Help Your Audience Deal with Disruption

One of my most popular keynote topics these days is “Creating a Disruption-Proof Culture.” We are all well aware that the pace of change has gone through the roof. In fact, it’s almost cliché, now, to say that. We don’t need to be reminded that disruption is happening—we need strategies for managing the change.

Unfortunately, even if you identify strategies for managing change, your culture still may prevent you from doing it well. It’s like an invisible hand that is holding you back. For example, a fairly large percentage of the organizations I work with will admit that they struggle with conflict. This is not new to me. I started in the conflict resolution field 30 years ago. I’ve seen every form of conflict avoidance inside organizations there is.

So here’s an interesting data point for you: the two individual culture metrics in our research that have the strongest correlation are “managing conflict” and “embracing change.” In other words, cultures that identify managing conflict as strongly present also tend to have higher scores on embracing change. Of course, the opposite is true: if you don’t do conflict well, you tend to struggle with change.

Organizations will recognize that they don’t handle their conflict, but they don’t understand that this weakness is making it harder for them to deal with the change and disruption that is hitting them these days. When you need to make quick, bold shifts, you’re likely to upset some people, so you must be able to get on a video call with them and quickly work the issue through to full resolution. Every one of those conflict conversations that you avoid or mess up is going to delay and possibly derail your change efforts.

“Difficult conversations” is one of six areas of culture that I posit are directly related to an organization’s ability to manage change. In my keynotes on the topic, I also dig into “organizational clarity,” which includes the silo issue, and I offer concrete strategies for fixing these parts of your culture. If you’re interested in a keynote or workshop on this topic (or even a conflict resolution training), visit my speaker site at JamieNotter.com.