Total Innovation Podcast

10.Greg Satell: How to keep your ideas alive

• Wazoku Team • Season 1 • Episode 10

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Greg Satell is the Co-Founder of  ChangeOS, a transformation and change advisory. He is an international keynote speaker and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Changeand Mapping Innovation. His work has appeared in top publications like Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

As a Lecturer at Wharton, entrepreneur, and global executive, Greg helps organizations overcome resistance to change. He is recognized as a top innovation blogger and a leading digital transformation influencer. 

You can find Greg’s blog at www.DigitalTonto.com, check out his LinkedIn profile

For more insights into fostering innovation and transformation within organizations, check out this report on the importance of systems thinking in corporate innovation. 

Brought to you by The Infinite Loop – Where Ideas Evolve, Knowledge Flows, and Innovation Never Stops.

Welcome to today's episode of the total innovation podcast. Our guest today is the best selling author of the Buck's cascade and mapping innovation. A lecturer at Wharton, an accomplished entrepreneur, global executive, and importantly for today's episode is one of the foremost experts on transformation and change. He helps global organizations to overcome resistance to change and build a better future. Something that I know will resonate with everyone listening to today's podcast. If those clues are not enough, allow me to introduce a wonderful guest that I'm really excited to speak with, Greg Sattel. Welcome Greg. Thanks so much for having me, Simon. I'm a longtime fan. Me too, me too. I was just telling you, I, uh, took my wife away for a weekend and ended up sitting reading Cascades rather than hanging out with her. So, you know, some things to answer to that, but, um, it's a real pleasure. And this is actually the first time that you and I have connected. We've known each other through, uh, a lot of shared connections through LinkedIn and, uh, and a number of other circles that we coexist in, but never actually managed to speak. So I'm, I'm super soaked to, uh, finally connect. As I said, I've read all your books, I follow your work closely, um, but for those that don't know you that well, and I guess for a little bit for me, given we're talking for the first time, can you just share a bit about your journey and what led you to focus on change, both in your writing, your research, your teaching, and your advisory work? Well, in 1997, I was working in, well, 1996, I was, I was working in media in, in New York and somebody offered me a job to go and work in media in Poland. And I thought, well, you know, if I don't do something like this now, I'll never do it. So I'll go, I'll go out for six months and have a little adventure and, uh, see what happens. And, uh, six months turned into 15 years in Eastern Europe, encompassing about six years in Poland, eight years on and off in Ukraine, also, uh, Russia and, and Turkey, but it was a time of enormous change. And, uh, and, uh, I mean, the, it's just incredible transformation, especially the early years in Poland. And it was just a great time to learn about business. And I went over there thinking I understood the media business and I tried to. Tell people what I knew, and they would, polls tend to be congenitally skeptical, so they would, they would ask me why, and then I realized, well, some of the things makes, you know, have some reason, but most of what I was taught, you know, coming up in media in New York was, was just convention, and could be done a different way, and then as I, as I started traveling around, and, I began to see that the same business could be run, you know, in a different market, you know, just the next country over couldn't be run successfully in a completely different way or the same business process. Uh, TV buying is, is an interesting one because TV buying is done differently in, in almost every country in the world, the way it's negotiated. And you get this sense that, wow. Um, there's no, there's no limit in the ways you can, you can run a business. And as I was learning this, I landed straight in the middle of the orange revolution in Ukraine. I was running a major news organization right in the middle of it. And it was one of those moments where the universe kind of opens itself up and reveals a little bit of itself to you, where we tend to grow up thinking about a certain sense of order and power, and that's, you know, the way things work. And during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, nobody with any conventional form of power had any ability to shape events at all. There just seemed to be some mysterious force that was, uh, that was driving events along. And I wanted to know what that force was and bottle it and put it some sort of good use. I mean, here I was running this, you know, 800 person business with lots of, you know, bright, ambitious people all with their own ideas about things. And I needed them to get behind the one or two initiatives I wanted to prioritize, but I had no idea how to do that. Two years later, I was in Silicon Valley for a publishing course at Stanford. This is when social media was just getting big and, uh, we had a big digital business and I figured this is something I should really learn about. And what I found was almost. perfect mathematical explanation for just about everything that happened during the orange revolution. And that's what got me hooked. And then I met my friend Srdja Popovic, who, uh, was kind of the mastermind between, uh, mastermind behind the, the color revolutions, uh, and, and much that's happened since then. And he had developed based on, uh, the ideas of, of someone named Gene Sharpie. a repeatable model for overthrowing a country. And I put it in, in context of my experiences, transforming businesses. And I said, wow, this seems like a, a, a formal framework for doing that. And that's what became the Cascades research. So a lived, a lived