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Here’s Why “Creating Awareness” Is Usually A Waste Of Time | Digital Tonto
In one of my favorite essays the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” I can think of no greater example of this simple axiom than the practice of change management, especially with regard to communication. There is an enormous track record of failure—study after study finds that the vast majority do not succeed. These efforts frequently devolve into transformation theater that goes nowhere, but wastes enormous amounts of resources. Consider that, after decades of trying, skills like lean manufacturing, agile development and overcoming unconscious bias are woefully under-adopted in most organizations and you begin to understand the scale of the challenge. Part of the problem is that the most predominant change management models are not based on rigorous research, but rather case study interviews that are subject to high levels of bias. Executives are strongly motivated to spin yarns about how effective their strategies were and interviewers interpret what they hear through the lens of prior assumptions. Seldom, if ever, is any rigorous social science research referenced. Yet when more serious research is examined, many of the change management narratives about “promoting awareness” and “creating a sense of urgency” are undone Comprehensive research of the civil rights movement, to take one example, finds that messaging from passionate, mission-driven activists often backfires. It’s hard to see how poorly trusted corporate communication campaigns fare any better. Communication about change needs to trod a narrow, perilous path that attracts supporters but does not ignite resistance campaigns by detractors. The good news is that we have decades of research that also show that you only need a small minority of advocates for change to hit a tipping point and trigger a cascade. Change isn’t about persuasion, but collective dynamics. People adopt the changes that they see working around them, not the ones they just hear about. Change can’t be mandated and it can’t be wordsmithed or smart-talked. It can only be empowered.
Jack Welch’s GE Was The Wrong Model To Take From The 90s. Lou Gerstner’s IBM Is The Right One | Digital Tonto
When Jack Welch was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine in 1999, it was still unclear what his legacy was going to be. Yet all the success belied serious problems rumbling underneath the surface. Welch increased profits largely by “financializing” the firm. Innovation languished. Yet perhaps the greatest indictment of Welch is those he chose to carry on his legacy. Jeffrey Immelt, quite famously, ran GE into the ground. Other proteges such as Bob Nardelli and Jim McNerney went on to do untold damage at iconic firms such as Home Depot, Chrysler, 3M and Boeing. Far from a model to emulate, Jack Welch’s legacy seems more like a cautionary tale. Cost cutting and efficiency will only get you so far. Lou Gerstner understood that and his tenure at IBM produced not only outstanding financial results, but genuine discoveries, such as quantum teleportation, that would serve IBM well for decades. He made it possible for the nearly century-old firm to become a pioneer in open-source development, artificial intelligence and genomics. Perhaps most of all, great leaders serve the mission of the enterprise by crafting a culture that honors it. As Gerster himself put it, “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?" That’s why if you want to be an effective leader, you need to clearly define what you are leading toward. Leading implies a direction and a purpose. The ancient Greeks would call it telos. Wise leaders act in the service of something bigger than themselves, poor ones for their own aggrandizement. We learn from the past only if we take the right lessons.
Why The Right Way Is Usually The Hard Way | Digital Tonto
One of the things that I’ve learned in over two decades researching innovation, transformation and change is that things that change the world always arrive out of context, for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. Ideas start out feeble, weak and alone. They need ecosystems to make an impact on the world. Einstein's ideas about relativity started out as a boyhood dream about riding on a bolt of light. Penicillin languished in a medical journal for more than a decade before someone noticed it could be useful. Charlie Bennett first got interested in the ideas that led to quantum computing by imagining DNA as some kind of a computer and Jennifer Doudna discovered CRISPR gene editing by researching an obscure defense mechanism in bacteria. When you look at enough breakthroughs a consistent pattern begins to emerge: First, a seemingly useless idea surfaces, then a period of exploration ensues to identify a problem the idea can solve, resistance from the establishment in favor of some status quo and, eventually, the formation of an ecosystem that can deliver a solution at scale. There is simply no way to navigate all that with a linear approach. To innovate, leaders need to shift from a manager’s mindset, in which they build consensus, operate in an atmosphere of predictability and focus on execution, to a changemaker’s mindset in which they build coalitions, operate in an environment of uncertainty and focus on exploration. That’s why, when it comes to innovation, transformation and change, the right way is the hard way. The next big thing usually starts out looking like nothing at all. You don’t get from nothing to something without accumulating some scars along the way.
