Courage is being scared to death…and saddling up anyway. ~John Wayne Courage isn’t an absence of fear. It’s doing what you are afraid to do. It’s having the power to let go of the familiar and forge ahead into new territory. ~John Maxwell One of the scariest things I’ve ever done was my very first public talk. [...] Read more »
Running away versus running towards
The best in art and life comes from a center – something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that’s very hard to [...] Read more »
Psychology of change
Change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act. The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management Ever made this resolution: “I’m going to keep my email inbox empty.” Were you successful? I wasn’t. Why is change so hard? Because we’re not Econs, a [...] Read more »
What story does your approach to change tell?
The approach you take to a change initiative such as the deployment of enterprise software tells a story to those affected. Consider what each of these comments reveals: “If we didn’t do it quick enough, the person in charge of the project would send email to their boss, bosses’ boss, up to the CEO… ‘Are [...] Read more »
What motivates people at work
Would your organization be more successful if your employees were more obedient? Or, would you be more successful if your employees were more artistic, motivated, connected, aware, passionate, and genuine? Seth Godin, Linchpin Try asking people in your organization: “Why does this organization exist… why do you come to work each day?” or “Why does [...] Read more »
Redirecting personal and organizational narratives
People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change. Seth Godin As I mentioned in story editing [...] Read more »
Story editing leads to behavior change
Not only do we need to view a problem through other people’s eyes, we can also change the way they view it with relatively simple interventions. Even if self-views are often embedded in years of family dynamics, personal relationships, and cultural forces. Kurt Lewin Though it was more than 20 years ago, I still recall [...] Read more »
Technology is rational, predictable, controllable. People aren’t.
This situation reminds me of those old movies we’ve all seen of people trying to fly in machines before the airplane was invented: machines that had flapping wings; machines that had big, circular, umbrella-like contraptions that moved up and down; machines that had four sets of wings, none of which was large enough to generate [...] Read more »
Applying the Switch framework to two change efforts
In to succeed with change, tap into the power of the mind I summarized my takeaways from Switch. In this post, I’ll try applying the Switch framework to two very different types of change efforts. The first is a personal change effort many of us struggle with. The second is an organizational change effort. Losing weight [...] Read more »
To succeed with change, tap into the power of the mind
Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: can you get people to start behaving in a new way? For individual’s behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds. – Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip & Dan Heath In the [...] Read more »