Summary of the article published by Greg Satell
Key Takeaway
Change is not about persuasion but power. To bring about transformation, one needs to identify and undermine the sources of power supporting the status quo while strengthening forces favoring a different future.
Summary
- Change is often perceived as a hero’s journey, but in reality, it’s a strategic conflict between the current state and an alternative vision.
- The status quo is supported by sources of power, and genuine transformation requires identifying and influencing these pillars.
- Good ideas face resistance, sometimes due to rational factors like lack of trust or competing incentives, and sometimes due to irrational factors like identity.
- The process of change involves identifying relevant institutions, mobilizing constituencies, and targeting sources of power.
- An effective transformation strategy entails analyzing and categorizing institutions based on their level of support and influence.
- Tactics should be designed based on the identified sources of power to bring relative strength against relative weakness.
- Change is about power, not persuasion, and it requires a journey of strategic conflict rather than a predefined destination.
Quotes
- “The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true.”
- “Change isn’t about persuasion, but power.”
- “To bring about transformation we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future.”
- “Your targets determine your tactics.”
- “The truth is that effective strategy is more of a journey than a destination, you can never be sure beforehand where exactly you will find it, but it will become clear once you’ve arrived.”
- “Change is often a story told as a hero’s journey.”
- “The true story of change is that of strategic conflict between that alternative future state and the status quo.”
- “As long as those sources of power remain, nothing will ever change.”
- “Once you internalize this story, however, you are ready to build an effective strategy.”
- “We tend to think that if an idea has merit, everybody will immediately recognize its value, but that’s almost never true.”
- “The truth is that good ideas fail all the time and they don’t fail on their own, they fail because people resist them.”
- “That’s why, whenever we seek to bring about a genuine transformation, there will always be those who seek to undermine what we’re trying to achieve.”
- “That’s why to build an effective transformation strategy we need to identify the institutions that support the status quo, those that support the future state and those that are still on the fence and as yet uncommitted.”
- “That’s why efforts to borrow strategies that worked somewhere else so often fail, because the institutional context can be dramatically different, even if superficially the situations seem similar.”
- “Change Is About Power, Not Persuasion.”
- “To bring about transformational change we need to first identify the relevant institutions we need to target and then mobilize the constituencies to influence those institutions.”
- “Your targets determine your tactics.”
- “The truth is that effective strategy is more of a journey than a destination, you can never be sure beforehand where exactly you will find it, but it will become clear once you’ve arrived.”
Unlocking Change: The Power of Stories and Shared Values – Insights by Greg Satell
