Category Archives: Change

Embrace the Genius of the Obvious

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Embrace the Genius of the Obvious

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I’m currently reading Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao’s new book, The Friction Project, which is really a breath of fresh air. I was particularly struck by one passage in the beginning in which they write, “Friction fixers pride themselves in being masters of the obvious. They are mighty skeptical of secret solutions, shocking surprises, and miracle cures.”

It’s a simple truth that humans crave status and taking on an air of sophistication is one way to attain it. We have an urge to inject complexity, to make the case that we see something others don’t. This isn’t a moral failing, but as Will Storr explains in The Status Game, an integral part of how people relate to each other and signal identity.

So the first step toward embracing the genius of the obvious is to recognize that it isn’t something we naturally do. We tend to look for interesting stories involving complex phenomena behind things in our lives, which is why superstitions and conspiracy theories catch on. It takes effort and expertise to filter out complexity and expose the simple core.

Make It Easier For People To Perform And They Will Perform Better

While we like things to be simple, complexity is somewhat unavoidable. Complexity scientist Sam Arbesman’s book, Overcomplicated, explains why. We start out with simple intentions, but then as we try to scale things up and do more, things naturally get more complicated through two processes: Accretion and interaction.

For example, the US constitution is a fairly simple document, but to run a modern society, the legal code has to deal with a wide range of activity, including crimes, contract disputes, family law and many, many other things, which is while the legal code is almost unimaginably large and complex. Take into account the interactions between different jurisdictions and it’s fair to say that no one on earth understands the entire US legal system.

The same thing happens in organizations. You can develop a simple process for, say, getting expenses approved, but you necessarily need to expand it to take into account a variety of different expenses, for different situations and levels of seniority. A junior executive taking a client out to lunch is very different from a more senior executive hiring a contractor. Add in interactions between different departments and functions and things get complicated.

That’s why Sutton and Rao make the seemingly obvious, yet profound, point that we need to actively work to make ourselves accountable for friction by being responsible trustees of others’ time. We need to limit the “smart talk” and “jargon monoxide,” that obscure rather than reveal issues and engage in a “subtraction mindset” in order to actively remove barriers.

It is this last point that I think is the most helpful. Processes accrete over time and, if you don’t remove those that outlive their usefulness, they stay on as zombies that gum up the works. Leaders need to get comfortable with saying, “no.” It’s too easy to enact a new policy or to start a new initiative. We need to do the hard work of figuring out what to remove.

Poor People Have Problems That Cause Them To Miss Work

Managers often apply a procurement mindset to hiring. They determine what the “market rate” is for a particular task, role or set of skills, and then pay accordingly. Just as it doesn’t make sense to pay more for rent or a piece of equipment than you have to, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to pay more for an employee to do a job than you have to, right?

Not quite. In The Case for Good Jobs MIT’s Zeynep Ton points out that, unlike equipment and real estate, people have lives and those lives affect how they do their jobs. If they can’t afford healthy food, child care, a decent place to live or to be able to cover unplanned expenses, things will go wrong in their lives, which will cause them to miss work.

With more absenteeism, managers need to cover for employees and don’t have time to manage properly. Increased employee turnover results in increased training costs as well as greater burdens on managerial bandwidth. Morale declines along with performance, costing the business even more and, of course, because managers spend so much time plugging holes, nobody has time to fix anything.

Ton’s Good Jobs Institute works with organizations to fix the problem and has seen impressive results. From businesses as diverse as Aetna insurance, PayPal and Quest Diagnostics, raising the pay of financially insecure employees reduced turnover, which allowed the firms to invest in skills, manage more effectively and improve processes.

There is an obvious logic to it all. Poor people don’t make a lot of money, so raising their salaries doesn’t cost very much. In many, if not most, cases the increased productivity more than pays for itself if leaders are able to leverage a more stable, motivated workforce to improve operations and increase competitiveness.

People Resist Change

One of the most obvious principles about any kind of transformational initiative is that any time you ask people to change what they think or what they do, there will be people who won’t like it. Some will work to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

We all know this because we’ve all experienced it (and it has also been thoroughly documented in research). But some would have us believe that it doesn’t exist. Some so-called “change management experts” even claim that resistance to change is an illusion—the product of a failure to identify and communicate a value proposition rather than any real hostility to change.

This is so obviously hogwash that it’s hard to take it seriously, but then if you look at popular change management frameworks such as Kotter’s 8 Steps or Prosci’s ADKAR model, they have little or anything to say about overcoming resistance to change. In the rare instances they do discuss resistance they assume it is rational resistance and suggest some version of the information deficit model that we know doesn’t work.

That’s why at the beginning of every change initiative we work on we do a resistance inventory to anticipate who will resist, what form that resistance will take and what strategies can mitigate it. You can’t anticipate everything, but with a little planning, you can develop strategies to overcome even the most irrational, virulent resistance.

Don’t Overlook The Simple Truths

Ockham’s Razor, or the “principle of parsimony,” is often interpreted as another version of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule. Yet it is far more profound than that. A far more accurate translation from the original Latin is, “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, we should think before we add things that complicate matters.

In modern life we are constantly adding things. William of Ockham was a monk, who led a simple existence. We’re expected to build things and, as we do, principles, rules and procedures accumulate over time and, as a matter of course, multiply unnecessarily. We need to do the hard work of subtraction, taking out things that might have once made sense but don’t anymore.

When I’m writing, I always like to think my readers have a “cognitive budget” that they are willing to spend on a particular blog post, email, article or book chapter. When I edit, I always go through and ask, “is this worth the cognitive budget?” If there’s a doubt, I take it out. I’ve learned to apply the same principle to other facets of my life, to take out what doesn’t need to be there.