Change Always Involves Strategic Conflict. Here’s How You Build Strategies To Win: | Digital Tonto
The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. If you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. You not only need to build support for an alternative vision of the future, you have to undermine the forces supporting the status quo. That’s why we need to think about change as a strategic conflict between the present state and an alternative vision. The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. To bring about transformation we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future. To bring about transformational change we need to first identify the relevant institutions we need to target and then mobilize the constituencies to influence those institutions. We’re always mobilizing someone to influence something and those are the two questions we need to ask about every action we take: “Who are we mobilizing and to influence what?” Your targets determine your tactics. You don't start by deciding to, say, launch a social media campaign, design a training program or to hold a hackathon. To bring genuine transformation about you need to identify and analyze sources of power so that you can bring relative strength to bear against relative weakness. The truth is that effective strategy is more of a journey than a destination, you can never be sure beforehand where exactly you will find it, but it will become clear once you’ve arrived
Pundits Love To Blame Bureaucracy. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Listen To Them: | Digital Tonto
Over the past few decades pundits have become enamored by the change gospel. We’re told that we live in a VUCA world that is more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous and therefore our only option is to disrupt the status quo, which is bureaucratic and bumbling. We need to move fast and break things. The simple fact is that it’s much easier to talk about genuine transformation than produce it. Ed Hansen and I call this “Transformation Theater.” Consider the fact that transformational initiatives usually take 3-5 years to complete successfully, while the average executive tenure has fallen to 4.8 years, and it’s easy to see the attraction for careerists: Launch exciting new initiatives, make a lot of noise and move on before the sham is exposed. The blueprint for this type of hoax is Bob Nardelli’s tenure at Home Depot. After getting past over for the top job at GE, he landed at the Atlanta-based retail giant with a plan to transform the culture, implementing Six Sigma to ruthlessly cut costs and create efficiency. In the process, he undermined the firm’s famous service culture and allowed rival Lowe’s to gain the competitive advantage. Nardelli was fired and walked away with $210 million. We need to notice the telltale signs: First, there is a false sense of urgency calling for drastic action when none is needed. Second, is a rushed process, with little or no time taken for analysis or to listen to dissenting voices. Third, is a large public rollout that trumpets the initiative before there is any real evidence of success. To pull it all off successfully, transformation thespians need a bugbear and bureaucracy is always a convenient target. When someone raises it, we should be skeptical. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
There Is No Formula For Success. We Need To Prepare For Luck. | Digital Tonto
The French writer Albert Camus believed our existence was absurd. He compared the human condition to Sisyphus, the mythical Greek king condemned to roll a boulder uphill, only to see it roll back down, for eternity. Incredibly, Camus imagines Sisyphus, returning to his labors at the foot of the mountain, as happy, having found meaning in his task. That is the nature of existential rebellion, to find meaning for yourself in a universe that provides none. In two decades researching innovation, transformation and change, one constant I have found is that you can’t control your luck. Anything can happen. “Sure things” often fail while low-probability events occur all the time. Bill Haley performed “Rock Around The Clock,” because it spoke to him, even over the objections of the record labels. He had no way of knowing it would be a hit for the ages. In a similar way, Einstein pursued physics as a clerk at the Swiss patent office to answer his own questions. Anti-corruption activists worked for years in Ukraine—at great risk to themselves—when it seemed pointless or even, absurd. Yet it is not hard to imagine Haley joyfully jamming away, even if incredible fortune had not smiled on him, and that Einstein would have lived a fulfilling life even if his miracle year had never happened. Activists like Dasia Kaleniuk and Vitaliy Shabunin continue to investigate corruption in Ukraine, even while being subjected to vicious attacks. It is a simple truth that we can’t control our luck and luck greatly influences our successes and failures. But we can pursue meaning in things that we define ourselves—an idea, family, justice, compassion or anything else. Or, as the mathematician G.H. Hardy put it, “The case for my life, then… is this: that I have added something…”
If You Want To Lead, You Need To Embrace The Basic Human Need For Status | Digital Tonto
A simple truth about status games is that we all play them, whether we are aware of it or not. It is our drive for status that helps us form and signal identity, figure out who we are in relation to others and derive a sense of meaning about our existence, whether that meaning is rooted in achievement, care for those around us or our ability to enforce our will on others. One of the reasons that the various schemes of leaderless organizations that have arisen over the past decade ago have not taken root is that they ignore these basic facts of human nature. They are, in large part, a cop-out. Without the formal recognition of status conferred by a hierarchy, people resort to informal signals and, often, a kind of law of the jungle takes root. One of the things that I’ve learned in two decades of studying social movements such as the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe is that, while to the outside they may look amorphous, the ones that are successful have very clear governance structures. They are explicit about their values. Everybody knows the rules and follows them. As leaders, we also need to understand that the drive for status is also an underlying element of culture. Lou Gerstner wrote that “I came to see, in my time at IBM, 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?” So we need to ask ourselves, how are we conferring status on others? Do we recognize those who take credit or those who support their colleagues? Do aspiring executives get credit for launching new initiatives that never go anywhere, or successfully managing operations? Do we prize cruelty over kindness, avarice over honesty, dominance over hard work? Everything is a choice, whether we know we’re making it or not.
