Category Archives: Change

Be Explicit and Focus on Shared Values If You’re Serious About Change

Be Explicit and Focus on Shared Values If You're Serious About Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, he was an unlikely revolutionary. A McKinsey consultant and then the successful CEO of RJR Nabisco, he was considered to be a pillar of the establishment. He would, however, turn out to be as subversive as any activist, transforming the company and saving it from near-death.

Yet there was more to what he achieved than simply turning red ink to black. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of his chief lieutenants, told me.

Values are essential to culture and how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you are explicit about you values, even before you define your strategy. If not, you will pay the price later.

The Power Of The Freedom Charter

In June 1955, the Congress of The People, a gathering that included blacks, mixed race, Indians and liberal whites convened to draft and adopt the Freedom Charter, much like the Continental Congress gathered to produce the Declaration of Independence in America. The idea was to come up with a common and inclusive vision.

The Freedom Charter was anything but moderate, however. It was a “revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa… In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice,” Nelson Mandela would later write.

Yet despite its radical aims, the Freedom Charter spoke to common values, such as equal rights and equal protection under the law—not just among the signatories, but for anyone living in a free society. It didn’t seem so at the time—and the struggle would go on for decades—but the Freedom Charter ended up being the first major blow to Apartheid.

Nelson Mandela would later say that the Freedom Charter would have been very different if his organization, the African National Congress (ANC) had written it by themselves, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful. It not only gave anti-Apartheid groups a basis for collective action, by being explicit values, it formed a foundation for those outside of South Africa, who shared the same values, to share the anti-Apartheid purpose.

Perhaps most importantly, the Freedom Charter imposed costs and constraints on the anti-Apartheid movement. By committing itself to a multi-racial movement the African National Congress lost some freedom of action. However, constraining itself in that way was in itself a powerful argument for the viability of a multi-racial society in South Africa.

The Weakness Of The Hamas Charter

Throughout Mandela’s career, he was accused of being an extremist, a communist, and an anarchist, among other things. He would always point to the Freedom Charter as proof of his core beliefs. When emissaries of the de Klerk regime began visiting him in prison to discuss the end of Apartheid, his commitment to those core values carried significant weight.

Something very different happened after the October 7th attacks perpetrated by Hamas in Israel. Those sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinians defended the action as the justifiable actions of a long-oppressed people rising up against their oppressors. Many, especially on elite college campuses, marched in support of the Palestinians.

Yet when people went to the Hamas Covenant to see the values they were fighting for, they found something very different than the Freedom Charter in South Africa. Rather than universal principles everyone can identify with, it is filled with extreme religious views that only speak to Islamists and hate-filled calls for violence and murder.

For example, take a look at this little gem from the Seventh Article of the document:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

It’s hard to be sympathetic with those are not only condoning, but calling for violence, which is why even sympathetic Israelis point to the Hamas Covenant as justification for military action. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians living in Gaza are innocent, but it does bolster the point that Israel has a need to defend itself.

Clearly, if your opposition is using your own words to strengthen their argument, you’ve not taken a viable approach.

Values As A Weapon As Well As A Shield

Once you are explicit about your values you will inevitably find that not everyone shares them and that was certainly true of the Gerstner turnaround at IBM. For example, Wladawsky-Berger told me that “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. Lou put a stop to that and even let go of some senior executives who were known for infighting.”

A simple truth is that whenever we set out to make a significant impact, there will always be those who will work to undermine what we are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Yet when that happens we need to be careful not to get sucked into direct conflict, which will surely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Instead, we need to learn to design dilemmas.

Dilemma actions have been used for at least a century—famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels—but more recently codified by the global activist, Srdja Popović. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies—by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. That forces your opponent to make a choice: they can either disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and allow change to proceed.

For example, I was once running a transformation project that was being impeded by a Sales Director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it. So I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established and was dismissed from her position. Everything fell into place after that.

Building The Discipline Of Shared Values

John Lennon wrote that life is what happens when you’re planning other things and truer words were never spoken. We live life in the moment and moments are dictated by events. That’s why so many change efforts fail, because they do what feels good, choosing to signal identity rather than leverage shared values.

