From Innovation to Transformation with Greg Satell

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!

 

full transcript and show notes can be found at https://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2019/10/28/from-innovation-to-transformation