If You’re Serious About Change, You Need To Be Explicit And Focus On Shared Values | Digital Tonto
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 Economy 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.”
Every Revolution Needs To Anticipate Its Own Counterrevolution | Digital Tonto
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.
We Need To Embrace The Genius Of The Obvious | Digital Tonto
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.
Is What’s Good For General Electric Good For America? | Digital Tonto
General Electric has long been symbolic of the US economy. Formed in the 1890s when J.P. Morgan merged Thomas Edison’s electric company with other firms, it was one of the original components of the Dow Jones index and signaled America’s industrial rise. It was also became the first major conglomerate, forming the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919, which became a leading broadcaster. That all began to change when Jack Welch took over in 1981. He led a new era of “Welchism,” in which CEO’s laid off employees, offshored factories and engaged in “financial engineering,” to goose profits. American industry followed suit, cutting investment in R&D, lobbying hard for cuts in government spending and corporate taxes, hollowing out the US industrial base. Yet it appears that GE’s new CEO, Larry Culp, might be as emblematic for the new era as Jack Welch was for the old one. Instead of layoffs, he’s investing in lean manufacturing methods that put front-line workers at the center and instead of using acquisitions to fuel growth, he’s broken the company up to help focus on operational excellence. This reflects a greater shift that began during the Obama Administration with the creation of the Advanced Manufacturing Office and the Manufacturing USA Institutes. It has continued with under the Biden Administration with legislation such as the CHIPS Act and the IRA. The results are clear. Manufacturing employment has increased by roughly 1.5 million jobs since 2010, productivity is up and unemployment is at record lows. The truth is that we’re moving from an era of bits to an era of atoms and that means we can’t just move fast and break things anymore. We can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful, collaborative relationships in order to solve grand challenges. Once again, what’s going on at GE might be a sign of the times.
How “True Believers” Can Undermine Change | Digital Tonto
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 oif shared values and shared purpose. Change that lasts is always built on common ground. Not every transformation is for everybody. Meaningful change can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be empowered. 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.
If You Want To Tell A Kick-Ass Story, Do These 3 Things | Digital Tonto
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.
We Need To Rethink The Myth Of Macintosh And Xerox PARC | Digital Tonto
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.
4 Things That I Learned About Change From The Orange Revolution | Digital Tonto
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.
Why Truth Matters | Digital Tonto
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.
2024: A Pivotal Year | Digital Tonto
In 2009, it felt like the world was ending. I was still living in Ukraine then and the financial crisis hit there especially hard. GDP would fall by 14% and the ad market, which fueled the media business I ran, fell by 85%. I remember walking past the kiosks that traded currency everyday, tracking Ukraine’s Hryvnia fall heralding an even more uncertain future. Then things got worse. The next year, Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt thug whose attempt to steal a presidential election sparked the Orange Revolution in 2004, was voted into power in a legitimate election. He turned out to be even worse than most had feared and Ukraine descended into a bacchanalia of corruption and lawlessness, which led to the Euromaidan protests that brought down his regime. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2009 I started my blog, Digital Tonto, which turned my life in a new direction. The incredible cynicism and incompetence of Yanukovych’s rule stoked a desire to change direction. Activist attorneys created the Anti-Corruption Action Center which would form the basis for reforms. A video by Ukrainian journalists during the height of the protests captured the mood, calling for a shift in values. I get the sense that we’re in a similar time now and things are heading to a critical juncture. We have wars raging, authoritarian regimes on the rise, deep challenges posed by climate change, and the need to regulate our technology, especially, but not only, artificial intelligence. Even anti-semitism is making a comeback. Yet there are also great opportunities. The war in Ukraine raises the possibility that the country will be finally free from Russia, something its people have sought for over a century. New technologies like artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are leading to not only life-saving cures, but potential solutions to climate change. After a decade of a populist authoritarian rule, Poland chose democracy. We can too. The truth is that you only lose when you quit. I have no idea how this year will turn out. I do know that, whatever happens, it will not be the end of the story. CLICK TO READ MORE...
Top Posts Of 2023 | Digital Tonto
My friend Stephen Shapiro does not like New Year’s Resolutions. “According to our study, only 8% of Americans say they always achieve their New Year’s resolutions,” he writes. “The way it seems to work now, setting a New Year’s Resolution is a recipe for defeat. It has come to be one of the nation’s most
The 2023 Digital Tonto Reading List 2023 | Digital Tonto
I mark time through books because books define the zeitgeist. They reflect not only the wisdoms being received, but the questions being asked. We go to books not only for answers, but to sharpen our own inquiry. Last year’s list featured books about Ukraine (and this year’s list includes a great one too). So perhaps
Change Can Come From Anywhere | Digital Tonto
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. 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. 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.
