Changing Culture by Design: Activating Early Adopters to Shift Mindset and Momentum

Right. Well, welcome everybody. We are going to get started. If you are here today and you have the ability to turn your camera on, turn it on and smile at us, we would love to see you Keep that chat open as well. If you've not put your location in the chat.

Go ahead and put the, open up your chat, put your location in there. You can even tell us how warm or how cold it is in your current location. Henry's leading the way at 77 degrees right now. I think John's, I would say losing at 20 something degrees, but we're going to get our day up and started. Keep that chat open.

We'll be using it a bunch. If this is your first time attending a Beyond Limitss, welcome. My name is Kevin Sp, I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute, and we do this session on the first Friday of every month. Raise your hand or put a thumbs up or something in the chat if you have been here before, if this is something where you have seen us before. Perfect.

Hello to everybody who's waving back at me. If anybody wants to jump in and give the spiel at this point, you are welcome to. But I'll, uh, I'll do my very best. Now we do this first session on, uh, this session on the first Friday of every month. We're trying to get leaders together like yourself in a setting like this for about 55 minutes or so.

We're going to try to share with you some of the things that we are seeing that are going on with our clients that are going on in the world and share with you our approach to addressing those types of things through the lens of cognitive psychology and high performance. So what we're ultimately saying is the world has been telling us something. This came out last year and there was a repeat article this year that doubled down on the exact same information. If you read through the World Economic Forums Future Jobs report, you saw that there was some really glaring information going on in the world right here in front of us. The takeaway messages from that really interesting 270 page document was this, most job skills, right, 40% almost of job skills are going to be obsolete or drastically transformed in the next four years.

That's a pretty big shift. And the most important part of that is it's referring to white collar jobs. So don't think that this is just going to be the robots that are replacing this is the things like AI and some of the other automations that are coming into play that are going to tell us that what we've done in the past that has led us to being successful, 40% of those skills are not going to be valuable anymore. So those are going to be like the skills that I had when I was a little kid. Like my ability to shoot spitballs was really good when I was in eighth grade, but I grew out of that skillset.

The world evolved around me, and that's what's going to happen to a lot of us if we don't adapt our skills moving forward. Employers, those of us that are in the business of employing others are looking for this. 85% of the companies out there are saying they're prioritizing upskilling. So not hiring Steven for what he's done, what he's been good at, but instead hiring for what he is capable of doing in the future. Hiring for potential. Those of us that are parents out there, we understand the object and the idea of looking at somebody and seeing potential.

So this is exactly what employers are doing as well. So the takeaway message is this, self-efficacy, your belief in your own ability to cause change around you is the number one most crucial factor in the evolving workforce. In other words, if you're going to be successful moving forward, it's more valuable that you have the skillset of believing in yourself than it is that you've developed skills over the course of your career. Second part of that is resilience, flexibility, agility. These are going to be the components that separate people from the growing roles versus the ones that are declining.

We saw some news recently that a very large company did a 40% layoff fairly recently. Those individuals need to recognize that resilience, flexibility, and agility are going to be the keys to them moving forward in the future workforce, not the skills they had, but the ones that they're going to develop. So this quote might as well come from our backbone from 54 years ago when this organization started. Beliefs, shape behavior. People who believe in their ability to learn and adapt and their team's ability to learn and adapt are going to be the ones that thrive.

So that's what the world is telling us. That's what we are seeing. And if you've been to these sessions before, I'm going to ask for all of you to now tell me something. Put it in the chat, shout it out loud. This is my favorite part of these sessions.

This is where we tell me something good. What I want is anything that's shown up good in your world, I want you to turn on the awareness, put it in the chat. I will go first. My daughter competed for the first time in discus yesterday through a big, fat, heavy Frisbee, 46 and a half feet. It was the highlight of my day.

Jeff says his grandson has been here for a week. That's something good and heck, that's something great. What else? What are our something goods? Let's turn our awareness onto the positivity in the world. 10 hour meditation course.

Nick, I hope you're breathing deeply. Richard, now that you've joined, feel free

to chime in if you catch any here. Well, I'm just going to add my own Richard in his funk band playing all over the place. That's a heck of a routine. Brian, congratulations. So why do we do this?

Why do we do this? We do this because it doesn't take any time at all, right? Okay, if I belabor this, it'll take us two minutes. And as we sit here and we read through the things that are showing up on the screen, it reminds us that even though we're in a virtual workplace, there's a bunch of human beings here with beating hearts on the other side of these screens. And it doesn't take that long to just be a human being for a couple of minutes, Kevin, Can I make a, can I make a point about that?

One thing that I noticed was that it took 20 seconds or so for people to get active. So we asked you tell me something good. And notice that it was like, woo. What were the emotions going through your head as you, am I going to put myself out there? Oh, there's nothing really that good going on.

