Digital Tonto

JANUARY 14, 2024

Today, the truth can seem like nothing more than a preference. We pick a side, form a group identity and set out to prove our worth by supporting the party line. In our quest for status, we try to top those around us, leading to a purity spiral in which everyone competes to see who can be the most true to the cause. Yet truth is more than opinion. Facts are falsifiable.

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Groups Tools Leadership Management 108

Digital Tonto

JANUARY 7, 2024

In 2009, it felt like the world was ending. I was still living in Ukraine then and the financial crisis hit there especially hard. GDP would fall by 14% and the ad market, which fueled the media business I ran, fell by 85%. I remember walking past the kiosks that traded currency everyday, tracking Ukraine’s Hryvnia fall heralding an even more uncertain future.

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Artificial Inteligence Video Technology Change 154

Digital Tonto

DECEMBER 24, 2023

My friend Stephen Shapiro does not like New Year’s Resolutions. “According to our study, only 8% of Americans say they always achieve their New Year’s resolutions,” he writes. “The way it seems to work now, setting a New Year’s Resolution is a recipe for defeat. It has come to be one of the nation’s most […] The post Top Posts Of 2023 first appeared on Digital Tonto.

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Study 139

Digital Tonto

DECEMBER 10, 2023

Discussions about change tend to gravitate to one of two poles: Either change has to come from the top or it has to be grass roots. As I explain in Cascades, transformation isn’t top-down or bottom-up, but happens from side-to-side. You can find the entire spectrum—from active support to active resistance—at every level. The answer doesn’t lie in any specific strategy or initiative, but in how people are able to internalize the need for change and transfer ideas through social bonds.

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Change Groups Culture Strategy 178

Digital Tonto

NOVEMBER 26, 2023

For a while now, management gurus such as Gary Hamel have been advocating for flatter organizations, yet there is little evidence that eliminating leaders is a viable model. In fact, when Wharton Professor Ronnie Lee took a close look at game software developers, he actually found that the number of levels of bureaucracy increased significantly, not decreased, over the last 50 years.

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Digital Tonto

NOVEMBER 19, 2023

We need to constantly ask ourselves which ideas that are widely accepted today don’t hold water. Every era has its own fictions, things that are accepted because they are repeated, but lack any serious foundation. They become memes replicating themselves throughout the zeitgeist, rarely being questioned. When ideas are repeated often enough, we begin to take them as self-evident and don’t even question them.

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Digital Tonto

OCTOBER 29, 2023

Our identity and sense of self drives a lot of what we see and do, yet we rarely examine these things because we spend most of our time with people who are a lot like us, who live in similar places and experience similar things. Our innate perceptions and beliefs seem normal and those of outsiders strange, because our social networks shape us that way.

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Change Strategy Strategy Collaboration 120

Digital Tonto

OCTOBER 22, 2023

Change always begins with a grievance. There’s something people don’t like and they want it to be different. We like to see ourselves as heroes fighting for everything that’s right and we question the motivations of those who oppose our cause. When we believe in something passionately, it’s hard to see how anyone, in good conscience, can see it another way.

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Change Policies Disruption Strategy 179

Digital Tonto

OCTOBER 8, 2023

Shortly after I first arrived at college, my wrestling coach told my teammates and I that we would all be attending a freshman technique camp. It turned out to be something quite different than what I had expected. He didn’t teach us any advanced or esoteric method, but instead demonstrated the basics. It was incredibly humbling. The fact that we were there in the first place, competing for a Division 1 program, meant that we had all demonstrated outstanding accomplishment.

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Culture Learning Strategy Strategy 164

Digital Tonto

OCTOBER 1, 2023

Today we are in a change crisis. Businesses need to internalize new technologies like AI and adapt to new realities like hybrid work, but still struggle to adopt decades old skills related to lean manufacturing, agile development and cultural competency. If we are going to drive the transformations we need to compete, we need to take an evidence based approach.

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Change LEAN Tips Agile 123

Digital Tonto

SEPTEMBER 17, 2023

One of the most frustrating statements I come across is that “we had a good strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” That’s nonsense. Obviously, if you couldn’t execute, there were some important factors that you didn’t take into account. You miscalculated in some significant way. So how was that a good strategy? This raises an important question: What makes a strategy good?

