E62 - Becoming a Change Maker - Podcast with Alex Budak

Sometimes my job is just to give these cynics the permission to say yeah if the world seems tough , if it feels really hard in your company to lead a digital transformation effort because three CTOs have come and gone and they've all failed .

Well , you're right , it is really hard to lead change , and just because three have failed doesn't mean that the fourth will fail .

His award-winning Changemaker courses are consistently among Berkeley's top-rated offerings . His book Becoming a Changemaker is hailed as a top five non-fiction book . Everyone should be reading about work . Alex's journey began when he co-founded Start Some Good , which has helped people in over 50 countries raise millions of dollars to launch and scale new change initiatives .

In this episode , alex unpacks the multifaceted path to becoming a changemaker . Together , we dive into the realities of sparking transformative change , discussing the nuances , the challenges and , most importantly , the profound impact that comes with it . I am grateful to have Alex chatting with me today . Well , alex , thank you so much for your time .

I'm so grateful to have you in my podcast , the Inner Game of Change . I'm eternally grateful to have you with me today .

Even the title is actually inspiring . We can spend a lot of time on the title itself , but before we dive deep into it , it would be fantastic for you to introduce yourself to my audience to my audience .

Now I work at UC Berkeley , where I teach classes at both the business school as well as the School of Public Health . As you mentioned , I recently wrote the book Becoming a Changemaker , which in many ways grew out of my teaching , and I'm also a very proud dad , maybe my favorite identity out of all those .

The title implies that becoming a changemaker is a process . Have I got that right ?

I mean , hopefully you finish the book and you feel like you've arrived in some ways but it's a continual process , something you're always working on , and I think actually owning that as part of the title is important . I got advice from someone who's much better at branding than I am and he said the title should just be Changemaker .

But I thought , no , I actually wanted to include a bit of that journey as well . I hope that , no matter where you are in your journey as a changemaker , that this book will sort of capture you there .

So it's written in a way that can find people just at the very beginning maybe have never even heard the term changemaker , perhaps like some of your listeners and also the folks who maybe have more experience with change but want to further develop that identity or further develop that toolkit .

So I try to write in a very inclusive way , in a way that encourages that continual growth how to write in a very inclusive way and a way that encourages that continual growth .

I think you mentioned there's an impact equation and I think you talked about mindset . Divided by leadership , multiplied by action , equals impact .

It's impacted a lot of my students , so much so that one of my students actually got this impact equation tattooed on himself , and so I don't think you have to go that far perhaps , but it's a nice way of thinking about the way you leave your mark in the world .

Now , it doesn't take a brilliant mathematician to know that any number that you multiply by zero is zero . It doesn't matter if you multiply a million by zero , it's still zero .

And that's a way of us remembering and calling into a focal point this idea that it's not enough to just have a mindset , not enough to just have leadership , that changemakers have to take an action . It doesn't mean that it's easy . It can be really challenging . We can talk a bit about how you kind of overcome the inertia .

But every changemaker , if you want to have any impact in the world , you've got to start taking action .

Sometimes people like to measure a hundred different things and then they cherry pick the two or three metrics to make them look the best . That's obviously a mistake , and so I think , up front , you need to do some thinking about what are the most important metrics ? The one , two or three things that tell me , yes , I'm absolutely having an impact . Metrics ?

The one , two or three things that tell me , yes , I'm absolutely having an impact . The second is we need to stay away from vanity metrics that come from the lean startup world , but it's this idea of metrics that make us feel good or maybe look good on the outside but aren't actually that meaningful . And so that might be number of followers on Instagram .

That could feel really good , but just having followers on Instagram doesn't actually mean you have any impact . That's just a number that makes you feel like you're popular . The third thing I'd suggest is to not forget about the qualitative . We tend to obsess on the quantitative , but I think there's also a role for the quantitative .

I was living in Stockholm , sweden , and running an incubator for change , where we would give them basically the salary funding they needed to quit whatever they're doing , focus full-time on their idea , and we would ask them to measure their impact . We would ask them not just for the quantitative measures but also the qualitative .