It's just the plain old regular stuff that's happening. Why should it be so hard for us to talk about things that are going good in our lives? I ask you no need to answer. Thanks for contributing back to you. In case you want an answer to that question, Lou Tyce would say that we human beings, we have bad weather brains and that we've evolved through a lot.

So we have a natural tendency to see those negatives first. And that's just your brain looking out for what it thinks is your wellbeing. But we turn that reticular activating system, our raz on to something good on purpose so that we can try to focus what are the good things that are happening and we open up those neuro pathways. Hopefully we can hijack some of those good positive emotions that we're feeling after these meditation routines and kids going back to school after being sick and running a 5K and all these other things. Let's hijack some of that dopamine and bring it into the rest of our day because that is the cornerstone of a high performance culture.

And that's exactly what we're trying to talk about. How many people here have had some sort of a culture initiative take place in their work sometime in the past five years, some sort of a culture change initiative. We see a lot of those taking place. And we want to define what we mean by culture because we want to be real clear when we're talking about culture that we do not mean your social culture. You might have a wonderful social culture where everybody meets for happy hour, where everybody sings karaoke, where your Christmas party is amazing, you got a ping pong table in your break room and you send people on trips every time they win a sales contest.

But that's not the same as a high performance culture, right? That's a system of rewards. What we're talking about is shared leadership philosophies and belief systems that drive consistent and regular behavioral norms around execution, accountability and other metrics. Other things that are important. A high performance culture is one that's setting the expectation about what the organization has the potential to do and the expectation that each person is going to have the belief systems and the behavioral norms.

So what is expected around here moves to high execution, high accountability, and the other important metrics. If you raised your hand before about that culture change initiative, you've probably seen a lot of announcing, has anybody ever seen a culture change initiative in an organization? And it felt like it was a marketing campaign. You saw the big new banner up on the wall. We're doing this thing, we're rolling it out, everybody.

Guess what we believe now? All of us together. And you know what everybody said behind the scenes with that little voice that runs between their right ear and their left is self-talk. Yeah, nice try. Because you can't force a belief, right?

So it's not designed to be a marketing campaign. That's not how this is going to work. You can't just put beliefs up on the wall and expect people to act like that. It can't be mandated. Beliefs are optional.

I can't force you to believe in the tooth fairy. I can make it a requirement, but I can't force you to actually believe that putting a tooth under your pillow results in money. So the best thing that leaders can do is model it. In order for this to work, there has to be some way to model that. So here's our first chance to use the chat.

Let's go ahead and open up the chat. Think of a time when you saw a really great organizational team or culture. Go ahead and put in the chat. What did you see? What were the actions?

What did you see in that really good organizational team or culture that stood out to you? Give everybody about a minute or so to put some answers in there. Ooh, answers are coming in already. Modeling change, encouraging growth and collaboration. I love Stacey's answer.

Clear goals. Humans like that. Clarity. Yeah. And that one's about performance culture too, right?

Like there's a part of culture, which is modeling. There's a part like Steve said, which is supporting,

encouraging, but clear goals than talking about them all the time. Yeah. See a few extra trickling in here. I love that. Seahawks leadership from the top down is engaged in belief.

Starts with a team. First one, Pete Carroll started that. Who is a TPI disciple? Great. Not only did he use that with the Seahawks, he that with the uh, USC when they won national championships prior to that modeling is very, very important.

Sue man, again, around clarity, the culture of clarity. We knew what were trying to accomplish. Imagine that. There's that James Baldwin quote that I love that talks about modeling that children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but have never failed to imitate them. The exact same thing could be said of true of employees.

You model the behavior that you want people to exhibit. It's really easy for humans to do the old fashioned monkey see, monkey do. So modeling is a really common answer. They're coming in quick. Richard, am I missing any of them?

There's really good stuff here. Listen, I understand not to respond. Is that easy or hard? It's easy if you say it's hard, it's hard. I saw you, Stacy, You and Henry Ford have that in common, my friend.

So we know what it feels like when it's off to. We're really, really good at perception. Human beings are wonderful at perception. We've always had this ability to figure out what's going on in the world without saying anything, just by feeling it. Just like we can tell when it's humid outside without being able to see it.

We know what that feels like. We know what culture being off feels like as well. And it's not about the words that are said because those are just the things that get written on the wall that end up in the trash can. So it's about what people actually experience. It's about what they go through themselves.

It's about what they feel, right? So much of our memory is tied to our emotions that even when we put those feelings into how we think we're going to feel, it's like putting a future memory in place. It's all about the story we tell ourselves. If you're a Brene Brown fan, you know exactly what we're talking about and the story that you tell yourself. And as soon as you tell yourself that story, it's true.

We believe the things that we tell ourselves more than the things that our friends tell us more than the things we read, more than the things we see. So what I want to know is what's the opposite of that coin? We've got a really good thermometer inside of us. How do we take the temperature? How can we tell when something is off, when it's disconnected or misaligned?

What makes it feel that way? I'm not excited about what I'm going to see in the chat, but let's see it anyway. I like Curtis's answer. It's real simple. Poor communication.

