The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was rumoured to have said that his three rules for how to become rich were: Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil. It’s one of those eminently quotable remarks because it captures something we all know to be true, that luck and chance have as much to do with success as anything else.
Yet we don’t value people for their luck. We don’t exalt those who win the lottery or walk away from a roulette table flush with cash. Instead, we praise talent, skill, and dedication. And that creates tension, because although luck plays a big role in outcomes, it is only the effort we put into developing our abilities that we can control.
That is the nature of what the French writer Albert Camus called existential rebellion. It is through our own efforts and actions that we find meaning in an indifferent universe, even if the rewards for those efforts have a significant random element. Believing in luck, then, an act of defiance. To work, to strive, to build skill in such a world is not naïveté, but rebellion.
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Over a long and industrious career, the investor George Soros developed a theory he calls reflexivity. The basic idea is that expectations don’t form in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our perceptions of what other people believe. The more widely an idea is accepted, the more likely we are to accept it ourselves and that, in turn, reinforces the collective zeitgeist.
If many believe that, say, the stock market will go up or that AI will create an economic boom, we’re more likely to believe it too. That belief then drives behavior: investors buy stocks, companies pour money into AI, and the prediction begins to fulfill itself. All of this only adds fuel to the fire. Nobody wants to get left out of a good thing.
Soros made a fortune betting against reflexivity. Once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement takes hold, things are bound to overshoot. Expectations drift far beyond underlying reality—and eventually snap back. It seems something similar is brewing. As big institutions accumulate unprecedented power, a growing backlash seeks to take power back.
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It’s become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts don’t achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to change—including synaptic, network and cost effects—that lead to resistance.
Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies. These are famously flawed, lacking controls and often relying on self-serving accounts.
One unlikely place to find insight is an obscure academic named Gene Sharp, who wasn’t interested in business, but political revolutions. What he found was that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as they remain in place, nothing will change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible.
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Every good salesperson knows the 7-step process in which you identify and qualify a prospect to understand their needs, then present your offer, overcome objections, close the sale and follow up. It’s proven so consistently effective that its concepts have been the standard for training salespeople for decades.
Many business leaders come up through sales and marketing, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they try to use similar persuasion techniques for large-scale change.They work to understand the needs of their target market, craft a powerful message, overcome any objections and then follow-through on execution.
Unfortunately, that’s a terrible strategy. The truth is that the urge to persuade is often a red flag. It means you either have the wrong people or the wrong idea. Effective change strategy focuses on collective dynamics. Rather than trying to shape opinions, you’re much better off empowering early enthusiasts and then working to shape networks.
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Change is often presented as an enigma. Unlike a traditional management task, you can’t just devise a plan and execute it. To be an effective change leader, you need to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty because change, by definition, involves doing new things and that always involves some measure of unpredictability.
Still, that doesn’t mean change is mysterious. We actually know a lot about it. In Diffusion of Innovations, researcher Everett Rogers compiled hundreds of studies performed over many decades. Around the same time, Gene Sharp led a parallel effort to understand how large-scale political movements drive social and institutional change.
So while any change effort involves no small amount of uncertainty, there is also quite a bit of consistency. Much as Tolstoy remarked about families, successful transformations end up looking very much alike, while unsuccessful transformations end up failing in their own way. Here are four numbers to keep in mind as you embark on your change journey.
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Every year since 2010, I’ve posted an article about what trend I expect to dominate the next twelve months. Throughout the 2010s, these forecasts usually focused on emerging technologies or new currents in management thinking. But around 2020, that began to shift. The annual trends increasingly centered on how we cope with change rather than the change itself.
Last year, it was “The Coming Realignment.” History tends to propagate at a certain rhythm and then converges and cascades around certain points. Years like 1776, 1789, 1848, 1920, 1948, 1968, 1989—and, it seems, 2020—mark these inflection points. The years that follow are then spent absorbing the shock and navigating the fallout.
Today, everything is up for question. Will AI boom or bust? Will it take our jobs or bring new prosperity? What kind of economic system will we adopt for the future? We are in the midst of a great realignment. We know from previous inflections that what comes after will be profoundly different from before and what we most need to watch now is our institutions.
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When Benoit Mandelbrot first started out as a young researcher at IBM, one of the first problems he was asked to tackle was noise in communication lines. What he noticed was a strange pattern: There would be long periods of continuity, punctuated by periods of discontinuity that persisted until a dominant pattern could establish itself again.
Mandelbrot called these forces of continuity and discontinuity Noah Effects and Joseph Effects. “Joseph effects,” after the biblical story about seven good years and seven bad years, was continuous and predictable. The second, which he termed “Noah effects,” was like the famous storm that wiped everything clean.
Clearly, we’re in a period of discontinuity and things will continue to be chaotic until a new set of paradigms care establish themselves. When I look back on my writing over the past year it’s clear that two things were on my mind: How to adapt to this period of realignment and how best to create new paradigms. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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One of the great things about books is that they can take you out of your current context. You can go to a different period of history, explore another industry or even a different planet. That’s one reason that I like doing these annual reading lists. They give me a record about what worlds I’ve chosen to enter in past years.
Looking back over the past year it’s clear that how things work—or don’t—was very much on my mind. We can have great ideas, put together plans and strategies, but if you can’t execute on the ground, everything is bound to go off the rails. That’s probably why so many of the books I read this year are about how to make stuff work better.
Reading books is, quite simply, how I work through the ideas I’m grappling with and, even if I can’t always find answers, I can usually learn enough to start asking better questions. The books I’ve read over the past year have certainly helped me do that, and I hope they can do the same for you. Also, please let me know about the books you’ve read in the comments.
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There’s an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that the sensory world can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that’s why, although it has been debunked many times, the Inuit snow myth keeps getting repeated.
There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a another culture knows, people’s perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be.
So if the Inuit snow myth highlights an important concept, many would argue that there’s no real harm in repeating it, in much the same way we continue to tell the apocryphal story of George Washington cutting down his father’s cherry tree. Yet truth matters. Once we start degrading it we lose our ability to understand what is often a messy and nuanced world.
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“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” is a quote, often attributed to Mark Twain, endures because it so perfectly captures our everyday experience. You can learn things that you don’t know, but it’s incredibly difficult to unlearn something you believe in your heart to be true.
There’s real science behind this. Things we experience are packed away in our brain as connections called synapses, which form and evolve over time. These connections strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as neuroscientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together.
That’s why leaders pursuing change often default to a managers mindset instead of a changemaker mindset, because that’s what they know and what they’ve been successful with. Yet just like in that quote above, manager assumptions can undermine a transformational initiative. Here are three beliefs that sabotage change and what you can replace them with.
