Hey there Conversation Designers! Today I’m talking with Author, speaker and advisor Greg Satell about going beyond innovation to driving transformation. His recent book, Cascades, is about how to create a movement that drives real change and he’s teaching a workshop in Austin November 21st with my friend and podcast guest Douglas Furgueson.
Greg is also the author of Mapping Innovation, which was all about stepping back from a monolithic idea of innovation and turning it into a conversation - what do we mean when we say innovation? And by we, I mean whoever is coming together to make a change. A team, an organization, has to define for itself what change and impact means to them.
And this is the essence of the conversation Greg and I had - the importance of empathy across the board - not just with customers but with your internal stakeholders. It’s only through this kind of “mass empathy” that we, as change agents, can begin to find the shared values that will power change.
While we didn’t use these terms in the interview, the act of empathy and seeking shared values means you can shift your transformation from a ”push” effort to a “pull” effort - in other words, leveraging Invitation rather than Imposition. The core of any productive conversation, of any communication is invitation: the choice of all the participants to actually choose to participate.
There is one other idea I want to explore and that is making problems okay to talk about inside of a culture. In many of the transformation cascades Greg talked about in this episode, broad silence about a challenge was followed by everyone pulling in the same direction. What changed?
Some suggest that change only happens when we all feel like we’re on a burning platform, a phrase coined by John Kotter in the late 90s. But Greg is talking about change being driven by shared values, not just fear and panic. What seems to be happening in each of these instances is that stakeholder groups who initially thought that they had different goals and values suddenly saw a shared goal and shared set of values.The burning platform just makes the act of finding shared values easy - the need to focus on survival is a powerful motivator. But understanding that the fear is just one type of motivation is clarifying. This makes the job of a leader of change simple - or rather, one of simplification. Change is about making the choice simple - simple to see (through storytelling) and simple to make (through clear shared values).
You can learn more about Greg’s work (including seeing the entire eight-step cascades process) and the upcoming workshop in Austin @ GregSatell.com Enjoy the conversation!
Show Links
Greg Satell on the Web:
And
November 21st Cascades Workshop in Austin:
https://landing.voltagecontrol.co/cascades-workshop/
The Cascades Process:
https://www.gregsatell.com/workshops/
Cascades (the book):
https://www.amazon.com/Cascades-Create-Movement-Drives-Transformational/dp/126045401
Mapping Innovation:
https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Innovation-Playbook-Navigating-Disruptive/dp/1259862259/
Gene Sharp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp
The IBM Turnaround
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lou-gerstners-turnaround-tales-at-ibm
Network Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory
Instantaneous Phase Transitions in Physics and Culture:
Otpor And the Buldozer rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87
Stakeholder Mapping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis
Women’s March Controversy:
Amritsar Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
Salt march
https://www.history.com/topics/india/salt-march
Values and Choices: Even/Over Statements:
https://academy.nobl.io/how-to-write-a-strategy-your-team-will-remember/
Transcription:
Daniel: I'll officially welcome you to the Conversation Factory. Greg Satell, I'm so glad you're here. You're a titan. Your two books, Mapping Innovation and Cascades are lovely books that people should have not on their shelves, but on their desks, so thanks for spending time with me today.
Greg: Thanks so much. That's great to hear. Really happy to be here.
Daniel: Thank you. Let's go straight to it. What is your origin story? How did you come to care about these things that you write about? How did you get involved in these two topics?
Greg: Well, Mapping Innovation was just really frustration, right? I spent most of my career running businesses, and I always felt an incredible pressure to innovate, but not so sure how to go about it. And whenever I looked for guidance, everybody had a different idea about how to innovate, and you would look at something like design thinking and you'd say, "Jeez, Steve Jobs swears by this stuff, and look at all the great things IDEO has done and Stanford, for God's sakes, has built an entire school around design thinking. This must be how you do it." Then you look into design thinking and it's like you focus on the needs of the end user and then you rapidly make a prototype and rapidly iterate towards a solution. You say, "That makes a ton of sense."