And if we broke that into categories, we could probably pull that into 15 different things. I like Michelle's answer too. Just a gut feeling. I don't know man. I can just tell in communication, showing up a lot.

Broken trust, disengagement or lack of participation in meetings from Randy. That's a good one. Sue Goodwin meetings after the meetings, the real meeting, right? I like that one. Also, when senior management doesn't know what's going on, what is going on in that backseat?

Ooh, Henry, that's a good one. Raise your hand if you've ever seen something like that where people kind of use a bit of sarcasm to describe those company values on the wall, right? We've turned the company name into a 16 letter acronym that describes our values. Thank you for laughing along. So this is where we end up.

This is what happens a lot that that image look familiar to anybody. We've got this big culture change initiative sitting in the trash can kind of like dental floss works really well when you use it. Doesn't do a whole lot in the drawer or the trash can.

And that's what happens with a lot of these initiatives. So we get these questions, we get these questions a lot. How do you change culture? How do you change your performance culture? You talking about it all the time?

You do these Beyond Limits every month. Kevin and Richard, what the heck do you do to change a culture? And we're not talking about just tweaking it like, oh, little tiny changes or temporary changes and not just discuss it, not just announce important culture change initiative, but actually make some sort of a change. First we have to recognize that humans are the ones cha making the change. So we need to follow how humans adapt.

And what research has shown is that culture change and humans changing their behavior, it follows the exact same pattern as the innovation adoption when people adopt things like technology. So it spreads when belief becomes more visible. And we'll go into details about this in a second. It multiplies when there's social proof when everybody else is doing it and it sticks when there's enough trust in place to make sure. So my question is for you, what usually helps you decide a new idea, a new way of working, a new anything.

This could be the decision to use an iPhone or to use AI or to start using a virtual assistant. Whatever the case may be. What do you need? What has to be true for you to make a change? Give everybody a couple of minutes here, Heather, with an answer from the top rope on the first one.

Great answer. How will this benefit me? That's a human being answer. If I've ever seen one Cheryl with another version of it, believe it's worth it. Some utility answers there.

Resources. Keep me honest, Richard, these are coming in faster than I can read 'em. Lot of info. A Think about when you bought your first iPhone, what caused you to do that? That's a change, that big decision.

Hold on, I have to type on the screen. There's no buttons. What? That was definitely a loss. So we know that there needs to be some components in place.

We want to talk a little bit more about what those components are. We want to level set a bit though that innovation is not just technology, okay? It's easy to understand with technology, but this is all change. This can be, innovation can mean anything at all that just feels new or requires you to have a different belief, a different kind of behavior an action, a different way of leading. I'll just pick something random like an overall transition to a high performance culture, AKA.

What we do here, these are the types of innovations that are going to cause people to have this adoption curve that I'm about to explain. So I'm going to use the reference of an iPhone because the iPhone came out back in 2006. Did anybody here own an iPhone one? The original one, it was like the size of a tissue box. And in order to get that, you had to be a pretty early adopter.

So this curve that I'm going to explain here explains how change spreads over time. And since we've all kind of seen the iPhone spread over over the time to end on the, what are we on the 17 now for? Crying out loud, there were those initial innovators. Those are those people like Richard who decided, you know what? I am a technology person.

This is who I am. I'm going to go get this device. It's this computer in my pocket. They waited in line overnight and they paid, be honest, Richard, too much for it. And then they used it for a while.

They worked out all the kinks and they made it so that the rest of some of us, people maybe like myself, who are some of the early adopters who weren't about to get that first one, maybe not quite ready to get that first iPhone. But when the iPhone three came out, because they were so cool that they skipped the two, when the iPhone three came out, were willing to go get it then. And being willing to try it. We just weren't willing to to work out all the kinks that Richard and some of the others were. And then after a while, we started having a little bit better pictures on Facebook than everybody else.

'cause we had our phone with us all the time.

And suddenly we started realizing that there were more people around that had what looked like spaghetti was dangling out of our ears as we put on our white apple headphones. And we started seeing more and more people showing that, you know what, this starts to feel a little bit okay. And this is when things really start to shift because that's when we started realizing that text messages show up in different colors if we don't have that one anymore. It started to feel like it was wrong to not have an iPhone anymore. And the very last ones are just the folks that are left that are absolutely never going to make a change until they absolutely have to.

So if were talking about use of the internet instead of use of an iPhone, these would be the people that were just itching to still send faxes or ask their assistant to print out all those emails so that they could read them the old fashioned way. There's nothing wrong with being a laggard, it just means that you're at the tail end of things and you're not part of the cultural shift. You're part of the cultural anchoring. So for you, when change shows up, when you're in your workplace and you're looking at a chart like this where we see the progression from innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority in the laggards, where do you think you fall when it comes to culture change? Where do you think your team falls?

