October 1, 2025 • 34 mins
Have you ever felt like leading change is more confusing than it should be? In this episode, Kevin welcomes Jeff DeGraff to discuss the complex art of change. Jeff shares why traditional change efforts often stall and how paradoxes can serve as a source of innovation and energy. Together, Kevin and Jeff discuss ideas such as launching change from the edges of an organization, the distinction between science and art in managing transformation, and why experiences, rather than facts, are what truly shift people’s perspectives. They also discuss the "paradoxical mindset challenge" and offer practical tools for navigating change more effectively.
Listen For
00:00 Introduction: The Art of Change
00:56 Welcome to the Remarkable Leadership Podcast
02:10 Introducing Dr. Jeff DeGraff
03:18 Jeff’s Journey from Pizza to Paradoxes
04:53 Why This Book? The Frustration Behind It
06:14 Leading Change from the Edges, Not the Center
08:09 Art vs Science in Change
10:39 The Power of Paradox in Driving Change
13:15 Facilitating Change Through Constructive Conflict
16:25 The Paradoxical Mindset Challenge
20:32 Exploring a Favorite Paradox: Facts Don’t Change Minds
24:42 Failure as a Prerequisite to Learning
26:34 Leadership Lessons from the Pandemic
29:35 You Can’t Change Others Until You Change Yourself
30:49 What Jeff Does for Fun
32:32 What Jeff is Reading
33:17 Where to Connect with Jeff DeGraff
34:05 Final Thoughts and Call to Action
Jeff's Story: Jeff DeGraff is a clinical professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and the co-author with Staney DeGraff of The Art of Change: Transforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs. He founded Innovatrium, an innovation consulting firm that focuses on creating an innovation culture, capability, and community. The firm offers three types of coaching services: Executive Coaching, Innovation Project Coaching, and Personal Development Coaching. Known as the “Dean of Innovation,” he has spent four decades helping organizations—from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. military—lead change from the edges, not the center
This Episode is brought to you by...
Flexible Leadership is every leader’s guide to greater success in a world of increasing complexity and chaos.
Book Recommendations
Like this?
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
The title of
this episode is the Art of change.
Chances are you have a variety of thoughtsand feelings about change,
including when you have to lead it.
And so I want you to realizethat you've thought about this
a lot, and everyone around you has thoughtand experienced a lot about this.
(00:29):
And you may be thinking that you'vestudied it and you've led changes
and you feel like you're missingsomething.
You may be thinkingthat you'd like to find the Rosetta Stone
to help you figureall this change stuff out.
Or maybe you feel likeit's just too complex to master.
It's just part of the job.
If you feel any of those things,you're going to love this conversation
(00:51):
about how the art isat the heart of change efforts.
Welcome to another episodeof the Remarkable Leadership Podcast,
where we are helping leadersgrow personally and professionally
to lead more effectivelyand make a bigger difference
for their teams, organizations,and the world.
If you're listening to this podcastin the future,
you could join us live on your favoritesocial media channel.
(01:13):
You can find out when those are happening,and get information about those live
episodes, and interact with usand get the information sooner
by joining our Facebookor LinkedIn groups.
Just go to Remarkable podcast, eCommerce
Facebookor remarkable podcast.com/linked in.
Today's episode is brought to youby my latest book, Flexible Leadership.
(01:34):
Navigate Uncertaintyand Lead with Confidence.
It's timeto realize that styles can get in our way,
and that following our strengthsmight not always be the best approach
in a world that is more complexand uncertain than ever.
Leaders need a new perspective,a new set of tools to create the great
results their organizationsand team members want and need.
(01:55):
That'swhat flexible leadership provides you.
You can learn more and order your copytoday at Remarkable podcast.com/flexible.
Now with thatI'm going to bring in my guest.
And I'm going to introduce him.
And then we're going to dive in.
My guest today is Doctor Jeff de Graaf.
He is clinical professor at the Universityof Michigan's Ross School of Business
(02:18):
and the author of coauthorof the Art of Change
Transforming Paradoxesin To Breakthroughs.
Known as the Dean of innovation,he has spent four decades helping
organizations from fortune500 companies to the US military
lead change from the edges,not the center.
Jeff, welcome to the show.
So glad to have you, Kevin.
(02:39):
Thanks for having me on.
We had the chance to chat beforewe went live.
We have some things in commonwhich we probably won't get into today,
but I'm just going to do this.
I'm just going to wave to Melanieand you can do the same.
No one else will know what that's about,but we know, and we'll try to make sure
she gets a chanceto watch or listen to this.
So, Jeff,
when I got the book in the mail,I certainly knew who you were.
(03:02):
And I loved the title,which got me to dive in,
which almost immediately had me say, yeah,I want to have this guy on the show.
But before we get to the book,I want to know a little bit
about your journey that leads you
to do the work that you do every day.
Well, it's interesting,I, I was, I'm from Michigan,
(03:22):
I from Western Michigan,and grew up in a blue collar neighborhood.
And through a series of almost forcedgub like,
opportunities,I ended up being a pretty young PhD.
And at 25, I met a guy
who had a small pizza company.
And five years later, at 30,we sold Domino's
(03:44):
Pizza to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.
And then I was 30and didn't know what to do and did
a little stint with, Apple and, Steve Jobsand all that.
And Michigan asked meif I wanted to come back and teach,
MBAs how to be creative.
And I remember telling Bob Quinn,they're dull, drab and awful.
(04:07):
You can hear them think.
And he said, yeah,you know, that's why we want you to do it.
So I thought I would do itfor a little bit of time.
It's been for almost 40 years.
And over the yearsI built these consulting practices.
Two of them, onenot for profit and one for profit.
That's what brought me into the militarybecause of the work
(04:28):
I'd done at Apple and Google and GEand everybody else.
Right.
So it it it became an issue ofhow do you build
really sustainable
dynastic innovation ecosystems.
That was my interest.
And so that at leastat some level leads to this book.
Why why this book?
(04:48):
We're going to talk about the titleand a lot of the ideas in a second.
But why this book, the Art of change?
Yeah, it's interesting because it actuallycame from a frustration.
Some of your
listeners may know or may not know,I worked on the Covid vaccine.
I have a patch for rapid X.
I actually start the book with it.
I start the book by saying,when your country calls and says,
(05:10):
we have a problem,we need some help with this.
You you do what you can do, right?
The challenge of all of this was,
I had some of the brightest peopleI've ever met in my life.
Kevin.
And the one thing that actually stoppedeverybody is
they could not handlethe ambiguity of, of the future.
(05:30):
They could not handle paradoxes,which, of course, are central
to changing innovation,because there is no data on the future.
And the number one form of resistanceis excessive data gathering,
sort of getting stuckin the planning cycle.
So I wrote the book saying
paradoxes and ambiguityare not just a side effect of things.
They are the essence of change.
(05:52):
If you can't deal with it, you'reprobably not going to make change happen.
So, I mentioned at the beginning,
that this episode is brought to youby my new book, Flexible Leadership.
And for a long time, Jeff, the workingtitle had the word paradox in it,
so which I think maybedrew me to your subtitle a little bit.
And there's so many timesI found myself as I was reading, nodding.
(06:14):
And we're going to getto all the paradox stuff in a minute.
But I want to actually
ask you about something that's in.
It's likethe last thing I read in your intro,
it says that helping people lead moveto change from the edges, not the center.
What do you mean by that?
Well, innovation doesn't move inside out.
(06:35):
It moves outside in.
And what?
I have a rule that I call the 2080 rule.
It's not the 8020 rule.
The 8020 rule says it's,you know, Detroit.
Well, let's turn around.
The 2080 rule says it's easierto change 20% of an organization,
80%, than it isto change 80% of an organization 20%.
What your listeners need to think aboutis a bell curve.
(06:56):
And think about when people really change.
They're in a crisis. Well,why do you change the crisis?
Because the risk of trying somethingradical and the reward of where you're at
is reversed.