Daniel: It seems logical to me, right.
Greg: That's fantastic. That's how you do it. Then you read Clayton Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma and Disruptive Innovation, and he says, "That's how companies go out of business. They're too focused on their customers and when there's a change in the basis of competition, that all goes out the window and they go out of business." So which is it? Both those things can't be right.
Greg: Then there's open innovation, and then there's basic research people figuring how to split the atom, curing cancer. It all just becomes a confused mess. So that's the problem I was trying to solve, and what I found was that innovation's really about solving problems, and there's as many ways to innovate as there are different problems to solve. So what I created was a method of classifying problems so that you can choose the best fit strategy to solve them. And one of the things I noticed is that so many organizations, they say, "This is how we innovate. This is our innovation DNA," or something, and it works well for a really long time until they find a problem that doesn't quite fit, and then they just kind of spin their wheels. So that was really the problem I was trying to solve with Mapping Innovation.
Greg: Cascades is I think a more interesting story and has really become my number one passion. The origin story of that was I was running a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, so that was a really big experience and had a really big impact on me. It was an amazing thing to be a part of. One of the things I noticed was how thousands upon thousands of people who would ordinarily be doing very different things would stop whatever it was they were doing and start doing the same thing all at once in almost perfect unison.
Greg: I thought to myself, "Gee, I'd really like to be able to do that." Here I am running this big company and with thousands of potential customers. Wouldn't it be great if I could get them to stop whatever it was they were buying and all buy the stuff that I was trying to sell them? I had hundreds of employees, all really smart and capable, all with their own ideas. Wouldn't it be great though if I could get them all to unify on the initiatives I thought were important? Same thing with advertisers and investorsGreg: So I set out to figure out how that all worked, and it took be 15 years to figure out, and I found out that networks and network science has a lot to do with it, but I also found that there has been for decades an entire doctrine of how you create a movement, a lot of the ideas founded by a guy named Gene Sharp back in the '50s and '60s. I also found that we tend to have these three buckets when it comes to general change. We have political revolution, social movements, and then corporate or industrial transformation. And we treat them as completely separate, but what I found in my research is that they're incredibly similar, and the principles by which they succeed tend to be very similar.
Greg: So that was a real eye-opener and that's one of the things that made the book so much fun to research and write.
Daniel: That's awesome. I can understand why seeing structure underneath all this disparate phenomenon would be exciting to you, because you're clearly a structural thinker.
Greg: Right. Well, also once you make that connection between social and political revolutions and corporate and industrial transformations, it opens up the whole subject to a lot more rigor, because we tend to find out about corporate industrial transformations usually very much after the fact, and usually only when they succeed. Then some business school professor or consultant interviews a half dozen people and writes a case study, where in social and political movements, we have often thousands upon thousands of contemporary accounts.
Greg: And that really allowed me after doing the research on social and political movements and taking those principles and going into organizations and asking about those transformations, and as they were telling me their story I would ask them, "Did this happen?" They said, "You know what, it did. Is that a common thing?" Often they themselves didn't realize how much the Gerstner turnaround at IBM in the '90s mirrored Gandhi in the 1920s and '30s.
Daniel: It's so interesting because in science running experiments is important, and the same thing in innovation, but it can be hard to define what a good experiment is and what the boundaries of that experiment are, and having other context to draw on, I can see how that would really be helpful, to say, "Here's all these simulations that have been run for us already and we can have some intelligence that we can glean from all that."
Greg: Yeah, that was something I really tried hard to do in the book. I didn't want to, because I've read lots of books about movements, and I really, really tried hard to make the book more than a sample size of one. I have experienced a real movement. The Orange Revolution was very similar to the Arab Spring or the other movements within the Color Revolution, and it's so easy to treasure and admire that experience, that you don't acknowledge that that is your unique experience and it might not be others' experiences. So I really tried to expand that sample size and see how others experienced.
