Your World of Creativity Ian Ziskin + Collaborators, The Secret Sauce For Leading Transformational Change
Welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking your world of creativity, the podcast, where we talk about how to get inspired and how to organize our ideas. And most of all, how to gain the confidence and the connections to launch our creative work out and to the world.
Today we've got a unique set of guests who are gonna talk to us about transformational change and creativity, and how to apply our creativity in whatever creative practitioners might be working on right now.
They are Ian Ziskin and a panel of collaborators, Linda Naiman, Susan Robertson, Kelly Bean, and Karen Jaw-Madson.
Ian leads a group called the consortium for change and has just published a book, The Secret Sauce For Leading Transformational Change
The book is a collaborative effort by Ian and the Consortium for Change. Written by a diverse, and inclusive community of contributors and business experts, The Secret Sauce guides readers through navigating change on an individual, organizational, and societal level. Every essay is unique, ranging from deeply personal challenges like confronting a life-threatening cancer diagnosis to reimagining the organizational and societal impact of a world of work without jobs. Readers will learn concepts and techniques to engage the mind, navigate vulnerable moments, cultivate adaptive leadership, and much more.
Linda Naiman is joining the fourth industrial revolution and going technical, designing, and producing an online on-demand course on creative resilience.
Kelly Bean is the principal of parent strategy partners based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has been working with organizations and universities on how to integrate learning into everything we do on a daily basis.
Karen Jaw-Madson Has been primarily spending her time between executive coaching and consulting in leadership culture, diversity, talent optimization, and change. She has also been spending a lot of time teaching as well as advising and investing in the startup space and developing a research project at the intersection of DEI and culture.
Susan Robertson is working on her third book, real Cultural Transformation To Change. She is doing a lot of executive coaching on how to get into the C-suite and has a special interest in working with culture change in the healthcare industry.
We opened our discussion with what were some of the underpinnings that he began to explore when we cooked up the idea to put this book together.
- Those leaders who are actually successfully leading sustained transformational change why and what are they doing?
- The second question that we began to explore was a lot of situations where transformational change is not successful. Why do we so often fail? to touch on the broader concept of large-scale transformational change.
We also dove into each author’s sense of what transformational change was as they contributed to the book.
We also started with a bit of a hypothesis or premise that we wanted to explore. Basically, the assumption that all transformation is changed, but is all changed transformational
Linda Naiman: transformation has to do with an evolved state where you go transform from unawareness to awareness or to higher awareness and to create an improved quality.Her contribution to the book has to do with using the arts as a catalyst for transformation in people, and in organizations.
Kelly Bean: She says leaders have to be learners. And if you're a learner, you have every capability and possibility to be a leader. And so in order to do that, you have to practice
Karen Jaw-Madson: To be able to manage changes, you have to be good at change too. You have to be able to be adaptive and agile as well. Learning is demonstrated by changed behavior, and so learning is change and change is learning. The way you successfully manage change is you need to have enough depth and breadth in order to be successful
Susan Robertson: When it comes to transformation, you have to change it at the individual level, the team level, and the organizational level if you talk about the issues that create distrust, you'll actually create trust in order for them to be able to break down barriers between themselves and reach that creative space.
We also had a candid discussion on knowing that there were other people writing in parallel, and how it inspired, encouraged, and motivated each writer for their chapter.
Ian Ziskin said that people have different points of view and it was very motivating for him to keep it short enough to be usable, but also diverse enough to be valuable in terms of the input.
Kelly Bean : For her, it was just getting out of her own way.
Susan Robertson: Writing with other writers made her want to level up her game and learn in the process in terms of her own writing.
Karen Jaw-Madson: She asked herself where she could uniquely contribute and used it as a blank page.
In conclusion, Ian told us that one of the big things he learned about the process of putting the book together was trying to get the balance right between providing guidance and deadlines and being clear about what it is you that he was looking for. So people felt like they had some framework to work within while at the same time, providing an appropriate level of degrees of freedom for creativity and ideas and diverse perspectives to flow through.
Finally, the authors shared their versions of what should we not do -- and what should we do instead?
Susan Robertson: start anywhere, in terms of all the chapters, then pick a theme And go down
Linda Naiman: Don't run away from chaos and ambiguity
Kelly Bean: Don't have too much certainty and have more curiosity
Karen Jaw-Madson: Don't self-limit, explore the possibilities, connect with people, and also enjoy the journey.
www.transformationalchangebook.com
Ian Ziskin, coach, entrepreneur, speaker, teacher, and lead author of The Secret Sauce For Leading Transformational Change (coming June 1, 2022). Through his coaching and speaking, Ian has helped countless executives grow their leadership, effectively navigate organizational change, and develop their human capital strategy, and he is eager to share his expertise with your audience.
Ian brings 40 years of experience to his work, serving as a business and HR leader, board advisor and member, coach, consultant, entrepreneur, teacher, speaker, and author. He is President of the coaching and consulting firm EXec EXcel Group LLC, and the Co-Founder and Partner of Business inSITE Group (BiG), a strategic partnership focused on coaching, leadership development, and HR transformation. Ian is also Co-Founder and Leader of the Consortium for Change (C4C), a community of coaches and consultants, and Co-Founder of the CHREATE Project, designed to address the future of work and HR.
Ian has written or co-edited four books, The Secret Sauce for Leading Transformational Change (2022), Black Holes and White Spaces: Reimagining the Future of Work and HR with the CHREATE Project (2018), THREE: The Human Resources Emerging Executive (2015), and WillBe: 13 Reasons WillBe’s are Luckier than WannaBe’s (2011), and he is a contributing author to The End of Jobs by Jeff Wald (2020), The Rise of HR: Wisdom From 73 Thought Leaders edited by Dave Ulrich, et. al. (2015), and The Chief HR Officer: Defining the New Role of Human Resource Leaders, edited by Pat Wright, et.al. (2011). He has written dozens of articles, blogs, and book chapters on the future of work, HR, and leadership, as well as on coaching and HR’s role with Boards of Directors, among other topics.
Copyright 2025 Mark Stinson