In this episode of Yes, And with Avish Parashar, I sit down with Greg Satell—author of Cascades and Mapping Innovation, and a leading voice on evidence-based change management. We dive deep into why traditional change methods often backfire, the science of how change actually spreads, and how leaders can spark transformational change by starting small, building momentum, and leading with shared values.
Greg brings powerful insights from his time running media organizations during revolutions, writing for Harvard Business Review, and studying network science. We also explore the role humor and psychological safety play in helping people say “yes, and” to change.
Key Takeaways
Why a big kickoff meeting can actually sabotage your change initiative
The three types of change—and why collective behavior change requires a different approach
The surprising truth about how few people are needed to start a change cascade
Why leading with shared values (not differentiating ideas) is the secret to building buy-in
How to create “keystone changes” that are small, meaningful, and scalable
The science behind peer networks, influence, and the S-curve of adoption
How humor creates a sense of “we together” that supports shared effort and transformation
Relevant Links
Greg’s books: Cascades | Mapping Innovation
- Connect with Greg on LinkedIn
Unedited Transcript
Avish
Hello, Greg, and welcome to the podcast. How are you, sir?
Greg Satell
Good to see you.
Avish
Likewise. Well, thank you for doing this. You know, since I started this podcast, I've had you on my sort of list of people I got to talk to at some point, because I talk about change quite a bit from, from a different level, from like a humorous, entertaining side. But you're one of the top people I see out there talking about writing about change. So I definitely wanted to talk to you. And as fate had it, we were at a meeting last week and, you know, my ability to procrastinate ended when, you know, you're right in front of me. So before we get into that, just for people who are unfamiliar with you, could you give us kind of the one minute Greg Sattel summary kind of who you are, what you do.
Greg Satell
Well, my name is Greg Satell. I'm the author of two books, Cascades in Mapping Innovation. And I help organizations. I help organizations overcome resistance to change.
Avish
Okay. Wow. That was probably the.
The shortest one minute we've gotten from people, which is great. I appreciate the concises. And the other thing you didn't mention there, which, you know, as I told you, I do the intro afterwards, but I'm sure it's in your introduction, is that you've published many, many articles in the Harvard Business Review. Correct?
Greg Satell
I've published so 55, I think was the last count, so. Quite a few.
Avish
Yeah.
Greg Satell
Yeah, that.
Avish
That's a lot. That's a lot. So.
Greg Satell
And I've also published in. In Barons. I published. I was a contributor to Forbes for, for quite some time and for Inc. But. But I've focused on HBR for the past couple of years. I also teach at, at Wharton.
Avish
Oh, you do? I didn't realize that.
Greg Satell
Yeah, yeah, I just one class. So that's, that's a fairly new thing, just the past couple of years. But most of what I do is corporate work and helping leaders to overcome resistance to change.
Avish
God. And if I'm correct, from when we first met, which is years ago, I think pre pandemic is when we first met, I believe you were kind of first guys. So you actually spent. You started as a writer, right? You did most. You did lots and lots of writing, getting published and publishing, and then you sort of built the speaking on top of that. Is that correct?
Greg Satell
Well, so What? I spent 15 years running media businesses in Eastern Europe, as people do. Yeah. And that's where I got my interest in change, because I was running a news organization in Kiev during the Orange Revolution, and we can talk about that a little bit more if you want, but that's really what. What led to my. To the research that became Cascades. But while everything was blowing up in 2009 and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do next, I started a blog.
And the blog got super popular and eventually got picked up by Forbes and Harvard Business Review. And that's what started me with the writing. Lot of people think that because I ran a prominent news organization that I came up as a journalist, which I did not. I came up through marketing and sales, became a publisher, and then later started. I didn't start writing seriously until I was 40 years old. Wow.
Avish
And so when you. Was your blog all focused on change or was it just general business or what was kind of the focus of your blog?
Greg Satell
It was. I didn't know what it was about. It started off. It's still. The tagline was at the crossroads of media marketing and technology, which is not what it became at all. I didn't have the first clue what I was doing. It was 2009, and the financial crisis was much, much worse in, In, In Ukraine than it.
Than it was here. We, the ad business in 2009 fell off 85%. That's 85. Wow. You know, I think the economy dropped 14%. I mean, it was really severe. We eventually.