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Strategy Strategy Agile Project 160

Digital Tonto

AUGUST 27, 2023

Change always begins with a grievance—there’s something people don’t like and they want it to change. Yet the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. That’s why it’s so important to forge a shared purpose, because people need a common mission they can believe in to see themselves as stakeholders in a shared future.

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Change Learning Disruption Collaboration 133

Digital Tonto

JULY 30, 2023

The most important challenge leaders face is to navigate change. We can optimize operations, streamline our organizations and motivate our people, but eventually our square-peg business will meet its round-hole world and we will need to adapt, build new skills and shift our strategies. Unfortunately, the overwhelming evidence suggests that we will fail.

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Learning Case Study Study LEAN 123

Digital Tonto

JULY 23, 2023

Traditionally, strategy has been seen as a game of chess. Wise leaders survey the board of play, plan their moves carefully and execute flawlessly. That’s always been a fantasy, but it was close enough to reality to be helpful. Organizations could build up sustainable competitive advantage by painstakingly building up bargaining power within the value chain.

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Digital Tonto

JUNE 25, 2023

As I explained in CASCADES, there were myriad reasons for #Occupy’s failure. One of the gravest errors, however, was the insistence on ideological purity and the lack of any effort to understand those who had different ideas from their own. If you expect to bring change about, you need to attract, rather than overpower. Empathy is a good place to start.

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Change Learning Design Leadership 162

Digital Tonto

JUNE 18, 2023

One of the toughest things about ideas is that they can only be validated forward, never backward. You never know if you have the right idea until it’s been tested in the real world and, even then, there could be some confounding factor you may be missing. As Kevin Ashton put it, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.

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Learning Creativity Change How To 203

Digital Tonto

JUNE 4, 2023

The simple truth is that change rarely, if ever, starts at the top because it is people with power that create the status quo. They are attached to what they’ve built and take pride in their accomplishments, just like the rest of us. That’s why, to bring about genuine change, you need to mobilize people to influence institutions. At a pivotal moment during the height of the civil rights movement, Robert Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States and brother to the President, would turn to th

Change 178

Change Strategy Strategy Learning 178

Digital Tonto

MAY 21, 2023

Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

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Conference Collaboration Culture Change 220

Digital Tonto

MAY 14, 2023

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains aren’t aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, had similar findings. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened.

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Digital Tonto

MAY 7, 2023

Sometimes the hardest thing is merely to make yourself understood. Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context because, by definition, the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why innovators need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails. That’s easier said than done.

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Web Development Web Developers Tips Creativity 208

Digital Tonto

APRIL 23, 2023

In one of my favorite essays the physicist Richard Feynman wrote “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” He goes on further to say that simply being honest isn’t enough, you also need to “bend over backwards” to provide information so that others may prove you wrong.

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Data Change Leadership Management 228

Digital Tonto

MARCH 26, 2023

These days, it seems that every time you turn around you see some breakthrough technology that will change our lives. We see media reports about computing breakthroughs, miracle cures, new sources of energy and more. Unfortunately, very few will ever see the outside of a lab and even fewer will prove commercially viable enough to impact our lives. Don’t get me wrong.

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Technology Report Examples Change 198

Digital Tonto

MARCH 5, 2023

Clearly, there is something afoot in Silicon Valley. The technology is maturing, the scandals keep getting bigger and, with information and communication technologies representing a mere 6% of advanced economies, we still have yet to see anything approaching the impact of earlier technology revolutions. Make no mistake, a reckoning is fast approaching.

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Technology Disruption Software Marketing 214

Digital Tonto

FEBRUARY 26, 2023

People like to quote the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said things like “the only constant is change” and “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” They’re clever quotes and they give us confidence that the change we seek is not only possible, but inevitable. Yet while change in general may be inevitable, the prospects for any particular change initiative are decidedly poor and the failure to recognize that simple fact is why

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Change Analysis Management How To 220

Digital Tonto

FEBRUARY 12, 2023

Humans can be irrational and maddening. Decades of research have shown that, when given the exact same set of facts, even experts will make very different assessments. Some people will be more strict, others more lenient. Some of us are naturally optimistic, others are cynics. A family squabble in the morning can affect the choices we make all day. So it’s not unreasonable to want to improve quality and reduce variance in our decision making by taking a more algorithmic approach by offering clea

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Technical Review System Data Design 238

Digital Tonto

FEBRUARY 5, 2023

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that many of our opinions are a product of our inclusion in a particular team. Because our judgments are so closely intertwined with our identity, contrary views can feel like an attack. So we feel the urge to lash out and silence opposition. That almost guarantees a failure to survive victory.