Where do you think that might land? I, I think one of the easy themes we're going to pick up right away is that folks recognize that they fall on a different place than other people around them. L curve. It should work that way. What do you think we're seeing the most of?

Richard? I'm seeing a lot of early adopters. Yep. Fair number of folks that are considering themselves to be innovators. I will tell you, if you truly are in that two and a half percent and you are an innovator, it's frustrating, isn't it?

Constantly trying to get people, come on, come on, don't worry. We're going to talk about what to do if you're one of those innovators. In fact, we're going to talk about what to do if you're any one of these. So along the way, when it comes to thinking about a culture shift transition, there needs to be a tipping point in this chart. They call it the chasm, and it's located right there.

You ever notice when you're looking to make a change, there's this tipping point where suddenly everybody had an iPhone, suddenly everybody was using chat, GPT, suddenly everybody had an electric car. There's this pivot point that takes place and it happens right between where the early adopters and the early majority are right at about that 15, 16% mark is where it really starts to stall. And it's not because there's anything wrong with the change, and it's not because the new thing isn't better. It's not because the iPhone wasn't better than the flip phone and that AI wasn't better than the internet and all these other things. It's because it's not fully trusted.

And people haven't fully understood what the benefits are to them. And I can see Cheryl using it, but I just can't necessarily see if I could use that in my life. And until it reaches that point, it's hard for the majority to shift. It's hard to get the weight to the other side of that tipping point and have a full scale transformation. So what are some examples of this?

Where have you seen this happen in the past? A good idea, but it got a little momentum, but it lost it before it could take hold. Who's got some examples? This can be anything technology, this can be work initiatives, anything at all. Vivo is a great answer.

I see this in startup companies a lot.

You know, how about WeWork? I mean that one kind of took hold fully and then just fell apart. Yeah, Maybe that's a little bit more of an implosion. I was thinking something like Netflix, you know, or, or, uh, blockbuster is what I meant. Um, but even those guys, I mean they were the dominant folks.

And then this disruptive change happens. One thing that's interesting about this model as you guys are thinking about this, is if you study disruptive, change, disruptive technology, right? Often the thing that comes into replace the old thing, it way underperforms in the features that you thought mattered. It's just really good at one thing. So an example of that is, um, back in the eighties, everyone was walking around with these enormous beat boxes, these huge music producer things, right?

So you could play music and guess what? It was loud and it was cool and everybody around you had to suffer your music, whatever that was. And those things really developed. And then Sony came out with this thing called a Walkman. And it's totally different.

It's like horrible for that use case, but it performs really well in another use case, which is private personal listening to music. And as that, and it wasn't even like a really good sound, right? Kind of crummy headphones and all that other stuff. But as that develops, then Apple steps in and you get iPods and suddenly like there's this whole revolution. But those things did not perform well against the sort of the evaluative dimensions of the beatbox at all, right?

That happens a lot. So the folks that are the innovators and early adopters, they're often saying things like, you know what these features that everyone cares about, they're not as important as this one other thing. And then over time though, those features kind of get built back. It's a really interesting, um, thing that happens all the time. Are you going to explain why DVDs, uh, took off, but laser disc didn't?

Is that part of our next session? Yeah, I'm that one. I haven't, uh, looked into very carefully. Um, it's A choice though. I mean it's, uh, Richard didn't even know this slide was coming.

It was just a nice little setup. A choice, right? The decision to adopt to a new idea is a choice. You're deciding, am I going to participate in this change movement? Am I going to buy this new thing?

Am I going to become a different person who does this now? Just like when we become a different person that says, you know what, I do yoga now, that's who I am. So adopters are choosing to try something new and they're choosing for themselves if it's worth the risk. So another version of the same question we asked before, how do you decide if a new approach we're trying to do something in a different way is worth it? How do you really decide if it's worth it?

What are the key components for you? I'm going to float some random answers in there. A lot of answers coming in now. I like the testimonials. Answer, proof that somebody else has liked it enough to say.

So potential for increased efficacy is good. Does it add value to my life? Very honest, good answer. Does it create growth? Is it challenging?

That's a fun one. How hard is it to start? Hmm, What does failure look like? What does success look like? Does it align with me?

Good stuff here. I want to put a few up on the screen that research has found. I think just about everybody who put an answer in the chat, put one of these clarity. Is it clear? What does it actually look like using this?

If I start using this iPhone, what does it actually look like? Cool, I've got all my music in my pocket and it's a phone and I look cool. All right, clarity time. How long has this been going on? When did the iPhone first come out?

When did AI first start? How long ago did we start this culture change initiative? How much time has gone since it's started so that we can just get comfortable with this new concept trust, which comes in about a thousand different forms. But do you actually feel a level of trust, safety, and security with making that choice? And as we mentioned before, social proof.

Does everybody else have the iPhone? Am I going to be able to get this thing fixed?