So most of 2009 was spent trying to survive, saving the company. And then we eventually sold it to a guy named Petro Pochenko, who then of course became famous for. For other reasons. Ten years later, he. He became the president of Ukraine. So there was a. And there was a lot that happened in the, in the interim.
So we were in the process of selling it, and I, I didn't want to be part of that process, so I left the company. And I was trying to figure out what. What I was going to do next. So I didn't. My wife was nine months pregnant, and I was just sitting there surfing the Internet and. And I read this article about why you should start a business blog. So two days later, I launched Digital Tanto, which was.
That was back when people named their blogs. I didn't know how to write at all, but I knew how to publish. And because I knew how to publish, that, that sort of made me more successful than 95% of the other bloggers who didn't know how to write or to publish.
Avish
I remember the wild west of the blogosphere back in the late 2000s.
Greg Satell
Yeah. So I knew certain things about readability and usability, and so that Could. So for a while, because I also knew what I was talking about, that could masquerade as good writing. And because I was able to masquerade as a good writer, I was, I had some success and the success encouraged me to learn how to write. So eventually I became. I. What I think is, is, is, is a pretty good writer.
Avish
But I have validation to that.
Greg Satell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I do, but I didn't start off that way. And, and I think when you're talking about the type of change that you focus on, the laughter is part of it. And my friend Serjeant Popovich, who's, who's probably the world's most successful revolutionary, he, he coined this term leftivism, which, and, and Applebaum likes to cites him quite a bit. And people don't realize in terms of political change and social change, how important laughter is and that, and when you're in those types of situations like, like the Orange Revolution and where it was freezing cold and we didn't know whether we were going to get shot or what was going to happen, and we found out later that, that it, that came very, very close to happening. And, and the situation in Ukraine today, you have to have a sense of humor. And if you don't, it's, it's very difficult to get people to join you. Nobody, nobody likes angry people.
You have to have a certain sense of humor about yourself and about your situation. The problem is, is that people tend. There's a human urge to signal our identity and status, which often plays a very, very constructive role.
Because if we're going. The human superpower is collective action, right? We're not, we're not particularly big or strong or fast or we can't fly, but we can collaborate in massive numbers. Very, very. And very few animals can collaborate at all. Even, even primates cannot. And there's lots of scholarship on this.
They do not borrow practices from each other. A primate won't copy another primate like a gorilla won't copy another gorilla.
Avish
So then to, to interrupt you for a while, I don't know if you're, I don't know how memeified you are or have you. So have you seen the debate about could 100 men defeat one girl, one silverback gorilla in a fight? So do you believe because of the ability to collaborate and the superpower that the hundred men would be able to defeat the gorilla?
Greg Satell
Well, apparently the primatologist said that they would. But it's not just ganging up. It's that we learn from each other. So, you know, you And I are able to cook food because we know from generations that these recipes have been built up or that if we cook things that they're. But we're the only animal that does that. No animals share practices even among the current generation, but across generations, you know, gorillas or chimpanzees or, you know, they don't look over time. So when you, when.
So when you think about how we're able to do that and, and there's a lot of evidence that shows that the roots of religion come not from superstition, but from the need to engage in collective action, that religion essentially empowers collective action. And you can't really understand religion without the chanting and the singing and the clapping. So from that perspective, this need or this human instinct to signal identity and status is incredibly important. Because if, if we are going to collaborate, you and I, Avish, you need to know something about what I have to contribute, and I need to know something about what you can contribute. The problem with so many people, when they, when they feel passionately about something that needs to change, the urge to signal that identity and status overshadows everything else that I am a such and such and I want this and that rather than.
Avish
It's funny because I think I just talked about this in a keynote. And so at the time, the last, at the time we're recording this, the last podcast I just released, probably a couple back when this one comes out, was with a friend of mine named Alex Bulkowski. Not a speaker and he's actually just a guy who's been an executive same company for 27 years since college. And what he, you know, that his company, they move people around every couple years just to get the. And so I was talking about change and how do you quickly. And he's like, you know, the first three months for me is just about people. All I'm basically doing is asking them questions and listen to their answers.
And then I talked another friend who moved out to college. He's like the second highest person up in the LA county health system. Same type of thing. We started new job. He was like, I tell these people, I'm not going to tell you anything. Like I'm here to learn from you. And I hold those two up as examples, which it sounds like the opposite of what I believe, which is what you're saying, which is that most people, especially when dealing with a change or thrust, a new situation, they want to sort of assert who they are or here's kind of my vision is that kind of what you're what you're alluding to there.