That’s the genius of the obvious. Simple truths are rarely left out in the open, but obscured by the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. It takes work to dig them out and that work requires focus. It doesn’t happen by itself, but takes determination to whittle down to the core, so that the truths we seek can reveal themselves to us.

We all need to hold ourselves accountable. Uncovering the obvious is not a simple thing, but the work of a lifetime.

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

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How True Believers Undermine Change

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How True Believers Undermine Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Journalist and Puck co-founder Tina Nguyen has been doing the rounds to promote her new book, The Maga Diaries, that chronicles her rise through, as well as her retreat from, the right-wing media ecosystem. What she describes is a carefully constructed culture that identifies, indoctrinates and then promotes ultra-conservative media personalities.

Yet these efforts are prone to failure. As MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have shown, in their effort to create homophily, these types of echo chambers undermine critical thought by creating filter bubbles and diminishing access to information, which makes it hard to be relevant to a wider audience.

The truth is that lasting change is always built on shared values. We can’t just preach to the choir. We need to venture out of the church and mix with the heathens. The best way to identify shared values is to listen to those who oppose what you’re trying to achieve. If you only interact with those who agree with you, you are undermining your own efforts.

Humans Are Wired For Tribal Thinking

Humans naturally form tribes. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection, which explains how groups favor those who share their attributes in the hopes that those attributes will be propagated.

Marshall McLuhan, in his classic Understanding Media, one of the most influential books of the 20th century, described media as “extensions of man” and argued that technologies like the Gutenberg printing press not only accelerated the spread of information, but also affected human thought itself. In effect, the medium is the message.

Following this same line of thought, he predicted that the new electronic media that were emerging at the time would lead to a global village and people would be able to instantly exchange ideas and experiences across vast chasms of time and space. Communities would no longer be tied to a physical place, but intermingle with others on a world stage.

Yet McLuhan did not see the global village as a peaceful place. In fact, he predicted it would lead to a new form of tribalism and result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history, as long separated—and emotionally charged—cultural norms would now constantly intermingle, clash… and explode.

Building Status Within A Shared Identity

The indoctrination process that Nguyen describes is designed to create a uniformity of thought. The pressure is subtle at first. Young students are invited to dinners with prominent people, told that they have great potential and a big future ahead of them. They learn to take subtle cues about what ideas and beliefs are appreciated and which are not.

Then, as Will Storr explains in his bestselling book, a status game begins. As the players vie to signal identity, group polarization leads to “moral outbidding,” a purity spiral ensues and the most extreme views are proudly displayed, creating strong bonds of group identity and what Wittgenstein calls a private language begins to form.

Those who proudly display tribal signals and speak the tribal language, get access to opportunities others don’t. Nguyen tells about being given a mentor who opened up job opportunities for her in journalism and would advise what stories to report and what angles to take. Slowly, she started to feel that something was wrong.

The problem is that the more we dedicate ourselves to a particular status game, the more difficult we find it is to relate outside of it. Top notch athletes, Special Forces operators, Wall Street traders and members of religious cults often find they have difficulty relating to others who play different status games than they do.

Differentiating Values, Shared Values and The Social Media Business Model

When we feel passionately about an idea, we want to talk about how it’s different, because that’s what made us passionate in the first place. People who go to Trump rallies vie for who can wear the t-shirt with the most extreme slogans. Some who start out with a desire to promote social justice and basic fairness can drift into a belief in a hierarchy of oppression and cheer on cruelty and violence.

Social media business models exacerbate these underlying tendencies by rewarded content that draws strong reactions. For example, when Facebook researchers created a profile of a white woman named “Carol” that was interested in politics, parenting, Christianity, and Fox News, she was immediately subjected to a rabbit hole of hate speech and QAnon.

Within the bubble, this feels good. People become religiously dedicated to the cause, the sense of group identity intensifies and the movement feels powerful. The problem comes when ideas from inside the bubble escape out, such as when somebody shoots up a pizza shop because he gets convinced that a Satanic child sex abuse ring was being run out of its nonexistent basement or a Cornell professor declares that he was exhilarated by the murder of Israelis.

Differentiating values are what make people passionate about an idea, but by definition they can seem strange, or even extreme, to others. That creates an inevitable backlash. It’s a simple truth that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. To avoid that boomerang, you need to identify shared values that can bring people in without turning others off.

Failing To Survive Victory

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that many of our opinions are a product of our inclusion in a particular team. Because our judgments are so closely intertwined with our identity, contrary views can feel like an attack. So we feel the urge to lash out and silence opposition. That almost guarantees a failure to survive victory.

I first noticed this in the aftermath of the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. Having overcome a falsified election, we were so triumphant that we failed to see the gathering storm. Because we felt that the forces of history were on our side, we dismissed signs that the corrupt and thuggish Viktor Yanukovych was staging a comeback and paid a terrible price. DEI leaders are experiencing something similar today.

I see the same pattern in our work helping organizations with transformational initiatives. Change leaders feel so passionately about their idea they want to push it through and silence dissent. But not every transformation is for everybody. Meaningful change can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be empowered.

But in order to do that, you need to focus your energy on winning converts, rather than punishing heretics. ​​One of the most difficult things about leading change is that we need to let people embrace it for their own reasons and in their own way. Some will never embrace it and will take another path, pursue a different journey.

The truth is to bring about lasting change you need to learn to love your haters. They’re the ones who can help alert you to early flaws, which gives you the opportunity to fix them before they can do serious damage. They can also help you to identify shared values that can help you communicate more effectively and also design dilemmas that will send people your way.

