Jason Clarke on Embracing Change at TEDxPerth (Full Transcript)

Jason Clarke, founder of Minds At Work, talks on Embracing Change at TEDxPerth conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: jason-clarke-on-embracing-change-at-tedxperth

TRANSCRIPT: 

This is where it starts. Someone gets up at a TED Talk and says, “Behold, we don’t have to do it like this. I’ve got a better idea. There’s another way. There’s another technology. There’s a new way of seeing the world.” And the new guys go, “Wow, that’s fantastic. We’ll go out and create change.”

And you can’t wait to go to your workplace or go back to the people that you live with and say, “Rejoice my people. There is a better way. It doesn’t have to be this way.” And you’re expecting the whole world to go, “Fantastic, it’s going to change.” And this is what you hear. You go, “Come on, we can do this, we can totally do this.” They go, “No. You know what? Because we’ve done it before” or “Now’s not a good time” or “We haven’t got the money” or “It’s been done. It’s never been done. That’s not the way we do things around here. It’s not part of the charter. It’s traditional. It’s complicated. It’s political.”

Do you recognize any of these? Of course, they’re all different ways of saying this. They’re all just different ways of saying “It’s not going to happen.”

So what I’ve been doing, I work in the innovation space, I’m interested in this wall, and how do we get past this wall. How do we take our passion and our ideas and actually make them happen? So I’ve been trying to figure out, what this wall is made of and how do we get past it? If we can’t get past it, go under it, go around it, or just smash through it.

The first thing you need to know; these aren’t real reasons. These aren’t real reasons. That becomes pretty clear because they’re so easy to refute. If they say for example, “It’s always been like this”, what does that mean? It means the problem is older than you think it is. It’s not an argument for not changing it now. It’s a reason why we should have changed it 20 years ago. When they say, “It’s the same everywhere” what they’re really saying is the problem is broader and wider than you think. That’s not an argument for not fixing it here, it’s an argument for fixing it everywhere.

When they say for example, “It’s not in the budget”, it means we’ve spent the money in the wrong places. Right? When they say, “It’s not in the charter”, what they’re saying is the people who were supposed to provide the vision weren’t thinking as big as you. When they say, “It’s political”, what they’re saying is, “I’ve learned to keep my ideas to myself.” When they say, “It’s just traditional”, what they’re saying is, “Actually, I don’t know why we’re doing this, but it’s always been that way.”

OK, and the thing is, they are so easy to refute. So when they say things for example like, “It’s too complicated”, you say, “I can make it simpler for you.” When they say, “You know what, it just sounds like it’s too simple”, you say, “That’s okay, I’ll make it more complicated.” My favorite one, a friend of mine got this one the other day, “This isn’t what we pay you to do.” And his answer was, “That’s okay, this one’s a freebie.”