How Simplification is the Key to Change: Lisa Bodell at TEDxNormal (Full Transcript)

Lisa Bodell

Lisa Bodell – TEDx Talk TRANSCRIPT

I have a very simple goal today. I want to help you create more space for change and innovation in your organization, the places where you spend time every single day.

Now, I know that change and innovation are not new topics for everybody here sitting in the room. We talk about change all the time; we talk about innovation and making it stick. What I wonder more about is: Why aren’t we doing it? What’s really holding us back from being able to make that change happen?

And what I realized is that change is very hard for people. See, I spend my time talking to about 100,000 people all around the world each year about change, how to anticipate it and how to activate it. I know that it’s a very hard thing to do, but I wanted to know why.

So I started asking groups that I work with, whether it was 25 people or several thousand people at a time, this very simple question: “What do you spend your day doing?” Think about that. The day-to-day stuff you do. What do you spend your day doing? What surprised me was not the uniqueness of their answer but the consistency of it.

See, no matter what country or culture or company I was talking to, or what level or function of the person and the organization I was with, they all answered the exact same way “What do you spend your day doing?” And they would always say, “Meetings and emails.”