Why Good Change Strategies Still Fail with Julie Gawle

Oh, that's good.

You know, meaningful change.

Yeah.

And because this show is also about social entrepreneurship and sustainability, and our listeners are mainly like social entrepreneurs and sort of purpose-driven organizations, right? And change, we are very nimble and often involves, you know, shifting behaviors, cultures, communities, rather than just implementing a new system, right? So what lessons, your point of view, from enterprise transformation and how does it apply to them? Is there anything that you'd like to share, Julie?

Yeah, I think that's a really good question.

I think that one of the biggest lessons would be don't assume that because people believe in your purpose that they're automatically going to agree on the change.

You

can have 10 people who passionately believe in the same mission.

and you can have 10 completely different ideas about how to achieve it.

I mean, purpose helps enormously, but you still need clarity.

So what outcomes are we trying to create? What actually needs to change? Who will be affected? What are we asking people to do differently? And where do people have genuine opportunities to shape the solution? You know, I think I would also resist the temptation to like try to convince everyone.

But listen first and understand where the friction is coming from.

And sometimes what looks like resistance is actually useful information about a barrier that the people designing the change haven't seen.

True, I think I agree.

You know what? You know, I like resistance when I started sort of running my social enterprise at first, you know, I hate it when somebody comes up, oh, you know, Faiz, you should do this and that.

But no, actually, I sort of invite this and I always have somebody who's always resistant to my ideas rather than having like, yes, man, just agreeing with you, right?

Exactly, exactly.

You got to have varying degrees of opinions.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, I understand.

Yeah, and looking ahead, what does sort of successful change leadership look like in the world where organizations and communities are constantly adapting right now? What do you see, Julie?

So, I think that we have to stop treating change as an interruption between periods of stability.

You know, there really isn't going to be a point where we finish all the transformations and everybody gets to just go back to normal.

You know, I think there's no normal anymore, you know.

A lot of people are navigating multiple changes at the same time and the environment is changing while they're doing it.