Never underestimate the primordial need to signal identity. We want to show that we are not only a full-fledged member of our tribe, but a star player on the team. That’s why we engage in the type of moral outbidding that results in a purity spiral. Before you know it, we are voicing opinions and taking actions that are not only out of the mainstream, but that actually turn away those who might support our objectives.

That’s why #Occupy protesters slept in parks and shouted obscenities, why women wore pussy hats after the election of Donald Trump, why DEI activists claim that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is racist, why a Cornell professor said he was exhilarated by the murder of innocents, and why America’s far-right activists identify with murderous dictators. It feels good to show that we are different, that we have status.

Yet while these efforts may make their point, they fail to make a difference. #Occupy protesters soon went home and achieved nothing. The World Economic Forum has found that #MeToo has undermined women in the workplace. DEI programs across the country are being crushed, Hamas has lost legitimacy, even with Palestinians and hundreds of January 6th insurrectionists have gone to jail.

The challenge and discipline for leading change is to focus on shared values, so even people who don’t agree with you can identify with your motives. The truth is that success doesn’t depend on how radical or how moderate your vision, but how well you can appeal to common goals. Or, as Nelson Mandela himself put it, “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

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

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Revolutions Must Anticipate Their Own Counterrevolutions

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Revolutions Must Anticipate Their Own Counterrevolutions

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1954 the economist Paul Samuelson received a postcard about an obscure dissertation. Written in 1900 by a long forgotten mathematician named Louis Bachelier, it implied that market behavior could be predicted using statistical techniques. Based on that foundation, Samuelson pioneered a new era of financial engineering.

As the eminent sociologist Max Weber pointed out, while material interests govern people’s conduct, ideas act like switchmen, determining the tracks that we travel down. Samuelson’s discovery of Bachelier’s paper was a moment when the track was switched. If markets could be engineered, the thinking went, they could be trusted.

We need to be careful about the stories we accept. Once the switchman changes those tracks, a zeitgeist forms and the wheels of society turn to keep the train going. We begin to judge progress on how far and fast we can get the train to go, rarely questioning whether we are on the right track or how we got started in that direction. Inevitably, we miss the backlash.

The Engineering Mindset

Samuelson’s discovery of Bachelier’s paper revolutionized economics. If economic behavior could be mathematically predicted, then systems could be built to drive decision making. Rather than rely on human judgment or fuzzy intuition, policy could be built on a much more concrete foundation. The hope was that the endless cycles of economic boom and bust could be eliminated, significantly reducing human hardship and pain.

This engineering approach to human affairs was not an altogether new idea. It was, in fact, early similar to the logical positivist movement that arose in the 1920s. Many felt that we need to take a more “scientific” approach, making sure that we logically verify each proposition we intend to accept and act on. In a short time, however, a young logician named Kurt Gödel would show that approach was hopelessly flawed.

In much the same way, a young mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot soon exposed unfixable cracks in the foundations of financial engineering. Essentially, he showed empirically that the world was far more volatile than Samuelson and Bachelier assumed and their mathematics assumptions were unsound. He predicted these flaws would eventually lead to a financial meltdown, which they did in 2008.

Financial engineering isn’t the only effort to take human judgment out of policymaking. The realist school of foreign policy advises us to act on our interests rather than our values. The consumer welfare standard suggests that economic analysis, rather than the concerns of regulators, should govern antitrust matters. The doctrine of shareholder value dictates how corporate leaders make their decisions.

It’s no accident that these approaches gained steam in the 1970s, in the wake of the phenomenal engineering accomplishments of the Apollo program. The logical positivist movement in the 1920s arose in the wake of historic advances in physical sciences. Unfortunately, trying to apply those approaches to social sciences courts disaster.

The Pervasiveness Of identity And Dignity

The idea that we can govern our decisions by pure logic is tantalizing. We can analyze the factors at play, apply an objective standard and execute the resulting decision. Yet there is a reason that these ideas consistently fall short. As Gödel showed in his famous theorems, every logical analysis is necessarily incomplete. One of the most often overlooked factors that govern human decisions is identity and dignity.

