Scott Taylor rocks Brazilian entrepreneurship conference
HunterSage partner and micro business mentor Scott Taylor brought down the house at O Povo’s 13th annual Entrepreneurship Seminar in Fortaleza, Brazil in October 2019. Taylor presented 18 tips on how to be a successful business owner to an in-person and online audience of 1500.
His three-hour session closed with an animated audience participation exercise on responding to change, inspired by management guru Ken Blanchard. After asking attendees to pair off and change 15 things about their physical appearance during two short rounds, Taylor called out the most common reactions to change:
Awkwardness. If people don’t feel awkward doing something new, it’s probably not new.
Mourning. If teams started by taking something off, they know the feeling of loss that can accompany change. People need time to mourn what was.
Aloneness. If participants felt like they were on their own, they weren’t alone. They may need a support system to ease the transition.
Moderation. If participants were fine with the first round of changes but struggled with the second, it may be that they needed more time to pace out the change. People can handle only so much change at once.
Scarcity. If teams complained that they didn’t have enough accessories to change 15 things, they demonstrated the scarcity principle. In times of change, people often don’t think they have enough resources to accomplish the task.
Readiness. If one team’s enthusiasm for the exercise didn’t match another’s, it’s no wonder. Different people approach change at different levels of readiness.
Revert. If the audience returned everything to the way it was when the exercise was over, they did what most people do when the pressure is off. They revert to their old ways.
Creative. If the last few changes in appearance were really creative, the audience showed what’s possible when operating under constraint. Change leads them to think and act differently. And that leads to innovation.