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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
To err is human: apologizing brings the human side back into business
Apology is not just a social nicety. It is an important ritual, a way of showing respect and empathy for the wronged person. It is also a way of acknowledging an act that, if otherwise left unnoticed, might compromise the relationship. Apology has the ability to disarm others of their anger and to prevent further [...]
Visualizing the adoption experience
Earlier I blogged about visualizing the customer experience using customer experience journey maps. The experience I’m currently trying to understand and visualize is the experience people go through when adopting a new application at work. The challenge of people adopting of new applications in an organization is a much different challenge than the one of people [...]
Designing with the social brain in mind
We are like a herd of buffalo quietly grazing on a plain until one of our neighbors starts to run… then we start to run, and others start to run, and suddenly mysteriously, the whole herd is barreling forward… Cooperation, altruism, punishment, and free-riding are written into our DNA. – Nicholas Cristakis and James Fowler, [...]
Build design thinking into organizational DNA to infuse delight into customer’s lives
In Designing in hostile territory I talked about injecting design thinking into your organization using a subversive, bottom-up approach. But to really benefit from design thinking, to create products and services that delight customers, an organization has to build design into their DNA, like many of the world’s most innovative companies have done. Some of these companies have [...]
How to trigger an epidemic of good – the power of positive gossip
Last week when chatting with a customer who’s had tremendous success in accelerating adoption of ECM across her organization, she said something that really captured my attention. “We start all our meetings with positive gossip.” In other words, they start each meeting by sharing anecdotes and stories of what’s working. The key was that the anecdotes [...]
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