This week I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed by the universe’s content proliferation and also, to be honest, by the complexity of the models that are emerging from some really incredible and impressive research. (To be clear, I think that deep research is critical and should, if anything, be increased, not decreased.)
The challenge is, those models might be the best explanations we’ve ever had and they might be the most comprehensive. But they run into the buzzsaw at the point of implementation. A few weeks ago I tried an experiment on myself in which I attempted to engage nine new tactics to solve a complex problem over the course of a couple of weeks. (I picked a nine tactic model because it seems to be that everything has nine key elements). I screwed up all of them and it was a mess because I was trying to keep too much in my head at once.
That doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have tried one of those things until I mastered it and moved on to the next. In fact, that’s precisely what I might have done if I really wanted that approach to be the one priority of my work. But what happens if I pick one part of every model I want to use to work on every day? Then I’m right back where I started, trying to master the first step in nine models.
So instead of trying to get to the perfect solution with lots of elements, we’re going to work toward the 80% solution—the one that gives the most lift for the least amount of intellectual and behavioral work. In this blog, we’ll start by unpacking our Change Leadership Framework, and then we’ll offer more short (~90 seconds to read), practical meditations on the behavioral insights that help make that framework work.