experience. Led you to writing the book of, of Cascades for folks that haven't read it. Um, maybe you can talk a little bit about it, but you were also telling me upfront before we started recording today, that the way that Cascades came to being was, was by your second book, uh, mapping, mapping innovation. So the innovation journey was, was a straight line. No, not at all. Right. From your perspective, like how, how did that come about and talk a little bit about the books as well? Well, This is something I really tried hard to convey in, in, in Cascades, is that it wasn't that I had some sort of epiphany it's, you know, I, I had what I had was a lot of confusion about what happened. I mean, here you're sitting in this country and all of a sudden the world changes and nobody can quite figure out why nobody, nobody had an explanation for how or why that happened. Um, so I was confused. I was very confused and it took me a long time to to figure out and and it was quite difficult. I mean, it was a 15 years of very, very hard work. And while I was, I was working on it. Um, I, uh, and I, I actually, uh, tried to get the book published three times, failed each time. And, and when you're trying to get a book published, you don't get rejected once. That's, you know, each, each time it fails, that's like 40 rejections. So it was, you know, it was heartbreaking. And then I had this idea for mapping innovation, because one of the other things I was working on is, is how do you, because everybody has so many different ideas about innovation. Which one do you use? Because you read all these books and you listen to all these innovation gurus and they all have, you know, it sounds great, um, it makes sense, but then, you know, if you listen to what, you know, Clayton Christensen tells you to do, you know, it's going to be the exact opposite of what some other guru tells you to do. So, you know, if, if, if you want to innovate the Google way, you're going to violate what Apple says that you should do. So how do you do it? And, and so the idea behind mapping innovation was that, um, ideas are really about problems. And if you're, excuse me, innovation is, is, is really about solving problems. So the first step is to figure out what type of problem you have, and then you can, uh, and then. You can better fit a strategy, uh, to help you solve it. So the purpose of this podcast is to go deep on a, on a, on a thematic. And I know through that narrative and through the books and everything else, and this sort of loving your problems, right. So then get to this concept of problem solution fits, which is very close to my heart, um, from a business perspective as well, changes has kind of become. thing, right? Like this is your, this is your area of focus. And so I want to deep dive. Into change, um, as a, as a topic and start with a pretty broad question of what do we mean by change? Well, in, in mapping innovation, I, I, uh, I talked about innovation is not a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. And those almost always happen in different places with different people and managing innovation to a large extent is kind of managing those handoffs. I mean, how do you get something from the lab into an actual product or service? And then once you have that product or service, how you get it adopted. And I think it's again, I think my background is important because I had very little. Exposure to, you know, uh, U. S. or even European corporations like inside. I was building businesses, but I was building them in a very different business environment. And I, I had heard that there was something called change management, but I didn't know anything about it. It was only, I only started coming into contact with it really seriously after Cascades was written. And my reaction was, you must be joking. This must be a joke because this has nothing to do with change. This is, you know, Internal communication. This is, you know, persuasive language. This is maybe some training mixed in, but change isn't about persuasion. I mean, you're married, right? I mean, you know how hard it can be to persuade an, even a single person of something, uh, anybody who's been married or had kids. And the first thing you need to do, if you're going to change anything is you need a strategy to overcome resistance. And we, you know, we have decades of research that help us understand how to do that. Uh, there's, you know, everybody knows about Everett Rogers and his diffusion curve, but that wasn't his real contribution. His real contribution was he created an entire field of, of, uh, researching and understanding change, you know, hundreds of studies over. whatever it was, 50, 60 years ever, you know, since the 1960s. And those, uh, those studies are pretty consistent on four things. The first is that, uh, change comes from the outside and it incurs resistance. We know that from the very first studies on, uh, on hybrid corn and, and tetracycline. The second is that there is a, what's called a cap gap, meaning that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don't necessarily result in shifts in practice. You might know you shouldn't eat the cookie, doesn't mean you're not going to eat the cookie. And, and, and we know that in every organization, there are. Significant knowing, knowing, doing gaps. So just changing somebody's attitude about something or their awareness of something doesn't mean you're going to change anything. The third is that that change, uh, follows an S curve. Right? It starts off slowly and, uh, hits a tipping point, um, or an inflection point, usually between 10 and 20%, depending on the context. Um, and then, uh, that's what triggers a cascade. Um, so we don't need to, we don't need to convince everybody at once. That's not The task of change, the task of changes is to get to that 10 to 20 percent tipping point. And then the last is we know that change is socially propagated people, people adopt the changes they see working around them, not the ones they just hear about. So that is, you know, Everett Rogers. But then while that was