The best place to start is with a problem that people actually want solved, that can be pursued with a sense of shared values and shared purpose. Change that lasts is always built on common ground. The secret to bringing about large-scale change is understanding you don’t have to bring in everyone at once, just enough to help you get to the tipping point where you can unlock a cascade.

Change is about collective dynamics, not persuasion, or snappy slogans. In fact, the urge to persuade is a red flag. It usually means you either have the wrong change or the wrong people. That’s why you want to start out with a problem that people want solved, that can be pursued with shared values and shared purpose.

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

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Do These 3 Things to Tell a Compelling Story

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Do These 3 Things to Tell a Compelling Story

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There’s a great, although perhaps apocryphal, story about Franz Kafka and a little girl. The relatively unknown author—he wouldn’t achieve great fame until after his death—met a young girl who lost her doll. Kafka helped her look for it, but to no avail. The doll was lost forever and the girl was heartbroken.

But then Kafka told her a story. The next day he brought her a letter from the doll. “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world.” Kafka would bring her letters telling her of the doll’s adventures. He eventually bought her another doll and gave it to her with another note that said, “my travels have changed me.”

As the story goes, after Kafka’s death the girl found another letter hidden in the replacement doll that said, “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.” We can’t all write like Kafka, but with a little bit of knowledge and some practice, we can all learn to tell stories that give meaning and purpose to our messages.

1. Create Tension

The first element of any story is its exposition, which is the world you build around the story. It includes the setting, the characters and other background information. That’s where most people start their stories, but it can be a trap, like when your mother starts a story about meeting someone at a drugstore and ten minutes later you’re still hearing about the grandchildren and wondering what the point is.

Master storytellers start with a tension or conflict, like the girl losing her doll in the Kafka story or a James Bond movie when it starts with him hanging from a helicopter and you have no idea why. It’s the tension or conflict that keeps our attention because we want to see it resolved. The Metamorphosis, the only novel Kafka ever finished, began with:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Another element of tension and conflict is the characters themselves. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, points out that we find characters like Darth Vader more interesting than one dimensional characters like Superman because they lack moral clarity. It is that ambiguity that makes them interesting and provokes thought and discussion.

Notice how in the story with the girl, the resolution to the lost doll creates its own tension. What will the letters say? Will she appreciate them, learn from them or see through the ruse? We appreciate the ending of the story not only because the tension was resolved, but in a way that honored the feeling of loss that created it.

2. Manage The Cognitive Budget

Born in the late 13th century, William of Ockham was a giant of his age. As one of the few intellectual lights of medieval times, his commentaries on reason, logic and political theory are studied even today. His ideas about the separation of church and state were literally centuries ahead of their time and formed the basis for our own constitutional principle.

Yet he’s best known for Ockham’s Razor, sometimes known as the “principle of parsimony.” Often, the principle is interpreted as “Keep It Simple Stupid,” but that’s not quite right. Notice how the Kafka story, although it’s short, has a sort of elegant complexity to it. The notion of a doll traveling around the world having adventures certainly isn’t simplistic.

A much more accurate translation would be, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, if something doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be. Everything you include, should be intentional and have a purpose. Even a subplot needs to play a role in the overall narrative. Anything else just distracts from what you’re trying to say.

A useful device I use for applying Ockham’s razor is to imagine my audience, whether that is a reader or a listener, as having an internal “cognitive budget” they are willing to devote to whatever I’m trying to tell them. Then I judge everything I include by the standard of, “is this worth using up my cognitive budget?”

So be cautious and respectful with your audience’s attention. If you have any doubts whether it needs to be there, it probably doesn’t. Take it out and see if anything meaningful is lost. If not, keep it out and don’t look back.

3. Create “Buts” And “Therefores”

Being mindful of your audience’s cognitive budget doesn’t mean stories should be linear. In fact, you want twists and turns. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone call this their But & Therefore Rule. Learning how to master it can dramatically improve the way you tell stories and engage audiences.

The idea is that each element of a story is either a causal connection or a twist. There should never be a simple, “and then” linking two elements together. You can see Parker and Stone explaining the concept in this video:

We can see the concept at work in the Kafka story. Kafka found the girl crying, THEREFORE he helped her look for it BUT they couldn’t find it THEREFORE she was heartbroken. BUT he brought her the letter telling her the doll was going on a trip to see the world. BUT eventually he bought her a new doll. Kafka dies and their relationship ends, BUT he left her one final note.

Each THEREFORE reinforces the element that precedes it and each BUT creates a new twist. Everything has a purpose and nothing is there that doesn’t need to be, which is what makes the story so elegantly compelling.

We All Need To Learn To Leverage The Power Of Story

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, along with other giants like Oppenheimer, von Neumann and Gödel, would reside until 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. Without the stories, Fuld Hall is just a red brick building.

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.

Stories, as Hollywood mogul Peter Guber has put it, provides emotional transport for ideas. Emotions are like little yellow highlighters in our brains, providing markers that tell us, “remember this, it’s important.” It is, of course, crucial to get your facts straight, but if you don’t learn how to tell a story, those facts will be easily forgotten.

Do yourself and those around you a favor. Learn how to tell stories and tell them well. Life’s too short to be boring or to be bored.

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

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We Must Rethink the Myth of Xerox PARC and the Macintosh

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We Must Rethink the Myth of Xerox PARC and the Macintosh

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When people like to tell stories of historic corporate missteps, the story of Xerox and the Macintosh is near the top of the list. As the tale goes, the corporate giant spent a fortune to create all the technology that the famous computer was based on, but failed to market it and let Steve Jobs steal it out from under them.