Tell us the story of the work you've done and how that's changed or influenced folks . And then the fourth idea is to root it in something called the theory of change . So if you're a very logical person , this works well for you . It's also sometimes referred to as a logic model , but the idea is you actually start with the vision in mind .

So , 10 , 20 years from now , if things go perfectly , what's that vision ? What's the ideal state that you want to be at ? Then you work back of it and say , okay for that to be true , what would have to be true five years from now ? Okay For that to be true , what would have to be true one year from now ?

And then you think about what are the metrics , the things that would tell me that I'm on the right path towards that ? So I don't have any direct answers there , because , again , I think it's a field that we're all trying to figure out as we go , but that's how it suggests , that you at least start thinking about it .

Again , you're going back to the idea of taking action , which is really important . You did talk about the vanity measures . It is hard not to have vanity measures . Is your suggestion that they might pop up , but then you'll have to go beyond them ?

If you want to think about social media engagement , you know , look at how many folks are sharing your posts or engaging with your posts or giving it to someone else . What's the growth ? Those types of things . But it's so easy to just fall into the things that make us feel good or look good . Another way to think about this is we think about sort of .

The process of becoming a changemaker is where are you looking for your locus of control ? Are you focused externally or are you focused more internally ? Are you focused on things having a process , doing things in the right way , or are you focused on maybe cutting some corners ?

But as long as you can get to that end result , whatever it is , then you feel good about it . I think that when it comes to meaningful metrics , you want to be focused on things that are a little bit more on the intrinsic side rather than the extrinsic side side rather than the extrinsic side .

Sometimes a guest asks me about them but I think my metric for success , which is the impact I make on my audience so if I get a piece of feedback or somebody saying I listened to your podcast and I'm thinking , why would you listen to my podcast ? You're actually a plumber , believe it or not , or a nurse ?

You're actually a plumber , believe it or not , or a nurse I just feel that , okay , well , I influenced somebody and if I raise the question in somebody's head or maybe fine-tune something , that would be fantastic for me . So that would be the measure of my success going forward . So , yes , I did have the vanity measure , but I think I moved on very quickly .

I want to talk to you and I want to ask you about . You did talk a lot in your book about looking at stepping stones as opportunities . You want to shed light on that ?

There's pressure from the publisher , from the Amazon . There's just so much pressure there . But I heard something that changed my perspective a bit Adam Grant , who of course sells lots of copies of books , the management professor at Wharton .

He said there's a lot of books that sell a lot of copies but don't get read , and that really resonated with me that a lot of people buy these books but it may not actually make a difference in their life .

And so for me that helped me make this shift , a bit like you , to stop thinking about how many books are sold , but rather what's the impact of the books , the notes that I receive from folks about how the book changed their mindset , their leadership , their perspective , the things they did differently , and that's really what drives me .

So yeah , and that builds in a bit to your question now about the stepping stones .

So at Berkeley I teach a wide range of students everywhere , from incoming freshmen so 18-year-olds all the way to doing executive education with senior executive C-suite folks , and no matter who I work with , no matter how experienced they are , change can feel really scary .

Sometimes we're folks that have that sort of big vision we can sort of think about oh yeah , this is where I want to be . But many don't , and many get so paralyzed by that fear of going . I don't know exactly where I'm going to be in 10 years . I might as well not start .

I might as well wait until I get that sort of perfect bolt of inspiration and then I'll go . You actually learn so much by the act of doing , and so I'm a big believer in breaking things down into small , actionable steps .

The boxer , mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face , and I think that's so true that we'd love to have our plans . It feels secure , nice , but the sooner we get comfortable with the fact that , no matter how perfect our plan is , it's going to fall apart pretty soon anyway and just get out there and start doing things .

So in many ways , the key to being a change maker is not perfect planning , but rather being able to iterate , to change , to try new things and to be willing to fail .

