Navigate and Embrace Change | Simon Sinek

If I ask you, do you need to

change

? And you said "No", I'd be worried, you know? Like you think you've figured it all out, emotionally and professionally, all your relationships, everything is golden. Oh, okay. How's that going for you? I think the answer is always yes, and that is to consider ourselves or our organizations as works in progress. You know, that's an infinite mindset. The infinite mindset is fundamentally about constant improvement. So, you know, there are big

change

s, there are little changes, there are adjustments, there are dramatic changes. Sometimes it's reacting to cultural changes, changes in culture, politics, technology, you know, sometimes the change is ours, sometimes we have to react to it.

But I think the honest answer is yes, we have to change. There is always an opportunity to improve something. So in companies there is a notion that people fear change, which is fundamentally false. People fear sudden changes, you know? But incremental change is not a threat. People fear the change that threatens them, right? And very often the way we change management is by doing a lot of PowerPoint presentations about what's to come. "Don't worry, we have all this stuff" and we deal with it very rationally. And what we are ignoring is the emotional response. Now there are some people who love change.

It is an infinite-minded attitude to

embrace

uncertainty, to see opportunity in surprise. Some people, especially those who have been good at something for 10 or 20 years, are afraid that you will suddenly say you are going to change it. Again, there's that emotive word. They fear that they don't know how to do it or it will set them back. Therefore, no amount of rational safeguards will help them overcome it. At some point we have to let them go through the process. The law of diffusion is a theory proposed in the 50s or 60s by Emmett Rogers, and basically all populations move along the standard deviation of the old bell curve.

If you have high performers, you have low performers, etcetera, things like that. And with a law of diffusion it tells us: are they the first two and a half percent of its population or its innovators? These are the people of your great ideas. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, right? Then you have 13 and a half percent of your population who are early adopters. These are the people who are willing to pay a premium, suffer an inconvenience, and devote extra energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs. Line up to see Star Wars a week before its premiere.

Although you can wait two or three weeks, buy a ticket and enter. For them, it's worth it. Good? And then there are the early and late majority who are more cynical and more practical. "What do I get out of this? What guarantee will I have? What happens if it goes wrong? Will I get my money back?" Like that kind of thing. Know? Have you ever seen the YouTube video of the guy dancing alone and the first users come and then the next one? Everyone comes and that's a movement, right? That's a great example of how it works.

Now, expand it to an organization. The innovator is the person who came up with the idea, the person who started dancing and everyone else said, "You're an idiot." Good? But a small group said, "I mean, it's funny. You know, we'll try it." And then before you know it, it's a perfect example of how the law of diffusions works and how tipping points work. When we try to make changes within an organization, we obviously want the bill to not affect the majority of the company. But that's not how change happens because most won't try something until someone has tried it first.

They are intolerant of risk. So what we really want to do is target early adopters. You point to people who are doing well: "It's not perfect. I'll try." And if you can get that 15 to 18 percent market penetration, that's just going to be a tip. Again, because someone else tried, it happened. So the way you affect change in an organization is not to impose it on everyone because you will get massive resistance from the majority, but to identify the pockets of the early adopters, individuals and teams, who are willing to try this new What you want. try, fix the problems, and then before you know it, what ends up happening is that most of them start to get angry and think, "Why didn't they give us this?" Well, that's called demand.

We love that. So, it's about generating demand and creating that inflection point. That's a more effective way to create sticky changes.