But that version leaves out important context. Yes, Xerox did create the technology. It was also true that Steve Jobs, while touring the company’s research facility, understood that he could use it to make a revolutionary consumer product. But it wasn’t a blunder. Steve Jobs was there because Xerox had invested in Apple at bargain prices, not because they were tricked in some way.

The story has deeper implications, because the myth of Xerox’s blunder influences how firms invest in technology. The truth is that Xerox’s research strategy was visionary and incredibly successful. In fact, it likely saved the company. So rather than looking at the story of Xerox and the Macintosh as a cautionary tale, we should see it as a model to replicate.

The Xerox PARC Strategy

When Peter McColough took the helm of Xerox in 1968, it was at the top of American industry. An incredibly profitable business, it had a culture devoted to technical excellence and produced the world’s best performing copiers. Over the years it also developed a great sales and service organization that built strong relationships with its customers.

But it was becoming clear that trouble was looming. Japanese competitors like Canon and Ricoh started selling simpler, cheaper copiers, based on 20-year-old technology, that were easier to use and needed less maintenance. Rather than staffing a “copy room,” companies could place these smaller, less expensive units on every floor.

Xerox was getting disrupted. It continued to innovate, but most of those efforts were going toward making its copiers better and better at things people cared less and less about. McColough saw the nascent computer industry as an opportunity and sought to control the “architecture of information.

“It was a great phrase,” someone would later say, “because no one knew exactly what it meant.” To that end, he created the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and located it 3000 miles from Xerox’s headquarters. He hired Bob Taylor, already considered a visionary for his work on ARPANET and told him to staff it with the best minds in the emerging field of computer science.

The Incredible Success Of The Laser Printer

It was around this time that the company hired a young engineer named Gary Starkweather. He was a guy with big ideas, but soon found he didn’t fit in well at Xerox. Part of the problem probably had to do with his background. Copiers were largely based on chemistry and Gary’s interest was optics. In particular, he was excited about lasers.

But it was more than that. Gary wanted to build something outside the copier business and the higher-ups just didn’t see how it fit in with their business. In fact, his boss actually threatened to fire anyone who worked with Starkweather on the project.

Eventually, he had enough. He marched into the Vice President’s office and asked, “Do you want me to do this for you or for someone else?” In the business culture at the time, this was considered unheard of behavior, clearly a firing offense. Yet fate intervened and destiny had something very different in store for Gary Starkweather.

As luck would have it,news of Gary’s work made it across the country to PARC, the fledgling computer lab that Xerox had recently established in California. The researchers there had developed a graphical technology called bitmapping, but had no way to print the images out until he showed up. His development of the laser printer was not only a breakthrough in its own right, but with the decline of Xerox’s copier business, it actually saved the company.

Leveraging PARC Technology

No one disputes that the number of groundbreaking technologies created at PARC was astounding. The graphical user interface, networked computing, object oriented programing, the list goes on. Virtually everything that we came to know as “personal computing” had its roots in the work done at PARC in the 1970s.

Yet Xerox never became successful in the computer industry, which is why so many question the strategy. That’s the wrong way to look at the investment, however. You wouldn’t evaluate a stock portfolio against all the companies you could have bought, but on how the portfolio performed and by that measure PARC was a magnificent investment.

Clearly, the development of the laser printer paid for the investment of PARC many times over. It also mildly profited on its shares in Apple (although not nearly as much as it could have if it held on to them longer). Xerox PARC technology also led to a number of spinoffs, including 3Com, Adobe and Synoptics, just to name a few. Xerox had shares in many of them.

Many look at these companies and see lost opportunities for Xerox, but that’s a red herring. There is no way that any company could have pursued all of those opportunities. As Henry Chesbrough put it in Open Innovation, “The success of some of these departing spinoffs was largely unforeseen—and unforeseeable. When they left, these spin-offs were more like ugly ducklings than elegant swans.

When you add it all up, even the supposed “failures” of PARC provided enormous value for Xerox.

If You Don’t Explore, You Won’t Invent And You Will Be Disrupted

In the late 1960s, Xerox faced a problem without a clear solution. With many of its key patents expiring, it was losing its chokehold on the industry it had created. That’s what led its visionary CEO, Peter McColough, to create PARC, which invented breakthrough technologies, incredible profits and saved the company.

Yet many see it as a cautionary tale because of all the possibilities it wasn’t able to pursue. Steve Jobs once said that “Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties.”

Maybe it could have. But you don’t judge a strategy on what could have been, but on whether it solved the problem it was designed to solve. Xerox was facing irrelevance and extinction. Its copier business was dying and it desperately needed technologies that would provide new sources of revenue for a company that was quickly becoming irrelevant. In that context, Xerox PARC succeeded enormously.

In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that the most important thing that great innovators do differently is that they are actively seeking out new problems. In other words, they not only continue to hone their existing processes and practices, they go actively look for areas where they can make an impact.

The truth is that innovation needs exploration and that’s never efficient nor can it be optimized, but it can be done cheaply enough to be sustainable. For large enterprises that usually means investing in labs, but even small business can access world class research by connecting to larger institutions, such as government labs and universities.

It’s a fairly simple equation. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, you will be disrupted.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 1,550+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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4 Things to Learn About Change From the Orange Revolution

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4 Things to Learn About Change From the Orange Revolution

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2004, I joined a KP Media, the leading news organization in Ukraine, where I would become Co-CEO. In the runup to the presidential election that year, the opposition candidate for president, a technocratic reformer named Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned by pro-Russian agents. He survived, but his face was permanently disfigured.

In that moment, the once mild-mannered banker was transformed into an inspirational leader. His opponent, an almost cartoonish thug named Viktor Yanukovych, tried to falsify the election. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets to protest in what came to be known as the Orange Revolution.