Well , here's the statement that I've kind of formulated out of reading part of the book is that we only have a measure of control over uncertainty only when we embrace the change . And so if we run away from the and the change here is actually is another way to say you're going to have to act .

So sometimes , you know , the world comes at us in different ways . We can choose to do absolutely nothing , we can retreat , we can take minimum action or we can take , you know , giant steps forward . And I think that giant , those giant steps , they're the only way for me to make sense of the uncertainty that is actually coming my way .

So that's one thing that I've learned . But also I have learned the art of by all means dream big but really start small and start the steps . And the examples in the world are everywhere you know Apple , ibm , microsoft , facebook , with all the literature , with thousands of years of history . We still struggle to actually understand the formula .

So I think in your book you put sort of a canvas to help changemakers . You want to shed some light on that .

So , for me , I was a social entrepreneur before joining academia and in my entire life I wrote one business plan , and the business plan was only to enter a business plan competition , and by the time we wrote that business plan it was already out of date , and so I wanted to build something that sort of bridges those two , something that helps you get your

thoughts onto paper . And what I wanted to do is I found so many people get paralyzed with fear of what Pfeffer and Sutton at Stanford University called the knowing-doing gap , where it's like you know what to do , you just can't get over it , you just can't go .

And so how can we narrow that gap , make it a little less scary , and so it's a tool that takes maybe 30 minutes an hour to fill out . I mean , you need to be thoughtful about it , but it's not a heavy , burdensome tool . If you want to take a look , by the way , you can go to my website , alexbudakcom slash canvas and download it for free .

But that bridges that gap , that it helps you really sit down and understand the problem you want to solve and look at it from three different perspectives . So what's the core problem you're solving ? What are the consequences ? What are the root causes ? What's the systemic change ?

You might make A few other blocks from the vision , from articulating in one sentence what that change is , as well as thinking about who are the people you engage , because you engage folks in different ways , you might have a core team .

Then you also need to think about who are the evangelists , the people who might not be active day to day but whose buy-in , whose support , whose social proof might be key for this . So , again , you spend 30 minutes an hour up front filling this out . All the blocks are logical , they all sort of float together .

And then , by the time you're done , what you find is that your change challenge has shifted from a question of strategy to question of execution , that we so often confuse strategy and execution and we'll be back and forth between the two . And you start and instead it says , okay , no , just get it all down on paper .

It's one single page , one single piece of paper . And once you do , then the first steps become clear and you start taking action Now . Of course , the plans will change as you go .

This is just your snapshot to get you started , but so many people have said that this helps them get over that hurdle , close that knowing doing gap , and that's what I think a helpful tool can be . It helps us get out of our heads a little bit and start having a biased transaction .

Is that the outside world you know the jungle is too wild for me and therefore sometimes I take no action . What would be the difference for you between a student that you think will take this and make it happen to a student who , what we described they are champions in training only ?

You can't plan for it , just the serendipity that happens . But I find that there's a couple of different personas in terms of people who take my class . So one group are the idealists . They're people who so want to create change .

They believe in the potential of change , they're eager , they're excited , they have this raw talent and they really just need the ability , they need the tools .

They need to know how do I get my first follower , how do I get folks excited about this , how do I build a movement , and so for them it's really building this leadership skills , that changemaker leadership , how you engage with the world . And then the other group are the sort of cynics .

You know , the folks that maybe want to believe in change but think it's not possible or they feel down by it .

Maybe they've tried to lead change and it just didn't work , and so with them , my challenge is to really help them shift their mindset , to help them open their eyes again , to remind them that change is really hard you know there's things like the status quo bias , that people prefer the status quo , and so it's real to come up against resistance with change but

to help them challenge some of those notions and to believe that a better world actually is possible . It doesn't mean you stop being critical , but it's very easy , especially in academia , to get stuck in these circles where and research has shown us that you tend to be perceived as smarter .