All of these are the factors that are helping the idea of carrying adoption forward. Taking the idea of saying, we want a new initiative, we want a different way of thinking or believing. And as a result, a way of behaving, these are the components that help carry that forward. So if you think about change initiative, what gives it wheels is clarity, time, trust, and social proof. And when it turns into that tipping point, when people cross over that chasm, when we move from those early adopters to early majority and we reach that 50% point, and we finally start to feel the momentum shifting from one side of the scale to the other, it happens when enough people adopt, right?

We need to get to that weighted point where we cross that threshold. The belief needs to move from optional to normal. It needs to become the new way of doing thing and the expected behavior changes. So what we are supposed to do and what is expected of me begins to change. And when you can start to look at a scenario and say, how I'm supposed to behave in this environment is different than how I was supposed to envi behave in this environment yesterday.

When you say the new normal behavior is expected of me and that happens to be in the right direction, that's the tipping point. That's the exact point. When what is expected goes from obscure, what you've got your music on your phone, you've got spaghetti sticking out of your ears, you don't have any buttons to, this is now the norm where absolutely everybody has headphones in their ears. Everybody has their phone in their pocket, everybody has a touchscreen. It becomes the new normal.

So I'm going to play a quick little video. Some of you've probably seen this before if you haven't, what we're going to be watching is a three minute video that talks about how you can start a movement. And we're going to watch a movement get started over the course of three minutes. Now this is filmed at a music festival and I think it was filmed by a person in a couple instances who might have been jumping on a trampoline. So I apologize if the video's a little bit jumpy, but what I want you to really think about is where's the adoption happening?

What is taking place as you're watching this? And then we'll unpack it a little bit. If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen. Start to finish in under three minutes and dissect some lessons. First, of course, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous.

But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow. Now here comes the first follower with a crucial role. He publicly shows everyone else how to follow.

Notice how the leader embraces him as an equal. So it's not about the leader anymore, it's about them plural. Notice how he's calling to his friends to join in. So he takes guts to be a first follower. You stand out and you brave ridicule yourself.

Being a first follower is an underappreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire. Now here's the second follower. This is a turning point.

It's proof the first has done well. Now it's not a lone nut, and it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news. A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader.

Everyone needs to see the followers because new followers emulate followers, not the leader. Now, here come two more people than three more immediately. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. And now we have a movement.

As more people jump in, it's no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there's no reason not to join in now. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, and they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry. And over the next minute, you'll see the rest who prefer to stay part of the crowd because eventually they'd be ridiculed for not joining. And ladies and gentlemen, that is of how a movement is made.

So let's recap what we've learned. If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement. Not you be public, be easy to follow. But the biggest lesson here, did you catch it? Leadership is over glorified.

Yes, it started with the shirtless guy and he'll get all the credit. But you saw what really happened. It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader. There's no movement without the first follower. See, we're told that we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in. Be honest, how many of you were itching to just join in and start dancing like an idiot? I, I can't watch it without bobbing my head along a little bit. But as as goofy as it is, I think the lessons are really, really strong. Um, before I put some of the lessons up on the screen, I'm just curious, uh, if you want to put it in the chat, what are some of the things that stood out?

There's a lot of positives in here. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody picked up something we missed. But what are some of the takeaways that you heard from our, uh, shirtless dancing guy? Yeah, I agree. Every time I watch it, I'm like, really?

He's going to get every single one of these people to join in. But Cheryl says, the importance of the first follower support starts culture. I love that Steve. Yeah. How important that first follower is something about wearing sunscreen.

Very good. Very important. It's really important. We had a lot of people here who answered that they felt like they were innovators, which means there's a lot of people here that have felt like the shirtless dancing guy before and know exactly what it's like to feel like you're the only one doing something. But if you take a leadership lesson from this, it's the, the shirtless dancing guy got the, got the movement started and he stuck with it.

And he did it by himself for a while. And there was high levels of persistence. But you also need to be easy to follow. Was he doing anything complicated? Was there anything to it?

It catches on faster than line dancing because there's no rules. You don't have to do it any particular way. Just go act like an idiot. So we made it easy to follow. You've gotta embrace and nurture those first followers.

So instead of turning it into a competition, when somebody came and danced with shirtless dancing guy, he made it about the other person. He passed the baton and said, no longer am I the dancing idiot. Now it's about you. One of the really important parts of that is followers follow other followers, not the leader. So if you don't nurture those other followers, you don't show other people how they're supposed to follow.

And as a leader, that's hard because that takes you off stage. And as the guy who's holding the microphone right now, I know how hard that is to do. But in order to be a good leader, you need to be easy to follow. And that means you need to be public. You need to be visible, and you need to make it so that if Brian's going to be my first follower, I make sure that he and I are equals on day one, so that people understand when you show up and you become a follower here, you're embraced.

So I love one of the takeaway message leadership is over glorified. The shirtless guy's going to get all the credit for it. But really the one who needs to be getting credit is the first person who showed up and said, I'm comfortable following. I'm going to go ahead and help everybody else see what a new normal can be around here. And when you do that, it becomes about the movement and not about the leader.

