How Do You Lead in a VUCA World? The 4 Traits of Successful Changemakers

Is Your Company Ready for the Future? How to Use “Design Thinking” to Navigate Chaos

Stop fearing disruption. Discover the 4-level “Futures Cone” and learn how to use design thinking to solve complex problems in this expert review of Changemakers. Ready to stop reacting to change and start designing it? Scroll down to learn the ‘Futures Cone’ strategy and how to predict the unpredictable.

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Change-makers – today’s bold developers of innovative concepts and designs – have a lot to contribute. In this comprehensive book on instigating, navigating, and advancing change, business leaders Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland explain what change-making is all about, how it works, and what it requires. They also outline the pitfalls that threaten those who challenge the status quo. If you’re engaging in relevant, business-driven change, keep this information-packed manual on your desk.

Take-Aways

• A change-maker offers the hope of positive, transformational improvements.
• Change-makers are courageous, optimistic, passionate, and purposeful.
• Change-makers rely on known processes to chart the best path forward.
• No one can create change in the absence of a viable opportunity.
• Dramatic change depends on a brilliant design.
• Amid change, treat your stakeholders like gold.
• Repeated iterations drive the change-making process.
• Effective change-makers must be futurists.
• Change-makers share certain personality traits.

Summary

A change-maker offers the hope of positive, transformational improvements.

Disneyland and Disney World devote big sections of their amusement parks to a positive, transformational view of the future. Their rosy vision foretells social, technological, and organizational progress that can improve life for everyone.

In the real world, change sometimes works and makes life better – and, sometimes, it fails and makes life worse. New advances may disrupt business or the larger society. Change doesn’t reach everyone: While some segments of the world’s population benefit from cutting-edge improvements, large populations live in hardscrabble circumstances that modern advances barely touch.

“[Change-makers] see the patterns around them, identify the problems in any situation, figure out ways to solve the problem, organize fluid teams, lead collective action, and then continually adapt as situations change.” (Ashoka founder Bill Drayton)

With volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) problems facing the world, including destructive climate change, transformational improvements are essential. Such advances do not occur magically by themselves. They require visionary change-makers – leaders, designers, developers, and inventors – tons of hard work, and plenty of money.

Change-makers are courageous, optimistic, passionate, and purposeful.

Change-makers may be individuals or organizations, such as World Central Kitchen, which sets up facilities to serve food to disaster victims, and Web3, which unites visionary leaders to enhance the future of the internet.

While some drives for improvement still come from the top down, modern change often evolves through “laterally connected, distributed collaborations” that offer a better fit for today’s “evolutionary trajectory” of organizational change.

“Optimism combines with courage and purpose to provide a rational, determined sense of where you’re going and a positive commitment to get there.”

Effective change-makers have courage and love change – constant, dramatic, off-the-meter change. Most people prefer the status quo and fear change, so change can be a tough proposition.

Influential change-makers offer guidance and coaching to show others the best way forward. But they aren’t gurus. They’re leaders who can make allies of those around them and resolve intractable disputes.

“So much of effective collaboration is about face time and building relationships with people and building trust. You can’t just swoop in.” (Catherine Courage, VP UX, Consumer Products, Google)

Change-makers are community-minded. They draw strength and purpose from their networks. From the minute they embark on a change initiative, they know that close-minded bosses, unimaginative supervisors, and jealous peers may disparage or undermine them. Change-makers must embrace these challenges and soldier on. To make better decisions in the present, they routinely shift their gaze to tomorrow.

Change-makers rely on known processes to chart the best path forward.

Even the most intrepid change-makers value already tested processes that map a path toward organizational change. Generally, such processes are made up of a series of sequential procedures and actions that lead a change team – and eventually, a company – forward.

“Change-making is a marathon. If you’re at all successful, it will quickly take over your brain and your life…even when it’s going well, it can be too much. You have to find moments to go to a spa for a week to let off steam.” (author Janice Fraser)

Leading change-makers select and implement the right map – the most appropriate sequential procedure. If you can handle this approach wisely, you can lead your organization through stable, intentional change. Handle it poorly, and you risk leaving your organization on a scattered or aimless course.

No one can create change in the absence of a viable opportunity.

Notable change cannot happen without an open door. Successful change-makers must select “the right problem” to solve, one that presents a clear opportunity to achieve lasting success.

“Change is easy to request but difficult to allow.”

Even with the perfect alignment of a skilled change-maker and an opportunity for significant change, advancing a change program requires hard work and ample resources. To make that work worthwhile, be sure you have a legitimate opportunity to make an impact.

Most dramatic change depends on a brilliant design.

Monumental change requires excellent design, something Apple began to redefine in the 1990s. Thanks to visionary leadership and design expertise, enlightened companies now view design as a strategy, not a task. For such firms, design centers on the “behaviors, beliefs and motivations of real people.”

“I worked at Apple for eight years and got really inculcated into that culture. Apple is a very aggressive, intense, honest culture. If you are part of that culture, you’re totally fine with that.” (Bob Baxley, design leader)

Modern change-makers view the future as a “design problem” that requires “design-driven” solutions.

Amid change, treat your stakeholders like gold.

Stakeholders play a pivotal role in any change effort. The outcome will affect each of them, so your change-making team must have their support.

“The temptation to jump into problem-solving is strong. It’s a visible indication of progress. It demonstrates ability and validates the ego. But it’s a mistake to skip the preliminary stage of fully exploring a problem’s causes and examining potential solutions.”