It's not justpeople think about the first trillion
our companies company I've been associatedwith forever, which is Apple, right?
Apple is basically going bankrupt in 1997.
And when you're in that kind of state,that's why when people get a divorce
(07:19):
or they lose their jobor somebody passes way close to them,
they're likely to change.
And the same is truewhen you're on a roll,
when you're on a roll,we have what's called risk capital.
So the right off the bat,the reason the edge matters
is it the middle you'reprotecting the rent right at the edges.
You're not.
And most people,when they start trying to launch change
(07:40):
from the middle, they're really just doingproject management.
X marks the spot.
If you can hit it from the day thatyou started, it tells you that the change
that you've made is very incrementaland probably not very significant.
That doesn'tmean there's not a place for that.
It's just not that it's not.
Let's just not call itwhat it's not. Right. Yeah.
And then we have awe have a nice term for that.
(08:01):
And in the innovationwe call it the long tail.
Right.
So the long tail meansonce we figured it out
then there's a whole bunch of stuffyou get.
Right. So,
the book is called the Art of change.
And in the, in the writing that I didto hopefully encourage people to come join
us, I talked about I talked about thatword art versus science.
(08:24):
And so let's just talk about thatfor a second. Like
there is some science to change.
And I find that that'swhere a lot of people want to focus.
And yet that's where they still get stuck.
So talk about the differencebetween art versus science.
Yeah, I think there's two parts to this.
And think of itlike training a real artist.
I mean, there's a part toanything that you do
(08:45):
that has to do with tradecraft.
You're learning to play the piano.
You have to learn the, you know, the whiteand black keys, the squiggly lines
where your hands go, this is a mazurkaversus a Polynyas or whatever.
So the stuff you have to learnand the same is true for change.
One of the big issues
is organizations actually functionin some very rational ways.
(09:06):
All organizations.And this is my other favorite one.
No, the military's different.
No, it's not right.
It's not. And health care is different.
No, it's I mean, the last 5% is,but most of it exactly the same.
Not that's the science.
And you do have to learn that the art is.
What exactly are you seeing?
So let me give you some things about artthat almost all I think almost all leaders
(09:29):
get wrong. Number one,the problem's never the problem.
You come in, somebody tells youwhat the problem is.
It's never.The problem's like going to the doctor.
You know,
you read a web MD and you think, you knowwhat's wrong with this person's?
The more experience.
They've seen thousands of patientsand they actually went to medical school
and they they have they finessewhat the problem is.
And they understand that the problem issomething that kind of emerges.
(09:51):
That's art.
It's not science.
Second thing is the solution.
The people who get blown upfirst in change efforts
are those people have those things like gobig or go home.
I can't tell you in my 40 year career,all those guys go home.
They eventually go homebecause that's a gamble.
Most of us,the art is we sort of wade into it.
(10:12):
We figure stuff out as we go along.
As my colleague Bob Quinn says,you build the bridges, you walk over it.
So there's a lot of aspects to this
that are aspects that are intuitive,aspects
that you're learning along the way,aspects that experience brings into it.
That's art.
Anyone can figure out where your handsgo on the keyboard,
(10:33):
but not anyone could be a jazz improvimprovizational musician.
That's a special skill.
I love that. So,
the book is really about these paradoxes.
And before we get into the paradoxes, I'mgoing to let you pick the one that's
your favorite to talk about,and then I may pick one as well.
(10:53):
We'll just see how that all goes.
But I really want to talkfirst about the role of paradox
and change before we get intowhat they are specifically.
But why is paradox so important
to this art that we're talking about?
Paradox creates tensions and tensions.
We create generative energy, which isrequired to make anything better or new.
(11:17):
So if you don't have a paradox,if something is basically
just wrong, right,then step one is fix it.
If something is ambiguous,then step one is wade into it.
Figure out what it is.
If step one is it's a paradox.
We need to we need to both, cut costsand raise sales at the same time.
(11:38):
And how do we do that at the same time?
What's happening is inthat paradox is the very energy
that is requiredto get to a higher point of view,
a different point of view,a better point of view, not compromise,
not trying to solve for X,but trying to figure out how to use that
tense of energy.
So a great example is right nowin America,
(11:59):
everybody's going, oh,the the out of the world's new civil war.
It's not that at all.
The death of changing innovationis apathy.
When everything's overaligned, everybody agrees.
Everybody's happy with what they do.
Nothing moves.There's no reason to move it.
There's no energy.
When people have different ideasand they're good, there's good change
and there's bad change.
We don't want, you know, we don't wantanything bad happening, buddy.
(12:22):
But that tension, that paradox, provides
the actual energy that's going to requiredto make things better.
And you.
Yeah, I say to people all the timeto, to expect there
to be change without resistance is likeit's just not possible.
And the rise and resistance is ultimatelyjust energy to your, to your exact point.
And the more somebody resists somethingand this is important for your
(12:45):
for your listeners to understand this,the more somebody resists something,
the more they believe their protectsomething sacred.
The more somebody resists,the more they believe
they're protecting something sacred.
And that's why great changeagents are almost always invisible.
They're almost always peoplewho give credit to other people.
Right.
That's why because those people believedthey were protecting something sacred.
(13:07):
They gave up somethingthat was very important to them.
How do we accredit them with the changethat I made things better in New.
So. So how does that relate to the idea?
Kevin's already off script.
How does that how does that relateto the idea of facilitating change?
Because when
I think about the word facilitating,it simply just means to make it easier.
(13:30):
And that's what I heard you sayingjust now.
So do you use that phrase?
How does that phrase facilitating changerelate to the point you just made?
Jeff,
my work is basically based on a numberof other people's work through history.
You know, you're going to find Quinn's,
Bob Quinn's model of competing values,a large model of car composites.
Remember, I'm I'm at the Ross Schoolfor 36 years, so obviously my elders.
(13:53):
But the older brothershad an influence on me.
But my contribution is that there'screative power in constructive conflict.
I'm a huge believer that you have to putvery different ideas together in a room,
and the reason for that is when I startedstudying these innovation, what we call
creativity clusters,
what we noticed was that the only thingthat was really different about them,
(14:14):
which producedalmost all the electrical property
around the world,these big creativity clusters,
is that people have different ideas
and they know how to engagein these conflicts in a normative way.
So it's not personal,it's not prejudice, it's not destructive.
It's I'm challenging your idea.
So the first how it relates isthe first thing is you're
trying to actually createthe difficult conversation.
(14:37):
Or as I like to put it, the dinner party.
You put the two people that you doyou don't want.
The people are going to be nastyto each other,
but you do put the two people nextto each other who have different ideas,
and you kind of shake,shake the box a little bit
and you say,what are we going to get from there?
Now, if they're if they're purposeful,if they're really what they're really at
the intentionality of doing good things,they'll respect the other person.
(14:58):
But that idea will move forward.
And so that becomes the key of that.
That becomes the key.
Don't try and destroy the person.
They have a belief system.
And that's not why we're here.
Why we're here is to challenge an idea andto see if we can get that idea to grow.
And that growth will come by
us, by us both understandingthe other person's perspective
(15:22):
and seeing it from their lens, even if westill don't agree, right? Agree.
And we have to encounter the other,the other problem, the problem
with the internet and with social mediais it's an echo chamber.
All you know what,forget politics and religion.
You know, look at somebodywhose interest is all bands or something.
You know, they they believeall the same crap all of us do.
(15:44):
And you get the likes which are, you know,you get the, you know, adrenaline going.
Well, those people aren't very helpful.
You're not going to get to the next place.
A lot of times they're liking bad ideas.
The only way you're going to get tothe next place is you have to encounter
the loyal opposition with the conceptthat you're both
trying, or all of you are tryingto get to this better place.
(16:07):
So you talk.
We've been hinting at what you call
the paradoxical mindset challenge,but can you outline it
a little more specificallybecause it's sort of forms
the concept of the rest of the book.
