How to Be Awesome at Your Job 1084: How to Navigate Change and Encourage Innovation with Jeff DeGraff
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Aug 13, 2025 Jeff DeGraff, known as the “Dean of Innovation,” is a professor at the University of Michigan, advising global leaders on change. He reveals why facts don’t change minds, focusing instead on how experiences shape our perspectives. Jeff highlights the importance of constructive conflict and shares insights on navigating overwhelming choices. He advocates for simple experimentation, illustrating how small-scale trials can drive innovation. Ultimately, he stresses the necessity of an agile mindset to embrace ambiguity in a rapidly evolving world.
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We Know Facts Fail, Yet We Use Them First
- People often act hypocritically about change: they know facts don't move minds yet still use facts first.
- Recognize that habit and design experiences that produce learning instead of repeating data arguments.
Experiences Change Minds, Not Facts
- Facts rarely change minds; experiences do the heavy lifting in belief change.
- People update after direct experiences at crisis or peak moments, not from data alone.
Run Cheap Experiments To Learn Fast
- Stop overplanning and run cheap, rapid experiments to get real feedback from the world.
- Hedge by spending little time and money across options and accelerate failures to learn fast.
