so that’s where you will want to start as well.

Building In Constraints Through A Genome Of Values

Creating a clear vision for change is absolutely essential, but it’s only a first step. You also need to be clear and explicit about your values. While a vision for the future represents possibility, values represent constraints. Values make clear that we not only want things, but we’re also willing to incur certain costs to attain them.

For example, throughout his life, Nelson Mandela was accused of being a Communist, an anarchist, an extremist and worse. Yet when confronted with these accusations, he would always say that no one had to guess what he believed or what he was fighting for, because it was all written down in 1955 in a document called the Freedom Charter.

Importantly, the Freedom Charter imposed constraints on Mandela and his movement. When he rose to power, he couldn’t oppress white Afrikaners, because that would betray all that he’d been fighting for. That gave the movement credibility and power. Occupy, of course, was never clear or explicit about its values and never sought to constrain itself in any way. It’s activists were often seen as undisciplined and vulgar

In a similar vein, when Lou Gerstner set out to transform IBM in the 90s, he vowed that he would shift the company’s values from the “stack of its own proprietary technologies” to its “customers’ stack of business processes.” Yet it was his willingness to forego revenue on every sale to make good on this value is what made people believe in it. If not for that, it’s doubtful IBM would still be in business today.

Make no mistake. Values always cost something. If you are unwilling to bear costs and constraints, it isn’t a value. It’s a platitude. Change is always built on a foundation of shared values and common purpose. If you aren’t able to communicate clearly about what you believe and what you value, you can’t expect others to join you.

Mobilizing People To Influence Institutions

In October 2011, at the height of the #Occupy protests, the civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis showed up at an #Occupy rally in Atlanta and asked to speak. He was refused. Some attributed the snub to racism among the privileged white protestors. Others faulted Lewis himself, who didn’t understand the complex rules of the rally.

The protester who led the charge to block Lewis, however, described a different motivation. For him, Lewis’s great crime was that he was part of the “two-party system” and therefore unworthy of trust. “Any organization that upholds the legitimacy of the two-party system simply buttresses interests opposed to those of everyday people,” the man said.

This is, of course, total nonsense. Every regime or status quo depends on institutions to support them. That’s why a key part of any transformation strategy is to mobilize people to influence the institutions that can bring change about. One major reason that #Occupy failed was that it mobilized people to do no more than sleep in parks and snarl out epithets.

Now consider Martin Luther King Jr., who was able to bring considerable influence to bear on the US political system, just as Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston did with the US legal system and Nelson Mandela did with international institutions. These men had at least as much reason to be skeptical as any #Occupy protester, but understood that it is institutions that have the power to make change real.

In our corporate work, we find the same principle applies. Would-be changemakers tend to construe institutions too narrowly. If it is an internal initiative, they overlook customers, industry associations, community leaders and other external stakeholders. If it is an externally facing initiative, they often overlook important internal stakeholders that can help.

Preparing For Your Moment

It’s easy to confuse a moment with a movement. A movement involves linking together small, but often disparate groups in the context of shared purpose and shared values. A moment occurs when an event triggers a temporary decrease in resistance to an action or idea that opens up a window of opportunity. Movements require preparation. Moments require little more than luck.

That’s why we see protesters suddenly fill the streets and then, almost as suddenly, dissipate with little or no impact. It’s why some startups catch investors’ imagination and race to billion-dollar unicorn status, only to crash and burn just as fast. Politicians’ fortunes rise and fall, social media stars have their moment in the sun before disappearing into obscurity.

Building a movement requires work. You need to get beyond mere grievances and articulate an affirmative vision. You need to identify and speak to shared values and build on common ground. You need to invite people to join your cause for their own reasons, which may be different from your own. And then you need to focus your efforts on influencing the institutions that can actually make a difference.

So we should never mistake a moment for a movement. However, we can build a movement in anticipation for a moment that we expect will come. Gandhi trained his disciples for ten years before the opportunity for the Salt March came along. King’s efforts failed in Albany, but triumphed in Birmingham under better circumstances. Polish protesters were ill-prepared in 1970, but learned from the mistakes and later brought down an empire.

The crucial point to remember is that moments of opportunity are rare. We need to prepare for them. So that when they happen and fortune smiles on us we are ready. We have everything in place. That’s how radical, transformational change comes about.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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