And the idea is I want us to talk about.
So go ahead. And interrupt you. Sorry.
(16:27):
Yes. Covered that.
It really came from what I noticed aboutpeople who are able to deal with paradox.
And I think I'msomebody who's okay at that.
I'm pretty fluent in that.
Well, the first stepis we tell ourselves a lot of stories.
I don't know if you do it,but I do all the time.
And sometimes I tell them outloud to myself, right.
I'm like, TVA in Fiddler on the roof.
(16:48):
I'm always talking to myself about things,
and they tell the story to tell the storyand tell the story.
And a lot of times I'm looking forwhat's the right way to tell the story.
But a lot of times when I tell the storyto myself about something that happened,
I noticethere's something that doesn't quite fit.
It seems like there's thingsthat I normally don't do.
So let me give you an examplethat I've given the book I love trees,
(17:11):
I'm a tree guy and I live like a hobbiton the Huron River.
I'm surrounded by these 200 year oldtrees, trees everywhere, and I love them.
We had a terriblesnowstorm a few years back,
and a lot of the big trees losthuge limbs.
And I'm not talking about I'm
talking about limbsthat way, you know, three tons.
I mean, these are large trees.
Well,there were some trees, some apple trees,
(17:33):
some apple blossomsthat were going over my sunroom.
And while they're cutting downthese branches that needed to be cut down,
a guy asked me, do you cut this tree down?
Because I just wanted to trim it upso it didn't fall on the sunroom.
And in a moment I said, yeah,cut it down in the mini, cut it down.
I thought,oh my God, why did I do this right?
(17:54):
I love trees,I'm normally not, capricious like that.
So that would be a storythat I'd say there's a paradox.
I love trees,but I love them. Cut it down.
Well, the second step isyou got to find the paradox.
You tell a story and tell the story
and tell the story to findwhat's the paradox in here?
And that takes time.That's not easy to do.
(18:15):
If your listeners are trying to figure outhow to do this, I can tell you
the one area where almost everybody
gets to think about a relationshipthat you want it to work, that didn't.
It's a perfect way
to find them, because you'll findI thought it was this.
But these two things happen together,
and I couldn't quite figure outwhat was at the center of this.
Right.
Yeah. Well, that's part of the next piece.
(18:35):
The third piece.
What simple rulescan you divine from this?
What can I divine frommy let the guy cut the tree down,
or I asked the guy to cut the tree down.
When he asked me if I wanted to do it.
Well, the simple rule would be, you know,count to ten or ask your wife or,
you know, develop
a way to say, I give me 5 minutesor 10 minutes to go through this.
(18:55):
So that's, you know, it's a, it'sa, it's a little it's a little,
a littledevice, if you will, a cognitive device.
And then finally, what's the experiment?
Well, I tell in the book, you know,
we are out east one time with the familyand the car broke down.
This wasn't far after the tree.
Issue.
And now the issue became, do you know.
(19:17):
Oh, we got to fix your car,and it's going to cost $1 million.
And here's how we have to do it.
And you say, wait a minute.
What I'm going to dois I'm going to take I'm going to
try this step of giving myself some timeand looking at some alternatives.
And I did, and I found a verydifferent way to handle the problem.
So now all of a sudden, I'mable to make this change as a habit
because I was able to deconstructand reconstruct the paradox.
(19:41):
So that is how you encourage us
to think about the paradoxesthat that you outline in the book.
And I found myself as I was reading,
even just reading the titlesof the chapters
for each of the paradoxes,I found myself smiling, in some cases,
because those were things that I alreadyrecognized, those paradoxes,
(20:03):
and in other cases, things that like,okay, I want to learn more about those,
and I'd just like youto pick one of them to you.
Maybe it's one of your favorites.
Maybe it's the one that you just feel ledto talk about today.
Maybe it's the one that you find peoplegetting stuck on the most.
I don't care which one you pick,but, like, pick one of them,
(20:24):
to help us get an insightinto the art of change.
Number one and number two,to help us see how
this idea of paradox can help us as we'reguiding change.
Yeah.
One of my favoritesis we use facts to change people's minds.
But facts don't changepeople's minds, right?
And I'm around these really smart peopleall my life.
And, you know,
(20:45):
my wife will come home and she'll starttalking about how something was explained.
Remember, she's the coauthor of this book.
She's very my wife'sextremely intelligent.
Right.
And I'll have to stop her and say, yeah,but facts don't change people's minds.
So a perfect experiment.
You know, example of thatI think would be global warming.
I have,I do a lot of work around the country,
(21:07):
and you go to placesthey don't believe in it.
Well, what's happenedover time is some of these places have had
category four hurricanes.
Some of these places have hadtheir houses washed away.
Some of these placeslive up in the mountains,
and they've had fires that they couldn't
put out there, thingsthat didn't normally happen to them.
And we don't wish bad things on anybody.We wish good things.
(21:28):
Pray for good things,but these bad things happen to them.
And when the bad things happen to them,all of the sudden
they understoodbecause they had an experience.
Facts don't change minds. Experiences do.
And I want to point out to you,and I'm not trying to be controversial,
but I do start the book with my workon the Covid vaccine,
(21:49):
and one of the thingsthat was very difficult about that now
depends on whether you look at the JohnsHopkins study or the Brown study.
Right out of the first millionpeople who died in the United States, 25
to 40% of them died with the vaccineavailable to them.
Now, here's the point I'm trying to make.
I'm not trying to makea political statement at all.
I'm trying to make this statementwhat people believe is so powerful
(22:12):
that they're willing to diefor it, literally,
and that it is only through experiences.
And some people say storiesand other stuff.
I'm not sure that's even true.
I think people have to have an experience.
So what? What?
I suggest my suggestionis, rather than waiting to
somebody, has the terrible experience,let them have a small experience.
(22:32):
So this is my this is the father in me.
I have three children.
My wife and I have a very differentparenting style.
My wife style is don't dothat, don't do that.
She sounds like Minnie Mouse.
Don't do that, don't do that.
My style is hurt. Didn'tit hurt? Isn't it?
Yeah. Hurt didn't it?
What do we learn from this right now?
Don't get me wrong.
(22:52):
You don't let juniorgo play on the freeway. You go get them.
But the notion is,I think as parents and as leaders,
we have to have the abilityfor the people who are around us
to have some experience,hopefully limited.
Hopefully not bad.
We wish good things for people,
but have some experienceabout the upside and downside of,
(23:14):
what their thoughts are.
They have to somehow take their thoughtsand put them into the world.
Yeah.
So go back to your point about experiencesversus stories.
I think stories can can plant seeds,but I'm with you
that, or they can reinforce.
But ultimately it's got to bewhat I experienced.
Yeah. And that's really hard.
(23:35):
And it's really hard to watchsomebody skin up their knees.
It's really hard for somebody
to watch somebody botch a presentationthat could have been, you know, a deal.
It's hard.
But you also knowif we're trying to go forward
and if we're taking the long viewwith our children, our colleagues,
the people who were responsiblefor or responsible with babies,
by the way, putting it, if we have to,then we have to allow them
(23:57):
to develop through their experience,the same competencies that we have. Now.
I don't know, Kevin, aboutyour experience, but I've, I've worked
for some people who are not exactlythe nicest people in the world,
but I really learned a lotbecause one of the things
that they typically would do is they'dsay, okay, this is this is screwed up.
You're going to have a lot of fun
the next two nights, staying up all nightand trying to solve it.
(24:20):
Yeah, I'm going to try and figure it out.
Yeah.
One of the other paradoxes we're bumpingup against one of the other paradoxes,
which is I'mjust reading it so I get it right.
We attempt to avoid
failure, but all learning is developmentaland requires failure.
Like, how do we get therewithout the failure, right?
Like hearing about someone else'sfailure, to your point earlier is not
(24:41):
the same as is experiencingit ourselves, right?
Absolutely.