By the time the video is done, we can't even see shirtless dancing guy. Mm-hmm. He's the star, but we can't see him at all anymore because it's all about the movement. And the vast majority of people that joined that movement probably never saw shirtless dancing guy at the beginning. They just saw what was happening.

But without the first follower, there is no movement. Nothing is going to happen without a first follower. That same thing is shirtless dancing guy by himself. And we've all seen it happen before, but without the importance of that first follower and somebody who's brave enough to say, you know what? I'm going to go do this same darn thing and show others that it's safe movements don't happen.

And we wouldn't get a chance to laugh at this crazy video. So first followers are early adopters. It's the same darn thing, right? It's not necessarily the innovator. Yes, you might be the innovator, but if so, you need to work on getting your first follower.

If you're not the innovator, then have the courage to be the first follower. Because they're not just agreeing. I'm not just telling Randy, oh, it's a great idea, man, let's go along with it. It's modeling it. It's going out there and showing others, not just saying, Hey, shirtless dancing guys doing the right stuff.

I swear it's going out there and modeling it yourself, showing other people, here's my ridiculous dance moves. They normalize it and do it on an ongoing basis. They invite others to come join in along the way. And it's super visible. It's not behind closed doors, it's out in the front.

So to get across that chasm, it's really about making it

interesting enough so that that extra 35%, the one that's up here that says, Hmm, that looks interesting, is it for me, starts to recognize there's a lot of social proof, there's a lot of trust, there's a lot of good going on. I can see myself in this replacement picture. So let's see some answers in the chat. Who is someone that others naturally watch or follow in the organization? This is either an innovator a first follower, but who gets watched?

You can call it by a role or a name if you want to call somebody out. But who gets watched in organizations? Yep. CEOs get watched, principals get watched, presidents gets watched. You work in sales.

How about top producers, executives, directors, leaders? A challenge that I would have for everybody as a take home challenge would be, if a new initiative started tomorrow and you needed to go recruiting first followers, who would you recruit in your organization? If you were going to be shirtless dancing guy, who would be your first person, the guy in the uh, the olive green shirt to come follow along with you? So as we said before, culture's going to move through trust and social proof, right? Those are going to be the, the, the safety.

Those are the, uh, the lily pads to leap across. 'cause people are not going to copy messages, they just don't. But they are going to copy people. So if you can get people to live and act those messages, right? If there'd been a banner at that festival that just said, come dance like an idiot, come dance like an idiot, come dance like an idiot.

That is not the same thing. To copy as somebody who's out there saying, look, this is okay to do. I can act like an idiot. So if there's trust and they believe that they can do that, act safely. There's no limit on what people will do to fit into a group.

So who would really need to model a new behavior for it to feel real and believable? So it's not going to be the CEO anymore. It's not going to be the executive director the president. Who's going to be the first follower? Who's going to really be the first person that starts to follow along?

This'll be probably a different answer in every organization. This doesn't mean that it's the vice president if it's the president, but it's going to be different in every organization. Who are the people that get followed? Sometimes it's going to be the top sales folks, sometimes it's going to be the head of hr, sometimes it's going to be the social folks. But in each organization, that's the kind of dissection that you want to think about is who do we get to be those early adopters?

Like Cheryl says, who do we get to be the first followers that the equivalent of when the new trend started in high school, we all know there was a couple popular kids. They weren't necessarily class president or anything else, but others would emulate what they're doing. That's how your culture shifts, is the equivalent of who are those quote popular kids. So in order to shift a culture, you don't have to shift everyone. It feels like it's going to be really, really difficult.

And if you tried to go out there and make the entire festival, start doing that all at once, it'd feel really frustrating. And if you looked at this like it was a initiative, it has a lot of failure. Early on, nobody joined in. There was only two people, there was only three, there was only five. And we really started getting excited when there was like eight, 10 or 12, and that's when the floodgates opened.

So all you really need is the right few. You just strategically need to find the right individuals who believe that this is the new way of doing things. That yeah, let's do this. I'm going to go dance like a goofball who are actually going to live it with them who go arm in arm and go, yeah, this is a good idea. I, I think Aaron is crazy, but you know what?

I'm going to be crazy with him. That opens the door for creating trust. Now, once you've hit that 50% part, you've started to reach that level of trust. And that late majority starts looking around going, wait a minute, if I don't start dancing, I'm not going to fit in anymore. If I don't do this thing that was different, I'm now different.

And I really like fitting in. And once you reach that point, you got 80 some odd percent of your organization and you have yourself a full scale culture shift taking place. Hopefully you'll get those lage to come along. But who can help you? Who can help you create early momentum for a culture shift on your team?

This is where you really think about who you can recruit

that if we're going to decide, we've always said that Red was the best, but we've decided we're going to be blue. Who's going to live it on your organizations? And with that, you can start thinking about creating that momentum. The only thing that stopped the momentum in the Dancing guy video is that they stopped the stinking music. I'm sure they started another song and they would've gotten even more going, but that momentum had to get started.

