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We Need To Break The Disruption Mindset | Digital Tonto
The dumbest thing anybody ever said about change is that you want to start by creating a sense of urgency. If the change is truly urgent then everyone already know it. The reason why so many change leaders cling to this "burning platform" mentality is because it ennobles the change leader, not the change itself. It’s been roughly 25 years since Clayton Christensen inaugurated the disruptive era and what he initially intended to describe as a special case has been implemented as if it were a general rule. Disruption is increasingly self-referential, used as both premise and conclusion, while the status quo is assumed to be broken and inadequate as an a priori principle. The truth is that creating a sense of disruption doesn’t accelerate transformation—it undermines it. It impairs creativity, drains morale, fuels change fatigue, and triggers resistance. We need to abandon the disruption mindset, pursue fewer changes and make sure we bring people along and make sure that we see them through. If you want to bring genuine change about you need to start by creating a sense of safety around the change conversation. You do that by approaching transformation with a sense of empathy, identifying shared values and building trust. Meaningful change can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be empowered. Change that lasts is always built on common ground. Read the full post below:
Culture Is How An Enterprise Honors It Mission | Digital Tonto
In his book, "Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance," Lou Gerstner wrote, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value… What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?” Every organization, whether consciously or not, develops norms and rituals that shape behaviors. In a positive organizational culture, norms and rituals support behaviors that honor the mission of the enterprise. Negative cultures undermine that mission. A common problem with many transformation initiatives is that they focus on designing incentives to alter behaviors, ignoring the underlying norms and rituals. Home Depot built a high-touch culture around serving the customer and sputtered when Bob Nardelli tried to impose a six-sigma mindset. Netflix, quite famously, has a culture deck that explicitly describes the norms that it expects its people to embrace. Amazon has built a writing culture around its six-page memo. No leader has full visibility into their organization, and wise leaders recognize that control is an illusion. You can’t force your people to do what you want—there’s many of them and only one of you—but you can inspire them to want what you want by honoring a mission that they care about and can devote their energy and talents to. When you empower people to achieve, they have a way of surprising you.
The Evidence Behind Why Big Transformations Start Small | Digital Tonto
The most common mistake that leaders make when pursuing change is to assume that once people understand it, they will embrace it. So they approach transformation with a typical project management approach, looking to create a sense of urgency, build awareness, remove obstacles and quickly show progress against a timeline. Yet we have decades of research and experience, with every type of change imaginable, that shows that’s not how transformation really works. What we know is that change comes from the outside and takes hold among a small group of enthusiasts. They adopt the idea cautiously at first, but their success encourages others to adopt it more aggressively. As leaders, we can empower this process along, by supporting those early adopters, helping them to succeed and giving them resources they can co-opt to help change spread. To do that, we must shift from a traditional manager mindset—centered on consensus, predictability, and execution—to a changemaker mindset that emphasizes building coalitions, embracing uncertainty, and fostering exploration. We need to follow the evidence. Change doesn’t have to fail. It follows a distinct pattern that we can leverage to achieve what we want to. By recognizing and embracing this pattern, we can avoid the pitfalls of transformation theater so many leaders fall into and consistently bring about genuine change. In an era of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt and leaders who can inspire change have a distinct competitive advantage. Transformation can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be inspired and empowered.
To Innovate, Leaders Need To Empower The Edges | Digital Tonto
In thinking about social justice, the philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment known as the Veil of Ignorance. What kind of society would you design if you didn’t know what position you’d occupy in it—rich or poor, Black, white, or brown, gay, straight, or trans? While Rawls was focused on justice, not innovation, the Veil of Ignorance offers a useful model for thinking about how access and influence are structured within organizations. When coaching business leaders, I often pose a similar question: If a junior employee had a game-changing idea, how would they get it implemented and scaled throughout the organization? How do transformational ideas and practices ideas filter up to the top? For most, the exercise is an eye-opening experience. The truth is, very few organizations are designed to incorporate new ideas. They’re built to deliver on a specific mission—whether that’s serving customers, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or enforcing laws. But over time, the very structures that ensure consistency and reliability also reduce adaptability. That’s why it’s incredibly hard for an enterprise to be both optimized for today’s mission and responsive to tomorrow’s possibilities. Yet the situation is far from hopeless. You can equip people with the knowledge and skills to drive change from within, to identify important problems, build a core team of enthusiasts, develop a Keystone Change project and leverage networks to grow scale. As Rita McGrath has pointed out, change originates at the edges. Leaders, by definition, are at the center with limited access to those edges and limited resources to get there. If you want your organization to be ready for change you don’t just need better ideas—you need better changemakers who can help those ideas gain traction, build momentum and scale to impact.