Can You Change Yesterday's People? Mark Surman, Mozilla
Mark Surman’s three key insights: spending years wrestling with whether your foundational values still make sense; accepting that legacy teams can't build the future, so you need separate structures; and mastering the ability to think across different timescales simultaneously.
Mark Surman, Mozilla's president, shares the messy reality of transforming a 25-year-old organization for the AI era. He's replaced 60% of staff, created entirely separate companies, and spent five years questioning whether Mozilla's core values around privacy and open source even work anymore.
This isn't your typical change management playbook. Mark talks about the "righteousness stick" that nonprofit employees wield to resist transformation, why he set up independent entities to avoid the innovator's dilemma, and his ongoing struggle to help people let go of the past without losing what made them special.
You'll hear practical advice about validating that your communication actually landed, the temperament required to shift between strategic and tactical thinking, and why change leaders need to resist the temptation to force transformation down people's throats. Mark's honest about what's working, what isn't, and whether this whole thing might end up being a "flaming dumpster fire of disaster."
If you're wrestling with organizational transformation, this conversation offers both wisdom and warnings from someone deep in the trenches.
Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change and transformation.
***
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Is Your Organization Change Allergic? Anne Gotte
Three key insights from Anne Gotte: change management is as outdated as "personnel" organizations must diagnose their change allergies before attempting transformation; and leaders need to embrace clumsy imperfection while providing clear direction.
Anne Gotte is SVP Global Talent & Organization Effectiveness at Mondelēz and she brings refreshing honesty to the messy reality of organizational transformation. She's worked at Bumble, Ecolab, and General Mills, collecting scars and wisdom along the way.
This conversation challenges the traditional playbook. Anne argues that "decree change" — where executives design solutions in isolation, announce them broadly, then expect magic — as well and truly reached its expiration date.
Instead, she advocates for building ongoing change capacity rather than managing episodic projects. Her approach starts with uncomfortable questions: Who are we today? What makes any change difficult for us? How do our systems contradict our change story?
The discussion explores why change feels clumsy (spoiler: it's supposed to), how to honour uncertainty while providing clarity, and why slow can actually be fast. Anne's insights about getting comfortable being uncomfortable offer a different path forward for change leaders tired of pretending transformation should feel orderly and predictable.
This is change leadership for grown-ups who've learned that the mess is actually the work.
Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change and transformation.
***
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26:22
Start with the Gnarliest Problem: Rodney Evans
Three key insights: Change work isn't transformative anymore—it's operational; your organization does everything the same dysfunctional way; and everyone secretly benefits from broken patterns.
My guest, Rodney Evans from TheReady, has abandoned talking about "adaptability" because people's eyes glaze over. Instead, she starts every conversation with leaders by asking about their gnarliest cross-functional problem that can't be solved.
Why does this work? Because everyone has experienced that moment where important work gets "chopped up, parceled out across the org chart where it goes to die."
Rodney introduces her depth-finding model — four organizational zones from sky to midnight that reveal how change actually happens. The insight that stopped me cold: how your organization does hiring is how it rewards, makes strategy, and handles everything else.
A particularly uncomfortable truth? Broken organizational patterns persist because everybody gets something out of them, even while complaining. The solution involves naming the pattern and stepping outside it through small interventions in how work actually gets done.
This conversation will shift how you see organizational change from discrete projects to continuous evolution. If you're tired of the same problems recurring, Rodney Evans offers a different way forward.
Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change, transformation, and growth.
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)
The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly
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36:59
The Imperfection Advantage: Charles Conn
Could it be that your strategic planning is actually paralyzing you, your biggest critics hold the keys to breakthrough innovation, and the military metaphors you're using to lead change are fundamentally broken?
Charles Conn, former McKinsey partner, former Head of Rhodes House, and current chair of Patagonia's board, brings a provocative challenge to how we think about transformation. He argues that our obsession with perfect planning is the enemy of progress in uncertain times.
Instead of waiting for clarity, Conn advocates for small, reversible experiments that build capability while you learn.
But here's also what’s true: you need to actively seek out the people who aren't impressed by you — the unhappy customers, the skeptical colleagues, the ones giving you one-star reviews.
Conn shares a powerful framework for breaking overwhelming problems into manageable parts, focusing on high-impact, low-difficulty components. He also reveals why Amazon never bought a bank to enter financial services, and how two Stanford students disrupted orthodontics by seeing through their customers' eyes rather than the industry's.
This isn't theoretical change management — it's battle-tested wisdom from someone who's led transformation at scale and lived to tell the tale.
Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change, transformation, and growth.
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)
The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly
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CONNECT
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SAY THANKS
💜Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
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34:01
How Many Times Should You Fight Your Boss? Molly Graham
Discover why emotional "monsters" sabotage change projects, learn the "fight it three times" rule for managing upwards, and understand why grief is the most overlooked emotion in transformation work.
Molly Graham has scaled teams at Google and Meta, and now runs Glue Club for startup operators. She brings hard-won wisdom about the messy human side of change that most leaders pretend doesn't exist.
The conversation digs into why competing visions create "zebra-giraffe" disasters and how to craft clarity that actually sticks. Molly shares her mentor's brilliant approach to influencing stubborn bosses without burning bridges.
What I thought was most powerful? Her insight about work grief. Leaders race ahead to the future while their teams are still mourning what they're losing. It's the marathon effect — you've crossed the finish line while everyone else is still running the race.
Oh, and then there's Bob. Molly's personification of the emotional chaos that comes with any change, good or bad. Once you meet Bob, you'll never look at resistance the same way.
This isn't your typical change management playbook. It's real talk about the loneliness, emotion, and community that make or break transformation efforts.
Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change, transformation, and growth.
***
WHEN YOU’RE READY
🎧 A new episode every week (and sometimes two!)
The Change Signal newsletter. Short, practical, weekly
***
CONNECT
💼Connect on LinkedIn
***
SAY THANKS
💜Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
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If you’re leading change in organizations, this will be your favourite podcast.
Change is harder than ever. Transformation is more complex, unpredictable and overwhelming than it’s ever been. Change Signal cuts through the noise to find the good stuff that works.
Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit and organizational transformation student for thirty years, talks to the best thinkers, senior leaders, and experienced practitioners in the world of change, to find what works, what doesn’t, and what to try instead. With Change Signal as your guide, you’ll be more efficient and less overwhelmed, and your change projects will more likely succeed.
Change Signal: Where we cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works.
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