Here are three provocative questions that arise from this Change Signal conversation with Damon Centola: What are you mistaking for adoption? Who actually makes change feel normal? And are your change agents too scattered?
Damon Centola is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Network Dynamics Group, and author of Change: How to Make Big Things Happen and Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence. His research into networks reveals why information can spread quickly while actual behaviour stubbornly refuses to follow. Damon has spent years studying how change actually spreads through networks, and his work challenges some familiar assumptions about change leadership and transformation. Awareness is not adoption, influential people are often less important than the everyday networks around us, and behaviour change depends on repeated social reinforcement.
We talk about why complex change behaves differently from information, why a critical mass matters, and why that critical mass has to be connected rather than scattered across the organization. Damon also explains why change agents may be more effective clustered together, and why scaling change across silos requires “wide bridges” — multiple reinforcing relationships between groups.
If you lead change in a large organization, this conversation offers a practical way to think about where change really starts, how it spreads, and why communication alone so often fails.
Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change. If you’re a transformational leader seeking modern change mastery, you’re in exactly the right place.
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