Professor Steve Peters – The Chimp Paradox

A powerful talk that shows how easily we are tricked into beliefs and perspectives that turn out to be different to what we initially thought.

An emotional speech to world leaders by an amazing young lady who, whilst attracting criticism of her language and methods from some people, has single-handedly created a movement for change. Hopefully post-Covid-19 we can now get this existential threat back onto the global agenda.

When a transformation programme loses energy, the instinctive explanation is that there’s simply too much change happening at once. It’s an appealing diagnosis because it feels analytically sound. The problem is it’s usually wrong. Here’s what actually causes change fatigue, and why acting on the wrong diagnosis tends to make things considerably worse.

Although commonly overlooked, taking positive action to ensure changes progress from being ‘new’ to being ‘normal’ is critical to achieving sustainable change.

Most transformation programmes don’t fail because of the plan or the technology or the people leading them. They fail because of beliefs about how change works that were taken as given from the outset and never examined. Here are the assumptions most commonly getting in the way, and what shifts when leaders are willing to question them.

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