Simon Sinek explains why organizations need an infinite mindset that embraces constant change. He breaks down the law of diffusion of innovations: target the first 2.5% of innovators and 13.5% of early adopters to hit a tipping point around 15-18% penetration, which then spreads change naturally. Emotional buy-in matters more than rational arguments.
Chapters
If I asked you, do you need to change? And you said to me, no, I'd be worried. You know, like you think you figured everything out, like emotionally, professionally, all your relationships, everything's golden. Okay, how's that working out for you? You know, I think the answer is always yes, which is to view ourselves or our organizations as works in progress. You know, that is an infinite mindset. Infinite mindset is fundamentally constant improvement. So, you know, there's big change, there's little change, there's tweaks, there's dramatic change. Sometimes it's reacting to changing cultures, changes in culture, politics, technology. You know, sometimes the change is our own, sometimes we have to react to it. But I think the honest answer is yes, we have to change. There's always opportunity to improve something.
So there's this notion in businesses that people fear change, which is just fundamentally not true. People fear sudden change, you know, but incremental change is not threatening. People fear change that threatens them. Right? And very often the way we change, manage is we do lots of PowerPoint presentations about what's coming and don't worry, and we have all these things and we treat it very rationally and what we're ignoring is the emotional response. Now there are some people who love change.
It's an infinite minded thing to embrace uncertainty, to see opportunity and surprise. For some people, especially people who have been who have gotten good at doing something for 10 years, 20 years, that all of a sudden you say you're going to change it, they fear again, there's that emotional word. They fear that they won't know how to or it will set them back. And so no number of rational assurances will help them get over that. At some point we have to just let them go through the process.
The law of diffusion is a theory that was proposed in the 50s or 60s by Emmett Rogers.
And basically all populations shift across the standard deviation, the old bell curve. If you have high performers, you have low performers, you know, etc. Stuff like that. And what the law of diffusion tells us is that the first two and a half percent of your population are your innovators. This is your big idea, people. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, right? Then you have 13 and a half percent of your population that are your early adopters. These are the people who are willing to pay a premium, suffer an inconvenience, extend extra energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs, stand in line to see Star Wars a week before it comes out, even though you can just wait two or three weeks and buy a ticket and go in for them, it's worth it, right? And then you have your early and late majority who are more cynical, more practical. What's in it for me? What guarantee am I going to have? What happens if it goes wrong? Will I get my money back? Like that kind of stuff, you know. You've ever seen the YouTube video of the guy dancing solo and then the early adopters come and the next everyone's coming. And that's a movement, right? That's a great example of how it work. Now amplify that to an organization. The innovator is the person who came up with the idea, the person who first started dancing. And other people said, you're an idiot. Right? But a small group said, yeah, but it's fun, you know, we'll give it a try. And then before you know it, it's a perfect example of how law of diffusions work and how tipping points work. We, when we try to affect change inside an organization, we obviously want to affect the bell, we want to affect the majority of the company. But that's not how change happens because the majority will not try something until someone has tried it first. They're risk intolerant. And so what you actually want to do is aim for the early adopters, you aim for the people go, alright, it's not perfect. Give it a try. And if you can get about 15 to 18% market penetration, it just tips again because someone else has tried it, it's happened. And so the way you effect change in an organization is not to thrust it upon everybody because you're going to get massive resistance from the majority, but rather identify the pockets of early adopters, individuals and teams that are willing to try this new thing that you want to try. Get the kinks out. And then before you know it, what ends up happening is the majority starts getting angry. Like, why weren't we given this? Well, that's called demand. We love that. So it's about building demand and, and creating that tipping point that's a more effective way to create sticky changes.
