Julia Dhar

The second one, and this is very natural behavior for human beings, turns out to be pretty natural behavior for organizations as well.

And so as I describe those three types of stories, threat, fitness, and destiny, it's possible, Rachel, that in your mind you said to yourself, oh, destiny sounds nice.

Like that feels like the best of the stories.

That's very glamorous.

So much of the change that we are trying to make in organizations is not about utterly fulfilling our destiny.

It's about fitness and getting consistently better and better at the things that we do every day.

And that's just not as exciting as being able to talk about achieving our destiny.

But it is incredibly useful in terms of actually creating a return on our efforts to change.

So that's the very first thing we can do is say, is the story underlying that innovation clear?

Why are you trying to innovate?

Is it directly in response to a threat, either competitive or existential or disruptive technology?

Is it fitness?

Are you basically doing continuous improvement in order to maintain the discipline of the organization?

Or are you trying to either find your way back to who you were always meant to be or to stretch yourself further and further into a new horizon for the company?

If that's even a little bit ambiguous, if it's hard to classify what you're hearing into one of those, I think that's a really good sign to dig a bit deeper.

One of the things we know about founders, it's actually true of executives overall, by the way, is they have a very high appetite to change and a very high enthusiasm for change.

It is often what leads someone to found a business in the first place, that they are frustrated with the way the world looks right now and want to do something about it.

You kindly said at the beginning that we just finished writing this book about how change really works, which is called How Change Really Works.

And the primary motivation to write it at the beginning was to answer that question, is it true that most people just don't like to change?

Do people just hate to change?