Greg: For instance, the Orange Revolution was really an outgrowth of the similar revolution in Serbia. I called Otpor! The organization was called Otpor! and it was called the Bulldozer Revolution, overthrew Milosevic. So I spent a lot of time talking to one of the leaders of that revolution to understand how it was different or the same as the Orange Revolution, and then I went and talked to a gentleman named Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who was one of Gerstner's chief lieutenants in the '90s in the IBM turnaround, and what was fascinating was to the extent they seemed to be almost finishing each other's sentences. To me that was just so amazing.
Greg: When you think about turning around a company, an enormous company, this historical turnaround at IBM in the '90s, and then you think about these kids, which they really were just kids, overthrowing a dictator like Milosevic in Serbia, and they're talking about the same things. They're finishing each other's sentences. It was almost like a mystical experience, like you're seeing some kind of unity in the universe or something. It was really amazing.
Daniel: Yeah. So this is really interesting, because I think there's a story in Cascades early on where you talk about I think it was the woman you were with at the time where nobody was talking about the problem, she was not talking about the problem. Then one day she was just going out to demonstrate with everyone else. I think there's this idea of somehow nobody sees the problem or nobody's talking about the problem and then everybody is talking about the problem.
Greg: Right. So that's really interesting. First of all, that was my fiancee at the time and now my wife.
Daniel: Yeah. Congratulations. I'm glad that worked out.
Greg: That worked out, that worked out. She's still working on her transformation, which is me.
Daniel: That's a good project.
Greg: That's her big project. What was so interesting is that two years after the Orange Revolution, I was in Silicon Valley and everybody was talking about social networks, and we had an enormous digital business, at the time about 40% of the digital advertising market in the Ukraine. So I said, "This is something I really need to know about." So I started studying network theory and I came across this amazing... This is what sort of flicked the switch for me and turned the light on. It was called an instantaneous phase transition, exactly what I experienced with my fiancee, where all of a sudden the world seemed to have changed, where all these links start accumulating and the system flips.
Greg: That was a big revelation for me, that students and activists can protest. It's when the marketing managers and the accountants, when they start hitting the streets, that's when the true revolution begins.
Daniel: Yeah, so just to make a sidebar, I think Loonshots from Safi Bahcall, he's...
Greg: Yeah, he also talks about phase transitions.
Daniel: Well, it's interesting because I love that physics and human systems also can mirror each other, that there's this idea of suddenly everything crystallizes. Something precipitates out of the solution.
Greg: Right. I don't think we should take the physics too literally. He was talking from a physical point of view. There is actually, there was something called the Erdos-Renyi model, which just mathematically figured this out, that at a certain point you get enough links that an unconnected system becomes connected.
Daniel: Yes.
Greg: There's also a similar theory in mathematics about when disordered points become order, randomly become order, and there's a lot of interesting math that goes around predicting when that point will hit. And I think that's interesting, but from a transformation point of view, it's a really deep and important concept, because you think about how that happens. Like in the Orange Revolution, this organization called Pora. It was a students' movement, but it became powerful, not through the students' movement but through second and third degree connections. Aunts, uncles, older cousins. And that's how it became powerful.
Greg: I think there's another concept in the book about local majorities and how majorities don't just rule, they also influence, and I think that's a key part of driving a transformation, that you're always building local majorities, but it's always dynamic. It's never static. Because if you just sit in your local majority then you're just preaching to the choir. You have to get out of the church and start preaching to some of the heathens.
Daniel: Yeah, so this is where I want to start drawing these points together, because in Mapping Innovation, you talk about innovation as a novel solution to an important problem, and what was interesting to me about that story of your fiancee in the Orange Revolution is that there's a problem and nobody's talking about it, or nobody's... At least this was my memory of the story, is that the students are talking about it but the middle managers and the silent majority is sort of going on with their lives. And suddenly everyone is talking about the problem.