Consider the ultimatum game. One player is given a dollar and needs to propose how to split it with another player. If it is accepted, both players get the agreed upon shares. If it is not accepted, neither player gets anything. If the world was completely rational, the second player would accept an offer of even a single penny. After all, a penny is better than nothing.

Yet decades of experiments across different cultures show that most people do not accept it. In fact, offers of less than 30 cents are routinely rejected as unfair. It offends people’s dignity and sense of self. For many of the same reasons, there is increasing evidence that financial targets don’t motivate employees. No one wants to be a cog in someone else’s wheel.

This may seem impractical, but it is in the service of a greater logic. In a study in which a public goods game similar to the ultimatum game was played it was found that cooperative—as well as punitive—behavior is contagious, spreading through three degrees of interactions, even between people who haven’t had any direct contact.

Behavior isn’t just about transactions, it’s about setting norms. People need to make sense of the world and they do that through narratives. Those narratives, in turn, drive behaviors.

Building The Power Narrative

The march of history has been a succession of narratives. Centuries ago people marched into battle, bled and died gruesome deaths because they believed in the divine right of kings. The American revolution marked not just a change in government, but a change in the stories people told themselves. World Wars were fought based on competing narratives.

Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen a quick succession of failed storylines. The excesses of Johnson’s Great Society gave way to the Reagan Revolution, which told us that government was the enemy and needed to get out of the way. Then, in short order, we had a Savings and Loan crisis and it seemed that unbridled free enterprise had its shortcomings.

The growing distrust in government led to a new era of celebrity CEOs. Lee Iacocca paved the way for Jack Welch’s management revolution that hollowed out our industrial base and helped lead to scandals such as Enron. We believed the tales Alan Greenspan told us about self-correcting markets until a meltdown in mortgage bonds brought on the Great Recession.

With big business discredited, we put our faith in Silicon Valley, which looks increasingly like a doomsday machine. We no longer assume the good faith of idealistic tech entrepreneurs, but fear being manipulated and controlled by big tech monopolies. Unions, once pilloried as corrupt underminers of capitalism are now enjoying a surge in popularity.

As MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson point out in their book, Power and Progress, narratives are often pushed by elites for their own purposes. It makes sense for government bureaucrats to wax glowingly about the virtues of public service, while CEOs preach the joys of the free market even as they undermine competition and get fat off of government contracts. There’s always somebody selling us something.
If Power Corrupts, What Contains It?

Saul Alinsky noted that every revolution inspires its own counter-revolution. “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counterrevolution, we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counterrevolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward to minimizing the latter,” he wrote.

We are at an inflection point, with multiple pendulum’s beginning to swing the other way. The Business Roundtable denounced shareholder capitalism, Russia’s failures in Ukraine, military and otherwise, exposed not only the bankruptcy of the realists but the importance of values and living up to them. The New Brandeis movement is beginning to strengthen antitrust enforcement and promote greater market competition.

Underlying these trends is a convergence of power shifts the most important of which is demography. The Boomer generation, because the Generation X which followed was so small, has wielded political dominance since the 80s, but is now being displaced by Millennials and Zoomers who hold vastly different values and priorities.

Yet as power is shifting, we need to ask where it is shifting to, who will benefit, what narratives they will build. The ultimate adversary of genuine, lasting change is excess. The ideas that are now being discredited arose for a reason. They filled legitimate needs and produced real benefits. That’s how they gained traction in the first place.

That’s why if we really care about change, we need to learn to love our haters. They’re the ones who can keep us in check, point out flaws in our ideas and even point us toward shared values and shared purpose. Transformation can’t be an end in itself, it needs to be in service of the people it affects.

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

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20 Philosophical Questions to Wrap Your Head Around

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20 Philosophical Questions to Wrap Your Head Around

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

MSN published a piece with this title, and I am complete sucker for such things, mainly as a way to pressure test the views I express in The Infinite Staircase. I plan to answer as many of these questions as I can, one at a time, and invite you to follow along to play the same game in parallel with your own ideas about what’s what.