It was very much an awakening. That was the moment when Ukraine, although not yet ready to turn away from Russia, began to insist on its independence and freedom, something that Vladimir Putin wasn’t willing to respect. It was also a turning point for me. It would permanently change how I saw the world and how it works. Here are four things I learned.

1. Power Doesn’t Work Like We Typically Think It Does

One of the first things I noticed about the Orange Revolution was that nobody with any conventional form of power had any ability to shape events at all. In fact, nobody seemed to understand what was going on or what would happen next—not the journalists I would speak to in the newsroom everyday, not the other business leaders and certainly not the political leaders.

We all grow up amidst power structures. We have parents who make the rules at home, teachers and administrators who do so at school. When we enter adulthood and begin to work for a living, we have managers and customers to attend to. Political leaders call the shots in public life. Everywhere we go, there is some authority guiding us.

But in the Orange Revolution nobody seemed to be directing the action. There was just a mysterious force, which nobody could describe but nobody could deny, that was moving things along. It almost felt like we were all characters in a play, there to play a part but without any real agency over events.

In Martin Heidegger’s essay, The Question Concerning Technology, he described technology as akin to art, in that it reveals truths about the nature of the world, brings them forth and puts them to some specific use. I learned that power is something akin to that, a force that we can shape and direct, but not anything we can actually possess.

2. The Power Of Cascades

One of the first things I discovered on my journey to understand the events during the Orange Revolution of 2004 is that scientists had known for centuries about the mysterious force I encountered on the streets of Kyiv and even had a name for it. It’s called a network cascade or a viral cascade.

Imagine thousands of protesters rushing to flood the streets of Kyiv, or Cairo — or Washington D.C. Countless fireflies blinking on and off in nearly perfect unison. Sports fans doing the “wave” at a stadium. These are all examples of information cascading through a network and they have the power to create rapid, transformational change.

When ideas are held by individuals or small groups, they are negligible. However, when groups connect and synchronize their collective behavior, they can become immensely powerful. An industry is remade, a country overthrown, entire societies evolve and change, the preceding order is transcended and the world is transformed.

The key to understanding cascades is that they are driven by small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose. This is true for any network, whether the nodes are people, proteins or computers. To drive transformation, change leaders need to help those groups to connect and inspire them with purpose.

3. You Have To Prepare To Survive Victory From The Start

I still remember the feeling in the winter of 2005. We were triumphant. We had taken to the streets and, seemingly against all odds, we won—or at least we thought we did. But those who opposed our cause, they didn’t just melt away and go home. No, they redoubled their efforts to undermine us and were able to reverse what we had achieved.

Our mistake was that we failed to understand that you can never bet your transformation on any particular person, policy, program or technology. It always needs to be rooted in shared values. That was what we got wrong. The Orange Revolution got its name because orange was the campaign color of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. Its purpose was to propel him into office.

Yet once we won and Yushchenko rose to the presidency, we lost our purpose and everyone went home. And it turned out that Yushchenko wasn’t a magician or a god who could make the country’s deep problems disappear. He was just a man, who was fallible, made mistakes and couldn’t achieve all that we wanted. That’s why we failed to survive victory.

When the global financial crisis hit, Ukraine once again descended into crisis and whatever support Yushchenko still had quickly dissipated. Yanukovych, the thuggish candidate backed by Russia, had his image rehabilitated by American campaign consultant Paul Manafort, who ran a polished campaign predicated on re-establishing order. He won in an election international observers deemed to be legitimate.

He was even worse than we had feared and in 2013, the new protests broke out. But this time they got it right. These protests were called Euromaidan because they were about values, specifically European values and as things progressed the events became known as the Revolution of Dignity, because they were fighting for their basic identity and sovereign status.

4. There Is A Limit To How Much Impropriety People Will Accept

When I first arrived in Ukraine it was a cynical place. After 80 years of communism and then 10 more under kleptocratic rule, few thought change was possible. So why worry or complain about things that you couldn’t do anything about anyway? It seemed better to focus on things close to you; your family, your work, your friends.

The Orange Revolution in 2004 changed that. It turned out that there was a limit to what people could accept. It wasn’t so much about policy, capitalism or even democracy, it was about dignity, the most basic yearning for people to be treated as ends in themselves, not means to the ends of a corrupt elite.

The original intention of the Ukrainian people was not to pull away from Russia, which many, if not most, considered a “brother” country, but to pursue a so-called “Finnish model” that would maintain good relations with both Russia and the west. Yet Putin could not bring himself to recognize the Ukrainians’ desire for a separate and distinct identity.

That’s an important lesson for anyone seeking to bring about transformation. When leaders set out to pursue change we must do it in ways that allow others to adopt in ways that reinforce, rather than undermine, their identity. That’s why the second Ukrainian revolution continues even now, because it was about dignity.

Lasting change is always built on common ground.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Dall-E

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Why the Truth Matters

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Why the Truth Matters

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2012, when Marco Rubio was gearing up for a run at the Presidency, he sat for an in-depth interview with the magazine GQ to bolster his image. “I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow,” he proudly declared. “I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that.”

The attitude belies dangerous ignorance. The big bang is not just a theory, but a set of theories, including general relativity and quantum mechanics that underlie modern technologies such as computers, GPS satellites, lasers and solar cells, just to name a few. Our economy literally could not function without them.

As Vannevar Bush famously wrote, “There must be a stream of new scientific knowledge to turn the wheels of private and public enterprise.” Yet today we get “alternative truths” and book bans. Make no mistake: truth matters. History shows when we abandon the quest for discovery and design narratives to suit our preferences, the consequences tend to be severe.