Daniel: In your process, which I'm looking at, your Cascades process, the vision of tomorrow is this first step, and it seems like getting everyone to have a shared vision is a powerful moment in accelerating that change.
Greg: That is a very important part of it, a shared vision, but also shared values. Shared values in many ways are more important than shared vision, because generally speaking, in a situation like the Orange Revolution, where you have this oppressive regime, they spoke to shared values. They spoke to stability. People really just didn't want to even think about it. I mean, when I first came to Ukraine, I would ask, "What do you think about Kuchma?", who was the ruler at the time, and they would say, "It doesn't really have anything to do with us." Everybody knew it was a problem but they didn't-
Daniel: Sort of like, it's fine.
Greg: Right, so part of it is the social proof, but part of it is in the Orange Revolution they changed how they saw the country, that they had the right to be a normal country, that it wasn't right that they have this election that was a sham. It wasn't right. And people got angry about it and they saw the possibility that it could change. Because when you see things that you don't like and you don't see the possibility of change you figure the optimal strategy is just to figure out how to accept that.
Daniel: Yeah, which is a really hard position to be in as a human being, like that internal conflict between what you see and what you're experiencing and what you feel like you can say.
Greg: Absolutely, yeah.
Daniel: I mean, I guess this is what I'm driving towards, is inside of an organization, what makes it suddenly possible to start talking about a problem that people are seeing and feeling but not talking about? Because it seems like in order to accelerate transformation, at some point you have to make an unspeakable problem speakable.
Greg: Right. The key is really to think about... What I see in the work we've been doing is that often people construe institutions far too narrowly and stakeholders far too narrowly. There is the sort of thing, like they say, "Okay, well, the middle managers, they'll never buy into this," or, "This particular department will never accept it," or whatever it is. But then once you start thinking more broadly about stakeholders... I'll give you an example from political revolutions, and then we'll go back to the corporate, give a corporate example.
Greg: During anti-Apartheid, how do you convince these white supremacists in South Africa to give up power? One of the tactics that they did was a bunch of anti-Apartheid activists started a campaign against Barclays Bank in British university towns. Now, you can imagine what the white supremacists in South Africa thought of that. I mean, what do they care what a bunch of hippies in college towns in the UK are doing? But over two years, the Barclay share of the student market fell from 27% to 15%, and you can believe they cared about that. And they ended up pulling out all of their investments out of South Africa, and that kind of had a domino effect, because other companies who had investments in South Africa, they started pulling out too, because nobody wanted that to happen to them and South Africa just wasn't that much money.
Greg: Once you start having-
Daniel: Yeah, it wasn't worth the trouble.
Greg: Absolutely. Once you start having businesses pull out, countries, the whole rationale for not sanctioning Apartheid sort of fell my the wayside. That's why Apartheid fell, not because somebody all of a sudden, white supremacists all of a sudden had this big change of mind. It just had become economically untenable, and the rest of South Africans were no longer willing to support it.
Greg: So now if you think about your opposition, not the hardened die hard active opposition, but people who are neutral or passive opposition or apathetic, what influences them? You have all these institutional stakeholders. For instance, if you look at tech companies like Google or Microsoft or IBM, they invest significant amounts of money into their university programs. Why? Because universities are a key pillar of influence in technology. That's where graduate students, that's where research is done.
Greg: If you think about education, look at Common Core. They got all their ducks in a row. They came up with the plan. They got all the internal stakeholders to agree to it, but then Koch brothers start sending thousands of people. They missed the media as a key pillar of support and influence in education. Just to sort of sum up, that's how you actually make change happen. You mobilize people to influence institution.
Daniel: Yeah. I want to dig into this idea of a spectrum of allies, because I think when people are thinking or planning about change, they may not be thinking about all of the stakeholders in the space and how to make who's reachable and who's unreachable. Do you have tools that you use to think about mapping stakeholders? Is that part of the spectrum?
