Blog Posts — Caleb Gardner | Change Faster. Lead Smarter. | Author, Strategist, & Keynote Speaker

The difficulty of managing expectations

At our current moment there are dueling theories about why everyone feels so badly about the economy. Nate Cohn draws a straight line between perceptions of the economy and confidence in the Biden administration. Paul Krugman claims that the media, especially right-wing media, is over-indexing on stories about inflation.

Either way, we’re in a moment that illustrates the difficulty of expectation setting and the power of narrative—and especially the narrative reinforcement mechanisms inherent to our current media ecosystem.

Change ManagementCaleb GardnerFebruary 17, 2022Communications, PR, Expectations management

Zeros and ones

Shared cultural language can be a boon to movements for change—and a barrier to seeing that change happen.

Bumperstickers and banners establish shared credentials, show us who we can trust, tell us who’s on the inside of the movement. But they’re also off-putting to those who don’t share that language, and can antagonize those whom we need to make the change happen.

Change ManagementCaleb GardnerFebruary 10, 2022Change Management, Culture, Language

Adam Grant on knowing when to change

Important concepts covered here include identity foreclosure, cognitive entrenchment, escalation of commitment, and why we all should have bailed on “Game of Thrones” earlier.

Change ManagementCaleb GardnerApril 30, 2021Psychology

What if the platforms are always burning?

There’s a classic thought experiment in change management called a burning platform.

From a 1993 book by Daryl R. Conner called “Managing at the Speed of Change”, it describes a situation in which maintaining the status quo is so costly, so detrimental to the business, that the level of resolve to change becomes a no-brainer. The metaphor Conner uses is is a literal platform on fire: you have to jump, because the status quo means certain death.

Change ManagementCaleb GardnerDecember 16, 2020Change Management

What will "normal" look like?

Now that we officially have a vaccine, focus has understandably shifted to how exactly it will be distributed, and by when. We are almost certainly headed back to some version of normal by the back half of 2021.

Which begs the question: what will that new version of normal look like?

Change ManagementCaleb GardnerDecember 14, 2020Work, Public life

Desiring machines

How hard is it to turn a culture around? Harder than you think.

We like to think of organizations in terms of rational outputs: finance, marketing, manufacturing. But each work stream is made up of individuals responding to internal cultural influences. Each component of an organization is working toward an end, and sometimes changing that end mid-stream is like trying to get a river to run a different direction.

Change ManagementCaleb GardnerDecember 8, 2020Culture, Change Management

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