Today’s Topic? What is the true essence of reality? You gotta love a question that has three words in it, true, essence, and reality, none of which are readily definable! Here’s the paragraph that follows:

The article titled ‘What Is the True Nature of Reality?‘, published on the Curious Matrix website, explains how throughout history countless philosophers and scientists have grappled with the mysteries of reality. Their exploration encompasses both the realm encompassing matter and particles as well as the intangible aspects of existence. This philosophical dualism has sparked an array of probing questions; What truly constitutes the essence of the mind? How does it relate to the body? Do they exist independently? When we ponder the nature of the reality we inevitably question our perceptions. Contemplate the very core of existence.

By the way, it is worth clicking through to read that article because it goes way beyond the mind/matter dualism that is summarized above. Setting that aside, however, how should we reply to the question itself? Note that it has changed the phrasing from “true nature of reality” to “true essence of reality” which actually makes a difference, and I am going to stick with the former because the latter makes the assumption that reality coalesces into an essence, which is not something I can agree to.

My answer is that the true nature of reality is a hierarchy of systems, each one of which emerges from the ones prior, with no top or bottom system clearly in view. In The Infinite Staircase I make the case for a stack of eleven such systems, beginning with three at the bottom that are materialistic in nature (physics, chemistry, and biology), all of which are all governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or what I call the metaphysics of entropy. These are followed by four systems that are organic in nature (desire, consciousness, values, and culture), representing the evolution of life prior to the arrival of mankind, all governed by the dynamics of natural and sexual selection, or what I call the metaphysics of Darwinism. Those underpinnings tee up the topmost set of systems. ones that are distinctively human in nature (language, narrative, analytics, and theory), all governed by symbols and symbolism, or what I call the metaphysics of memes.

The advantage of this framework is that, instead of limiting ourselves to one or two foundations, we can refer to any of eleven possible platforms, alone or in combination with others, to explain any particular aspect of reality. Here’s how one might take advantage of this to answer the questions that are embedded in the latter half of the paragraph quotes above.

What constitutes the essence of mind? Mind is made up of multiple systems in the staircase, but the primary two are narrative and analytics, both leveraging the system of language. That is, most of our conscious experience is taken up with us telling stories to others or to ourselves and processing those stories to extract knowledge or entertainment. In support of this activity, our minds are powered by our brains, hence involving the stairstep of consciousness and all the material systems below it, so no, our minds cannot be independent of our bodies. At the same time, minds are socially developed, bringing in the stairsteps of values, culture, and language.

In sum, the true nature of our minds is that they are a layer cake of systems interoperating with one another in service to us executing our strategies for living. The fact that we have success in these efforts is demonstrated by the real-world outcome of our continued existence. This suggests that we have no pressing need to question our perceptions. The thing to question instead is the notion that there is a “very core” to our existence, a true essence of reality. That concept is way too monistic, given the complexity of the system’s hierarchy and its interdependent operations.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Gemini

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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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What Is the Difference Between Change Management and Project Management?

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What Is the Difference Between Change Management and Project Management?

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

What Is the Difference Between Change Management and Project Management? (Short Answer)

Project management delivers an output — a system, process, product, or deliverable — on time, on scope, and on budget. Change management prepares, equips, and supports people so that output is adopted and the change objectives are met in behavior. A project can finish successfully while the change still fails. Many organizations treat change management as a subset of project management. The healthier frame is the reverse: every project changes something, so project delivery sits inside a larger change effort.

Finishing the build is not the same as achieving the change.

Below you’ll find a side-by-side comparison, why the relationship is often drawn backwards, how the two disciplines work together, and how to tell which one you are missing. For the definition of change management itself, see What Is Change Management?

How Do Change Management and Project Management Differ?

	Project management	Change management
Primary question	Did we deliver the output?	Did people adopt the new way and meet the objectives?
Focus	Scope, schedule, cost, quality of the deliverable	Readiness, sponsorship, enablement, adoption, reinforcement
“Done”	Go-live, handover, or project close	Named behaviors stick after the project team leaves
Success metrics	Milestones, budget, defect rates, on-time delivery	Behavior adoption, old-path retirement, confidence, outcomes
Typical owner	Project or program manager	Change lead, sponsor, and a durable BAU owner
Risk if missing	Late, over budget, or incomplete deliverable	Shelfware, workarounds, and a “successful” project that changes nothing

Both disciplines matter. Confusing them produces the most expensive kind of success: a green project that never becomes a new way of working.