You Need To Be Skeptical Of Advice From Business Pundits And Gurus. Here’s Why: | Digital Tonto
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. 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. 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.” CLICK TO READ MORE...
Can We Finally Kill The Idea Of Leaderless Organizations? | Digital Tonto
For a while now, management gurus such as Gary Hamel have been advocating for flatter organizations, yet there is little evidence that eliminating leaders is a viable model. In fact, when Wharton Professor Ronnie Lee took a close look at game software developers, he actually found that the number of levels of bureaucracy increased significantly, not decreased, over the last 50 years. There are several reasons that this is true. The first is that, while having a flatter structure leads to more innovation and creativity, you need good leadership and governance to execute well. As an industry matures and becomes more complex, more levels of hierarchy are needed to manage it effectively. Another important factor to consider is that even without a formal hierarchy, leaders will tend to emerge. Which is why when you take a closer look at often cited examples of “leaderless organizations,” there is much more hierarchy that it would at first seem. Just because there isn’t an organization chart doesn’t mean there isn’t a pecking order. We need to stop thinking in terms of how many levels of bureaucracy there are and start working to network our organizations. We don’t need to eliminate managers—or anyone else for that matter—but to widen and deepen connections within and without our enterprise. We need to lead and to do it more effectively. The role of leadership in organizations has changed. It is no longer merely to plan and direct work, but to inspire meaning and empower belief. As I wrote in Cascades, the key to transformational change is small groups, loosely connected by united by a shared purpose. The job of leaders today is to help those groups connect and forge a common purpose.
3 Stubborn Facts That Business Leaders Need To Accept | Digital Tonto
We need to constantly ask ourselves which ideas that are widely accepted today don’t hold water. Every era has its own fictions, things that are accepted because they are repeated, but lack any serious foundation. They become memes replicating themselves throughout the zeitgeist, rarely being questioned. When ideas are repeated often enough, we begin to take them as self-evident and don’t even question them. People take it for granted that small organizations are more innovative than larger ones, that flatter organizations outperform those with high levels of bureaucracy and that business is more competitive today than in earlier eras. If you believe all that, then you would avoid getting involved with a large organization if you want to innovate, you would try to eliminate levels of hierarchy and create a high sense of urgency about everything you do. Yet when you examine the evidence it becomes clear that none of these things are factual. The truth is that size has little to do with innovation. As we saw during Covid, the most pathbreaking advances came from collaborations between organizations, public and private, large and small. The levels of hierarchy in an organization aren’t nearly as important as its networks. Pushing too many initiatives is more likely to result in a high level of change fatigue and diminished mental health than lead to genuine results. When we look back at earlier eras, it’s easy to see the errors in the zeitgeist. It seems obvious that the robber barons undermined society, that excessive tariffs during the depression would impoverished society and that Enron was a fraud. Yet we need to look with the same skeptical eye at prevalent beliefs today. As Richard Dawkins has explained, memes are selfish. They propagate themselves for their own benefit, not necessarily for ours. We need to learn to be fiercer advocates for our fates. CLICK TO READ MORE…
To Overcome Resistance To Change, You Need A Strategy, Not A Slogan | Digital Tonto
When we’re passionate about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. We want to believe that if others can just understand the idea, they will embrace it. That’s why most change management practices focus on persuasion, explaining the need for change and creating a sense of urgency. But consider recent research that finds that we can’t even agree on simple concepts such as what a penguin is and it becomes clear that for any given initiative, people are bound to see it differently. The simple truth is that change doesn’t fail on its own, it fails because people resist it. If we are to bring about genuine change, our first job is to overcome that resistance. The simple truth is that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened, we act in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. Any effective change strategy has to begin with that. Clever gimmicks or snappy slogans won’t bring about true transformation. We have to build a strategy to overcome resistance from the start. As Saul Alinsky once put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That’s why every change effort must plan from the beginning to survive victory. You need to anticipate resistance, think about where you’re vulnerable and how you’ll mitigate those attacks by leveraging shared values. The truth is that change is always a journey, never a particular destination, which is why lasting change is always built on the common ground of shared values. 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. A leader’s role is not necessarily to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief. CLICK TO READ MORE...