Strategy 190

Strategy Strategy Change Learning 190

Digital Tonto

JANUARY 8, 2023

It’s been roughly 25 years since Clayton Christensen inaugurated the disruptive era and what he initially intended to describe as a special case has been implemented as a general rule. Disruption is increasingly self-referential, used as both premise and conclusion, while the status quo is assumed to be inadequate as an a priori principle. The results, by just about any metric imaginable, have been tragic.

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Disruption Internet of things Course Competition 224

Digital Tonto

DECEMBER 18, 2022

At the beginning of this year, I wrote that the theme for 2022 would be Surviving Change and I think that’s been borne out. We’ve had so many shocks to the system that all of the happy talk about disruption has become not only juvenile and naive, but downright irresponsible. If anything, we’ve learned how […]. The post Top Posts of 2022 first appeared on Digital Tonto.

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Disruption System Learning Change 133

Digital Tonto

DECEMBER 4, 2022

In an earlier age, organizations were far more hierarchical. Power rested at the top. Information flowed up, orders went down, work got done and people got paid. Incentives seemed to work. You could pay more and get more. Yet in today's marketplace, that’s no longer tenable because the work we need done is increasingly non-routine. That means we need people to do more than merely carry out tasks, they need to put all of their passion and creativity into their work to perform at a high-level.

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Leadership Collaboration Creativity Change 248

Digital Tonto

NOVEMBER 6, 2022

In the two decades I have been researching transformation and change, the failure to survive victory is probably the most consistent aspect of it. In fact, it is so common you can almost set your watch by it. Amazingly, no matter how many times change advocates experience it, they rarely see it coming. Many, in fact, seem to take pride in how many battles they have lost, seeing it as some kind of badge of honor.

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Policies Change Industry Technology 216

Digital Tonto

OCTOBER 30, 2022

If you were a person of sophistication and education in the 19th century, your world view was based on certain axiomatic truths, such as parallel lines never cross, logical propositions are either true or false and "bad airs" made people sick. For the most part, these ideas would have served you well for the challenges you faced in daily life. Even more importantly, your understanding of these concepts would signal your inclusion and acceptance into a particular tribe, which would confer prestig

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Conference Learning Change How To 207

Digital Tonto

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

When I’m finishing up a book, I send out sections to be fact-checked by experts and those who have first-person knowledge of events. I’m always amazed at how much I get wrong. In some cases, I make truly egregious errors about facts I should have known (or did know, but failed to take into account). It can be an incredibly humbling process. That’s why it's so important to not to believe everything you think, there are simply too many ways to get things wrong.

Management 172

Management Change 172

Digital Tonto

SEPTEMBER 4, 2022

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story. Unlike others, we are witnesses to our internal process and get to observe our logic develop. So our thoughts makes perfect sense to us and it can be incredibly frustrating when others don’t see it as we do. Our inclination is to imagine them to be fools, simply incapable of grasping basic concepts.

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Marketing Management Learning Change 215

Digital Tonto

AUGUST 14, 2022

Vannevar Bush’s vision during World War II helped the United States become a leader in science and technology. The Cold War helped further that notion that government should invest in science as a public good for private benefit. So, in a sense, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that when we became a lone superpower, we got thrown off our game. Yet a rising China and, to a certain extent, the role of science in developing vaccines to help end the pandemic, have served as a new organizing principl

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Innovation Technology Disruption Industry 201

Digital Tonto

JULY 31, 2022

The truth is that values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

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Strategy Strategy Collaboration Resources 236

Digital Tonto

JULY 24, 2022

One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it comes about when those who oppose it are somehow persuaded. That almost never happens. Look back at any major transformation throughout history and the tide turned when those who opposed it discredited themselves by taking action that was widely judged to be objectionable. In Gandhi’s Salt March, the British discredited themselves when they violently attacked peaceful protestors.

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Conference Change Meeting Design 192

Digital Tonto

JULY 10, 2022

When we’re passionate about something, we want to take action. We want to launch an initiative, start a business, hit the streets, get stuff done. Yet our bias for action can be a trap that. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

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