If you're a pessimist Just perception you tend to be perceived as smarter . If you're a pessimist Just perception , you tend to be perceived . And so there tends to be a move towards cynicism .

And a lot of what I do in my class is to peel away some of that cynicism , to invite folks not to see the world as it is which many people in academia are very good at to understand why the world is the way it is and why it's messed up , but to also come with me and imagine the way the world could be .

And that doesn't always happen overnight , but it's a really powerful transformation when it does , and so you can imagine the magic of this classroom We've got sort of two tracks of folks .

You've got the excited idealists that are learning the skills they need to get going and you've got the cynics who are starting to relearn some of their mental patterns around change . And then the fusion , the interaction , the intersection between the two is very exciting .

So start with myself first , but within , so I start with myself first and then I go outside and maybe I don't need to think about the world as this humongous beast and I can only start with my friend or my son or my daughter or my husband or my wife .

examined the three types of flexibility , so sort of what makes leaders better able to adapt to change . So there's three types . There's cognitive , it's kind of strategic flexibility , holding multiple mental models in mind . There's emotional being able to vary your states , to meet others states .

And then the third , which I think is most important here , is dispositional , and that's the ability at the same time to be both realistic and also believe in a better future . So I think so often in change making we feel this pressure to be on one of two sides , one of two poles .

Either the side of I mean , it's great , you know , don't worry about it , it'll work out the kind of toxic positivity side , yes . Or on the other side , it's that things are hopeless .

You know what am I call like when people say like learned helplessness , like it's just it's inevitable , there's nothing you can do , and then the middle is actually not that helpful . You're just sort of a little optimistic , a little pessimistic , not that helpful , and what you want to do is actually own both .

The best change makers , I know , are able to see both things . They don't pretend that the world doesn't need change or that we're not facing real systemic hard problems , but also we have this belief that tomorrow can be better than today and we can play some role in making sure that it is so .

Sometimes , my job is just to give these cynics the permission to say yeah if the world seems tough , if it feels really hard in your company to lead a digital transformation effort because three CTOs have come and gone and they've all failed , well , you're right , it is really hard to lead change , and just because three have failed doesn't mean that the fourth will

fail . And so it's giving them both that space , seeing them for where they are , but also that permission to say yeah , and you could do something about it .

What can go wrong , and I'm pretty sure that you probably touch on that or your students touch on that . What can go wrong with this ? And so we imagine that things that can go wrong , and we go back and then we put them in a sort of order as a risk management strategy , and I always try to invite the people that are actually from the three spectrums .

They're too excited , they're too cynical and we don't have a shortage of cynics , you know , in Australia especially and then we hope that we'll have a couple of people that fall within not the neutral , the zero , but at least the one and two positive side and then .

So then insight can happen around that sort of region , and sometimes also we say the excited person , I'm going to move them a little bit closer and bring them down to reality , maybe about a four or a five closer to the zero , the cynic . We usually say if , after this session , we move them from a resistance of eight into a six , that's probably a win .

For now I was doing that based on a book I read called your Brain at Work by Dr David Rock , but now you actually just linked that to a proper framework , so I thank you for that . Now you've just completed the picture for me , so I'm really grateful for that .

I want to shift gear and I want to talk to you about the emergence of AI and the technology in general . Anyway , how do you see that positioned as an enabler for change makers ?

I'm seeing way too many people who are way too young in their career that are feeling so overwhelmed with AI that they're sort of giving up on it . They're sort of saying , look , I've figured things out .

I'm already a VP , I kind of got things going and , yeah , maybe I'm 20 years before retirement , but like I don't want to learn AI , I figured things out , I know how to win in the 2023 , 2024 world ,

I'm good .

Then there's the other side , which are the people who are eager to learn and to grow and to try new things , and I think it's scary to think about all the people that are trying to ignore AI , because I can't predict all the ways it's going to change our world , but there's no doubt that it will , and so I think one of the most important things to be

thinking about right now is to be adopting a mindset of learning and growing from it . What's exciting about it , and what's also scary , is that there are so many unknowns .