Why Is What We Know So Different From What We Do? | Digital Tonto
We’d like to think that if something is a good idea, can be proven to work, improve performance and make people’s lives better, that market and technological forces will somehow make it inevitable. Unfortunately, the history of the last half century makes it clear that’s not true. Most people in developed countries are worse off than a generation ago. Yes it’s true that our TV’s have gotten better and we have infinitely more channels. We carry supercomputers around in our pockets that give us unprecedented access to information and emerging services like ChatGPT give us almost superhuman powers to process it. Yet the cost of basics, such as housing, healthcare and education have impoverished us. This wasn’t inevitable. Consider that in the US per capita GDP has nearly doubled since 1985 but median household income has risen only 27% and you begin to see the problem. In my work with organizational transformation it is clear that similar forces are at work in the corporate world. For all the talk about disruption and change, the status quo usually prevails. We need to be more cognizant of the stories we tell ourselves. We have a primal need to be the heroes in our own narratives, to tell ourselves that we are on the right path while others are just fooling themselves, to look for information that confirms our choices and neglect evidence to the contrary. It is not a character flaw, but a reality of human nature. Ironically, it is through awareness of our failings that can help us overcome them. Decades of research show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in behavior. Once we know that we can be more vigilant and hold ourselves to a higher standard. What we know and what we do are two different things, but with effort we can narrow the gap. CLICK TO READ MORE...
Never Underestimate The Power Of Identity | Digital Tonto
Our identity and sense of self drives a lot of what we see and do, yet we rarely examine these things because we spend most of our time with people who are a lot like us, who live in similar places and experience similar things. Our innate perceptions and beliefs seem normal and those of outsiders strange, because our social networks shape us that way. That’s why we often see so much resistance to change. People get invested in the status quo. They work within it, follow its rules and achieve some things. Those achievements become part of their identity and to reject the means in which their present self arose is, in some sense, to reject a part of themselves. Yet our identities aren’t fixed. They grow and evolve over time. We routinely choose to add facets to our identity, while shedding others, changing jobs, moving neighborhoods, breaking off some associations as we take on others. “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. It is at this nexus of identity and purpose that creativity and innovation reside, because when we learn to collaborate with others who possess knowledge, skills and perspectives that we don’t, new possibilities emerge to achieve greater things. To make that possible, however, we need to support the identities of those around us, so that we can build the shared purpose upon which we can build a shared future. CLICK TO READ MORE...
The Stories We Tell Determine The Change We Can Achieve | Digital Tonto
Change always begins with a grievance. There’s something people don’t like and they want it to be different. We like to see ourselves as heroes fighting for everything that’s right and we question the motivations of those who oppose our cause. When we believe in something passionately, it’s hard to see how anyone, in good conscience, can see it another way. Yet consider recent research that finds our conceptions of even something so simple as a penguin vary so widely that the mention of the word evokes very different associations in all of us. Clearly, more emotionally-laden content, such as a policy issue or a business strategy is going to spark vigorous debates. The stories we tell need to create a sense of safety around transformation, to emphasize a shared future. Yet all too often we begin our stories with silly talk about “disruption” or burning platforms. The storytellers seek to ennoble themselves as champions and demonize others who see things differently. Yet if we truly care about change, we need to hold ourselves accountable to be effective messengers. That’s why the narratives we build about change need to focus on shared values and establish common ground upon which we can build a shared future. The stories we tell are important. We need to choose them wisely and tell them well.
Why Is There So Much Bullshit? | Digital Tonto
Pretty much everywhere you look, you’ll find bullshit. We are constantly bombarded with politicians and “experts “on TV, at conferences and on social media, spouting bullshit. An economist would tell you that it is simply impossible for so much bullshit to exist, because the market values truth, but of course that’s bullshit. One possible reason that there is so much bullshit in the world is that there are so many bullshitters. Yet that explanation has a critical flaw. People spouting bullshit are, in most cases, completely sincere. They believe that they are truth tellers, uncovering and sharing critical wisdoms that add value and meaning to our lives. In his famous essay, On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt makes the case that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are,” because liars need to actually ascertain the truth to misrepresent it. Bullshitters, on the other hand, show complete disregard for facts. I would argue, however, that’s only half the story. We bullshit because it serves a crucial purpose. We’re willing to accept a certain amount of bullshit in our lives. Scientific frameworks like The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) explain that for low involvement areas, we actually prefer low information arguments with emotive content over more detailed explanations. Most of all though, we bullshit to protect our identities, both individual and collective. It is through our beliefs that we connect with others, build communities and engage in shared purpose. It’s an equation that, for the most part, works very well. We engage in bullshit, so that we can do things together that matter, that make a difference in our lives and in others’. Yet every once in a while we need to take a more disciplined approach. A natural disaster occurs, a pandemic arises or a crisis erupts in a far off place that we know little about and we need to show more humility about what we think we know and why we think we know it. David McRaney suggests we can do this by giving a level of certainty—from 1-10—to ideas that we believe and ask ourselves why that level isn’t higher or lower. It’s an effective practice. Try it. Because sometimes we get to a point where all the bullshit just has to stop. CLICK TO READ MORE…
We Need To Take A More Evidence-Based Approach For Transformation And Change | Digital Tonto
Today we are in a change crisis. Businesses need to internalize new technologies like AI and adapt to new realities like hybrid work, but still struggle to adopt decades old skills related to lean manufacturing, agile development and cultural competency. If we are going to drive the transformations we need to compete, we need to take an evidence based approach. The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. If you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The good news is that we have over a half-century of research and practice that can inform our efforts. Yet to be effective, we have to put that learning to work. It makes no sense, for example, to “create a sense of urgency” around change when we know that transformation follows an s-shaped curve, starting slowly and then accelerating after a tipping point, doing so is more likely to trigger resistance than to move things forward. In much the same way, if we know that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in practice and that ideas about change are transmitted socially, we should focus our efforts on empowering enthusiasts rather than wordsmithing and broadcasting slogans. People tend to adopt the ideas and actions of those around them. We need to think about change as a strategic conflict between the present state and an alternative vision. The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. To bring about transformation we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future. CLICK TO READ MORE...