Greg: Yeah, that's the spectrum of allies, and it's really just about getting down on paper. Much as a general maps out the terrain on which the battle is going to be fought, the spectrum of allies allows you to map out the battle upon which the change will be fought, the terrain upon which the battle for change will be fought.
Daniel: What does that look like for you? Because what I find interesting about this is Mapping Innovation provides this space to talk about innovation in a really, really specific way and say of this whole universe, this whole field of innovation, I think we should go here. And someone else can say, "Yes, but I think we should go here." And we can have the conversation about what innovation means to us. Similarly, it seems like with a good stakeholder mapping process, a group can say, "I think we should be talking to these people," and someone else can say, "Yes, and I think we should be talking to these people." They can really have that big picture view of the space in which the challenge is happening.
Greg: Right. Well, the first thing is being specific about it, instead of, "People like us, people don't like us." And the spectrum of allies, and this is a really important point, it's always about people. They're not stakeholders. They're just people. So you want to identify who are your most active allies, who are your passive allies, who's neutral, who's passive opposition, and who's most active opposition.
Greg: Your active opposition you probably don't want to engage directly because-
Daniel: Is there another axis that you... So I'm going to put a really find point on this by the way, because I see people stakeholder mapping and they do write departments and they write entire industries, and I often say you want to put a face and a voice and a name to those stakeholders, because you want to know what they care about. It's a person.
Greg: Well, you also want to make a distinction between people and institutions. You mobilize people. Spectrum of allies, those are people you're trying to mobilize. You mobilize people to influence institutions. If you think about Common Core, the Koch brothers were masterful at mobilizing those people to go to school boards and influence those institutions. So you want to keep those two things separate. The spectrum of allies is about people who are mobilized.
Greg: The other tool, pillars of support, is about institutions that you're trying to influence. So if you think about Martin Luther King, what was the subject of those marches? What was the purpose? To influence specific institutions, media, legislative pillar, judicial pillar. So it's really, really important, and one of the reasons that Occupied failed, by the way. You always need to ask, "Who are we mobilizing to influence what?"
Greg: You think about that Apartheid example. Mobilizing British university students to influence foreign corporations, because that was a key pillar of support. Once you identify international investors as a key pillar of support to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, well, that's a much softer target, right? That's a much, much softer target.
Greg: So identifying those key institutions is important, but then also you have to ask why did those British university students, why were they willing to protest against Barclays Bank? The reason was because they felt they shared values with the anti-Apartheid. That's why it's so important to be explicit about your values and really clear. We can see the problems that the modern women's movement has run into, because they weren't explicit about their values. So when one of their leaders had this appearance with Louis Farrakhan, many people were absolutely repulsed, where others said, "What's the problem? That has nothing to do with the values of the women's movement." And that created quite a schism because they didn't ask themselves the hard question, "What are our values." If you don't define your values to yourself, how can you build a sense of shared values and bring people in?
Daniel: Yeah, and it seems like, I'm looking at the eight step process, and it's clear that this hinge point in the middle of values, allies, and the pillars is a fulcrum that takes you from where we are now to where we want to be. That's a really important moment in-
Greg: Well, also values signal constraints, right?
Daniel: Yeah.
Greg: Great example of this is the IBM turnaround in the '90s, where they said the value shifted from technology to customers. We're going to shift our values from our proprietary stack of technologies to the customer stack of business processes. Because that said we are not going to force every piece of technology down your throat. We're going to constrain ourselves and do what's best for your business. That completely changed. That required an enormous cultural change within IBM, but that's the only reason IBM's still in business today, because they were able to make that change.
Daniel: Yeah. So let's talk for a second, because time marches on. You're doing a workshop in Austin towards the end of November.
Greg: The 21st.