And I love at the end when they pan up the hill and you just see this wall of humans come running down, because that's what momentum is. That's the snowball that started as a tiny little snowball that now takes out a car at the bottom of the hill. Hmm. So it's the results. People saw others having fun.

Hey, look at that. It looks like it's going okay. And you look at that, you're not getting made fun of for doing that new thing. So the risk factor went away, being visible, built confidence. You could see it.

It was out in front of everybody. It was something where everybody could pay attention to what was going on. And understand there is safety in doing this. There's safety in numbers and the trust and the social proof started to accelerate it. And that's what went from like a little bit of a movement of eight or 10 or 12 people to suddenly there was a mosh pit of idiocy taking place.

And if you're like me and you get excited about stuff like that, it's really, really exciting. Hmm. So what kind of early wins do people need? If you wanted to generate early momentum in your organization, some sort of a shift, what do people need in your organization? What kind of early wins are necessary?

Let's see what some of those answers in the chat might be. What early wins a good one? Randy? Keeping money the same. Sue has one that's so good knowing they'll be seen, acknowledged, and appreciated for trying in a new culture, especially a high performance culture, there may be some new ideas and new ways of doing things.

And believe it or not, in all I, not all ideas and new ways of doing things are good. So if a person offers an ideand your organization and they get slapped for having a dumb idea, that doesn't exactly open the door for more good ideas. But you can oftentimes create momentum by how you handle a bad idea. Curtis hit it on the head. I think clearly communicating why we're doing something new.

Mm-hmm. What's in it for me? Why are we doing this? Humans are terrible. When we don't have a roadmap, we start creating all these worst case scenarios in our mind.

Mm-hmm. Let's Go Nick. Now the key that we want to talk about is design culture is being formed all the time. Culture is always changing. Your high performance culture, the expectations.

It is a nonstop changing. So your options are you can do something about it and design it on your own, or you can just accept that it's going to change on its own. There's nothing you can do about it. And I'm going to make the argument that culture is not like the tides. It is changing all the time, but you do have control over your culture.

You're not at the impact of the efficacy is on the outside. You can control the culture. You don't have to be controlled by your culture. And designing a culture is exactly what we do. If this part sounds like a sales pitch, it is.

This is exactly what we do. We design cultures intentionally so that when we try to do the equivalent of the shirtless dancing guy, that we can help build that early momentum. And it happens by getting intentional belief in place. We typically do that with the executive team so that we can start cascading that down. But in order for that to work, we also recognize that executive team is going to need their first followers.

They can't just be the lone nut out there. So we do that by demonstrating what that visible behavior is by making sure that when they do learn those new things about the culture, when they do find different ways of thinking and behaving and working within their organization, that that becomes visible. That it's not hidden behind closed doors, that it's something that could be bragged about.

It's the equivalent of the spaghetti coming out of your ears to prove you're now an iPhone user. And it's creating systems that actually reinforce that. Actually taking the organizational culture into consideration when designing your systems. That's everything from onboarding and how you onboard to the level of efficacy that you're creating for individuals to how you let people go. Mm-hmm.

Which I hate to say it is a very integral part of a lot of jobs, and unfortunately may be happening more than a lot of people want to in the coming years. But if it's inevitable and it has to happen, how you let people go in your organization is just as important as how you bring 'em in. So what part of your culture do you think could be more intentionally shaped? What's an area of your culture that's happening right now that is like the tides? Huh?

It's in. It's out. We just, we deal with it. And where do you think maybe you could change that? Is it how you recruit?

Is it how you hire or promote? I like Stacy's answer. How you give and receive feedback, abso freaking literally. So if you've seen anything we've ever done before, you know that we're going to tell you that. It starts with belief.

Your job as a leader is to drive results in one sense or another. It's more out of your students, more out of your staff, more out of yourself, more from the company. We're all in charge of driving results. In order to do that, we're going to need to shift all of these people over here to do something different. And in order for that to happen, we're going to go to an offsite and we're going to build ourselves a strategy.

Strategies are really, really good. But much like in sports, they're just plays. And a playbook doesn't do any good if you don't run the plays. Just like dental floss doesn't do any good when it's in the drawer, right? So we need to behave.

There needs to be an action that takes place. So in order for the strategy to work, we gotta take a certain behavior. And if we want that behavior to take hold in the organization, we're going to need that early and late majority to do that behavior. Not just those of us that are early adopters and innovators or consider ourself that way. But in order for that behavior to happen, it's all going to start with the beliefs.

It's going to start with the beliefs. Who are the innovators and the early adopters who are then going to show everybody else how you can behave safely to drive the type of results that you want. This is what we mean when we talk about a high performance culture. This is the area that we're talking about, is taking the beliefs and the behavioral norms of your organization and making it so that this is what we do around here to drive the results that we want. Note that that is outside of the strategy.