Why VUCA Is (Mostly) A Myth | Digital Tonto
At any given time, there are many s-curves going on at once. Some are just beginning to crawl, others speeding up and still others slowing down. Pointing out the ones that are speeding up and ignoring everything else that’s going on may be exciting, but it's not the way to get the best results. It’s no accident that VUCA is a military term. The ever-present mantra that we are living in a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity makes corporate executives feel like swashbuckling heroes. The truth is that there is very little evidence that is the case and a veritable mountain to the contrary. There is also evidence that all the hype around change is doing real damage. Leaders conjure up dramatic images of “burning platforms” to justify launching ambitious initiatives, which rarely succeed. These failures then are given as confirmation for how dire the need for change really is and more initiatives are launched with similar results. That is the change gospel. Transformation has, all too often, become an end in itself rather than a means to an end. We end up pivoting so much that we end up right where we started. The problem with cheerleading change is that it puts the cart before the horse. People don’t embrace change because you came up with a fancy slogan, they adopt what they find meaningful, that creates genuine value to their lives and their work. We need to have more reverence for the mundane and ordinary. When you look at previous eras in which more genuine transformation took place and far more economic value was produced, there was much less talk about disruption and much more focus on improving the human condition. The truth is that we’re not really disrupting industries anymore as much as we are disrupting ourselves and fairy tales and living in a VUCA era will not change those basic facts. We need to think less about disruption and more about tackling grand challenges that will impact the world in significant ways. Innovation should serve people, not the other way around. CLICK TO READ MORE...
These 4 Simple Rules WIll Make You Exponentially More Effective And Productive | Digital Tonto
Shortly after I first arrived at college, my wrestling coach told my teammates and I that we would all be attending a freshman technique camp. It turned out to be something quite different than what I had expected. He didn’t teach us any advanced or esoteric method, but instead demonstrated the basics. It was incredibly humbling. The fact that we were there in the first place, competing for a Division 1 program, meant that we had all demonstrated outstanding accomplishment. And now we were supposed to revisit the stuff we learned in peewee programs? It seemed insulting at first, but turned out to be one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned. The truth is that in any endeavor, you are only as good as your fundamentals. While it’s easy to get enamored with grand strategies and fancy tactics, whether you succeed or fail is far more likely to depend on doing simple, basic things consistently well. In much the same way, I’ve found that simple rules can, if applied sensibly, can help make you incredibly effective. These are four of them. CLICK TO READ MORE...
What Makes A Strategy “Good?” | Digital Tonto
One of the most frustrating statements I come across is that “we had a good strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” That’s nonsense. Obviously, if you couldn’t execute, there were some important factors that you didn’t take into account. You miscalculated in some significant way. So how was that a good strategy? This raises an important question: What makes a strategy good? The concept of strategy gets thrown around so much and so incompetently, few stop to define the term. Strategy often becomes self-referential, a consensus-driven story that no one dares to question, but everyone is duty bound to carry out, for better or worse. One helpful concept is the German military principle of Schwerpunkt, which roughly translates to “focal point.” You need to pick the battles that will prove decisive, the ones that matter and which you can win. Or, as Richard Rumelt has put it, good strategy puts relative strength against relative weakness. Figuring that out is what makes the difference. We tend to think of change as a journey to bring about some alternative future state, but that’s only half of the story. The truth is that future state is in a strategic conflict with the status quo, which has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. You can never bring about the desired future state until you address the status quo. The key to doing that is to define the focal point of your efforts—the Schwerpunkt—where you can bring relative strength to bear against relative weakness. However Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static, concept. As your actions impact the context, the focal point will necessarily change, requiring you to adjust with strategic agility. In "How Big Things Get Done," Bent Flyvbjerg argues that any planning big project requires experimentation and testing. You don’t start with answers, but questions. Planning consists of a series of low-cost virtual experiments in which you are exploring possibilities, identifying opportunities and exposing problems. We want to fail in planning, where it’s cheap, so we minimize failure in the real world, where it costs us dearly. That’s why we need to take a more Bayesian approach to strategy, in which we don’t pretend that we have the “right” strategy, but endeavor to make it less wrong over time. Good strategy isn’t a master plan, but a process of discovery. It is, most of all, an iterative set of choices made about how to address meaningful challenges. CLICK TO READ MORE...