Greg Satell
But they are, they are asserting an identity. Right. I mean, they do have markers of an identity. Right. I mean, they're, you talked about one was an executive at a particular company and the other was the second. Right.
Avish
They're not exactly going in, though, like waving their banner like, here's who I am. You got to listen to me. It's rather, let me take, like, obviously, if you're just.
Greg Satell
Right. But it's quite obvious, right? It's quite obvious, right. Who they're coming in as.
Avish
Yes.
Greg Satell
And what they are signaling is I am this person who wants to work with you like this. And, and, and once you start, once you're aware of it, the amount of identifiers people drop in a normal conversation is really incredible. Especially in America, by the way, to a much greater extent than in other countries. Generally speaking, within five minutes of you meeting an American, they will tell you, I'm a so and so, and I believe this and that, which is much more prevalent, at least in my experience, in America than it does somewhere else. But when, but often it goes, often that that instinct goes awry and that's where you get people who are working harder to make a point than they work to make a difference. But I think very relevant, relevant to the, to the work that you do that laughter brings us to the same level. Laughter is always we together, right.
Avish
When it's done right. Right. When it's not.
Greg Satell
When it's done right. Right.
Avish
When it's not right.
Greg Satell
Yeah. Well, then that's not really humor. That's just cruelty.
Avish
Sure.
Greg Satell
Right. But, but laughter says we together, right? When, when you're laughing with somebody, you are saying we are part of something shared. Right. And it's that, that feeling of shared values that leads to shared endeavor.
Avish
Well, let's, let's build on that because I think, I don't know if this is when you send me or on one your LinkedIn post recently, I think you, you were talking about, and I forget, I didn't make a note of exactly how you phrase it, but you said something about that. Like, which is that something about getting through the change or how values kind of. I don't know, you obviously, like I said, this is pop my head something you said. You're kind of using our shared values is what leads us through change as opposed to, like, ideas and, you know, tactics.
Greg Satell
Well, so when people are passionate about an idea, they want to talk about what differentiates it, you know, and that's what they tell you to do in marketing class. What's the. But if. If you want to bring other people in, that's the worst thing you can do. You want to talk about shared values. And in our workshops, that's one of the things we do, is we talk about what. What are the values of this.
Of this effort, and then which of those are shared values and which of those are differentiating values? And I'll give you two examples. One, a social example and a business example.
Avish
Okay.
Greg Satell
Social example is with the LGBTQ movement, and for decades, everything was about difference. We're here, we're queer, we want to be accepted. Our difference. And every time they got ahead, they got bashed right back down. And because of things like family values and defense of marriage. And then how did they win? Right. Through marriage equality. And the. The. We want the same things you want. We want.
We want to raise healthy and happy families. We want to live in committed marriages. We. We are like you, but we're different in that way. Right? They. But. But you notice the difference in the formulation.
We are just like you, and we have this difference right now.
Avish
What is primary, what is secondary? Right? Like, you lead with the commonality versus.
Greg Satell
The differentiation, because if you feel commonality with something, you're able to accept that difference. I mean, think of all. We all have friends and family members and people we love that are very different than us, but it's with what we share, right?
I have a great friend Yasmin. You know, she was a black Muslim, Somali woman. Right? We have, as a, you know, white, suburban, you know, Jewish man, you know, I'm. We. We have a lot that's very, very different and certainly different beliefs about things. But then there's a lot that we share as well.
And of course, you know, focusing on marriage equality and, And. And. And raising families never made anybody any less gay. Right? So you're not. You're not trying to hide that you're different. You're not trying to hide, but you're leading with that sense of commonality, which humor is a great way to do that. Right. Another example that I think will hit home for.
For most people in the corporate world is. Is Agile. Any. Anybody who's met somebody who's just come back from an Agile workshop. Right. Usually those people are insufferable. They expect everything to change right now.
