Anyone who has tried to lead transformational change within a large company knows how hard it is to move from meetings to action. Sometimes even mentioning a new, bold idea can throw a team into disorder. How will we navigate a project outside of our core business? What if it fails? These are just a few of the questions that uncertainty can uncover, and for good reason. When it comes to organizational innovation, the odds of success are not favorable. But the barriers to success may not be what you think.Most organizational innovations fail not because of technical problems, but rather, because of the human problems associated with change itself, such as internal politics, fear of the unknown, poor decision-making due to biases, and an inability to imagine a future that looks much different than todayEvery day, we see a big gap between the pressure on organizations to innovate within a rapidly changing and uncertain business climate, and the tools available to prepare leaders for the grand challenge of transformation.This is exactly the premise behind our recent book, Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company's Future, authored by myself, Nathan Furr, and Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, where we lay the foundation for a new framework that shows leaders exactly how to overcome these human barriers to innovation.Now, Singularity University has developed Understanding Behavioral Transformation, a new four-week Online Course that distills the key frameworks and tools from Leading Transformation into a unique, multi-format interactive online learning experience.The course will not only teach you the tools mentioned above but will also allow you to interact with the material and learn how to put it to use within your own business context and move forward with a better roadmap for leading change in today’s world.
Leading Transformation is broken down into three steps: envisioning the future, breaking bottlenecks, and navigating the unknown. In the book we outline cutting-edge tools and processes that we’ve fine-tuned with some of the most and seemingly least innovative companies today, to help leaders override powerful habits and routines that prevent organizations from adapting for the future.The tools in our transformational process include:
To develop these tools, we drew on both established research and our own research across multiple related disciplines, taking insights from behavioral economics, psychology, social psychology, applied neuroscience, and innovation. In drawing on these domains, instead of rattling off lists of issues, biases, and limitations, we focused on the critical behavioral traps we see in the real world—the fear, habits, politics, and incremental thinking that hold organizations back from doing what they say they will do.
Leading Transformation was born out of an emerging management field called behavioral transformation, which brings a particular focus to the behavioral limitations that keep leaders and organizations from seeing and capturing opportunities for transformational changes.It is a way of bringing a deeper understanding to how innovation and transformation actually happen within organizations, because if we can understand the psychological, cognitive, and identity biases that stymie innovation, then we can truly confront and overcome these barriers. Unlike classical management, behavioral transformation brings specific attention to the behavioral limitations that obstruct great leaders and organizations from seeing and capturing new opportunities.We developed the visionary process outlined in Leading Transformation to empower leaders like you to overcome the incremental thinking and fear of change that holds so many organizations and teams back from remaining sharp for the future and realizing their true potential.Will you join this new movement impacting the future of how organizations lead change? Get started by signing up for Understanding Behavioral Transformation to learn more about these concepts and to join an engaged community of 21st-Century leaders.