Jewish Physics

In 1905, an unknown physicist working at the Swiss patent office named Albert Einstein unleashed four papers, written in his spare time, that would change the world so completely that it would come to be known as his miracle year. He would later follow up with his theory of general relativity and solidify his place as one of the greatest minds to ever live.

These breakthrough theories would change how scientists thought about the universe. We learned that time and space were not static, but relative, that light travels through discrete packets called “quanta” and that mass could be converted into energy. His discoveries would, within a few decades, be translated into revolutionary new technologies.

You would think he would be a hero in his home country of Germany, but just the opposite happened. As the Nazis gained power and Jews became scapegoated, Einstein’s theories became to be known as Jewish physics and the science of quantum theory and relativity was banned from schools. Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, both backed the shift and promoted anti-relativity Deutsche Physik.

The United States went a different way. It welcomed not only Einstein, but an entire generation of leading scientists. Over just a few short decades, America was transformed from a scientific backwater, where promising students would need to go abroad to receive advanced education, to a technological superpower.

In 1939, Leo Szilard, another refugee from fascist Europe, who had helped develop the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, went to see Einstein. Szilard alerted him that uranium could be used to make a bomb of unimaginable power. Together with emigres Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, they drafted a letter to President Roosevelt which initiated the Manhattan project that led to the Allies ultimate victory in World War II.

Lysenko’s Biology

In the 1930s the Soviet Union was plagued by famines brought on by failed collectivization. The most famous of which, Holodomor in Ukraine, killed as many as seven million people. Clearly, something had to change and Stalin called on his favorite scientist, Trofim Lysenko, to figure out a way to increase agricultural production.

The problem was that Lysenko was both a fool and a fraud. He rejected the new science of genetics in favor of a wacky set of theories which collectively became known as Lysenkoism. At the heart of his thinking was that an organism’s environment can affect the germ line, so rather than selectively breeding for desired traits, he would try to “educate” crops by, for example, soaking crops in freezing water to help them grow in the winter.

It was all nonsense, of course. But ideology held sway over the scientific method and real scientists who questioned Lysenkoism faced serious consequences. Thousands of legitimate researchers were dismissed from their jobs and sent to the Gulag. Many were killed for nothing more than speaking the truth.

Stalin’s dedication to Lysenko and his pseudoscience worsened the famines and deepened the suffering of the Soviet people. Later, his ideas would be adopted by Mao Zedong and lead to the Great Chinese Famine. Tens of millions more would die needlessly. All of this happened for no other reason than the desire to defy what the Soviets called “Bourgeois pseudoscience.”

Identity—and the need to signal it—is a powerful thing.

Darwin And The Age Of The Earth

In 2012, Paul Broun, a US Congressman on the Science, Space and Technology Committee, asserted that evolution, embryology and big bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” A recent Gallup survey suggests that 40% of Americans still agree with him. Darwin’s theory remains controversial in many quarters.

Just recently, the Texas state Board of Education recently voted to teach creationism along with evolution. West Virginia and Florida also passed laws promoting the teaching of “Intelligent Design,” a pseudoscientific theory that is designed to undermine the theory of natural selection in schools and promote a religious alternative.

These moves have consequences. Darwin’s theory is no abstraction, but a working model that scientists use every day. It is used, for example, to help understand the spread of pandemics and how to fight cancer. Genetic algorithms based on natural selection are used for a variety of complex optimization functions, such as organizing logistics.

Science And Pseudoscience

Today, the truth can seem like nothing more than a preference. We pick a side, form a group identity and set out to prove our worth by supporting the party line. In our quest for status, we try to top those around us, leading to a purity spiral in which everyone competes to see who can be the most true to the cause.

Yet truth is more than opinion. Facts are falsifiable. We can test them. Einstein’s relativity is a wacky theory, but unless we use it to calibrate GPS satellites, they won’t be accurate. Darwin’s theory may conflict with other beliefs, but it can help us cure terrible diseases like COVID and Cancer. These aren’t just ideas, but tools we use to create the modern world.

What we need to be careful about is those who assign identity to specific ideas. Once an idea becomes associated with a particular team, it can be used to manipulate our sense of self. The same basic urges that nearly robbed us of the ideas of Copernicus and Galilieo are no less pervasive today then they were centuries ago.

The telltale sign is leveraging identity to manipulate us, the use of an “us” and “them” to push us in a particular direction of what to believe. For those that are looking to con us, there can never be a “we together,” because that will undermine their narrative of an ideological battle, rather than a search for truth in the service for a greater good.

The need for truth is especially dire today when we have so many pressing problems to solve. We simply can’t afford anything less than an honest search to discover and ascertain facts.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Dall-E

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2026

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2026Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Time to Rethink Pitch Fests and Business Plan Competitions — by Arlen Meyers
  2. What If You Could Prove the Government is Ripping Us Off? — by Braden Kelley
  3. The Surprising Innovation History of the Bicycle — by John Bessant
  4. Dead Actors Society — by Art Inteligencia
  5. Amazon Connect Combines Human Empathy with AI to Redefine Service — by Shep Hyken
  6. AI Will Create a More Human Future, Not a Less Human One — by Braden Kelley
  7. Managing Your Work Friends — by David Burkus
  8. Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit — by Braden Kelley
  9. Customer Experience Audit vs. Customer Satisfaction Survey — by Braden Kelley
  10. Case Study – Innovating Around a Disruption — by Jason Hauer

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in July that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last five years:

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Change is Coming from Everywhere

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Change is Coming From Everywhere

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the small town of Alamogordo, New Mexico in 2002, a plan was hatched to pass a no smoking ordinance. The wife of a City Council member, a strong no-smoking advocate, orchestrated the campaign. She recruited activists from the next town over, twisted arms and, in a show of force, pushed for a quick vote. It failed.