And they're talking about this thing called the Agile Manifesto, which they're very passionate about, when. If they had just talked about what are better projects done faster and cheaper. That's how you bring people in. Not that I want you to believe these very differentiating values that I feel passionate about, but I, I want you to, but I'm committed to our shared endeavor. That's what, you know, that's what makes people. And, and this is something I talk with my friend Whitney Johnson, who's, whose brand is, is disrupt yourself. And we were talking once and I, and I said, you know, Whitney, I've noticed every time you, you talk about, you got to a juncture where you disrupted yourself, you mentions, you bring up your husband.
And she said, did I? I said, yeah.
I said, because it really seems to me that it is the security you feel from your marriage that allows you to disrupt yourself. And I think that's what people, I would say most go wrong about change. You need a certain amount of safety to be able to embrace disruption. And when leaders, they talk about disruption, they often limit the safety or fail to provide the safety that people actually need to embrace changes.
Avish
So when you say safety, are you talking psychological safety? You're talking financial safety, you're talking security, stability? Like what, what do you mean when.
Greg Satell
You say all of those things? All of those things. Right. Psychological safety is, is just that, you know, you can share an idea without being ridiculed.
Avish
Yeah.
Greg Satell
You know, and it's very difficult to embrace change if, if you don't have psychological safety. If you feel like you're going to be fired at any moment. Again, it's very difficult. There's a woman named Zeynep Ton, who, she's a professor at MIT and she writes about good jobs and she does research on companies and, and many of them find that when they increase salaries that their costs go down. Because if you're not paying somebody a living wage, they're not able to deal with stuff in their life. Right. They, they're gonna miss work because they need to stay home with their kids.
They can't, they can't pay to get, you know, if their kid is sick.
Avish
Yeah.
Greg Satell
They can't pay to get their car fixed. So they're eventually going to end up missing work and having all sorts of other problems and then they're going to quit or get fired and you're going to have to hire somebody else and then you're going to have to train that person and that person isn't going to get up to full speed immediately. So there's costs associated with that. And then you're not paying them what they need to fix their car and take care of their kids. So after a couple of months, the same thing's gonna happen with them.
Avish
And there's a, like, that's like the very tangible practice but I would think psychologically also and that I could be wrong. I don't have any state stays in this. But there's like a sweet spot of like until you pay a person this much, like they're less invested. Like I, because I definitely know people who are like I don't get paid enough for this. Right. Like to, to care as much about their job. Now there's a point probably where, all right, any more money is not going to make them care more.
But if you don't hit that sweet spot, at least you're also, I would assume losing some productivity. Just, you know, if you're looking at just numbers, it's like, well let's, by paying the person less, you're actually hurting yourself in the long run. In the overall both tangibly and I.
Greg Satell
Would think psychologically I think that's true. But that's, that's not just with pay. I think if, if you're sending signals that you don't care about the person that works for you, then it's going to be difficult for them to care about your business. It's going to be difficult for them to care about your customers. Once you take that transactional approach, you know, if you're running a store and you say listen, I pay you, you work here and that's the transaction. The second you leave that store, chances are, I mean that, that that employee is much more likely to say, well if he's getting over on me, I'm going to get over on him somehow. Right. It's just very difficult to, once you set up that, that dynamic of, of this is just a pure economic transaction, chances are you're not going to get.
And, and, and, and we see this at any number of businesses. I mean if you look at an Apple store, right there is, you know, they are not, they're not saving money on labor. Right. I mean you see there's blue shirts all through.
Avish
Yeah.
Greg Satell
I mean there's, there's no shortage of people to help you. Yeah, you go to Trader Joe's. I mean there's no automated check out there. You know, you stop, you know, you walk a few feet. There's somebody who's will, will stop what they're doing and help you find whatever it is you need to find. And those are also Costco, the same thing. Walmart has changed on this a lot because they've, they found and if, if you go through Zon's research You know, there is such a strong factual, evidentiary basis for this.
And again, coming back to humor, because humor is a really shared endeavor that giving people this feeling of shared endeavor, that is we together rather than us versus them. I mean, that's what's really key. And it doesn't really matter whether it is a organizational change or a political revolution or a social revolution. And I've been researching this for two decades. Those basic principles really apply throughout.
Avish
Well, that's awesome. That's what. And Cascades is very much about. It's about change.
It's a lot of. About social and political change. Correct. I haven't read that yet. I read a bunch of.
Greg Satell
Well, no. Well, so Cascades is about applying the principles of social and political movements to organizational change.
Avish
Got it. Okay.