Daniel: The 21st of November. Where people are going to go through this whole process and leave with a game plan on how to, I don't want to use the word incite. For some reason the word incite is coming to mind. In order to incite the revolution that they would like to incite, is there a limit to the challenge of the problems-
Greg: Absolutely, to drive-
Daniel: ... the scope of problems that somebody could bring into that workshop?
Greg: Sure. So digital transformation is a big one. I know that we've talked to other people who wanted to create a movement around user centricity within their organization. Another one, we were just talking recently about a state government that wanted to drive a change around making government agile, adopting agile tactics, throughout state government. You start thinking about, by the way, the possibility of that in some of those things. Think about making a department of revenue agile and user-centric. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine calling up your department of revenue and saying, "Wow, that was a fantastic experience."
Daniel: Yeah, that requisition I filled out was great.
Greg: Right. So I guess the process all starts with asking yourself, "What really bothers me? What really I don't like?" And then flipping that and saying, "Well, if I could make any change I wanted, if I was king for a day or if I had a magic wand, what would that change be? What would it look like?" Then we through the cascades process, we show you how to get there.
Daniel: That sounds magical. Because I mean, once you know what the change you want to create is, then you can start working.
Greg: Yeah, one of the things that I think makes the process so powerful is there's nothing magical about it. It's very deliberate and step by step, and a lot of it is thinking about and anticipating what happens next. I think we were talking before about what if Black Lives Matter had anticipated that they would be portrayed as anti-police? How might things have gone very, very differently?
Daniel: Yeah. Well, let's back up and talk about that, because in our pre-conversation we talked a little bit about how political movements learn from their mistakes, and I'm wondering, learning from mistakes is, as Hamlet would say, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Is there an example that you can share of how a movement learned form its mistakes and adapted?
Greg: One of my favorite examples is... And I should point out I found the same thing in corporate and industrial transformations, that they made mistakes as well, but they learned from them. But I think probably the most powerful example was Gandhi in 1919, where he started this campaign of civil disobedience, and things just spun out of control and it led to a disaster, a horrible, horrible massacre at Amritsar, and he would later call it his Himalayan Miscalculation. And it haunted him for years, and then in 1929, when the Indian National Congress declared independence from Great Britain in a document very similar to our Declaration of Independence, meaning it didn't mean anything, they just declared it. And they asked him to design a campaign of civil disobedience to bring independence about. He went back and thought long and hard about it because he certainly wanted to avoid making that same Himalayan Miscalculation again, and the result was the Salt March, which is today considered his greatest triumph and was really what broke the spell of British dominance and led to Indian independence.
Daniel: People don't often understand the significance of this moment, because it was this absurd sort of prohibition and tax and it was such a simple act, and somehow it pushed against something, an absurdity, and that shook a surprising amount loose.
Greg: Right, it was also about shared values. I mean, salt was something that everybody needed. It didn't matter whether you were Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or upper caste or lower caste. You needed salt to live, and the burden fell on the poorest people the most. It was instead of something like liberty or justice or something abstract, it was at the same time very visceral, but it was also an appeal to shared values. Even in Great Britain, the salt laws were considered by many to be fundamentally unjust, and I think that's such a powerful point when you're trying to drive change. Instead of saying, "This is the change I want," you think in terms of how can I make this an appeal to shared values.
Greg: I think the LGBT movement is a great example of this, where for decades it was all about accentuating difference. We're here, we're queer, we're different. But when they made that shift from that to "We want the same things you do. We want to live in committed relationships. We want to raise happy and healthy families," things shifted enormously quickly.
Daniel: It's hard to imagine how quickly marriage equality swept through the legal system, and I think they chose a really wise target.