Make These 3 Cultural Shifts To Reignite Change In Your Organization | Digital Tonto
Today, few would question the dignity of the Ukrainian people. In fact, they have become such an inspiration to the world that it’s hard to remember that the country used to be a very cynical place. When I first arrived there in 2002, I was struck by the apathy. There was so little hope that anything could ever change that few saw any sense in even trying. 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. That’s certainly true of Ukraine today, but also true of successful organizational transformations. Today, Apple is so associated with Steve Jobs and the Macintosh that it seems incredible that he was fired from the company, in large part due to tensions that resulted from its development. Lou Gerstner’s turnaround of IBM was so complete it seems crazy that most people assumed the company would be broken up and sold for parts. Artificial intelligence has become so embedded in our lives, it’s hard to remember that not long ago it seemed like science fiction. One of the things that makes change so challenging is that when we hear about the successes—failures are rarely documented—the story is told in a way that makes everything seem inevitable. We have to remember that things start out much differently. There were failures along the way that needed to be learned from and overcome. The successful path to transformation starts with culture, how people see themselves and those around them. That doesn’t just happen. Leaders must work intentionally to create shared values. The truth is that change that is imposed never sticks, because it asks those who must affect change to betray themselves. You must first change minds before you can change actions. CLICK TO READ MORE...
If You Want To Innovate, Learn To Say “No” | Digital Tonto
While we talk about transformation more and more, we seem to be doing it less and less. This is no accident. Change and transformation aren’t about coming up with the idea and doing a fancy kickoff event followed by an extensive communication campaign, it’s about converting those ideas into impactful solutions to problems people care about. There’s far too much talk and not nearly enough impact. Change should be an inspiration, not one more burden in an otherwise exhausted workplace. It’s time to refocus our efforts on change that matters. In most enterprises, that will mean committing to fewer initiatives, but seeing them through. To do that effectively, leaders need to learn to say, “no.” Every organization needs to maximize the impact of limited resources and that means we need to make choices. Pursuing one thing means that we need to give up something else. We can’t just spin our wheels and expect to get anywhere, we need to pick a direction and get going. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Committing to a specific objective means we limit our options. Sticking with a project when things get tough takes courage and resilience. That’s why so few leaders are able to do it consistently. But the evidence is clear. If you want to compete successfully, that’s what you need to do. CLICK TO READ MORE...
If You Care About Change, You Need To Learn To Leverage Shared Values. Here’s Why: | Digital Tonto
Change always begins with a grievance—there’s something people don’t like and they want it to change. Yet the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. That’s why it’s so important to forge a shared purpose, because people need a common mission they can believe in to see themselves as stakeholders in a shared future. The reason so many organizations find themselves unable to pursue a purpose isn’t because they don’t want to, but because it is so hard. Purpose doesn’t begin with a single step, but with a diverging path. To honor a value we need to be willing to incur costs and constraints. We must choose one direction at the expense of another, or stay mired and lost, unable to move forward. That’s why the change conversation needs to focus on what you value. Values are 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. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve. Perhaps most importantly, shared values enable a shared identity, which is what you need for change to last. The goal of a revolution, as Srdja Popović once explained to me, is not a constant state of disruption, but eventually to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. That can only be done if change is built on common ground. CLICK TO READ MORE...
It’s Usually Better To Be Careful Than Smart | Digital Tonto
We all like to have opinions and like act on them. When, for instance, people were asked if they supported bombing Agrabah, the fictional hometown of the Disney character Aladdin, 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said yes. Yet our urge to make judgments has nothing to do with our ability to make wise choices. Humans tend to think in terms of narratives. We like things to fit into neat patterns and fill in the gaps in our knowledge so that everything makes sense. People who are “smart,” have a greater ability to retain and process information than most and can use their imagination to build robust visions, but that’s no guarantee those visions will conform to reality. We need to be hyper-aware that a track record of success makes us more confident and confidence in our judgments is inversely correlated to their accuracy. That’s why it’s often better to be careful than smart. There are formal processes that can help us do that, such as pre-mortems and red teams, but most of all we need to keep ourselves in check. Perhaps most important is to appreciate that there are glitches in our mental machinery and we are greatly influenced by our social networks. The people around us tend to have access to similar information as we do and our perceptions are colored by prior judgments we’ve made. We are surrounded by mental minefields and the only way out is to proceed with caution. There's a sucker born every minute and they're usually the ones who think they're playing it smart. CLICK TO READ MORE...