Greg Satell
And how it came about was I had this experience in the Orange Revolution, and one of the things I noticed was that power doesn't work the way I thought it did. It was like one of those moments when the universe opens up and reveals a little bit of itself to you. And what became immediately apparent was that nobody with any conventional form of power had any ability to shape events at all. And nobody really understood what was going on or what would happen next. Not the journalists I would speak to in the newsroom every day. Not the other business leaders, certainly not the political leaders. There was just this mysterious force that nobody could describe, but nobody could deny that was moving things.
And I had no idea what that force was, but I was interested. I remember even thinking at the time, I'd really like to bottle that force. Right? I'd like to. I'd like to, you know, understand it and put it to some good use. Because here I was running. You know, I was managing over 800 people, and all of them young, ambitious, with bursting with their own ideas. And I.
I needed to figure out how I would get them to embrace the one or two initiatives that I thought needed to be priorities. Because there's. There's more change needed than you can actually act on. So a big part of change in an organization is being disciplined, Right? Is saying, okay, I know we need to do that, but we're not going to do that because we're doing these two other things, and we need to finish them. Right? An organization can only take, or society can only take so much stress at a time.
So having that discipline is really important. But then even if you're having that discipline, how do you truly get people to buy into it? I had no idea how to do it. I had some and I think every leader who's led more than, there's a Dunbar number, 150, 200 in that range where you need to start managing an enterprise differently, where social bonds don't get it done. And then two years later I was in Stanford, I was in Silicon Valley taking a publishing course at Stanford. And everybody's talking about social networks because now it's 2006 and Facebook is really starting to gain traction. And I said, and we had a very big digital business, about 40, 50% of the digital revenues in Ukraine at the time.
We had essentially the yahoo.com and the newyorktimes.com of Ukraine at the time, plus some, some other things as well. And so I said this, this really seems important. I should learn about this. I started researching science and especially the work of Duncan Watts, but other people as well. And, and what I found was a perfect mathematical explanation for almost everything that happened during the Orange Revolution.
So that's what got me hooked. And so I started researching movements and, and networks and, and I, when I started my blog some years later, I, I started writing about it and that's how, and, and of course you can't research movements or modern movements long at all. Before coming across Serjeant Popovich, who was the chief architect of the Color Revolutions. He led the movement that overthrew Milosevic in Serbia and then trained the guys in Georgia and then in Ukraine. And since then he's been active in more than 50 countries. And, and so eventually our paths crossed and Sir Ja became a friend and he, he showed me this repeatable model he had built for overthrowing a country based on the work of a guy named Gene Sharp. And you do a lot of transformation in 15 years in Eastern Europe.
And I thought, wow, this would really, this really seems like it would be a good model for, for organizational or institutional or corporate transformation. And that's, that's what led to the research that became Cascades.
Avish
Got it. Wow. It's interesting.
Such a cool approach. And I want to get into some of the more kind of a little bit of the nitty gritty, but rather than kind of going through it kind of one by one, I want to take it from slightly different angle, which is there's you describe yourself or your, your kind of niche as evidence based change management because you're kind of based on what actually works as opposed to all the theory. So there's like a bunch of, I would say either tropes or sacred cows or kind of common wisdom around change, which you basically think are wrong. I wanted to start kind of with some of those. Just kind of get your approach. One of them being, and I see this all the time is one of the reasons I get hired often is the big kickoff meeting, which is to like kind of announce the change, get everyone excited and on board. And this is something you think actually is counterproductive?
Greg Satell
I think it often is. And I think first of all, let's take a step back and define what kind of change we're talking about. And when it comes to organizations, we're really talking about three types of change. The first is a strategic change which requires communication and coordination. So the classic example of this is at Intel, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove made the decision to get out of memory chips and into and focus on microprocessors. Now they didn't need to convince anybody they had complete authority over this change. You know, and if, if, if they were, if they said that we're going to switch over factories, they were going to switch over factories, there's no question.
But they did have a communication and coordination problem and a training problem because marketers need to know how to market these chips. Salespeople need to know how to. There could be changes in logistics and you know what, all sorts of changes. And everybody needs to know about these to be able to embrace.
If they don't like them, they can leave. There's nothing they can do about them. And most changes used to be that kind of change. In 1975, more than 80% of, of corporate assets were tangible assets, things like buildings and factories and equipment. Today, I think in the last, the last known research was 2020, and more than 90% is intangible. So the type of change we're talking about now is much, much different, usually related to culture or skills or something. So that's the first type of change.