And all of a sudden I'mstarting to see books that are I've wrote
a book very early on, probably 30,40 years ago called Creativity at Work.
And, one of the thingsI try to point out in the book was that,
learning to change and innovateis inextricably linked to learning.
(25:03):
There's a learning that learning.
And it's the same thing
because and there's a wonderful bookby a colleague of mine, Dorothy, Leonard,
called Deep Smarts and her husband,Walter, super bright, deep smarts.
It's a brilliant book.
She she's retired.
She's a old Harvard professor, and she'sjust a old but retired Harvard professor.
(25:24):
And what I love about the book, that's.
All relative, by the way. Yeah, that's.
I know as I'm getting old,
what I love about the book,though, is she takes you through and says,
you know, look at here's here'show you develop actual tradecraft.
I did a program,
with, Twyla Tharp, years ago.
And I love her.
The great choreographer
(25:44):
and some of this young womangot up and said, well, how do you learn
to be a great choreographer?I'm trying to be a choreographer.
And Twyla Tharp said,what time do you get up?
And she said, oh, between 9 and 10.
She said, no, you get up at five.
And she said,and how are you learning about this?
So go to Google. No, you're.What's all this?
You haven't earned it.
She her point was you haven't had
(26:06):
you haven't gone through the the the the
the experience that you need to go throughin order to be able to really do this.
You haven't earned it.
Yeah, I love that.
So. So, let's go back.
I want to before we start to close up.
And I know that you and I couldgo a have a long conversation longer.
Maybe we will someday, but not necessarilyon camera slash microphone.
(26:29):
Because we can talk aboutall of these paradoxes.
They're all fabulous waysfor us to think in new ways.
And I'm talking with Jeff Graff,one of the two authors of the new book,
the Art of ChangeTransforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs.
And sobut I want to go back to the pandemic,
and I don't necessarilywant to talk about the vaccine
(26:52):
as much as that was a timewhen I think all of us now can have.
We had experiences with changerelated to the pandemic.
So, like, what are some thingsthat maybe we as leaders can take
from those
experiences that can help us with changesmoving forward?
Yeah. The first thing was,
(27:12):
there were two parts.I would say right off the bat.
First thing was when you don't know
what something is, don't immediatelyjump to here's the solution.
And that was the problem.
The problem waswhat's called the forward position problem
means there's a lot of ambiguity.And what we really need to do is hedge.
We really need to look at a diversityof ways of handling this problem.
We closed the box too early, right.
(27:33):
So all of us, there was a lot ofother things that could have been done.
And we saw this in some small places.
That's the first thing that could havebeen could have been learned.
Don't be so certain.
You know what things are right beforeyou know what they are.
And then the second thing is thatwhich I think goes along with this,
is that anything that's worth learningreveals itself over time.
So you're going to change your mind.
(27:54):
And people who said, well, you know,I can't believe we did this
and we did this and we did.
I'm like, well,we did. We had incomplete information.
That's how it all make sense backward.But it. Is. Yeah.
I'm like, you know,and you know, any fool can do that.
The notion is as you're going forward,you have to adjust
based on what's going on.
And that was the whole thing.
And once we got to that point,and once we got to that point,
(28:17):
sort of collectively, did you notice howquickly everything went all of a sudden?
We were good at this. Right?
But boy, it took about six monthsor seven months of,
you know, and hang on, this is the way wethis is the way we sort this out,
you know, so that that I thinkis what we really could take from it.
And I think the biggest thingthat we could take from it
(28:38):
is that change is inevitable.
If you read about pandemics or wars
or natural resource, you can read about itin studies, you can read about Herod.
It's the Bible. You pick it.
The human condition, the basics.
The centerpiece of the humancondition is change.
It's not something that happens to us orthe homeostasis that we believe we have.
(28:58):
That's the part that we're imagining.
The world is in flux. We are in flux.
That is the key to the whole thing.
Understanding the dynamics.
It's not so much the structure, it'sthe dynamics that make the difference.
Allah states it's not homeostasis.
There we go. Very good. You're right.
You're right.
So but no one wants to talk about thatbecause they talk about so.
(29:20):
So listen, Jeff, is there anything I mean,there's lots more we can talk about,
and and I hope everyone goesgets a copy of the book and all of that.
But is there anything we didn't talk aboutas this unfolded that you wish
we would have or or looking backnow, you wish I would have asked?
Well, I think the one thing I would just,I would just say is
(29:40):
our people,people can't change other people.
That the one thingI think that I'd like your listeners
to take away from thisis that the journey starts with you
and you know whether or notyou can affect another person.
I mean, think about it.I've been married for a long, long time.
How well is that little changegoing? Right.
You know, so the notion is the notion is
how is ityou're, keeping track of your own journey?
(30:04):
How is ityou're keeping track of your own growth?
Right. That'sthe one thing that you can actually do.
That's the thingI'd really like to emphasize on that.
And we're all works in progress.
Forgive yourselffor the things that don't work
a lot of them,and forgive yourself for the hypocrisy.
I'm a terrible hypocrite this way.
I sit in the same seats in the stadiumI've sat in for 40 years.
I drive the same carI've driven for 15 years.
(30:24):
People always ask me,why don't I change what to me?
I don't want to change it.
So there are certain things in lifethat you want to change in certain ways.
Life that you don't want to change. It'snot a problem.
It just has to work for you and the peoplearound you that you love and care about.
Yeah, I love that.
So a couple of other things before we go,kind of shifting gears, I'd love to know.
(30:46):
Jeff, what is it that you do for fun?
Well,
you know, I travel a lot.
I'm one of those almost 3 million mileguys on, Delta Airlines alone.
But one of the things that's fun is,because I have a life
that's very much like a Federal Expresspackage around the world.
I'll take an afternoon or a day off.
And I love to, really immerse myselfwith the culture,
(31:09):
eat food, go to their temples,go to sporting events.
I love sporting events.
My wifenow goes with me to a lot of these things.
So the first thing is that I really likethere's a hobby is
just really, really embrace the world.
Okay.
The only thing you knew I was going to askyou is this.
(31:31):
What are you reading these days, Jeff?
Well, I just read the book abundance.
I really liked it.I recommend it to people.
I disagree with the partabout the Covid vaccine,
but that'sjust because I lived through it.
There's a good book called The ShotThat Saved the World by,
Zuckerman of the Wall Street Journal.
I think a little better,treatment of that.
But, I'm reading a book about the SevenWonders of the Ancient World by Bethany.
(31:55):
I can't remember her last name.
She's the BBC lady, and it's fascinating.
I like history,and I really think that history gives,
really doestell us a lot about the human condition.
More thana lot of people want to recognize.
Yeah, in my opinion. So,
tell peoplewhere they can reach out to you,
(32:16):
where they can connect with you,where they can get the book.
Where do you want to point?
I think the easiest thing to do is I'mone of the original LinkedIn influencers.
So if you go to LinkedIn,
you look for me on LinkedIn,Jeff de Graaf, you'll find me.
You can also find me a
a graph.com, but I think it'd be easierjust to contact me on LinkedIn.
That's the best way to do it.
And and I'm also like hearing from peopleabout, you know, I disagree with this.
(32:38):
Those are my favorite ones.Or have you thought about this?
This might go a sitesslightly different direction.
I'm really this is the professor.
I mean, I really like that.
Let's get, you know, let's let's,what are the young people say?
Chop it up. Let's chop it up.
You can chop it up.You can do it at LinkedIn.
You go to Jeff siggraph.com.
You can go to Art of changedot net. There's websites.
Oh yeah. Yeah you can do Art of change.Not not yet. That works too.
(33:01):
All right, all right.
So before we go, before
I let Jeff go and before I let all of yougo before this ends, I want to ask
all of you the questionthat I ask every single episode.
And the question is simply this. Now what?
What will you do nowthat you've heard this conversation?
What insights do you take from this?
(33:21):
But that's not really it.
It's not really the idea.
But what are you going to do with the ideathat matters?