Greg: Just to give you a corporate parallel to that, I think a great one is Paul O'Neill when he took over Alcoa. It was in dire straits. This was back in the late '80s I believe. They said, "What are you going to do to bring Alcoa back to profitability?" He said, "I'm going to make Alcoa the safest company in America. We're going to go for zero workplace injuries." People thought he was crazy. They said, "No, we're talking about finances." He said, "You didn't understand me." But by talking about safety, that was an appeal to shared values, and in following up on that and letting people know, making sure people understood that safety was going to be how they were going to be judged, that created an enormous amount of shared values and shared purpose with the employees. And of course safety, workplace safety, and operational excellence go hand in hand. And many of those same processes that started off with workplace safety were then used to create operational excellence, and I think within a year Alcoa was back at record profits. Some other things went right as well, but that was an enormous turnaround of that business.
Daniel: It seems like, if I can reframe this, when you're talking about digital transformation or when you're brought in, you're like, "We want to become more innovative and we want to move faster and be more agile." These are really, really ephemeral or intangible value. Grounding ourselves in something really, really clear, like we're going to be safe seems like a much, much more powerful way to incite or to weave that network behind you. How can we ground these big ideas of innovation and transformation in the daily lived human experience of people inside of organizations?
Greg: Well, one of the things we ask in the workshop, we ask people to define their values. Then we ask what they expect those values to cost them. What costs are they willing to incur? If you say, "Oh, well, we value the customer." Okay, what costs are you willing to incur? When Lou Gerstner said, "We're going to focus on the customer as our core value," he made clear we are not going to make people buy stuff anymore that they don't need. So he was willing as the CEO to incur those costs. And that's because if you're not willing to incur costs then it's not really a value, is it?
Daniel: Yeah.
Greg: That's where you start getting really into the nitty gritty. If you say you want to be innovative, what costs are you willing to incur to be more innovative? Because there's always a tension between optimization and innovation. If you're honing processes, you're not going to be doing things differently. So once you start thinking about what costs you're going to incur and realize that there is no such thing as a free value or a free choice, that's where the rubber starts hitting the road.
Daniel: Yeah, this is, like the even over statements that I've heard some people use. Customer centricity even over, I don't know what people are willing to give up, though. How do you get people willing to step away from what's comfortable? Because the idea that I'm going to focus on something to the detriment or the cost of something that we currently care about, that's a challenge.
Greg: It is, and people need to be forced to make those choices if something's going to change. I mean, in our workshops people come saying that they're committed to change, right?
Daniel: Yeah.
Greg: So if you are not committed to making some sort of choice, then you are committed to the status quo and things won't change.
Daniel: Well, can I dig into that, because I'm slightly allergic to the word force. Because I'm wondering when you talk about weaving the network, I can't imagine that you really force people to make that change, that there's more of a rotational. How do you invite them to really-
Greg: In designing the movement, you need to make choices. This is the difference between... And this is really important, because when the Arab Spring was going on, people started talking about these leaderless revolutions and leaderless movements, and this whole idea that hierarchies and leadership had become somehow passe. Those were not leaderless movements. People were leading those movements, and those people made choices. So your point is very much to your point. There's fantastic research behind this when it comes to political uprisings around participation and the fact that you can't overpower. You need to attract, and that's how you build a movement. Another mistake that the Occupy movement made, right? Once you start getting into this idea that only the most pure of heart belong. You always want to be connecting out.
Daniel: Purity politics. I mean, on the left and the right in the United States, it's pretty challenging. I imagine it's very hard to weave a network and to build a coalition if there's a sharp boundary drawn onto what kosher is or isn't/
Greg: Right, right. It's not easy, but the way you do it is with an appeal to shared values, and I think it's not so long ago that Barack Obama came on the scene out of nowhere. In 2004, when our politics were incredibly acrimonious, here was this, as he calls himself, this black guy with a funny name at the Democratic convention having this amazing call to shared values. We are not blue America or red America, we're United States of America. That was powerful enough to put that obscure state senator from Illinois into the presidency four years later.
Daniel: Yeah. It's so interesting, because one of the things we talked about before we started recording was this idea that resistance happens in change dynamics. Some people are still trying to legislate the Civil War, and some could look at our current political state as a pendulum swing wildly in the other direction from what former President Obama was calling towards. In Cascades, in transformations, does that sometimes, is that something that we should be looking at?