And in that type of change, a, the typical change management approach from like Ad Car or, or Cotter or something that can help in that, in that case, a, a kickoff meeting isn't such a bad idea, right? Because resistance doesn't really matter. The, the second type of change is a behavior change where. And this is more of a coaching, a coaching challenge, right? You, you want people to be more collaborative and whatever it is. And there's lots of great methodologies, whether it's fogs or immunity to change or that are very, very good coaching methodologies. But then the last type of change is collective change, right?
Collective behavior, like a culture change or a skills change or agile is a great example. I mean, you can't have half the company embracing Agile on the other half the company. Right. And in this case, resistance does matter. And when we get back to that, that, that reality that in the, back in the 1980s when all of this, these change management methodologies were first coming up, they were designed for that old world where we were talking about strategic change, where today, where more than 90% of assets or intangible assets, things like licenses and know how and best practices and all these things, when we talk about change, we're talking about things people think and do and they have an incredible capacity to resist that type of change. And in that type of change situation, a.
Excuse me, sorry. And that type of situation, a big launch effort or kickoff campaign can, can hurt you. Yes, it can get people excited about the change, but just as likely you're sure to incite that resistance.
Right to where. And people are going to say, well, I better start undermining this now or it might actually happen. And there's we, and getting back to the, to the research, I mean, we have decades and decades of research that shows the tipping point for change is usually 10 to 20%.
Avish
Yeah, I read that in one of your things. And that to me was fascinating because, you know, you would really assume you got to get over 50% on board, but, you know, the research is showing it's a much smaller number.
Greg Satell
And when we say research, we're not talking one or two studies, we're talking about hundreds. Right. Political change is different.
It's political change. Erica Chenoweth puts it, she's at Harvard county, she puts it at three and a half. And there's, there's good reason to think about the larger the universe, the smaller the percentage. So that, that makes sense. But, but there's no evidence that shows it's any more than than 50% the way a lot of people tend. I've never seen somebody looking at research. I mean, when people talk about this anecdotally through their experiences, they tend to say, well, it's, it's, you know, 30, it's a third, a third and a third or like 25, 50, 25.
Where once you get that initial bit on board, then the middle one, that middle 50 is, is, is pretty quick to jump on. Once, once it's, it's, it's gained traction and then the, the final 25 you can just run over, to be honest.
Avish
Sure. Well, then once everyone else on board, they either got to kind of.
Greg Satell
Yeah.
Avish
They either have to go along.
Greg Satell
They're gonna get once, once your, once your adoption is over 2/3. Well, then that's a much different thing. What you don't want to be doing is triggering that resistance when a. You've, you, you have an idea with no record of success. No. And, and, and it, it hasn't even gotten traction yet. You know, Ed Catmull, one of my favorite quotes is from Ed Catmull, the, the former CEO of, of Pixar.
And he said that ideas are like ugly babies. They need to be protected. So if this is an important idea, you need to protect it. You know, you need to, to bring people in who, who really care about it, who are as enthusiastic as you are and who want it to work. Because chances are it's not going to work right out of the gate. There's always something you don't expect or, but once you make it work somewhere. And when, when we're in workshops and we, we're, we're working on something called a keystone change, which is that sort of first, almost initial, almost pilot project.
I'm sure you've heard of the five whys of the Toyota production system with keystone changes. It's like the three make it smallers. You know, I was recently talking about a doctor about how you would change the medical system. And we're talking about one of the things we were talking about is what's it called? Prior approval? Prior authorization. Right. And what a problem it can be.
And he told me this heartbreaking story of a, a man who, who needed a heart transplant and couldn't get prior off. He was literally on the table. So, you know, before you change the entire medical system, you know, a keystone change might be just try to get prior authorization change. Well, how do you make that smaller? Okay, maybe prior authorization only for heart transplants. Okay, how do we make that smaller? Okay, maybe prior authorization for heart transplants in the state of Rhode Island.
Now you can see how you know in just one state, right? And you don't even need to be that specific. It could be, okay, let's look for one procedure, one state. Once you do that, you can build from there. Until you do that, you're nowhere. So there's no use making a lot of noise and inciting that resistance when you're nowhere, right?