I took a bunch of notes for me.
But the question is, what did you takefrom this that you will apply?
Because until you do that,this isn't nearly as valuable,
as it, as a
as using this as a collector ofinformation is one level, using this as a,
(33:45):
as a spurto or an inspiration to action is,
I think, ultimatelywhat both of us would prefer for you,
and it's ultimatelywhat will make this most valuable for you.
So Jeff, thanks so much for being here.
I've been looking forward to it.
We had a bit of a fit and startbefore we got here.
I'm so gladwe finally got the chance together.
Thanks for having me on andthanks to your listeners for having me on.
And thanks for the remarkable leadershipfor having me on. Thanks, guys.
(34:07):
All right, everybody.And so I hope you enjoyed it.
If you did, make sure you're subscribedwherever you're watching,
you're listening.So don't miss any future episodes.
Make sure you tell somebody elseto join us as well, because that's
a part of leadership is helpingothers move in positive direction.
Hope you'll do that.
Hope you'll be back next week
for another episodeof the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.
Thanks, everybody.
The title of
this episode is the Art of change.
Chances are you have a variety of thoughtsand feelings about change,
including when you have to lead it.
And so I want you to realizethat you've thought about this
a lot, and everyone around you has thoughtand experienced a lot about this.
(00:29):
And you may be thinking that you'vestudied it and you've led changes
and you feel like you're missingsomething.
You may be thinkingthat you'd like to find the Rosetta Stone
to help you figureall this change stuff out.
Or maybe you feel likeit's just too complex to master.
It's just part of the job.
If you feel any of those things,you're going to love this conversation
(00:51):
about how the art isat the heart of change efforts.
Welcome to another episodeof the Remarkable Leadership Podcast,
where we are helping leadersgrow personally and professionally
to lead more effectivelyand make a bigger difference
for their teams, organizations,and the world.
If you're listening to this podcastin the future,
you could join us live on your favoritesocial media channel.
(01:13):
You can find out when those are happening,and get information about those live
episodes, and interact with usand get the information sooner
by joining our Facebookor LinkedIn groups.
Just go to Remarkable podcast, eCommerce
Facebookor remarkable podcast.com/linked in.
Today's episode is brought to youby my latest book, Flexible Leadership.
(01:34):
Navigate Uncertaintyand Lead with Confidence.
It's timeto realize that styles can get in our way,
and that following our strengthsmight not always be the best approach
in a world that is more complexand uncertain than ever.
Leaders need a new perspective,a new set of tools to create the great
results their organizationsand team members want and need.
(01:55):
That'swhat flexible leadership provides you.
You can learn more and order your copytoday at Remarkable podcast.com/flexible.
Now with thatI'm going to bring in my guest.
And I'm going to introduce him.
And then we're going to dive in.
My guest today is Doctor Jeff de Graaf.
He is clinical professor at the Universityof Michigan's Ross School of Business
(02:18):
and the author of coauthorof the Art of Change
Transforming Paradoxesin To Breakthroughs.
Known as the Dean of innovation,he has spent four decades helping
organizations from fortune500 companies to the US military
lead change from the edges,not the center.
Jeff, welcome to the show.
So glad to have you, Kevin.
(02:39):
Thanks for having me on.
We had the chance to chat beforewe went live.
We have some things in commonwhich we probably won't get into today,
but I'm just going to do this.
I'm just going to wave to Melanieand you can do the same.
No one else will know what that's about,but we know, and we'll try to make sure
she gets a chanceto watch or listen to this.
So, Jeff,
when I got the book in the mail,I certainly knew who you were.
(03:02):
And I loved the title,which got me to dive in,
which almost immediately had me say, yeah,I want to have this guy on the show.
But before we get to the book,I want to know a little bit
about your journey that leads you
to do the work that you do every day.
Well, it's interesting,I, I was, I'm from Michigan,
(03:22):
I from Western Michigan,and grew up in a blue collar neighborhood.
And through a series of almost forcedgub like,
opportunities,I ended up being a pretty young PhD.
And at 25, I met a guy
who had a small pizza company.
And five years later, at 30,we sold Domino's
(03:44):
Pizza to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.
And then I was 30and didn't know what to do and did
a little stint with, Apple and, Steve Jobsand all that.
And Michigan asked meif I wanted to come back and teach,
MBAs how to be creative.
And I remember telling Bob Quinn,they're dull, drab and awful.
(04:07):
You can hear them think.
And he said, yeah,you know, that's why we want you to do it.
So I thought I would do itfor a little bit of time.
It's been for almost 40 years.
And over the yearsI built these consulting practices.
Two of them, onenot for profit and one for profit.
That's what brought me into the militarybecause of the work
(04:28):
I'd done at Apple and Google and GEand everybody else.
Right.
So it it it became an issue ofhow do you build
really sustainable
dynastic innovation ecosystems.
That was my interest.
And so that at leastat some level leads to this book.
Why why this book?
(04:48):
We're going to talk about the titleand a lot of the ideas in a second.
But why this book, the Art of change?
Yeah, it's interesting because it actuallycame from a frustration.
Some of your
listeners may know or may not know,I worked on the Covid vaccine.
I have a patch for rapid X.
I actually start the book with it.
I start the book by saying,when your country calls and says,
(05:10):
we have a problem,we need some help with this.
You you do what you can do, right?
The challenge of all of this was,
I had some of the brightest peopleI've ever met in my life.
Kevin.
And the one thing that actually stoppedeverybody is
they could not handlethe ambiguity of, of the future.
(05:30):
They could not handle paradoxes,which, of course, are central
to changing innovation,because there is no data on the future.
And the number one form of resistanceis excessive data gathering,
sort of getting stuckin the planning cycle.
So I wrote the book saying
paradoxes and ambiguityare not just a side effect of things.
They are the essence of change.
(05:52):
If you can't deal with it, you'reprobably not going to make change happen.
So, I mentioned at the beginning,
that this episode is brought to youby my new book, Flexible Leadership.
And for a long time, Jeff, the workingtitle had the word paradox in it,
so which I think maybedrew me to your subtitle a little bit.
And there's so many timesI found myself as I was reading, nodding.
(06:14):
And we're going to getto all the paradox stuff in a minute.
But I want to actually
ask you about something that's in.
It's likethe last thing I read in your intro,
it says that helping people lead moveto change from the edges, not the center.
What do you mean by that?
Well, innovation doesn't move inside out.
(06:35):
It moves outside in.
And what?
I have a rule that I call the 2080 rule.
It's not the 8020 rule.
The 8020 rule says it's,you know, Detroit.
Well, let's turn around.
The 2080 rule says it's easierto change 20% of an organization,
80%, than it isto change 80% of an organization 20%.
What your listeners need to think aboutis a bell curve.
(06:56):
And think about when people really change.
They're in a crisis. Well,why do you change the crisis?
Because the risk of trying somethingradical and the reward of where you're at
is reversed.
It's not justpeople think about the first trillion
our companies company I've been associatedwith forever, which is Apple, right?
Apple is basically going bankrupt in 1997.
And when you're in that kind of state,that's why when people get a divorce
(07:19):
or they lose their jobor somebody passes way close to them,
they're likely to change.
And the same is truewhen you're on a roll,
when you're on a roll,we have what's called risk capital.
So the right off the bat,the reason the edge matters
is it the middle you'reprotecting the rent right at the edges.
You're not.
And most people,when they start trying to launch change
(07:40):
from the middle, they're really just doingproject management.
X marks the spot.
If you can hit it from the day thatyou started, it tells you that the change
that you've made is very incrementaland probably not very significant.
That doesn'tmean there's not a place for that.
It's just not that it's not.
Let's just not call itwhat it's not. Right. Yeah.
And then we have awe have a nice term for that.
(08:01):
And in the innovationwe call it the long tail.
Right.
So the long tail meansonce we figured it out
then there's a whole bunch of stuffyou get.