going on. Uh, pretty much at the same time, a guy named Gene Sharp emerged who was studying Gandhi and other revolutions, and he built an entire, uh, an entire, uh, framework. Um, he's, some people call him the Von Clausewitz of nonviolent conflict, and he saw, uh, revolutions as, as, uh, as a strategic conflict. Not using violence because regimes tend to have a monopoly on violence, but using other, other, uh, weapons that are economical, sociological, psychological, where the regime doesn't have an advantage. And his key insight is that was that the regime or the status quo always has sources of power, keeping it in place. And those sources of power have an institutional basis. So if you can influence or remove those sources of power, the regime or the status quo will fall. And I think that's, it's a very, very different strain of change, but completely consistent. With, uh, even some of the, the frameworks looks similar. So we have these two very, very different strains that show us something similar. Um, but that, that second piece on, because when you're, I can tell you when you're opposing an authoritarian regime, the idea that you might face some resistance is not academic, uh, but that, that idea that, because I think we tend to, people tend to see change as. A hero's journey where you're trying to bring about some alternative future vision, very much like Luke Skywalker, um, needed to face himself before he could face, you know, and that's how people treat change. Um, they look at it as a personal, um, a personal mission, but it doesn't have anything to do with you. And once you make, and if you make it about you, whether you're good enough or persuasive enough, you're probably not gonna, you're probably gonna fail. You need to understand that it's a strategic conflict between that vision and the status quo. And then you can start making some headway. How do you think about making that a tactile thing? Cause I, I think sometimes With the power of hindsight, you can look back and see where things could have been done better, where things could have been done differently. But when you're in the middle of that, that battle, whether even you think it's a battle or not, we call that a project, I guess, normally, but that battle, let's call it, it's not as easy to sense or feel where you are. You may feel like you're pushing water uphill or that you're struggling, but you don't really know where you are on the S curve of change. It's very hard to match whether you're fighting the right battles or not with the right networks of people. Like, how do you, how do you tackle that? So you're not going to get everything right. And you don't have to. But you can start, right? And one of the first things we do is we do a resistance inventory, five different categories of resistance for a rational one is not, what are they? Sit down, discuss them. Where's it going to come from? How are you going to mitigate having that discussion ahead of time at the very beginning is just incredibly helpful. Instead of just waiting for it to happen, we're ignoring it. Usually they ignore it. No, no, no. Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about the vision. Talk about the problems upfront. Where are we going to, what are we going to run into and what are we going to do about it? You're not going to be able to predict or anticipate everything, but you'd be amazed. You can predict a lot. Get ahead of it. Exactly. Get ahead of it. And also, um, we do very, very tactile. I was just talking about the sources of power, right? So we map them very, very clearly. Um, and, and we analyze them according to two different, um, Metrics in terms of approachability and influence, and we map them and we talk about them when that's another concept. We talk about a lot is your targets. Determine your tactics. So once you identify those targets that we call pillars of support, which again comes from from Jean Sharp, you can. Then you can start thinking seriously about what you're going to do. I mean, people ask us, well, should we use social media? Who are your targets? You know, and, and, and you're, you're, you're not talking just about stakeholders, but different types of stakeholders. So there's a separate analysis called Spectrum of Allies, which is about constituencies. And the question is, who are you gonna mobilize and influence? What, so if people say, should we do a hackathon? Should we do social media? Always the same question. Who are you? Who, who are you mobilizing and to influence? What, what's the actual target? And those are the two questions you need to ask of each and everything you do. So if you have those two things, if you're clear, if you, if you get some clarity around what resistance you're going to face. And the second thing is that you understand What's your targets for influence on both internally and externally. And then, uh, that's what really determines your strategy. And then the last part is simply to start small. I mean, start with people. We call it start with the majority. You can always expand the majority out. Once you're in the minority, you're going to feel immediate. One of the, I think this builds on this quite nicely, but if not, I apologize for taking this off on a slight tangent, but there's a, there's a line in Cascades that I underlined and then stuck a post it note over and rewrote again and used, which in which you said, Power no longer sits at the top of hierarchies, but emanates from the center of networks. And I think it's a really profound statement. And obviously the world has shifted on its axis. But just, can you just explain why this shift in thinking and understanding is so important to how we think about change and the environments in which we exist that we're trying to change? Right. Well, hierarchies and networks, they coexist. I think in the past, when things were much slower, And things weren't as connected. Hierarchies were much more dominant. Uh, and I think we see this in our organizations, especially since, um, back in 1975, more than 80 percent of. Assets for tangible assets and by