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Why Leaders Need To Master Tribal Signals | Digital Tonto
Humanity’s superpower is collective action. We collaborate in large numbers and in incredibly complex ways. That’s how we managed to hunt animals larger than ourselves, build shelters for protection, and pass knowledge down through generations—something no other species does. Our tribal instincts made all of that possible. Yet tribal instincts can also go awry. Our need to signal identity and belonging can lead to group polarization. Moderate voices are drowned out and extreme views dominate. Members engage in “moral outbidding,” a purity spiral ensues and those deemed insufficiently loyal are ostracized and cast out while outsiders are viewed with extreme suspicion and attacked. Still, as Michael Morris points out, wise leaders can harness tribal instincts to build a better future. “Precedent signals” help root new ideas in the cherished traditions of the past. “Prestige signals” encourage people to excel and be recognized. “Peer signals” drive us to seek out best practices and implement them in our own activities. Tribal identities aren’t necessarily fixed. They can grow and evolve over time, incorporating new clans and new ideas to take on new challenges. “Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book on the subject. That insight is key to understanding how to make our tribal instincts work for us. Wise leaders don't ignore tribal instincts, but channel them to evolve a greater whole
How Unexpected Connections Can Lead To Surprising New Breakthroughs | Digital Tonto
When I arrived in Palo Alto for a publishing course at Stanford in 2006, I'd never heard of Srdja Popović or Duncan Watts—but their stories were about to become tangled up with mine. Facebook was just taking off and "social networks" were the hot new thing. I was running a sizable digital business, and it seemed that networks were something I should learn about. That led me to Duncan's work, and it immediately struck a chord. It felt deeply relevant to my own experience during Ukraine's Orange Revolution two years earlier. That's how I got hooked on studying change movements—and eventually, it led to my friendship with Srdja, who introduced me to his repeatable model for overthrowing authoritarian regimes. Over time, I kept digging. The more I explored, the more it became clear that Duncan and Srdja's work were deeply intertwined. I also began to see how their ideas could apply to business transformation—something I'd learned a lot about running media companies in post-communist Eastern Europe. In business, just like in revolutions, change rarely succeeds through top-down mandates. It spreads through networks. That's what led to the research that eventually became my book, "Cascades." Sometimes I joke that I stole half the book from Duncan and the other half from Srdja—my contribution being that Duncan knows nothing about Srdja and Srdja knows nothing about Duncan. But that's not really true. As the legendary mathematician G.H. Hardy once wrote: "The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them." Most people have never heard of my book—or of Srdja or Duncan, for that matter. But just as their work has made a difference for me, I hope mine has made a difference for others. Some have told me that it has. And they, in turn, can do the same for others. Slowly, slowly, we creep along—making progress where we can. Sometimes the world's problems can feel so vast that it seems pointless to try. But in doing what we can, we find purpose—and maybe help others find theirs too. That, I think, is what Camus meant by existential rebellion.
Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Resistance to Change | Digital Tonto
My friend, the global activist Srdja Popović, once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet today’s cult of disruption demands that we constantly change and pivot only to change and pivot some more. The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without a track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Leader’s who ignore this simple reality are abdicating their duty to be responsible stewards of their organizations. As innovation expert Stephen Shapiro explains in his book, Pivotal, the answer isn’t always something different, but something deeper. That’s why we need to take resistance to change seriously, because not every change is a good one. We need to make wise choices about the stress we put on our enterprises and its stakeholders. Then when we make the decision to pursue change, we need to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. Perhaps most of all, you need to accept that resistance is part of change and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, skeptics can often point out important flaws in your idea and make it stronger. The difference between successful change leaders and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.
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: