[Podcast] The Role of Communities in Navigating Disruption - With Charlene Li

Aug 31

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The Disruption Mindset and Community Leadership

In this episode of the Cohere podcast, Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas discuss the future of communities with digital transformation and disruptive leadership expert Charlene Li.

We speak with Charlene about her new book “The Disruption Mindset”, the quickly evolving role of social technologies, and the pitfalls and opportunities of leading during periods of disruption (for instance, during a global pandemic.)

We explore Charlene’s body of work - writing one of the most important books on social technologies (Groundswell, with Josh Bernoff), founding Altimeter Group (now part of Prophet), to help Leaders make sense of digital transformation, and following Groundswell with the book Open Leadership, to guide Leaders into the era of social media.

Key Quotes:

“We’re at this real, really interesting pivot point because it’s [the state of social technologies] been developing in an unchecked way going forward and we have just been exploring the edges of what’s possible. Now, I think we’re going into an era where I think of it as responsible social technologies and responsible social networking, where people are really stepping back and saying: ‘What kind of role do we want to have of these technologies in our lives and our companies? What personal responsibilities, what organizational and governmental responsibilities should we have to put some parameters around how these tools are being used?”

— Charlene Li

“I've been surprised by how badly organizations have been at structuring and using these technologies to actually change workflow. I would have imagined that people would have glommed on to the fact that these are incredibly powerful technologies and use them in a more systematic way rather than the organic way they have kind of crept into our organizations.”

“And disruption actually says, ‘Well, innovation that's worth doing - growth that's worth doing - is going to be a long, hard journey. And you prepare yourself for that journey. And that's the key difference is when companies start down that path of growth, they come to a point where they meet these obstacles, these hard choices to make, and unless they're prepared - if only bought into the innovation story, but not the disruption part of it - they're going to go turn around and go back.”

“So that future customer is so key and community is important because those future customers in themselves have their own community and group. And you can form smaller communities that are representative of them … so that you can go and tap into where these future customers already exist and thrive and are talking with each other, [so that you] better learn who they are, really sit with them, know them, and therefore be able to come back and see what they actually do and what you could actually do.”