Ep. 224 - Shannon Lucas, Co-author of Move Fast, Break Shit, Burnout: The Catalyst Guide to Working Well

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Shannon Lucas, co-author of the book, Move Fast, Break Shit, Burnout: The Catalyst Guide to Working Well. Shannon and I talk about the characteristics, roles and challenges that catalysts face in driving innovation within companies and how organizations can better identify and support these new change agents. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consultant services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview with Shannon Lucas

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Shannon Lucas. Shannon is the coauthor of Move Fast, Break Shit, Burnout: The Catalyst Guide to Working Well. Welcome Shannon. 

Shannon Lucas: Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Not only are you a new author, the book's coming out I believe tomorrow. You have been in the innovation space for a while. You've worked for great companies like Erickson and Cisco's Hyper Innovation Living Lab and Vodafone. So, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about some of the things that you're seeing and some of the great things that you put in your new book. 

Shannon Lucas: Thanks. You have some great guests. So, I'm excited to be part of the crew. 

Brian Ardinger: What made you decide to write another innovation book? What's different about this take on it?

Shannon Lucas: It's a great question, because there are so many books about how to do innovation better and innovation processes and change management. But there's very few books that actually talk directly to the change agents themselves, about how to do that sustainably and more effectively. Based on personal experience of going through these very catalyst cycles of the intense mania when you start first sinking your teeth into a wicked problem. All the way through trying to orchestrate across an ecosystem or an organization hitting resistance, and more often than not hitting some kind of burnout. 

I wanted to help other catalysts and other change agents see that they didn't have to have the intensity of those cycles and how to do it more effectively. I think we need wicked change agents now more than ever. There's a lot of positive change that we need to create in the world, but we need to make sure that they're not doing that at the expense of themselves. 

Brian Ardinger: What is a catalyst and how does that differ from a traditional employee? 

Shannon Lucas: My co-author Tracy is a ethnographer researcher and the distinction, the categorization of catalyst comes from a lot of research that she did. And it's basically people who take in lots of information from lots of sources from that they will see emergent new possibilities. They then sort of create a specific vision about something that needs to change and how they want to see the world be better. And importantly, they move into action and they move into action fast. Hence the name of the book. 

And they're often perceived as risk takers even though to them, it often doesn't feel risky because they have internalized and synthesize so much of the data. Why it was really interesting for me is I had been spending all of this time creating intrapreneur circles within Vodafone, sort of externally as a support group. And I kept seeing that they didn't all show up the same way. 

We had grown the innovation champion program we called it at Vodafone from ragtag group of eight positive troublemakers to this CEO sponsored, gamified, rewarded all these things. We had over a hundred people, but it was often like the same 10 or 15% that showed up over and over, that would lean in so hard that we were like, Oh, hold on, we'll get some of those barriers out of your way for you before you really break a lot of shit. And so it was important for me because it really helped me contextualize who these wicked change agents are. And then of course, how we could help them better. 

Brian Ardinger: So, with that can you give some examples of the type of people that you've seen, or some examples of how catalysts change the organization or move it forward.

Shannon Lucas: First important note is that a lot of catalysts will go in and out of organizations. You'll see on their resumes. Once you start to see the patterns, you'll start to be able to see them on LinkedIn. They'll stay in a role for a couple of years because they've moved on to the next big problem and they're looking for new ways to do it.

They often are more comfortable than the average person moving into startups, starting their own ventures and then going back into the corporate world.  It's like for them, the question is wherever I can create the next change that I need to create and whatever tools are the best tools to get that done, is where they will go.

It's interesting, actually, in one of the interviews recently, one of the catalysts said, you know, when people used to ask me where I'm going to be in five years, I never knew the answer to that. Cause he's like, I never know what problem I'm going to be solving next. And he said, so now my answer is I'm going to be a catalyst that much I know. And whatever that looks like I can't tell you. 

Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. And I imagine a lot of the listeners that we have on this podcast are now light bulbs or, you know, shooting off in their heads saying, Oh, I think I'm one of those people. Is that curious and restless, we'd call it in our organization that we're trying to find those folks that see things a little bit differently and willing to take action on that. Not everybody's a catalyst. How can you as an organization, if you want to lean into the innovation and try to identify these catalysts and cultivate that, what are some ways that you can first, as an organization, identify who in your organization are these catalysts? 

Shannon Lucas: Tracy and I sat with this question for a long time, as we've been creating our community and doing the research for the book, do we want to be the arbiters of who is a catalyst and who isn't? We have the data, so we can work with organizations to create the quizzes and do the identification of the personality types. What's more important though we found, is that people actually self-identify as catalysts. 

We talk about patterns, not templates like showing what some of these patterns look like, and then letting people to your point, it's like the light bulbs will go off when a catalyst starts to see and hear us talk about it. There's this deep resonance and really like this thrill because they're finally being seen and understood in a way that they really haven't been before. Most organizations in fact, we haven't found an organization yet that doesn't have catalysts. So I would encourage all of the HR people and leaders out there to find them.