night by 2015 that had shifted to more than 80 percent are intangible assets, you know, ideas, patents, licenses, know how. So when we used to talk about change, it tended to be changed in some strategic asset. You know, launching a new product, entering a new territory, whatever. Um, and people really couldn't question that. But when we talk about changes today, we're usually talking about changes in how people think and how they act. And that is, they have a much greater capacity to Resist that. And then that necessitates that we think in terms of networks. Now, hierarchies orders come down and those are very important because if you're going to execute any complex process, you need a hierarchy. Um, and that's why generally speaking, hierarchies have Increased over the last 30 years. You look at the research levels of organization have increased, not decreased, they become more hierarchical, not flat, but organizations have informal as well as formal structures. You know, if you're working in sales and your brother in law works in logistics, um, that's a real connection that changes the connectivity Everybody who works with you has with everybody who works with logistic. The thing is with power in hierarchies, they're set up up down in networks. And we can, we can see this mathematically. Power is always about centrality. Who's central to the network and you build centrality ironically by connecting out. That's how, so when we're dealing with informal structures and change again, is always built through peer networks. Um, we're talking, you know, it, it, it's not about persuasion. It's always about collective dynamics. The best indicator of what people think and what they do is what people around them think. And do I, and, and we know this experimentally from 10 different ways for decades. And we know that extends out. It's, it can be measured up to three, um, uh, three levels of separation. So not just your friends or your friends, friends, but the friends of your friends, friends are influencing you in ways you're not fully aware of people you don't even know. So when we think about change, If we don't, we know persuasion doesn't work because we know that there's a cap gap that knowledge and attitudes don't necessarily result in shifts in behaviors. We also know that we tend to adopt the ideas of the behaviors of the people around us. Well, we can, we can limit that, right? We can focus change on where there's people who, who really, who already like the idea. And we can start there. And that's how we can start building the collective dynamics through this idea that we're trying to build network centrality. We're trying to build density in those networks. Um, and you start with a majority, and you expand that majority out. Yeah, it does, it does make sense. I'm thinking about, part of my brain is whirring and this is like, it totally resonates, right? And I, I, this concept of, Small groups loosely connected and united by a common purpose that you can in these sort of informal and semi formal structures that exist all absolutely make sense and resonates. Then you get to this bit around, you know, really building meaningful change, particularly in the innovation context, right? Not all, not all innovate, not all changes innovation, but all innovation is definitely change. Especially if it wants to, to, to be lasting and impactful part of the struggle we face, I think is that it feels so, so hard and so complex. And it's like, how do you boil it back to the heart and soul of it? It's about people and relationships, which yes, there's complexity in there. But as you said earlier, where, you know, we're married, we have kids, we learn how to. Manage everyday relationships with communication and compromise and empathy and understanding and all the bits that come out of it and life's complicated, but it doesn't feel like this big change project. You've got to sit down and map out all the time, right? So how do you, how do we make it more instinctive? Do you think from an organizational perspective? Well, let's go back to the marriage thing. If your marriage is anything like mine. If I have an idea, um, about what we should do, or where we should go for dinner, vacation, whatever, um, one way to get it knocked down, surefire, is to tell my wife about it. Um, but if we're in a mixed setting, and there's a bunch of other people who've adopted that idea, She'll all of a sudden become very open to it, and often she'll turn to me and say, Hey, did you ever think this? And I was like, yeah, I was saying that exact thing last week, and you were telling me I'm some, you know, you treated me like I was some sort of an idiot. I didn't change. She didn't change. The collective dynamics changed. So a big thing is where do you start and who do you start with? So if you have a change, whatever it is, whether that's agile development tour, uh, new product idea or whatever, um, go to people who already like the idea and very, very, I was, uh, working with a mid sized American city, uh, few months ago and. They were pretty switched on. They had this idea for change, which was a new skill curriculum. They wanted to roll it out to 2, 500 people, all the employees in the city. And they said, we were thinking of starting the first cohort with our directors. We have 40 directors. How's that sound? And I said, how about 12? And they said, really? Wouldn't they be offended? And you could see they were getting nervous. And I said, well, of the 40, how many do you think would be genuine, genuinely enthusiastic? And they said, maybe half. And the way they said, maybe half, they'd be lucky to get a third, right? But I said, could you find 12 that would be genuinely enthusiastic? Oh yeah. They knew exactly who would be. We can start with this one and that one and the other. And if you run into a problem with the 40, what are they going to do? Oh, they're going to complain that if you run in, run into the problem with, with the 12, what are they going to do? Oh, they'll help us push through it and they'll help us solve it. Cause when you have change, you