From Resistance to Momentum: Rethinking Organizational Change | Greg Satell | 658

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you are joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Greg Sattell. He is the co-founder of ChangeOS, a transformation and change advisory. He's an international keynote speaker. He's the host of a cool podcast, which is the Changemaker Mindset Podcast. And the bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change. And his book prior to that was Mapping Innovation. He's also a guest lecturer at Wharton and has contributed to 50 HBR articles. So a classic underachiever. And, uh, I could sit here and tell you more and more about him, but I'd rather just talk to Greg. So welcome aboard, Greg.

Good to see you, Peter.

So tell us, tell me a little bit about your journey. How did, how did all this happen? How'd you get here? Because it's a, it's an interesting story and, and, and is, is in most cases it's not a typical linear thing.

Yeah, not, not at all. I started off working in media in, in New York. Uh, I was selling national radio and I, I got this offer to go work in Poland. Selling ad space there. So I'd been an athlete in college. I was a wrestler in college. And so I'd never been able to do a semester abroad. And I figured, well, the guy in the office next to me, you know, is a little older, makes a little bit more money and has a longer commute. Other than that, he's pretty much doing the same thing I'm doing.

Right. Right.

I might as well, I'll go out there for for 6 months and, you know, have a little bit of adventure and, you know, well, no, let me, let me, let me get this.

Like, certain markets are always thought to be the hot market. You go to Miami or Austin, whatever. Was Poland on the dream list of where to go to sell radio advertising back in the day? Did I miss it?

It was actually a, so it was a, it was a bunch of business journals, uh, that two American guys started after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They, they, I think they started a couple years earlier. And so the options were, uh, they had business journals in Prague, in Budapest, and in Warsaw. And out of the three, Warsaw was probably my fourth choice.

So you got your fourth choice.

Okay. I got my fourth choice and I got there and I just loved it from almost the first day. It was so exciting and I didn't realize how lucky I was to go to Poland. Poland, because Poland is by far, I mean, today anybody who's, who's spent any time in Europe knows that Poland is essentially the capital of Eastern Europe.

Yeah.

It is by far the biggest company, country, by far the biggest economy. And the, the level of competition there is the level of professionalism is quite high. Even by European standards, when you go to Warsaw, you need to feel like you're going to Frankfurt or to London. You're not, you go there for 6 months and then you stay there.

Well, you go there thinking this'll be—

but here I am at this moment in history where everything is changing and everybody knew it. I mean, you wouldn't, you have an entire country being rebuilt. From the, from the Marriott Hotel.

Very cool.

No Class A office space. So any, any company that wanted to start a business there, and we're talking about pretty much every Fortune 500 company, they, the only place they could go, they would send executives, they would stay in the Marriott, they would get an office at the Regis Center, which for those of you who don't know, that was WeWork before Silicon Valley got a hold of it.

Right.

And so you would eat in the Marriott, you would eat at their restaurants, you'd go to their, you'd go to the, the fitness club there and you'd go to the nightclub and everybody you needed to do business was doing the same thing.

So I was pretty easy. Oh, okay. So you stay there and then where does the, the seeds or the birth of Greg, the thought leader, the author, the academic, you know, the cascade guy.

How did, how did that— So I ended up staying there 15 years, uh, 6 in Poland, 8 on and off in Ukraine, uh, and a little bit in Russia, a little bit in Istanbul.

Okay.

And in 2004, I was leading a major news organization. It was a media company, but one of our biggest businesses was, was news. During the Orange Revolution.

Right.

And that, that had a deep impression on me. And it was one of those moments that the universe kind of opens itself up.

Sure.

And reveals a bit of itself to you. And what I realized was, is power didn't work the way I thought it did. You know, here you were in a situation with no, nobody with any conventional form of power at any ability to shape events at all. There was just this mysterious force that was moving things along. And I remember even then thinking, I'd like to bottle that force somehow, right? Okay. Uh, you know, here I was running, uh, you know, organization of 800 people.

But geopolitically and, and in the historical perspective, you, you're at a moment in time, at a place in time where, where things pretty special are going on. And you're looking at like, you're, you're kind of deconstructing how does this happen? Right? Like kind of as you're watching it happen.

No, I wasn't deconstructing.

Okay.

I was just like everybody else blindsided. Like what the hell just happened? I had no idea. I just knew there was something there. I, I couldn't describe it.

Everybody did.