Right. So,
the book is called the Art of change.
And in the, in the writing that I didto hopefully encourage people to come join
us, I talked about I talked about thatword art versus science.
(08:24):
And so let's just talk about thatfor a second. Like
there is some science to change.
And I find that that'swhere a lot of people want to focus.
And yet that's where they still get stuck.
So talk about the differencebetween art versus science.
Yeah, I think there's two parts to this.
And think of itlike training a real artist.
I mean, there's a part toanything that you do
(08:45):
that has to do with tradecraft.
You're learning to play the piano.
You have to learn the, you know, the whiteand black keys, the squiggly lines
where your hands go, this is a mazurkaversus a Polynyas or whatever.
So the stuff you have to learnand the same is true for change.
One of the big issues
is organizations actually functionin some very rational ways.
(09:06):
All organizations.And this is my other favorite one.
No, the military's different.
No, it's not right.
It's not. And health care is different.
No, it's I mean, the last 5% is,but most of it exactly the same.
Not that's the science.
And you do have to learn that the art is.
What exactly are you seeing?
So let me give you some things about artthat almost all I think almost all leaders
(09:29):
get wrong. Number one,the problem's never the problem.
You come in, somebody tells youwhat the problem is.
It's never.The problem's like going to the doctor.
You know,
you read a web MD and you think, you knowwhat's wrong with this person's?
The more experience.
They've seen thousands of patientsand they actually went to medical school
and they they have they finessewhat the problem is.
And they understand that the problem issomething that kind of emerges.
(09:51):
That's art.
It's not science.
Second thing is the solution.
The people who get blown upfirst in change efforts
are those people have those things like gobig or go home.
I can't tell you in my 40 year career,all those guys go home.
They eventually go homebecause that's a gamble.
Most of us,the art is we sort of wade into it.
(10:12):
We figure stuff out as we go along.
As my colleague Bob Quinn says,you build the bridges, you walk over it.
So there's a lot of aspects to this
that are aspects that are intuitive,aspects
that you're learning along the way,aspects that experience brings into it.
That's art.
Anyone can figure out where your handsgo on the keyboard,
(10:33):
but not anyone could be a jazz improvimprovizational musician.
That's a special skill.
I love that. So,
the book is really about these paradoxes.
And before we get into the paradoxes, I'mgoing to let you pick the one that's
your favorite to talk about,and then I may pick one as well.
(10:53):
We'll just see how that all goes.
But I really want to talkfirst about the role of paradox
and change before we get intowhat they are specifically.
But why is paradox so important
to this art that we're talking about?
Paradox creates tensions and tensions.
We create generative energy, which isrequired to make anything better or new.
(11:17):
So if you don't have a paradox,if something is basically
just wrong, right,then step one is fix it.
If something is ambiguous,then step one is wade into it.
Figure out what it is.
If step one is it's a paradox.
We need to we need to both, cut costsand raise sales at the same time.
(11:38):
And how do we do that at the same time?
What's happening is inthat paradox is the very energy
that is requiredto get to a higher point of view,
a different point of view,a better point of view, not compromise,
not trying to solve for X,but trying to figure out how to use that
tense of energy.
So a great example is right nowin America,
(11:59):
everybody's going, oh,the the out of the world's new civil war.
It's not that at all.
The death of changing innovationis apathy.
When everything's overaligned, everybody agrees.
Everybody's happy with what they do.
Nothing moves.There's no reason to move it.
There's no energy.
When people have different ideasand they're good, there's good change
and there's bad change.
We don't want, you know, we don't wantanything bad happening, buddy.
(12:22):
But that tension, that paradox, provides
the actual energy that's going to requiredto make things better.
And you.
Yeah, I say to people all the timeto, to expect there
to be change without resistance is likeit's just not possible.
And the rise and resistance is ultimatelyjust energy to your, to your exact point.
And the more somebody resists somethingand this is important for your
(12:45):
for your listeners to understand this,the more somebody resists something,
the more they believe their protectsomething sacred.
The more somebody resists,the more they believe
they're protecting something sacred.
And that's why great changeagents are almost always invisible.
They're almost always peoplewho give credit to other people.
Right.
That's why because those people believedthey were protecting something sacred.
(13:07):
They gave up somethingthat was very important to them.
How do we accredit them with the changethat I made things better in New.
So. So how does that relate to the idea?
Kevin's already off script.
How does that how does that relateto the idea of facilitating change?
Because when
I think about the word facilitating,it simply just means to make it easier.
(13:30):
And that's what I heard you sayingjust now.
So do you use that phrase?
How does that phrase facilitating changerelate to the point you just made?
Jeff,
my work is basically based on a numberof other people's work through history.
You know, you're going to find Quinn's,
Bob Quinn's model of competing values,a large model of car composites.
Remember, I'm I'm at the Ross Schoolfor 36 years, so obviously my elders.
(13:53):
But the older brothershad an influence on me.
But my contribution is that there'screative power in constructive conflict.
I'm a huge believer that you have to putvery different ideas together in a room,
and the reason for that is when I startedstudying these innovation, what we call
creativity clusters,
what we noticed was that the only thingthat was really different about them,
(14:14):
which producedalmost all the electrical property
around the world,these big creativity clusters,
is that people have different ideas
and they know how to engagein these conflicts in a normative way.
So it's not personal,it's not prejudice, it's not destructive.
It's I'm challenging your idea.
So the first how it relates isthe first thing is you're
trying to actually createthe difficult conversation.
(14:37):
Or as I like to put it, the dinner party.
You put the two people that you doyou don't want.
The people are going to be nastyto each other,
but you do put the two people nextto each other who have different ideas,
and you kind of shake,shake the box a little bit
and you say,what are we going to get from there?
Now, if they're if they're purposeful,if they're really what they're really at
the intentionality of doing good things,they'll respect the other person.
(14:58):
But that idea will move forward.
And so that becomes the key of that.
That becomes the key.
Don't try and destroy the person.
They have a belief system.
And that's not why we're here.
Why we're here is to challenge an idea andto see if we can get that idea to grow.
And that growth will come by
us, by us both understandingthe other person's perspective
(15:22):
and seeing it from their lens, even if westill don't agree, right? Agree.
And we have to encounter the other,the other problem, the problem
with the internet and with social mediais it's an echo chamber.
All you know what,forget politics and religion.
You know, look at somebodywhose interest is all bands or something.
You know, they they believeall the same crap all of us do.
(15:44):
And you get the likes which are, you know,you get the, you know, adrenaline going.
Well, those people aren't very helpful.
You're not going to get to the next place.
A lot of times they're liking bad ideas.
The only way you're going to get tothe next place is you have to encounter
the loyal opposition with the conceptthat you're both
trying, or all of you are tryingto get to this better place.
(16:07):
So you talk.
We've been hinting at what you call
the paradoxical mindset challenge,but can you outline it
a little more specificallybecause it's sort of forms
the concept of the rest of the book.
And the idea is I want us to talk about.
So go ahead. And interrupt you. Sorry.
(16:27):
Yes. Covered that.
It really came from what I noticed aboutpeople who are able to deal with paradox.
And I think I'msomebody who's okay at that.
I'm pretty fluent in that.
Well, the first stepis we tell ourselves a lot of stories.
I don't know if you do it,but I do all the time.
And sometimes I tell them outloud to myself, right.
I'm like, TVA in Fiddler on the roof.
(16:48):
I'm always talking to myself about things,
and they tell the story to tell the storyand tell the story.
And a lot of times I'm looking forwhat's the right way to tell the story.
But a lot of times when I tell the storyto myself about something that happened,
I noticethere's something that doesn't quite fit.
It seems like there's thingsthat I normally don't do.
So let me give you an examplethat I've given the book I love trees,
(17:11):
I'm a tree guy and I live like a hobbiton the Huron River.
I'm surrounded by these 200 year oldtrees, trees everywhere, and I love them.
We had a terriblesnowstorm a few years back,
and a lot of the big trees losthuge limbs.