Compare that to a similar effort in El Paso, Texas around the same time. The central advocate in this case was not anybody with great clout, but a student on an internship assigned to do research on the issue. As he quietly gathered facts, he became a local authority, spreading what he learned. The ordinance passed by a vote of 7-1.

People often say that change has to start at the top, but that’s not really true. Change isn’t top-down, nor is it bottom up. It emanates from the center of networks. Ironically, the way you get to the center is by connecting out to small groups, loosely connected and uniting them with a shared purpose. To really drive change, you can’t overpower, you need to attract.

Change Always Comes From The Outside

Whenever we see a successful transformation we look to the actions of leaders. We see a CEO who gave a speech, a marketer who came up with a big product idea or an engineer who took a project in a new direction. These events are real, but they rarely, if ever, appear out of nowhere. They are products of webs of influence.

When we look more closely, we inevitably find that the CEO was inspired to give the pivotal speech from a conversation he had with his daughter. The marketer got the initial idea for the campaign from a junior team member, who saw it somewhere else. Or the engineer changed the direction of the project after a fateful encounter on vacation.

One of the things we know from the earliest studies of how innovations spread is that change always comes from the outside. For example, the first Iowa farmers to adopt hybrid corn were the ones who visited Des Moines most frequently and the early adopters of tetracycline were doctors that most often attended out of town conferences.

So change doesn’t have to start at the top. What is true is that culture starts at the top. Leaders determine what gets rewarded and what gets punished. If people feel free to experiment with new things, more innovations will be adopted. If, on the other hand, there is an atmosphere of strict regimentation, then little will ever change.

The truth is though, most organizations are somewhere in between. There is a certain amount of freedom within agreed upon guardrails. What was striking about the two no-smoking ordinance examples is that the successful effort worked within the culture, while the unsuccessful effort tried to break established norms. Successful change efforts don’t overpower, they attract.

Working At Every Level

Once you realize that change doesn’t have to start at the top, it becomes clear that every level of the organization has a role to play. Leaders tend to be enthusiastic about change, because they want to be seen as dynamic and leading somewhere rather than standing still. People at the bottom are often open to change because they aren’t invested in the status quo.

It’s the so-called “muddy middle” where you tend to get the most resistance. They are high enough in the organization to have some attachment to the current state of affairs, while at the same time they, unlike senior leadership, will actually have to do the work to implement changes. For overworked executives, that can be a tough sell.

Yet it is precisely those middle level executives that are absolutely essential to any change effort. They usually have enough authority and resources to get an initial Keystone Change started and can help recruit others. They also usually have been around long enough to have some political savvy and know where the pitfalls and tripwires in the organization lie.

So the truth is that every level of the organization can be helpful. The most junior people are the easiest to recruit. Senior people have clout and are usually predisposed to want to see change (if, for no other reason than they can take credit if it is successful). The middle-level executives can actually help you get stuff done.

Identifying Your Apostles

What’s first striking about the two no-smoking ordinance efforts is the power differential. In Alamogordo, the wife of the City Council member had significant power and relationships in another town, where the student with the internship had none. It almost seems like having power can be a disadvantage.

As counterintuitive as that may seem, it is often the case. Decades of research show that change follows an S-curve, meaning that it starts out slowly, hits an inflection point and then begins to accelerate exponentially. The same research shows that the inflection point is usually hit when the participation rate is between 10%-20%.

If you try to overpower, you will begin to draw resistance before you’ve hit the inflection point and your effort will likely be sabotaged before it ever gets off the ground. But if you quietly gain support, without doing a lot to draw attention from detractors, you’re less likely to incur resistance early on and will have a much better chance of reaching the inflection point.

When we begin to work with an organization on a transformational initiative, one of the first things we work on is building a recruiting strategy for the initial group. Often, they know exactly who to approach. Other times it’s not as obvious. One tactic that’s often effective is to create an introductory workshop and then wait to see who comes up afterward.

What’s most important is that you identify people who are enthusiastic about the change you want to see. They will be the ones who will help you get to that 10%-20% tipping point that unlocks a cascade.

Going To Where The Energy Is

Discussions about change tend to gravitate to one of two poles: Either change has to come from the top or it has to be grass roots. As I explain in Cascades, transformation isn’t top-down or bottom-up, but happens from side-to-side. You can find the entire spectrum—from active support to active resistance—at every level.

The answer doesn’t lie in any specific strategy or initiative, but in how people are able to internalize the need for change and transfer ideas through social bonds. The truth is that it is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose that drives transformation. Effective change leaders help those groups to connect and unite them with a sense of shared values and shared purpose.

What’s important is that you go to where the energy is, not try to create or maintain it by yourself. Go out and find those who are enthusiastic about change, who want it to work and will not only work to bring it about, but bring in others who can bring in others still. You need to recognize that the urge to persuade is a red flag. It usually means you have the wrong people or the wrong change.

Change never happens all at once and can’t simply be willed into existence. The best way to do that is to empower those who already believe in change to bring in those around them. That’s what’s key to successful transformations. A leader’s role is not to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 1,450+ FREE quote posters available at http://misterinnovation.com

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Never Trust a Guru

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Never Trust a Guru

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2005 W. Chan Kim and Renée published Blue Ocean Strategy, which found that “blue ocean” launches, those in new categories without competition, far outperformed the shark-infested “red ocean” line extensions that are the norm in the corporate world. It was an immediate hit, selling over 3.5 million copies.

Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen’ published, Profit from the Core, around the same time. They found that firms that focused on their ”core” far outperformed those who strayed. For example, they warned that Amazon was putting itself from peril for expanding its business beyond books and predicted dire results.

Clearly, none of this makes sense. How can you both “focus on your core” and seek out “blue oceans?” It betrays logic that both strategies could outperform one another. Today, Amazon makes most of its money outside of books. Yes, new markets lack competitors, but they also lack customers. The truth is that most business research is surprisingly shoddy.

Cargo Cult Science

When Richard Feynman took the podium to give the commencement speech at CalTech in 1974, he told the strange story of cargo cults. In certain islands in the South Pacific, he explained, tribal societies had seen troops build airfields during World War and were impressed with the valuable cargo that arrived at the bases.

After the troops left, the island societies built their own airfields, complete with mock radios, aircraft and mimicked military drills in the hopes of attracting cargo themselves. It seems more than a little silly, and of course, no cargo ever came. Yet these tribal societies persisted in their strange behaviors.

Feynman’s point was that we can’t merely mimic behaviors and expect to get results. To illustrate what he meant, he told a story about going to a new-age resort where people were learning reflexology. A man was sitting in a hot tub rubbing a woman’s big toe and asking the instructor, “Is this the pituitary?” Unable to contain himself, the great physicist blurted out, “You’re a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man.”

What makes science real is not fancy sounding words or slick charts with numbers on them. Business gurus often boast of their “research” that consists of hundreds of case study interviews and large databases containing data on thousands of firms, but without the proper methods and controls, those things are meaningless.

The Problem With Case Studies

Organizations are often inscrutable and hard to research. That’s why the preferred mode of analysis is case studies in which insiders are interviewed and a particular situation is interpreted by investigators. These can be helpful, but they also have severe limitations.

First, with shareholders and customers to please, managers are rarely eager to talk about failures. So we usually only hear about successes. Those, of course, are important but also subject to survivorship bias. For example, if a risky strategy results in 1% of the firms being wildly successful and 99% going out of business, then we’ll tend to hear glowing accounts of that lucky 1% and we’ll miss the vast majority that flamed out.

Another issue with the case study method is that it is necessarily limited. When researchers did a case study on a company I used to run, to take just one example, they interviewed insiders (including me) and did their best to interpret what they heard and what they could glean from background information regarding the market.

While I don’t think anything was inaccurate, it wasn’t exactly the truth either. Only a handful of people were interviewed, almost all of them were concentrated in a single part of the business and none of them, besides me, were involved in making decisions. The issues presented in the case study simply weren’t the ones we were actually wrestling with.

The problem with case studies is that they offer little to no documentation. In more rigorous fields like, say, sociology or psychology, researchers are expected to share their data so that others can interpret it. Unfortunately, that’s rarely true in business research.

Working Around The Glitches In Our Brains’ Machinery

We tend to imagine that our minds are some sort of machines, recording what we see and hear, then storing those experiences away to be retrieved at a later time, but that’s not how our brains work at all. Humans have a need to build narratives. We like things to fit into neat patterns and fill in the gaps in our knowledge so that everything makes sense.

Psychologists often point to a halo effect, the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another. For example, when someone is physically attractive, we tend to infer other good qualities and when a company is successful, we tend to think other good things about it.

The truth is that our thinking is riddled with subtle yet predictable biases. We are apt to be influenced not by the most rigorous information, but what we can most readily access. We make confounding errors that confuse correlation with causality and then look for information that confirms our judgments while discounting evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, so many of the popular management ideas today come from people who never actually operated a business, such as business school professors and consultants. These are often people who’ve never failed. They’ve been told that they’re smart all their lives and expect others to be impressed by their ideas, not to examine them thoroughly.

That’s why it’s so important to not to believe everything you think, there are simply too many ways to get things wrong and so few ways to get things right.

It’s More Important To Be Careful Than Smart

When I lived in Poland, a common aphorism advised that “life is cruel, and full of traps.” From an American perspective, the aphorism can be a bit of a culture shock. We tend to believe in the power of positivity, the American dream and the can-do spirit. Negativity can be seen as something worse than a weakness, both an indulgence and a privation at the same time.

Over the years, however, I came to respect the Poles’ innate suspicion. The truth is that we are far too easily fooled and taken in by those prey on the glitches in our cognitive machinery. Often business gurus have fooled themselves. They believe they have special powers of insight and get taken in by the glitches we all have in our mental machinery.

We get taken in because we want their claims to be true. We’d like to think that there is a secret we’re missing, that there’s a black magic that we’re not privy to and, if we prove our worth and obtain access to a few simple truths, we’ll capture the success that eludes us. Things can seem simple in a PowerPoint deck, but the truth is that the world is a messy place.

That’s why we need to train ourselves to ask the tough questions. What are we not seeing? What data is missing? What are alternative interpretations for the evidence being presented? It’s more important to be careful than smart. We can only make decisions on higher or lower levels of confidence. In the real world, there are no “sure things.”

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2026

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2026Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are July’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. What Happens When AI Becomes Your Customer? — by Shep Hyken
  2. The Experience Economy 2.0 — by Braden Kelley
  3. How to Calculate the ROI of Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley
  4. Strategic Foresight: A Practitioner’s Guide to Thinking About the Future — by Braden Kelley
  5. Innovation or Not — InTruth — by Braden Kelley
  6. Innovation Framework Examples: 7 Real-World Cases That Show How They Work — by Braden Kelley
  7. The Personal AI Renaissance — by Braden Kelley
  8. Your 3 Phase AI Journey — by Geoffrey Moore
  9. Why So Much Bullshit? — by Greg Satell
  10. Creating an Innovation Edge — by John Bessant

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in June that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last five years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.