I mean, you can't be there without feeling what that was. Um, and it was like nothing I'd, I'd ever experienced before. Even, you know, I'd been in the region, what was it? That was 2000, like 7 years at that time. So I was fluent in the languages, the culture. I'd seen a, yeah, yeah, a lot of upheaval, but nothing like this. And I, I had this thought like, what if I could bottle this force and, and put it to some useful purpose? You know, I was running an 800-person company and I'm like, you know, young, bright people all with their own ideas. How do I get them all going in the same direction on what the things I think need to be priority? Had no idea how to do that. 2 years later, I'm taking a, a publishing course out at Stanford. I'm, so I'm in Silicon Valley for a few weeks. Everybody's talking about social network and that's when Facebook was just, you know, really becoming a thing. And we had a, we also had a very big digital business. So I said, this is something I should really learn about. So I started researching network science and the, uh, especially the work of Duncan Watts. And here was a mathematical explanation for almost everything that happened during the Orange Revolution. So now I was hooked and I, I started researching deeper about movements, about social networks. And then when the world was blowing up in 2009 and we sold our bank to Petro Poroshenko, who would become the president of Ukraine, I was looking around for something to do. So while I did that, I, I started my blog and then that took off and got picked up by Forbes and Harvard Business Review. And eventually I came back here and this whole time now starting to write about it. And, and try and put my, these experiences into some coherent form. While I'm doing that, I run in, I, I meet this guy, Srdja Popović, who was the architect of the color revolutions. He led the movement that overthrew Milošević and then trained the guys in, in the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and then the Orange Revolution.

Right.

And he had built this and, and more than 50 countries since then. And he's become a, a close friend and he had built this repeatable model for overthrowing a country. And I did quite a bit of organizational transformation when I was in, you know, in 15 years of Eastern Europe. And right. I said, this seems to me like it would be a great model for organizational transformation.

Okay.

So now, and so the research that became Cascades, right?

So you took what you were observing, right? You were living it, you're observing it, you're part of it, it's there. And then you'd make that bridge, 'cause this is where that, that, that the interesting things happen at the seams, right? There's geopolitical change up, right? That's the people, this, that, and the other thing. And you're like, ah, this actually connects to how organizations go through change and issues and, and, and pieces. And that's really. When people think of you today, they think of you more as the Org Cascade guy than the observer of geopolitical revolutionary things.

Or the media guy or the publisher, the, or, or the, or any of those things. But, but one thing I, and I, I try and be very clear about this during it, you know, in writing the book, in the book, I'm, I had no idea. There wasn't this moment of epiphany where a light went on. There was just this feeling of extreme confusion about something that happened that I knew was important, but I had no idea how to make sense of it, much less, much less communicate to others. And that was a very, very long, hard process.

Right. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership. Please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So now organizations are bringing you in to, so fill in the blank, I get paid to do X for Y. Like, who's bringing you in to get what done based on?

So they're bringing me in to help them build a change strategy around an initiative that's important to their business. Okay. Whether that is a cultural change or a technology change Often I partner with other thought leaders.

Okay. Is this a new variation on change management or is it different?

So change management is, is, is much different. And, and, and this is a, when you're talking about change management and methodologies like ADKAR or Kotter, yeah, yeah. You're really talking about internal communication and training. You're talking about solving a communication and coordination problem. Here's a change, it's going to happen, that decision's been made. Um, you know, I, I would say the classic one is at Intel when they made that famous move out of memory chips.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If the CEO says our factories are changing over, that's, that's going to happen. It doesn't, it doesn't matter what anybody thinks about it, right? But most—

they burn, they burn the boats, right?

Yeah, most of the changes And they have full authority to make the change. But back then, back in the '80s when all these change management, '80s and '90s really, when these change management methodologies were being designed, there more than 80% of corporate assets were tangible assets. So most changes were strategic changes. Today, most, you know, more than 90% of strategic assets are Or excuse me, corporate assets are intangible assets, know-how licenses. So when we talk about change today, we're talking about change. It changes in what people think and what they do. And right.

You're not optimistic.

Types of changes require collective action and they're very sensitive to resistance.

Right. So you're not, and that's why they often fail a, a factory where you have control over the hardware, this is really the, the software, if you will, where you're gonna get the resistance. So when organizations are bringing you in to shepherd them through this, what are the various ways that you do that? There's speaking, advising, coaching, like—

Well, first of all, day one, we have a tool called the Resistance Inventory where we analyze that and build strategies and anticipate from day one where that resistance is gonna come from.