That strategy is not part of your company culture. Beliefs and behavioral norms are what drive you towards that. Because when what we're supposed to do here is expected, it changes from I'm supposed to sit on the grass and watch this show to I'm supposed to run like crazy to dance like a lunatic with all these other people. Culture will follow mindset. Mindset follows examples.

As humans follow other humans, change begins on the inside of us. So for you in your organization, what belief do leaders need to hold to guide culture change effectively? What would be a good belief? What would be something that needed to be repeated to themselves For culture, change to land? Anybody that uses daily affirmations may just write one here.

Richard and I have the good fortune of working with some very successful companies out there. One of them uses a company-wide affirmation. I'm bigger than the challenge in front of me. And they have a belief like that. Regardless of the challenge.

Ai COVID regulations, Richard says this change is good for us trusting your team. If it's to be, it's up to me. One of my favorites, Steve, if people have these types of beliefs, it makes it so much easier for everybody to understand what are we supposed to do, like shirtless dancing guy? So for leaders to cultivate that, to do our job as leaders, we create that belief through experience. We support the early adopters aggressively when we can, and we design for the tipping point on purpose.

We accept the fact that we don't give up when there's just a couple people as part of the movement that we don't throw our hands in the

air and go, oh, there's just the three of us, just me, Richard, and Cheryl. We're the only ones who actually believe this. We actually model what it's going to look like to drive the business forward. So let's see it. University of Waterloo says if we commit to an action, we are three times more likely to take said action.

Another way of stating that is, if we don't take a new action, we tend to not use 60% of the new information we bring in. So if you heard anything that you liked and you want to use it, solidify it, what do you think you can take to support your team in early momentum? It's easy. I love that. See a couple more answers in the chat.

I want to see these. What actions do you think you can take to support early momentum supporting those first followers? I was waiting for that answer. I didn't have to wait long. Acknowledge and support the early followers.

Show gratitude for those early ones, thanking people for their contributions, thanking them for joining along. Remember the shirtless dancing guy made it about the first two followers, not him. He didn't stand out in front of 'em and say, look, I'm still the leader. Mm-hmm. It's making sure that everybody understands Good stuff.

As we're nearing the end of our time, there's just one more thing that I have for us. We have an upcoming event coming on April 14th. Next month we're starting a session of our Invent Your Future. If you've been through Invent Your Future. Before you know that it is four virtual sessions held over two weeks.

We're starting that session on April the 14th. We consider this to be a really strong starting point. I have the QR code up on the screen for you. I'm going to play a short video to close out our day today, and I'm going to go ahead, go ahead and share this information in the chat for you as well. I'll stick on at the end of this conversation like I always do for another 10 or 15 minutes.

If anybody wants to stay around, ask any questions. We will of course be back again on the first Friday of next month. That'll be April the third where Richard and I are going to be doing a discussion on a couple of new products and programs that we have that have been working terrifically with our clients. But thank you everybody for your time and attention. We are right at the top of the hour, so I apologize this video will run past.

But thank you everybody for being here. Hopefully you picked up a couple new things. Hopefully you can be the shirtless dancing guy in your organization and if not, be proud of being that very first follower. You've heard it, right? You can't lead others until you lead yourself.

But we always focus on skills. What if the biggest barrier isn't a skill but a mindset? Let's look at some history. Back in 62, a record label rejected the Beatles. Yeah, that Beatles talk about a blind spot.

Or in 77 when a tech founder said No one would ever want a computer at home. Oops. And get this. In 1966, e-commerce was called a flop before it even had a chance to start. See, these weren't failures of expertise.

These were huge failures of mindset. Okay, so what does any of this have to do with your career right here, right now? Well, everything, because true performance isn't built on skills, it's built on your internal foundation. And this is about closing that gap between your potential and your actual achievements. It's designed for every leader from rising stars to team leads to senior executives.

It's a live hands-on experience meant to completely reset how you think lead and grow. We kick things off with awareness. Digging into the science of how your brain filters reality. You'll learn to interrupt that belief autopilot to see what other people are missing. Session two goes deep into the beliefs that are secretly shaping all your daily habits.

This is where you learn to flip those limiting habits into patterns that push you forward. Session three is all about your self-talk. You know that constant conversation in your head. You'll learn to turn up the volume on your inner coach to make much bolder decisions. And finally, session four turns all these new insights into real concrete action.

We'll use science-backed tools because clarity is what really sparks true commitment. So after all that, what do you actually walk away with? What are the tangible results you get? Authentic confidence habits that finally align with your goals and a clear vision. This whole transformation starts with me.

It grows to we and creates a better us. The core message here is powerful. You really are the architect of your own future. The live experience kicks off April 14th. So are you ready to stop learning and start transforming?

Thank you everybody for sticking around. I will be here for just a little bit longer, uh, until everybody drops off. But thank you again. We'll be back at the beginning of next month and uh, if anybody wants to get in touch with us, you can always reach out to our website.