never did it before. You know, Ed Catmull, he, at, uh, uh, the, the co founder of Pixar, he's got a wonderful book called Creativity, Inc. He said in, in the beginning, all of our movies suck. Our job is to get them from suck to not suck. And all of them were blockbusters. You know, most of them won Academy awards. He said, our movies, when they start off are ugly babies. You need to protect your ugly babies. So having a big launch campaign or exposing that idea when it's weak and feeble and ugly baby, that's a good way to get it killed. You want to take that ugly baby to people who are going to nurture it, and you want to empower them to succeed. Once you get that first success, that first keystone change, And that's why when we're working on Keystone Changes, we always ask, how can we make it smaller? How can we make it smaller? You get it to that one process or one team or one location, and you get it to people who want it to work. And then when it does work, that's something you can build on. Before that, don't tell anybody about it. Don't make a lot of noise. Don't try and show how enthusiastic you are. Get some success somewhere that then you can build on it. And we've built in other things such as, uh, co optable resources that can help you scale it, but getting it started, that's the crucial point. And, uh, and when you do that, having understanding of where the resistance is going to come from and what are the targets for influence. I think I'm going to start winding us up because we're going to run, uh, run, run along on time otherwise, and you and I could talk all day, I think, is. Part of that, part of that piece is, is about loving your problems, right? And making sure, I guess, that you're working on the right problems. Is there an element of that within change? I guess that's the upfront bit, right? But how do you, how do you think about that? How do we make sure we're changing the right things that we're getting our priorities right from our first step forward, recognizing that you may, you know, you may need to revisit those things. Yeah. I mean, if you're loving your problems, like you, you love your kids, you know, you don't, you don't drop your kid off in like a, Rough neighborhood, and you don't drop your kid off at a biker bar, right? Uh, you know, it's six months or something like this, right? You just don't do it. That's obvious. But there's something about human nature that when we have an idea that we feel passionately about, we want it. We want to go convince the skeptics. We want to go take it to the people who absolutely hate the idea so that they can batter it and beat it down. Don't do that. There was a former prime minister who did leave his kids. Don't, don't, don't drop your, your baby off at the, at the biker bar, right? Um, give it to, you know. Give it a nanny, nurture it, you know, make it stronger. Give it, give it every chance it can to succeed. Yeah. And I guess there's a constant push in the business, right? That they don't give that time and they don't give that space or that we've got to rush to solutions or, or whatever it might be that, that big long catalog of sort of doom stories and excuses and everything else that we're pushing towards that, but it's like, I think there's an element of just going slower to go faster later. Exactly. You down more than failure. Exactly. Exactly. Um, good. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna start to wrap us in then. So as I do that, thank you. Right. And I, I would actively encourage everybody to pick up both of these books that although they were published in reverse order should be read cascades and then mapping innovation because they, they, they flow nicely from each other. What are you working on now, Greg? I know you've just got a shiny new website, but what are you working on? Uh, well, I'm trying to make the work more accessible. So, I've put a lot of work into my YouTube channel this year. Uh, Obviously I have my blog, uh, and I have a podcast and every, you know, every week we're working with organizations to overcome exactly these types of challenges. We don't have a lack of ideas. The problem is, is those ideas are getting killed and every idea that fails, it contributes to the atmosphere of change fatigue and makes it that much harder for the next one to succeed. So that's what I'm really passionate about. Is, uh, helping these ideas succeed rather than fail, because that doesn't do anybody any good and, and far, far too many fail and, and we can, we can help organizations move forward. Well, I think we're very aligned on that piece. And you and I were talking up front about a workshop you run that, you know, once you have a good idea, how do you ensure it doesn't get killed? And I'm hoping we can bring something like that to, to customers together as, as we go forward. And, you know, I very much like some of the. Um, snippets of good questions and advice that you've put out there. You know, what resistance are we going to face? Who do we need to mobilize? What's the target that we're working towards? And, you know, targets determine your tactics are absolutely right. I think we bandy around some big words sometimes in business that get lost. Innovation is one of them. I think it gets lost in its, in its interpretation. Execution and understanding. And the more we can try and simplify this back and make it accessible to folk, the better, right? From a, from, from an impact, um, and delivery perspective as we go forward. So thank you very much for your time today. It's very much appreciated. And I, uh, I hope we can do plenty more together as, as we go forward, looking forward to seeing your, your podcast coming out pretty soon as well. Thanks for having me on. Thank you very much. And thanks again for everyone listening today. This has been a total innovation podcast for those that have enjoyed it. Please hit subscribe. There's a number of episodes coming very, very soon with equally exciting guests like Greg today. And Greg, once again, thank you very much.

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