Turning Change Into Action

Everyone has a trends deck. Well, most everyone. And some of them are very good! There are charts. Arrows. Gartner curves. Stock photos of people wearing headsets. Maybe even a slide telling you that Gen Alpha behaves differently from Baby Boomers. Breaking news!!

Then everyone closes the deck and goes back to work. And that’s where I get excited and/or very annoying because I want to know: What are we going to DO about it?

That’s how I think about transformation.

Spot the signal. Figure out what it means. MOVE.

Technology keeps changing, and consumer behavior changes with it.

Platforms rise and fall, algorithms get rewritten, and new competitors appear.

Media habits fragment, and of course, AI changes how work gets done and how information gets discovered.

Or maybe even culture occasionally decides something is embarrassing overnight. Or they create an embarassing moment for your brand.

Organizations have gotten pretty good at hearing that change is happening. The harder part is figuring out which changes matter, what they mean for the business and when to act.

My preferred sequence is pretty simple:

Signal → Implication → Decision → Pilot → Scale

• See the thing.

• Figure out why you care.

• Make a choice.

• Try something.

• Learn.

• If it works, make it bigger.

Obvious? Sure.

Easy inside a large organization? IT’S HARD. And I like hard.

Signals are EVERYWHERE

The future rarely arrives with a press release saying, "HELLO, I AM THE FUTURE."

Usually it looks smaller.

• A strange new behavior on TikTok.

• A tool that suddenly gets much better.

• A teenager using search differently.

• A creator inventing a format nobody planned.

• A platform quietly changing what it rewards.

• A customer asking a question that didn’t exist six months ago.

• A technology that feels silly right up until the moment it becomes normal.

I love this part, and I spend an unreasonable amount of time poking at new tools, platforms and behaviors because reading about them only gets you so far.

Ask why anyone cares and then ask what happens when it gets 10x better.

Ask what happens when everybody has it, and then ask what happens when your competitors figure it out before you do. OOPS!

The goal is rarely predicting the future perfectly. Good luck with that. The useful skill is noticing change early enough that you still have options.

Okay, but what does it MEAN?

A signal by itself is not a strategy. We have to figure out what does that mean for your company?

It could mean a change in customer service, search behavior, content production, reputational risk (or process). And sometimes it means not changing anything but waiting intentionally to see what consumers and competitors do.

That’s why I like starting with the organization and the problem:

• What are you trying to accomplish?

• Where is the friction?

• What do customers actually need?

• What does the organization already do unusually well?

• Where are competitors moving?

• What are employees hacking together themselves because the official process is too slow?

• What are we all pretending is working when everybody knows it isn’t?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Pilots beat PowerPoint

I have a very strong bias toward making something.

Pilots beat paralysis is one of those Greg Aphorisms I’ve been using for decaces.

I love pilots because it gives you something small enough that you can learn without spending nine months getting approval to learn.

Because the point of a pilot is information.

• Did it work?

• Did people use it?

• Did anybody care?

• Was the premise wrong?

• What broke?

• What surprised us?

• What would need to change before this could scale?

A good pilot turns an abstract debate into something everybody can poke at, and there is now an actual THING to discuss, even it if didn’t work. Because that’s data, too.

And then the organization shows up

A lot of organizations have smart people with good ideas. And sometimes people who ask questions that kills things.

• Who owns this?

• Whose budget is it?

• Does Legal approve?

• Is IT involved?

• Do we have a vendor?

• Does Procurement need to review it?

• Can we use this data?

• What if somebody screenshots it?

• Is there already a committee?

Fun fact: there is always a committee.

Transformation means reducing the distance between a good idea and a responsible test. And sometimes, miraculously, getting six people into the same room and discovering that everybody thought somebody else owned the problem. Hooray!

AI is making all of this VERY visible

AI is currently exposing a lot of organizational seams as marketing wants to move faster, legal wants appropriate controls, PR has heard they are the darlings of GEO/AEO, IT wants security, leadership wants productivity, and (some) employees are already using tools nobody knows about.

And somewhere, somebody has pasted confidential information into a chatbot and is hoping nobody asks questions. DON’T DO THAT.

This is why the most measurable AI work goes well beyond giving everybody a list of tools.

We have to ask:

• Where can AI genuinely improve the work?

• Where does human judgment matter most?

• What information can safely move through the system?

• What capabilities should the organization build internally?

• Where should we use outside partners?

• Which experiments are actually worth funding?

• What does success look like?

The answers will be different everywhere. GOOD. That’s where the work becomes worth it.

Transformation is happening outside the company, too

Sometimes the biggest change is happening in the market while the organization is busy having meetings about the organization.

AI search changes how brands get discovered, or creators change how recommendations travel.

Algorithms decide what gets seen, of course. And culture moves across platforms faster than most approval processes, which means audience behavior can shift before the annual marketing plan can adapt.

And suddenly all the little boxes on the org chart start bumping into each other:

• PR

• Social

• Influencer

• Content

• Search

• Reputation

• Creative

• Paid media

• Customer experience

Consumers, somewhat inconveniently, have refused to organize their lives according to our departmental structure. So the work has to connect.

The goal is useful momentum

I love futures work because it gives you options. Transformation is the part where somebody has to pick one and go.

We have to make the decision, run the experiment learn something, share our success, and then… go again!

And often the best transformation work leaves behind something bigger than the project itself:

• A team understands something differently.

• A new capability exists.

• A pilot becomes a product.

• People get faster at spotting signals.

• The organization gets a little better at responding the next time something changes.

Because something WILL change again.

My role at FINN Partners focuses on Futures & Client Transformation. I work across technology, culture, platforms, communications and creative strategy to help organizations see what’s coming and figure out what to actually do with it.

Sometimes that means AI, or social or influencers, or AI search, and sometimes a completely new way of reaching people.

Even better, often it means saying, "This thing everyone is freaking out about probably doesn’t matter to you yet." That counts too!

The tools will keep changing. The platforms will keep changing. The acronyms DEFINITELY will keep changing.

The useful muscle is learning how to change with them.

And then doing something.

-Greg