Okay.

'Cause that's something that usually, to be honest, almost never gets done. And when you look at, at, at change management methodologies like ADKAR, they don't have a methodology for, for dealing with resistance. So that's the first. Okay.

So you start with the tool and then what?

Well, then we, there's a suite of tools. So we have one for resistance, one for cultural triggers. One for stakeholder analysis. Almost all of it's built on this original methodology designed, thought up by a guy named Gene Sharp, and then put into practice by Serjot.

It's not dependent on you specifically. The tools could be administered by others. So there's some scale and leverage built into the model, right? It's that there are others that could, that could deploy these tools.

Right. And usually I'm partnering with another thought leader. So for instance, I have one friend who does gender intelligence, right?

Okay.

So she generally gets hired when a big corporation gets sued, quite frankly, or they have some bad happenings, or, or have some high-profile people robbed.

Yeah. Right.

So she comes and she has a a great methodology, great assessment tool, and she comes, she comes and helps them fix the problem. And then 5 years later, they call her again because, because it never took hold, right? They, they solved the problem and it went back. The best indicator of things that we think and do are what the people around us think and do. So even if we're, if, if somebody's convinced, once they get back embedded in those networks, they're gonna get convinced right back. This is a frustration among a lot of successful thought leaders is they go in, they help people understand the changes they need to make. Some initial successes are done, but a year or two later, they're right back where they started.

Yeah. So stay, stay there for a minute because that to me is the issue of sustainability, right? 'Cause it's Westphal's set to come in and say, I can go in, roll up my sleeves, be a good consultant, diagnose the problem, put together a slick report, talk to management, senior leadership around, here's the problem, here's the data to support it quantitatively, qualitatively. Senior leadership goes, okay, cool. I see it's a problem. Help me fix it. And then you say, well, here's what we're going to do first, right? That's 6 months, a year, whatever. And then we go our separate ways. But that sustainability piece, if you're not changing capabilities, if you're not changing culture, if you're not changing a whole bunch of other things, Guess what? Like you said, whether it's 2 years, 5 years, whatever, the weeds are gonna come back up, right?

Yes. And here we have this huge problem at this one division. Let's go in, we fix the problem, big success. That guy gets hired away, right? And then it goes back and the rest of the company, the rest of the organization never got touched. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because that was just the problem with the guy in the Northeast or something like that.

Who's now working at your competitor or whatever the case may Exactly. So I think a lot of thought leaders miss the opportunity to work backwards and say, I'm going to develop a set of an extension of my thought leadership that deals with the sustainability piece because that's really, I think most senior leaders have been through the diagnose the problem, do some consulting, do the front end, and then ha ha ha, 3, 4 years later, I'll see you in a little bit. Right? Like, how do you get to the root?

That and, that and I call it the day after Agile training.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Where, where you're going and you're, you're training somebody, you're giving them a skill, you're giving them a tool, right? And you're a thought leader and that's great and it works for them and everything, but they're not being good evangelists. Because we know what happens the day after Agile training. You send that guy super, or that girl, super enthusiastic. They go and they expect everything to change at once. And then when it doesn't, they get frustrated and then they, you know, all sorts of bad things happen. And this is another reason why I like other thought leaders partner with me is because ideally you want that executive that you've helped. To then go be an evangelist for you in that organization internally. So internally, so they become your best salespeople, not the people getting shunned and, and, and sort of soiling your bad name just because they're excited about your work.

Well, and at that moment in time inside the organization, they're typically most favored nation. They're a favorite child. Look at what they did. Look at how they're doing it. So now the other divisions, whether that's functional or geographical, are going, wow, so-and-so over here did some cool stuff. What's going on there? As we start to wrap, Greg, any thoughts or recommendations for others out there that might be on the cusp of saying, yeah, this thought leadership thing, I think I want to be that. It wouldn't be go to Poland for 6 months and stay for 15 years, I imagine.

Like, no, I think it is the best ideas don't automatically win. It took me 15 years to go from that initial, hey, what's that? To Cascades and even longer to, to really build it into a practice. So when you have an idea that you're excited about, you need to understand that people are not going to understand and adopt it in the form, in the same form in which you came to understand it.

Right.

Right. And that's how you need to serve.

Yeah.

Building that bridge. I love that.

Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time and I, and I love the story and the, the origin story and then the application and the bridging from sort of the geopolitical into the organizational. So th— thanks for sharing, Greg.

Thanks for having me on.

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