To win support and approval, change-makers must involve their organizations’ diverse stakeholders at every stage of the change-making process, from planning to execution. Discover your stakeholders’ needs, consider them in your programming, and embed ways for your change program to address their needs so you can earn their enthusiastic support.

Repeated iterations drive the change-making process.

Change-making includes both iteration and adaptation. Try one approach, a second approach, and then a third approach. Keep going until something works. All of this iteration and adaptation requires regular, informed feedback from your important stakeholders. Change-makers and their teams must reiterate until they experience success.

“Change is easy to request but difficult to allow.”

When people are patient and handle change-making correctly, it unfolds along the lines of this cyclical, experimental, step-by-step process:

1. Undergo your various change efforts.
2. Regularly review and analyze your results at each stage.
3. Continually make the necessary refinements and adjustments.
4. “Evolve the design” until you finally arrive at the perfect solution. When that happens, celebrate.

Effective change-makers must be futurists.

Futurists understand that change spurs more change and that multiple futures may occur. The journey is rarely linear and often proceeds along a jagged path of delays and emergencies. Change-makers learn to embrace and champion uncertainty.

In contrast, those who are not futurists limit their vision of possible future outcomes. In their eyes, the so-called “official future” calls for a simple extension of the present, although the official future rarely comes about intact.

“The future unfolds as a complex, dynamic system composed of interdependent elements that make its behavior difficult to model.”

Change-makers must contemplate a wide range of scenarios – the “alternative futures” that could conceivably occur. To be effective futurists, they strive to understand both subtle and complex eventualities, but they must examine their assumptions closely. Making the wrong assumptions can impede a change-maker from planning for developments that could unfold in the course of effectuating change. Carefully thinking through these possibilities gives them a higher level of confidence about their daily decisions and actions.

Measuring your chosen parameters and tracking data give you the tools to inculcate future change. To think comprehensively about the future, consider “different value systems, diverse religious perspectives, alternative governing policies, and the wildly varied goals that motivate” others to do what they do and that may affect the future.

Futurists use a variety of investigative strategies. For example, the “futures cone” model tracks four potential kinds of outcomes on the basis of their predictability – starting with the present and looking ahead. The longer a time span you consider, the less definite your projections can be. The cone looks at four different time frames:

1. Preferable: Want to happen – Starting with the present and taking a positive point of view, think about what results you want to see.
2. Probable: Likely to happen – Noting the trends you can identify, ask which outcome seems most predictable. This tracks what could happen if mitigating factors don’t change very much.
3. Plausible: What could happen – Consider what could occur in the future on the basis of what you know now with some variation. This future is still believable and doesn’t veer far from the probable level.
4. Possible: What might happen – Looking deeply into the future, consider all that could come about, including unlikely events.

Change is not static and has no endpoint. Change-makers must continually adapt and look for fresh ways to meet upcoming challenges. In practical terms, this means that as you wrap up one change initiative, another is probably on the horizon.

“If you do change right, there’s a freedom and an energy and a synergy that you create with your team or your program by moving with the flow of life, maybe even predicting it a little bit.” (Jennifer Deitz, director and associate dean, Stanford Continuing Studies)

Scaling up a change initiative often leads to a tipping point – the moment “when adoption reaches a critical mass of stakeholders.” A tipping point generates quicker and more penetrating acceptance of change. Analysts often look at a tipping point as an external factor, but the moment when a change achieves widespread impact is relevant internally within your organization.

Change-makers share certain personality traits.

Change-makers learn from their mistakes and persevere. Here’s how.

1. Change-makers are intelligent problem-solvers – Effective change-makers focus on problems that align with their expertise and experience. Change-makers who stick to what they know have a greater opportunity to succeed.
2. Change-makers aren’t miracle workers – Change-makers can’t wave a magic wand and solve a previously intractable problem. Savvy change-makers make sure they’ll have the resources necessary for their work to succeed. Among other factors, if you are leading the change initiative, but you’re not the project’s executive sponsor, you must have that executive’s steady, ongoing support.
3. Change efforts require compelling stories – Successful change initiatives must have a persuasive narrative that engages team members and stakeholders. Intelligent stories lessen the impact of setbacks or shortfalls. Change-makers’ stories should focus on the needs of the people within their organization, and they must align their work with its goals.
4. Change-makers use powerful visualization – Help your stakeholders visualize the impact of change by transforming dry data into concepts they can envision and grasp quickly.
5. Change-makers are fastidious researchers – Change-makers dig for information that enables them to design workable solutions to change problems. They “start broad and then go deep.”
6. Change-makers are adaptable – Since the future is unpredictable, change-makers must be ready to handle new circumstances and conditions.
7. Change-makers know how to strategize – Because they can envision the best outcomes for their organization, change-makers strategize what the company must do to achieve those results.
8. Change-makers can’t activate change by themselves – Change-makers need a committed, collaborative team.
9. Change-makers embrace iteration – Some designs and innovations will pan out while others will not, so change-makers try multiple approaches. They ensure that failure leads to fresh insights and better solutions.
10. Change-makers take on tough challenges – No one expects change to be easy.

About the Authors

Maria Giudice is the founder and CEO of the design firm Hot Studio. Christopher Ireland is the co-founder and CEO of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley design-research firm.