And I'm not talking about I'm
talking about limbsthat way, you know, three tons.
I mean, these are large trees.
Well,there were some trees, some apple trees,
(17:33):
some apple blossomsthat were going over my sunroom.
And while they're cutting downthese branches that needed to be cut down,
a guy asked me, do you cut this tree down?
Because I just wanted to trim it upso it didn't fall on the sunroom.
And in a moment I said, yeah,cut it down in the mini, cut it down.
I thought,oh my God, why did I do this right?
(17:54):
I love trees,I'm normally not, capricious like that.
So that would be a storythat I'd say there's a paradox.
I love trees,but I love them. Cut it down.
Well, the second step isyou got to find the paradox.
You tell a story and tell the story
and tell the story to findwhat's the paradox in here?
And that takes time.That's not easy to do.
(18:15):
If your listeners are trying to figure outhow to do this, I can tell you
the one area where almost everybody
gets to think about a relationshipthat you want it to work, that didn't.
It's a perfect way
to find them, because you'll findI thought it was this.
But these two things happen together,
and I couldn't quite figure outwhat was at the center of this.
Right.
Yeah. Well, that's part of the next piece.
(18:35):
The third piece.
What simple rulescan you divine from this?
What can I divine frommy let the guy cut the tree down,
or I asked the guy to cut the tree down.
When he asked me if I wanted to do it.
Well, the simple rule would be, you know,count to ten or ask your wife or,
you know, develop
a way to say, I give me 5 minutesor 10 minutes to go through this.
(18:55):
So that's, you know, it's a, it'sa, it's a little it's a little,
a littledevice, if you will, a cognitive device.
And then finally, what's the experiment?
Well, I tell in the book, you know,
we are out east one time with the familyand the car broke down.
This wasn't far after the tree.
Issue.
And now the issue became, do you know.
(19:17):
Oh, we got to fix your car,and it's going to cost $1 million.
And here's how we have to do it.
And you say, wait a minute.
What I'm going to dois I'm going to take I'm going to
try this step of giving myself some timeand looking at some alternatives.
And I did, and I found a verydifferent way to handle the problem.
So now all of a sudden, I'mable to make this change as a habit
because I was able to deconstructand reconstruct the paradox.
(19:41):
So that is how you encourage us
to think about the paradoxesthat that you outline in the book.
And I found myself as I was reading,
even just reading the titlesof the chapters
for each of the paradoxes,I found myself smiling, in some cases,
because those were things that I alreadyrecognized, those paradoxes,
(20:03):
and in other cases, things that like,okay, I want to learn more about those,
and I'd just like youto pick one of them to you.
Maybe it's one of your favorites.
Maybe it's the one that you just feel ledto talk about today.
Maybe it's the one that you find peoplegetting stuck on the most.
I don't care which one you pick,but, like, pick one of them,
(20:24):
to help us get an insightinto the art of change.
Number one and number two,to help us see how
this idea of paradox can help us as we'reguiding change.
Yeah.
One of my favoritesis we use facts to change people's minds.
But facts don't changepeople's minds, right?
And I'm around these really smart peopleall my life.
And, you know,
(20:45):
my wife will come home and she'll starttalking about how something was explained.
Remember, she's the coauthor of this book.
She's very my wife'sextremely intelligent.
Right.
And I'll have to stop her and say, yeah,but facts don't change people's minds.
So a perfect experiment.
You know, example of thatI think would be global warming.
I have,I do a lot of work around the country,
(21:07):
and you go to placesthey don't believe in it.
Well, what's happenedover time is some of these places have had
category four hurricanes.
Some of these places have hadtheir houses washed away.
Some of these placeslive up in the mountains,
and they've had fires that they couldn't
put out there, thingsthat didn't normally happen to them.
And we don't wish bad things on anybody.We wish good things.
(21:28):
Pray for good things,but these bad things happen to them.
And when the bad things happen to them,all of the sudden
they understoodbecause they had an experience.
Facts don't change minds. Experiences do.
And I want to point out to you,and I'm not trying to be controversial,
but I do start the book with my workon the Covid vaccine,
(21:49):
and one of the thingsthat was very difficult about that now
depends on whether you look at the JohnsHopkins study or the Brown study.
Right out of the first millionpeople who died in the United States, 25
to 40% of them died with the vaccineavailable to them.
Now, here's the point I'm trying to make.
I'm not trying to makea political statement at all.
I'm trying to make this statementwhat people believe is so powerful
(22:12):
that they're willing to diefor it, literally,
and that it is only through experiences.
And some people say storiesand other stuff.
I'm not sure that's even true.
I think people have to have an experience.
So what? What?
I suggest my suggestionis, rather than waiting to
somebody, has the terrible experience,let them have a small experience.
(22:32):
So this is my this is the father in me.
I have three children.
My wife and I have a very differentparenting style.
My wife style is don't dothat, don't do that.
She sounds like Minnie Mouse.
Don't do that, don't do that.
My style is hurt. Didn'tit hurt? Isn't it?
Yeah. Hurt didn't it?
What do we learn from this right now?
Don't get me wrong.
(22:52):
You don't let juniorgo play on the freeway. You go get them.
But the notion is,I think as parents and as leaders,
we have to have the abilityfor the people who are around us
to have some experience,hopefully limited.
Hopefully not bad.
We wish good things for people,
but have some experienceabout the upside and downside of,
(23:14):
what their thoughts are.
They have to somehow take their thoughtsand put them into the world.
Yeah.
So go back to your point about experiencesversus stories.
I think stories can can plant seeds,but I'm with you
that, or they can reinforce.
But ultimately it's got to bewhat I experienced.
Yeah. And that's really hard.
(23:35):
And it's really hard to watchsomebody skin up their knees.
It's really hard for somebody
to watch somebody botch a presentationthat could have been, you know, a deal.
It's hard.
But you also knowif we're trying to go forward
and if we're taking the long viewwith our children, our colleagues,
the people who were responsiblefor or responsible with babies,
by the way, putting it, if we have to,then we have to allow them
(23:57):
to develop through their experience,the same competencies that we have. Now.
I don't know, Kevin, aboutyour experience, but I've, I've worked
for some people who are not exactlythe nicest people in the world,
but I really learned a lotbecause one of the things
that they typically would do is they'dsay, okay, this is this is screwed up.
You're going to have a lot of fun
the next two nights, staying up all nightand trying to solve it.
(24:20):
Yeah, I'm going to try and figure it out.
Yeah.
One of the other paradoxes we're bumpingup against one of the other paradoxes,
which is I'mjust reading it so I get it right.
We attempt to avoid
failure, but all learning is developmentaland requires failure.
Like, how do we get therewithout the failure, right?
Like hearing about someone else'sfailure, to your point earlier is not
(24:41):
the same as is experiencingit ourselves, right?
Absolutely.
And all of a sudden I'mstarting to see books that are I've wrote
a book very early on, probably 30,40 years ago called Creativity at Work.
And, one of the thingsI try to point out in the book was that,
learning to change and innovateis inextricably linked to learning.
(25:03):
There's a learning that learning.
And it's the same thing
because and there's a wonderful bookby a colleague of mine, Dorothy, Leonard,
called Deep Smarts and her husband,Walter, super bright, deep smarts.
It's a brilliant book.
She she's retired.
She's a old Harvard professor, and she'sjust a old but retired Harvard professor.
(25:24):
And what I love about the book, that's.
All relative, by the way. Yeah, that's.
I know as I'm getting old,
what I love about the book,though, is she takes you through and says,
you know, look at here's here'show you develop actual tradecraft.
I did a program,
with, Twyla Tharp, years ago.
And I love her.
The great choreographer
(25:44):
and some of this young womangot up and said, well, how do you learn
to be a great choreographer?I'm trying to be a choreographer.
And Twyla Tharp said,what time do you get up?
And she said, oh, between 9 and 10.
She said, no, you get up at five.