Avish
So start small. What's the smallest little step you can take? Building to get that success, then build on the success.
Greg Satell
And not necessarily small. So one of the things they talk about in change management, which I really disagree with, is a quick and easy win. These wins. Prior authorization for one procedure in one state would not be Quick nor easy. It needs to be meaningful. The problem is when you start talking about quick and easy wins, people start trying to do the quickest and the easiest and then they start touting it. And if other people don't think it's relevant, you lose credibility.
And that's, that's the danger of it. Jesus was gonna say something.
Avish
So it needs to be small but still meaningful. So like it's not, it's not just a quick one or something, but oh.
Greg Satell
It needs to be small. No, I, I know where I was going with this. It. And, and that comes, that brings us to. I mean, there's four things the research just.
Let's backtrack for a second. There's four things that research tells us about change that we know. And it's study after study after study reinforces this. First is that change comes from the outside and incurs resistance. And we know this from the very first studies on hybrid corn and tetracycline, very first diffusion studies. The second is that change follows an S curve. Everybody knows.
Again, it sort of calls into question why you would need a.
Avish
Hold on one second. You cut out there for a second so you could you go back to. You were just saying it follows an S curve, kind of start from that point.
Greg Satell
The second, the second thing we know is that change follows an S curve, meaning that it starts off slowly and if hopefully eventually hits a tipping point and that unlocks a cascade and exponential progress. Which again calls into question why, if you know that change starts slowly, why do you need some huge launch event? Right, right. Especially when you're showing a slide at the launch event with an S curve saying this is going to start slowly. But why. The third is there's something called a cap gap. There's actually two different bodies of research that essentially say the same thing.
The cap gap is that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don't necessarily result in shifts in practice. So we might know we shouldn't eat the cookie. It doesn't mean we're not going to eat the cookie. Right. And there are knowing. Doing gaps in every organization. Just, just because you know it, you know about it and you know it's a good thing, doesn't mean you're going to do it.
Another parallel body of research is called the information deficit dis model. And, and that essentially says that, well, for a long time there was this idea and was a, in medical research that if, if you give people the right information, they will change their behavior. And what they found is in study after study is that that's not true.
Avish
Yeah.
Greg Satell
And I think we all saw that during. During COVID So this idea of, oh, you know, you're going to create awareness and desire and you're going to give people these knowledge, you're going to change your attitudes, doesn't mean they're going to change at all. There's no evidence that shows that that's going to change people's behavior. And the last one, in some ways, is the most interesting and goes back to this concept of networks and network cascades. And that is that people adopt ideas and change through peer networks. We adopt the changes we see working around us, not the ones we. We hear about from somewhere else, not the ones we read about.
But if we see something working for somebody, then we say that we will tend to copy that. And one of my favorite pieces of research about this comes from the 1950s with a sociologist named William White, who was studying. He was driving through a neighborhood in Philadelphia. And back then, this is when air conditioners just became. Just were starting to become popular. What he noticed was when you. Because back then, of course, you and I are old enough to remember this, a lot of our millennial and zoomer friends maybe aren' but back then, an air conditioner was something that sat outside your window and so you could see driving through neighborhoods, the adoption of air conditioners.
And you wouldn't see two or three there. You would see them in one building on one floor. And then you would, you know, and then some weeks later, you would see then spread throughout the building and eventually go to the next building on one floor and spread. People weren't. They weren't adopting. They weren't going out and buying air conditioners because they had heard about it or seen some advertising. Invariably what made them go buy an air conditioner was going over to their neighbor's house on a hot day and saying, gee, this really feels nice.
Avish
Yeah.
Greg Satell
And change in organizations, all change spreads that way. And we know.
We know this. We know this through network science. We know this through historical studies. We know this through statistical studies.
Avish
Cool. I want to ask one thing about that. We're gonna. We're kind of coming to end our time. I want to ask one question, then we'll kind of wrap up that's about that because it's something I'd made a note of. You've written in a couple places. Places. Is this similar to the idea why you say to.
Was it start with a small local majority Minority or. No, start with a small local majority.
Like a kind of. To create that Change in that small instead of kind of. Because you talk about like not going for the skeptic. Right? I talk about that too. Like when you hear a technique like I talk about yes. And people like oh, I want to get the biggest. Yes, butter.