We don't know exactly how it will disrupt our personal jobs , how it will disrupt society , maybe even how it will disrupt our elections , but it's this fascinating tool that I think we no longer have the privilege of ignoring . You and I talked before the podcast started recording this idea of always be learning , always be growing .

It's a chapter in my book that I call students always , and I think this idea that just when you think you've got things figured out , just when you're like , yeah , I got everything down , then there either comes an external shock or internal shock or something changes and you've got to keep learning , you've got to keep growing .

And so I think , when it comes to AI , we've got to get over this false notion that we've reached some plateau where things are steady .

It's going to be chaotic , it's going to be rocky , and you better jump on and try to learn and figure it out sooner rather than later , because at some point you'll need to , and so better to do it now rather than five years from now .

I thought this is the end , and so what martial arts taught me is that no matter what you do , there's always something else that you can learn , and so they go from learning lots of things to detailed things on certain moves .

The idea of AI and the uncertainties around it , I actually find personally , I found myself in a position June last year where I just worked with a group of people , got into , dragged into a rabbit hole about an AI strategy for a university .

Obviously , I started learning more about it and I needed to use it and I needed to to use chat , gpt and I use Calc Palette now and I compare it .

I find , unlike a lot of other people , but maybe that's my student mindset the uncertainties around AI and the potential and the promise is even more exciting than if I've got everything perfected in the technology . I've got everything perfected in the technology .

So literally I created my own rabbit hole and I'm so deep into it now because I found that I thought in my age it's too late for me to actually be ahead or come up with my own solutions . And all of that . And AI has offered somebody like me , not only as a tool to help me with my craft , but also like I'm creating my .

Currently I'm working on creating my GPT myself and I'm playing with it , but I'm not a technology guy , but I'm curious about how this thing happens . So I find that promise in it and the excitement around it and the potential will be really fantastic . I think it will transform lots of experiences . It's already happening anyway .

But the analogy that I use sometimes when you see those camps , I always think that it's like you are in a village and so far away you heard the story that there's a lion in one of the villages , so so far away from you , they don't care about it , until you start hearing more stories , until you start hearing the roaring of the lion , until the lion will

actually be in your village . And so we're saying the only way to actually again going back to my statement , the only way to take control of uncertainty is actually to embrace it and start learning about it .

And so I agree with that lion analogy that it's hard to force us to practice something right now , but there's real value in doing so , because the sooner that you get on it , the more good things that will come as a result . There's , I think , greater power and agency in doing that , so you can kind of be someone .

We sometimes talk about it being above the algorithm or below the algorithm . Are you someone who is affected by the decisions of others , so someone else creates an algorithm and you then have your life affected , or are you someone who has some say over how that algorithm itself is created ? And I think changemakers want to move above the algorithm .

That's changed a bit , as I listen to more kids songs than audiobooks , but some of the patterns still hold , and so it's finding ways to listen to interesting podcasts , interesting new ideas .

And then I also learn a lot from the sort of magic of bumping into people , of having people who inspire me and having regular conversations with them , bouncing ideas off of them , getting inspired by what they're reading . And then , of course , I think there's no better way to learn than to teach .

The classic saying goes one person teaches , two people learn , and so I think that's what drew me into education in the first place is that every single day I'm in the classroom . Sure , I'm the teacher , but I walk away with new ideas and new insights , and there's nothing better than that .

of , before they've been introduced to the ideas , and it measures all kinds of situational , behavioral activity type of indices .

Then they take it after the class is done and we also follow up every June with every alumni of my class and it's a way to see how they're growing and developing , both at a macro level , at a population level , but also a chance to reconnect and get a little bit of qualitative data as well and see what folks are up to .

And it's been really wonderfully rewarding to see the way my students grow and apply these lessons . In the class , students do a changemaker project .

There's no final exam and it's been wonderful to see how many of these changemaker projects actually continued on , have become venture-funded startups as a result , or even , when the project doesn't continue , that maybe they find their spark in the class .

