You can make change go faster
If you understand how ideas spread
👋 Hey, it’s Andrés. Welcome to Astrolab’s weekly newsletter on how to become a better communicator at work. We write for knowledge workers and business owners.
Today: How to be a catalyst in your organization
Read time: 12 minutes
Happy Thanksgiving 🦃! Here are my three ideas for today:
Waystar Royco and your company
Designing for complex contagion
Lay down the tracks
Do you have your ☕ in hand? Let’s do this!
Your company is trying something
I miss Succession, the HBO TV drama series about Logan Roy, his sons, and the struggles to control the fictional media conglomerate Waystar Royco.
The characters, the script—Roman quotes!—and the story made it memorable and relevant for this fast-paced business world in which we live in.
One of the things that stuck with me is how Waystar Royco is always going through a change or transformation. I forget all the details, but here are some of those milestones or issues that happen throughout the four seasons:
The Cruise Division scandal
The acquisition and then gutting of Vaulter
The launch of Living+
The GoJo merger deal
You don’t probably work in a company like Waystar Royco, but I bet there is always something new going on in your company, something that the leadership is trying. Take a closer look and you’ll see it:
A new digital tool
A new product line
A new safety protocol
A new leader
A new crisis, like this one👇🏽
In this sense, even if you’re working in a traditional or commoditized industry, there are things in the horizon—AI, Trump, climate change—that will continue to make change and transformation necessary for businesses that want to survive.
I want to focus the rest of the post on how to become a catalyst for those changes by understanding how different types of ideas spread.
Designing for complex contagion
When Óscar and myself started Astrolab back in 2012, we knew that we wanted to focus on interpersonal storytelling as a leadership tool.
A random guy I met at a party during those days responded to my foundation pitch in this way:
Oh, so you want to help people be better storytellers? You should read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. You need to understand that ideas spread like a virus.
My Amazon account shows that I bought Outliers on May 2012, but The Tipping Point was still on my reading list. I made a mental note to read it.
And then, I forgot about it.
Before coming to Penn, I read Change, by University of Pennsylvania professor Damon Centola. Change, funny story, was written as a rebuttal of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
Here’s the main idea behind the book: Not all ideas spread like a virus.
Simple ideas—those that do not require a change in beliefs or in behaviors—spread easily through networks, like COVID. Think of viral videos or a piece of gossip.
Until here, nothing opposed to Gladwell’s theory. But that’s exactly the problem.
Where Centola diverged from Gladwell was in his discussing of complex ideas, ideas that triggered resistance from individuals, like promoting a social cause, a new way of doing things that required effort, or adopting a new technology that included going through a learning curve.
How do these ideas spread? Not like a virus. Complex ideas required reinforcement from multiple sources, trust and repeated exposure to be adopted. In other words: we change when people close to us change.
While complex ideas spread through strong social ties that look like a fishing net, simple ideas travel through a weak social ties network that look like a firework:
So, whereas a TikTok can get to 100,000 views in less than 24-hours (simple idea), a deep rooted belief like how Vitamin C helps prevent colds—it doesn’t—will take much longer to modify.
Now, how do you think a new business decision travels in an organization? Is transformation a simple or a complex idea?
Complex idea, for sure! Many of these initiatives require employees to modify habits and ways of work that had been going for years, sometimes decades.
So, if you’re trying to make things go faster in your organization, how can you leverage this knowledge?
Make sure the distribution of ideas is built around redundancy of many people.
You can make change go faster
A couple of months ago, Malcolm Gladwell re-released his book under the name Revenge of the Tipping Point. In a live interview with Adam Grant at the Penn Museum that I attended, Gladwell spoke about Centola’s influence in his Revenge.
Centola ran an experiment to find out how many dissidents it would take to disrupt a consensus reached by the majority, and found the following:
The majority’s consensus fell apart when the number of outsiders reached 25 percent.
Yes, one quarter of your organization seems like a really big number, moreover knowing that the average number of employees in the biggest one thousand companies is the US is around 50,000 employees.
But not everyone’s voice is equal in an organization. Certainly, there are some formal and informal leaders that are better situated to share ideas, and hence will make information flow easily.
Here’s where communication, storytelling and influence comes to the picture: If you help leaders, managers and commercial teams become better storytellers—better at winning others over—, change and transformation ideas will spread faster.
We’ve seen this. A number of years ago we worked on several projects that made this crystal clear for us.
In 2008, Mars bought Wrigley. In October 2016, they decided to combine both businesses. Astrolab was brought in to teach the top 60 leaders of a regional operation how to become better communicators in those times of uncertainty
In 2016, the retail company OXXO launched a new HR tool for a specific audience. We trained a group of ambassadors in storytelling, and the adoption rate went from 10% to 95% in three months.
That year, we worked with the CEO of C&A Mexico to launch a new commercial model. We first helped the leadership team learn how to use storytelling, and then we worked with 400 managers to make sure the transformation moved fast
Maybe you’re thinking ok, well, but I’m not in HR or in training.
What could surprise you is that you don’t need to be a part of those teams. David, Cata, Chris, Adolfo, and Rodrigo are the names of some of our clients who fanned sparks into a flame without being part of HR.
Schedule a call with me and I’ll tell you how.
Tools: Build a Better Argument
In this final installment of the series focused on creating arguments to support your messages, we want to help you with the challenging task of selecting the best design to present your arguments.
We’d like to offer you a simple template with 5 different types of slides to present arguments, depending on their nature.
Download the PowerPoint template here.
Briefs
Hey, new section! I’ll share news and recos here. Let’s go:
Try INSPIRA. Kickstart your team’s storytelling journey for just $99 USD—that’s a fraction of the usual $4,000 USD for session. If you love what you see, you can continue with the full program, and the remaining three sessions will be at standard price. It’s a win-win for your team and your budget. Offer available until December 6. Leave a comment, answer this email or give me a call to know more about this
Astrolab on Audible: this month we’re listening to The New Rules of Influence: How to Authentically Build Trust, Drive Change, and Make an Impact, by Lida Citroën. I loved how she challenges the idea of executive presence. Tl;dr: you don’t have to look executive!
Crotonville. This fun and sad article about how GE closed its legendary training center
Let’s chat. We’re starting a chat for those who want to discuss storytelling and influence:
That’s all for today. I’ll see you next Thursday!
Andrés