Change in Times of Crisis — Conversations with Greg Satell

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Something beautiful has happened to me during this corona lockdown: I have found myself a new thinking partner.

To me, a thinking partner is someone who:

1. Shares his experience in a way that makes me understand my own experience better
2. Listens to my questions and responds in a way that inspires me to ask new questions
3. Empowers me to share my experience in a way that helps us move forward together

Bestselling author and international keynote speaker Greg Satell ticks all these boxes and that is why I’m excited to share what we’ve been thinking and talking about the past couple of weeks.

Where to focus when driving change?

In this 4 minute video, Greg talks about the major shift in leadership and shares his experience with change leaders using shared values to drive transformational change:

Who knows the shared purpose of your company?

Your CEO? The people who have worked in the company the longest? Or maybe your customers? Everybody seems to agree that a shared purpose is important for a company to succeed.

But what if you don’t know the answers from the beginning? And what if you never will unless you find a way to tap into the collective experience of your colleagues, customers, competitors and the rest of your ecosystem?

In this 8 minute video, Greg listens patiently to my questions about the nature of a shared purpose and responds by telling me about Gandhi’s and Mandela’s significant failures — and why you shouldn’t assume that you understand the shared purpose just because you had the idea:

What is the most powerful empowerment tool?

Do you know a simple empowerment tool that makes your stakeholders feel responsible for pointing at the problems AND providing the solutions? I do :-)

Webcast: A Roadmap for Transformational Change

After having explored our shared passion for change and leadership and exchanged our experiences with Cascades and Qvest — creating change by disrupting survey logic, we decided to invite others to join us.

In a few weeks, more than 200 people from all over the world signed up for our webcast: A Roadmap for Transformational Change.

It was amazing! People asked a lot of important questions, e.g.:

• Values has different interpretations in different cultures as well? So how to align the metaphors and bring in all qualitative perspectives?
• For whom is this approach most difficult for embracing and how to bring them on board? I am thinking about leaders, who (in some cases) will have to let go of traditional top down change approaches…
• What is relevant in transformation when crisis is the dominant theme?
• How to set the agenda in the organisation when covid19 has taken over all dialogue?
• How do you overcome resistance to change given that the reasons for resistance are so varied? Differentiated approaches perhaps?
• Is avoiding the opposition/active allies at contradictory with influencing the status quo? Wont “mainstream” allies be very close to status quo?
• How does culture impact people’s eagerness to ask questions? Also the more sensitive or unpopular ones?

I hope you enjoy the recording of our webcast — and if it sparks any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. I love questions :-)