Why Do Organizations Treat Change Management as a Subset of Project Management?

Because the project is visible. It has a charter, a budget, a go-live date, and a RAG status. Change work — readiness, practice, sponsorship with real levers, retiring the old path — looks softer on a dashboard, so it gets bolted on as a communications workstream inside the project plan.

That staffing pattern is backwards. Every project changes something for someone. The project is one means of producing a new state. Change management is the discipline of making sure people can live in that state and that the objectives are met. In the Architecting the Organization for Change framing I use in Charting Change, project management sits inside the change agenda — not the other way around.

If change is a line item under the project, adoption will be a line item after the celebration.

How Should Change Management and Project Management Work Together?

Share the same objectives. Write success as behaviors and outcomes, not only as deliverables. The project plan and the change plan should both serve those objectives.
Start change work before build peaks. Impact, readiness, and sponsorship cannot wait until UAT. By then the design of the work is already frozen.
Name two finishes. Technical go-live is one finish. Adopted behavior with a BAU owner is another. Celebrate the second, not only the first.
Fund enablement like delivery. Practice time, coaching, and the stop list for the old way need budget and calendar space — not leftover goodwill.
Align metrics. Project health and change health should both be visible. A green cutover with rising workarounds is not a green change. For what to measure after go-live, see 6 Metrics That Prove Change Worked — Beyond Go-Live Day.

When tools become shelfware, the failure is usually in that handoff between delivery and adoption — the patterns in 12 Adoption Mistakes That Turn Good Tools Into Shelfware.

How Do You Know Which One You Are Missing?

Strong project, weak change: On-time go-live, training completions up, and people still on the spreadsheet. Sponsors clap; the old path stays open “just in case.”
Strong change intent, weak project: Clear case for change and engaged champions, but the deliverable slips, quality fails, or the tool never works for the median user.
Both present and aligned: Delivery dates and adoption behaviors are on the same scorecard. Someone owns the new way after the PMO leaves. The old way has a kill date.

Leaders who still treat go-live as transformation should also read 8 Change Myths Leaders Still Believe in 2026. For the method spine behind planning, leadership, management, maintenance, and portfolio, see 5 Steps of Human-Centered Change That Survive Reality.

Which Comes First — the Project or the Change?

Start with the change you need in people’s work. Then decide which projects, if any, are required to make that change possible. A project without a change objective is construction. A change without delivery discipline is a wish. You need both — with adoption as the finish line that leadership actually funds.

Manage the project so something ships. Manage the change so something sticks.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

When project plans and change plans fight for the same calendar, people lose. The fix is a shared visual approach so delivery and adoption show up on the same page — with sponsors who have real levers.

See the methodology. Explore Human-Centered Change™, my visual, collaborative approach to planning change so the people who must live it can see the whole effort and adopt the new way.

Get the toolkit. Read Charting Change, my practical guide to Human-Centered Change™, built around the Change Planning Canvas™ and 70+ visual tools for getting everyone on the same page.

Deliver the output. Design the adoption. Do not mistake one for the other.

FAQ: Change Management vs Project Management

What is the difference between change management and project management?

Project management delivers an output on time, scope, and budget. Change management prepares and supports people so that output is adopted and the change objectives are met in behavior. A project can succeed while the change still fails.

Is change management part of project management?

No. Many organizations staff it that way, but every project changes something for someone. Project delivery should sit inside a larger change effort aimed at adoption and outcomes, not the reverse.

Can a project succeed and the change still fail?

Yes. The deliverable can go live on time while people keep using the old path, workarounds rise, and no one in the business owns the new way after the project team leaves. That is a successful project and a failed change.

Do you need both change management and project management?

Yes, for any effort that asks people to work differently. Project management ships the output. Change management makes the output usable and durable in real work. Missing either one produces delay, shelfware, or both.

When does change management start relative to the project?

Change management should start when the change is defined — impact, readiness, sponsorship, and adoption design — not after go-live. Waiting until delivery is nearly finished freezes bad job design and turns change work into a late communications push.

Image credits: Pixabay

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Cursor to clean up the article, add images and create infographics.

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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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