They find that they really care about I don't know educational equality and that becomes the change they pursue for the rest of their career . And so , yeah , I love keeping in touch with and hearing from former students .

So there of course could be self-selection bias people who take this class who are already at a school like Berkeley , so I'm aware of the sort of biased sample that we have .

But there's so much that students learn and the data show they grow as leaders , as shifting from someone sort of with an individual idea to bring people inclusively along on the journey , and so that's where we see really the biggest delta .

In fact , I've thought about this for a while and I always thought that a leader is actually a changemaker by default , and the way I see it is that a leader's job is to come every work to work to help their people succeed , and how they do that . They make decisions .

Those decisions become changes and therefore , by default , a leader is actually a changemaker , and so it's in their best interest to understand how humans adopt change in the first place . What's your observation in organizations about how they manage change ?

It's facilitator , coach , guide , mentor , dictator sometimes , but I make the case that it's a change maker . I think that's the best synonym for as we think about what it takes to lead today , and I think it's an important shift too , because the word leader itself is quite loaded .

I think there's some bias around race and class and gender and sort of who sees themselves as a leader .

Based on a small sample size just of my class , I found that , for instance , many of the women in my class feel more comfortable with the title of changemaker than of leader , again because of sort of built-in cultural biases around who can be a leader , what a leader looks like , and so changemaker is a more inclusive way to think about that , and so I love

this idea of shifting our identity to think about how can we be changemakers . Part of what I don't like about the word leader even if I'm a professor of leadership is that we often think in terms of scarcity .

We think that , okay , there's only one CEO in my organization , there's only five vice presidents , only one executive director , and that makes us feel like being a leader is scarce . And yeah , maybe titles of leadership is scarce , there's only one formal leader , but leadership as an act is actually abundant .

Leadership is something that each of us , no matter where we are in the organization , can practice .

Leadership itself doesn't require a title , doesn't require authority , and so I love helping people make that shift from thinking about sort of leader as a title or I'll lead once I'm a vice president , I'll lead once someone tells me I could lead to instead building that identity as a changemaker .

And once you have that , it reduces some of those barriers to doing leader-like acts and helping us show up in the best way , both for ourselves and for our teams and our organization .

So the idea is that if I vote for you , then I expect you to be a change maker . Which sort of compliments we are actually talking about now ? I also find it fascinating that people will value the title leader over a changemaker .

And I remember maybe 20 years ago , my coach leadership coach asked me always measure yourself by impact , how much impact do you actually ? And then it took me years to really understand what that even means . So maybe that's just also .

I needed to go through the process of going from a title to from a salary and a title to impact , and in fact , the more you're impactful it's kind of funny the more you get opportunities , the more you get paid . So it's kind of money the more you get opportunities , the more you get paid . So it's just the reverse cycle .

So that's what they call your market value multiplies by the level of impact you actually have on society . We are coming close to the end of the podcast .

Totally enjoying this , alex , and I'm grateful for your time , I'd like you to share with us , for people like myself and the change management community , and influence and relationship building , what would be the things that we need to think about when we go about our work every day ?

Almost any process could work , but where I see change often failing is not because you didn't choose the right tool or methodology , right system . It's that you didn't get people bought in with the right change maker mindset . And so I encourage you and folks that work on change to really focus on that changemaker mindset .

How can you get people to stop fearing change but start seeing the potential in change , stop seeing change as something that's done to them and rather something that they have a say in ? And I think that if you can unlock the change maker mindset in folks , then it then allows the change management process to open up and go so much more smoothly .

So it's not about the tools , it's about the mindset , and so I would start there .

So thank you for having me . I really enjoyed our conversation today .

Remember , and in my opinion , change is an enduring force and you will only have a measure of certainty and control when you embrace it . Until next time , thank you for being part of the Inner Game of Change community . I am Ali Jammah and this is the Inner Game of Change podcast .