That's the person I'm going to tackle with this. It's like no, you're setting yourself.
Greg Satell
Yeah, there's something strange about human nature that we all do this. That when we, we have an idea, we want to go tell someone who we know is going to hate the idea.
Avish
Well, we want to solve the biggest problem. We're like oh, we want to convince skeptic.
Greg Satell
So this is back to the science of cascades which was really figured out. There was a big change in network science in the late 90s. In 1998 was this breakthrough paper and, and, and it created this whole idea of, of small world networks. And this is where the work of Duncan Watts and others comes in.
But I'll just. There are three basic principles of cascades. Three scientific principles. The first comes from a. And I won't go through these experiments but it. The first comes from the ash conformity experiments back in the 1950s which are quite interesting in their own right. But we're short on time. But basically the best indicator of things that we think and do is what the people around us think and do.
And that actually extends out to. And we know this from more recent research that extends out to three degrees of separation. So even the friends of our friends friends are influencing our friends thoughts and behavior in ways we're not completely aware of. And this goes to things like habits like smoking and obesity.
I mean very. Not just, you know, political opinions or something. The second is called the threshold model of collective behavior. It's a very famous paper by, by a guy, a sociologist named Mark Granovetter. And what he essentially says is he posits this model that we all have different thresholds of, of resistance to partaking in an action or adopting an idea. And if we're around other people with lower thresholds, we're. And they start adopting it, then that's going to make us.
Eventually we're going to meet our threshold. If we're around people with higher thresholds than us, we will never adopt it. There's nobody around. Right. And we all have different levels of thresholds for different things. And the third is called the also from ground of etter, the strength of weak ties. And basically what that means is that there are, that there are links between adjacent clusters. Right. So you're in networks in your neighborhood, the people you went to school with, the people you work with, you know, associations. And if.
If one of those clusters meets their threshold and supersaturates can help the. An adjacent cluster meet its threshold. And that's where you get this. And when that happens, the system can undergo something called, that physicists call percolation. And that's what creates this cascading behavior, which I call small groups loosely connected, united by a shared purpose. So there's lots of science behind this, but we've all seen it. Whenever we see a wave at a stadium, right, People come to a stadium in small groups.
They don't all come at once, right? They come in, they come at small groups of friends. They sit in a stadium. They become loosely connected to the people around them. And when a common purpose emerges, you see this incredible cascading behavior that goes all around the stadium of people who never had any plan to collaborate in that way. And that's how change happens.
Avish
All right, well, that's a nice little button to put that on. So there's obviously a lot more information. You've kind of alluded to some other things and studies and things which we don't have time for here. So I'm gonna let you kind of let people know the best way to learn more, get your stuff, find out more about you, and then I'm going to kind of wrap up with one more question. So for anyone who's interested in learning more about Cascades, about change, about the work you do with organizations, what are the best ways to. To contact you and find out more information?
Greg Satell
Well, of course, my books, Mapping Innovation and Cascades, my either of my websites, digitaltanto.com or gregSatell.com and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.
Avish
Awesome. And we will have links to those in the show notes. Well, thank you so much, Greg.
This is fascinating. And I've been in the talk about change, but you open my eyes to a whole lot of things. And I made all these notes of things I need to go research some more about. I want to finish up with question. I kind of end all of these little interviews with is, you know, I talk about this idea of saying yes, and instead of yes, but which I do because I believe the world would be a better place if everyone just started with a default mindset of yes and instead of yes, but. So my question for you is, what is a small thing that you believe if everyone in the world just did or was better at it would make the world a better place.
Greg Satell
This is something I truly believe this one simple thing and I call it the day after the Agile the Agile Training. If you feel passionately about something, the tendency is to want everything to change at once and to tell everybody about it. Don't do that. Go and find people who are as enthusiastic as you are and go and start a project and actually try and make it work. The urge Once you understand that the urge to persuade is almost always a red flag. If you feel the urge to persuade somebody that your idea is the right one, you either have the wrong idea or the wrong people. If you want to make change happen, go find like minded people.
Go and go and make change work.
Avish
Wow, I love that. And we could have had a whole another 5, 10 minute conversation about that. But that is a great thought and people could chew on that and I love that idea. Thank you so much Greg for the time, for the awesome information and thank you for being a guest here.
Greg Satell
Thanks for having me. Always, always good to see you.