And she said,and how are you learning about this?
So go to Google. No, you're.What's all this?
You haven't earned it.
She her point was you haven't had
(26:06):
you haven't gone through the the the the
the experience that you need to go throughin order to be able to really do this.
You haven't earned it.
Yeah, I love that.
So. So, let's go back.
I want to before we start to close up.
And I know that you and I couldgo a have a long conversation longer.
Maybe we will someday, but not necessarilyon camera slash microphone.
(26:29):
Because we can talk aboutall of these paradoxes.
They're all fabulous waysfor us to think in new ways.
And I'm talking with Jeff Graff,one of the two authors of the new book,
the Art of ChangeTransforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs.
And sobut I want to go back to the pandemic,
and I don't necessarilywant to talk about the vaccine
(26:52):
as much as that was a timewhen I think all of us now can have.
We had experiences with changerelated to the pandemic.
So, like, what are some thingsthat maybe we as leaders can take
from those
experiences that can help us with changesmoving forward?
Yeah. The first thing was,
(27:12):
there were two parts.I would say right off the bat.
First thing was when you don't know
what something is, don't immediatelyjump to here's the solution.
And that was the problem.
The problem waswhat's called the forward position problem
means there's a lot of ambiguity.And what we really need to do is hedge.
We really need to look at a diversityof ways of handling this problem.
We closed the box too early, right.
(27:33):
So all of us, there was a lot ofother things that could have been done.
And we saw this in some small places.
That's the first thing that could havebeen could have been learned.
Don't be so certain.
You know what things are right beforeyou know what they are.
And then the second thing is thatwhich I think goes along with this,
is that anything that's worth learningreveals itself over time.
So you're going to change your mind.
(27:54):
And people who said, well, you know,I can't believe we did this
and we did this and we did.
I'm like, well,we did. We had incomplete information.
That's how it all make sense backward.But it. Is. Yeah.
I'm like, you know,and you know, any fool can do that.
The notion is as you're going forward,you have to adjust
based on what's going on.
And that was the whole thing.
And once we got to that point,and once we got to that point,
(28:17):
sort of collectively, did you notice howquickly everything went all of a sudden?
We were good at this. Right?
But boy, it took about six monthsor seven months of,
you know, and hang on, this is the way wethis is the way we sort this out,
you know, so that that I thinkis what we really could take from it.
And I think the biggest thingthat we could take from it
(28:38):
is that change is inevitable.
If you read about pandemics or wars
or natural resource, you can read about itin studies, you can read about Herod.
It's the Bible. You pick it.
The human condition, the basics.
The centerpiece of the humancondition is change.
It's not something that happens to us orthe homeostasis that we believe we have.
(28:58):
That's the part that we're imagining.
The world is in flux. We are in flux.
That is the key to the whole thing.
Understanding the dynamics.
It's not so much the structure, it'sthe dynamics that make the difference.
Allah states it's not homeostasis.
There we go. Very good. You're right.
You're right.
So but no one wants to talk about thatbecause they talk about so.
(29:20):
So listen, Jeff, is there anything I mean,there's lots more we can talk about,
and and I hope everyone goesgets a copy of the book and all of that.
But is there anything we didn't talk aboutas this unfolded that you wish
we would have or or looking backnow, you wish I would have asked?
Well, I think the one thing I would just,I would just say is
(29:40):
our people,people can't change other people.
That the one thingI think that I'd like your listeners
to take away from thisis that the journey starts with you
and you know whether or notyou can affect another person.
I mean, think about it.I've been married for a long, long time.
How well is that little changegoing? Right.
You know, so the notion is the notion is
how is ityou're, keeping track of your own journey?
(30:04):
How is ityou're keeping track of your own growth?
Right. That'sthe one thing that you can actually do.
That's the thingI'd really like to emphasize on that.
And we're all works in progress.
Forgive yourselffor the things that don't work
a lot of them,and forgive yourself for the hypocrisy.
I'm a terrible hypocrite this way.
I sit in the same seats in the stadiumI've sat in for 40 years.
I drive the same carI've driven for 15 years.
(30:24):
People always ask me,why don't I change what to me?
I don't want to change it.
So there are certain things in lifethat you want to change in certain ways.
Life that you don't want to change. It'snot a problem.
It just has to work for you and the peoplearound you that you love and care about.
Yeah, I love that.
So a couple of other things before we go,kind of shifting gears, I'd love to know.
(30:46):
Jeff, what is it that you do for fun?
Well,
you know, I travel a lot.
I'm one of those almost 3 million mileguys on, Delta Airlines alone.
But one of the things that's fun is,because I have a life
that's very much like a Federal Expresspackage around the world.
I'll take an afternoon or a day off.
And I love to, really immerse myselfwith the culture,
(31:09):
eat food, go to their temples,go to sporting events.
I love sporting events.
My wifenow goes with me to a lot of these things.
So the first thing is that I really likethere's a hobby is
just really, really embrace the world.
Okay.
The only thing you knew I was going to askyou is this.
(31:31):
What are you reading these days, Jeff?
Well, I just read the book abundance.
I really liked it.I recommend it to people.
I disagree with the partabout the Covid vaccine,
but that'sjust because I lived through it.
There's a good book called The ShotThat Saved the World by,
Zuckerman of the Wall Street Journal.
I think a little better,treatment of that.
But, I'm reading a book about the SevenWonders of the Ancient World by Bethany.
(31:55):
I can't remember her last name.
She's the BBC lady, and it's fascinating.
I like history,and I really think that history gives,
really doestell us a lot about the human condition.
More thana lot of people want to recognize.
Yeah, in my opinion. So,
tell peoplewhere they can reach out to you,
(32:16):
where they can connect with you,where they can get the book.
Where do you want to point?
I think the easiest thing to do is I'mone of the original LinkedIn influencers.
So if you go to LinkedIn,
you look for me on LinkedIn,Jeff de Graaf, you'll find me.
You can also find me a
a graph.com, but I think it'd be easierjust to contact me on LinkedIn.
That's the best way to do it.
And and I'm also like hearing from peopleabout, you know, I disagree with this.
(32:38):
Those are my favorite ones.Or have you thought about this?
This might go a sitesslightly different direction.
I'm really this is the professor.
I mean, I really like that.
Let's get, you know, let's let's,what are the young people say?
Chop it up. Let's chop it up.
You can chop it up.You can do it at LinkedIn.
You go to Jeff siggraph.com.
You can go to Art of changedot net. There's websites.
Oh yeah. Yeah you can do Art of change.Not not yet. That works too.
(33:01):
All right, all right.
So before we go, before
I let Jeff go and before I let all of yougo before this ends, I want to ask
all of you the questionthat I ask every single episode.
And the question is simply this. Now what?
What will you do nowthat you've heard this conversation?
What insights do you take from this?
(33:21):
But that's not really it.
It's not really the idea.
But what are you going to do with the ideathat matters?
I took a bunch of notes for me.
But the question is, what did you takefrom this that you will apply?
Because until you do that,this isn't nearly as valuable,
as it, as a
as using this as a collector ofinformation is one level, using this as a,
(33:45):
as a spurto or an inspiration to action is,
I think, ultimatelywhat both of us would prefer for you,
and it's ultimatelywhat will make this most valuable for you.
So Jeff, thanks so much for being here.
I've been looking forward to it.
We had a bit of a fit and startbefore we got here.
I'm so gladwe finally got the chance together.
Thanks for having me on andthanks to your listeners for having me on.
And thanks for the remarkable leadershipfor having me on. Thanks, guys.
(34:07):
All right, everybody.And so I hope you enjoyed it.
If you did, make sure you're subscribedwherever you're watching,
you're listening.So don't miss any future episodes.
Make sure you tell somebody elseto join us as well, because that's
a part of leadership is helpingothers move in positive direction.
Hope you'll do that.
Hope you'll be back next week
for another episodeof the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.
Thanks, everybody.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.