Greg: Yeah, I call it the tennis match.
Daniel: The sort of not just resistant but the tennis match.
Greg: Right. So again, the LGBT movement, if you think about how that went, you could sort of date it to the I think it was the 2004 State of the Union address, I think, where George Bush got up at the State of the Union address and I think called for the...
Daniel: We're going to get the actual, I love it.
Greg: He called for a marriage amendment, and then Gavin Newsom, who was the mayor of San Francisco at the time, he was in the audience. He was so incensed he went back to San Francisco and started performing same sex marriages at City Hall, and it was called the winter of something or other. Of course, that got people so incensed that there was a huge campaign for Proposition 8 in California and that Proposition 8 was so cruel and got people so incensed that it created the new LGBT movement and the gay, the same sex marriage movement, which even at that time was quite controversial in the LGBT community. Then it was that appeal to shared values.
Greg: You often get the pendulum swinging, or I say this, the tennis match of transformation, until you eventually hit on those shared values. We saw the same thing in Ukraine, by the way, where 2004 we took to the streets to keep Yanukovych out of office. Five years later, he's in office. That's what the concept we talk about in the workshops and in the book of surviving victory. When you think about your... One of the most interesting things I found in my research is that the victory phase is often the most dangerous phase, because those who oppose change, they don't just go away. Those who are working to undermine change, they don't just go away.
Greg: And think about how many times we've seen in the organizations that we work with that we work so hard to make a change and get executive approval, and the program passes. Everything's agreed to, and then what happens? Everything falls apart and goes back to the status quo. Why? Because the people who opposed it in the first place, they never went away. They say, "Okay, you can say whatever you want, we're just not going to go along," because you never created, they didn't see it as a shared value, and that's what eventually breaks the logjam.
Daniel: Yeah. This seems just like two people having a conversation where we can dig in into a bitter argument, and at some point somebody's going to have to pull the ripcord and say, "What are we doing here? What are we trying to accomplish? What's our shared goal? Let's go to couples counseling." I'm seeing this conversation, like the national conversation about gay marriage rights, it's just happening in the same way, just back and forth, and at some point somebody has to say, "What's the big idea? What's the big goal?" Similarly, we've got to do that inside of our organizations, is have those real conversations with people about why we're doing this and why it matters.
Greg: Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Daniel: I think you have. We're running out of time. Is there anything we haven't talked about that we should talk about?
Greg: Well, I think there are so many things that we could talk about that I feel like we could keep going for another hour, but I think that when it comes down to brass tacks, I think that we need to take responsibility for making change possible. And once you take responsibility for that, it almost necessitates thinking concretely about how you're going to bring that change about, and that's what we try and do in our workshop.
Daniel: I think it sounds, I mean, to me I think about being intentional in designing the conversations we want to have in the world, and if there's a change you want to create, thinking through that entire arc and having a real game plan seems like an absolute must.
Greg: Absolutely, absolute must.
Daniel: I wish I could be at the workshop if for no other reason that it's fun to hang out with Douglas and it's been fun hanging out with you too, Greg. I'll ask you to stay on the line for a second after we close things out, but on the internet, if somebody wants to learn more things about all things Greg Satell, where should they go on the internet?
Greg: You can go to my website, gregsatell.com, and to my blog, digitaltonto.com
Daniel: And if you want to know the origin story for that, we can tell you the story another time. Cool. I'll put those links in the show notes, obviously. Greg, thank you for the time. It's really a delight to talk to you. You're a deep thinker about this stuff, and the rabbit hole goes pretty far down, and anybody who's listening to this, I would definitely encourage you if you can make it out to Austin to spend some time with these fine gentlemen, because this is an important topic for sure.
Greg: Thanks so much for having me, Daniel. It was fun.