Happy 14th Birthday Digital Tonto! | Digital Tonto
When I first started this blog in my Kyiv flat in 2009 I couldn’t imagine that, in scarcely more than a decade, Ukraine would be at war with Russia, much less that it would be winning. If someone had told me back then that Ukraine’s president would be the world’s most admired leader I would’ve
We Need Think Less Like Engineers And More Like Gardeners | Digital Tonto
We like to think of ourselves as rational actors, weighing each piece of evidence before making a decision. Yet our brains don’t work like that. We build up our perspectives through synapses in our brain and through our social networks, which form complex webs of influence. Once we adopt a point of view, we rarely adapt it to new evidence. Engineers believe in laws that can be understood and put to specific use, so they build machines to perform specific tasks. Gardeners believe in complexity and emergence. They don’t design their garden as much as tend to it, nurture it and support its surrounding ecosystem. They don’t expect the same results every time, but understand they will need to adjust their approach as they go. We need to think less like engineers and more like gardeners. For most important purposes, we manage ecosystems, not machines. We need to think more in terms of networks that grow and less in terms of nodes whose behavior we can predict and control. Our success or failure depends less on individual entities than the connections between them. In a world driven by networks and ecosystems, we can no longer treat strategy as if it were a game of chess, planning out each move with near perfect precision and foresight. The task of leadership is to make decisions with full knowledge that many will be wrong and that you will need to make them right. There’s no system to do that for us, no impersonal forces that will point the way. In the end, we have to put trust in ourselves. There isn't anyone else.
Why Business Leaders Need To Learn About Social And Political Movements | Digital Tonto
The most important challenge leaders face is to navigate change. We can optimize operations, streamline our organizations and motivate our people, but eventually our square-peg business will meet its round-hole world and we will need to adapt, build new skills and shift our strategies. Unfortunately, the overwhelming evidence suggests that we will fail. Consider that, after decades of trying, skills like lean manufacturing, agile development and overcoming unconscious bias are woefully under-adopted in most organizations. Study after study shows that the vast majority of transformational efforts fail. We can’t continue to do the same thing and expect different results. One reason for this dismal performance is how we research and learn about change. Today’s change management models simply aren’t based on facts or evidence, but rather the interpretation of case studies. Those can help us understand nuance and give us greater depth, but they are no substitute for rigorous research. The truth is that we know a lot about change. Decades of studies have shown us that new ideas tend to come from outside the community and incur resistance. Research has shown there is a persistent gap between what people know and what they actually put into practice. We also know that transformation follows an s-shaped curve and that ideas are transmitted socially. Unfortunately, current organizational change practices address none of these challenges. However, social and political movements do and through the work of scholars like Gene Sharp and practitioners Srdja Popović we know what works and what doesn’t. My own work has shown that these principles can be put to use in organizations. The future is simply too important to be left to superstition and fantasy.
Ideas Can Only Be Validated Forward, Never Backward | Digital Tonto
Traditionally, strategy has been seen as a game of chess. Wise leaders survey the board of play, plan their moves carefully and execute flawlessly. That’s always been a fantasy, but it was close enough to reality to be helpful. Organizations could build up sustainable competitive advantage by painstakingly building up bargaining power within the value chain. Yet as Mike Tyson pointed out, “everybody has a plan until they get hit.” We can research and plan all we want, but the real world is a messy place. The facts, as we see them, are really just interpretations of the data we have available to us. Invariably, there are other data we’re not seeing and, even that which we have in front of us, can be interpreted in multiple ways. That’s why we need to take a more Bayesian approach to strategy, in which we don’t pretend that we have the “right strategy,” but endeavor to make it less wrong over time. As Rita Gunther McGrath has put it, it’s no longer as important to “learn to plan” as it is to “plan to learn.” We need to be more iterative, see what works and change course as needed. Today, instead of thinking about strategy as a game of chess, we’d do better to envision an online role-playing game, in which you bring certain capabilities and assets and connect with others to go on quests and discover new things along the way. Unlike chess, where everyone knows that their objective is to capture the opponent’s king, we need to expect the rules to change over time and adapt accordingly.