Make These 3 Cultural Shifts To Reignite Change In Your Organization

Greg Satell
6 min readNov 18, 2023
Photo by Ono Kosuki

On a cold November day in 2013, frustrated by recent events in Ukraine, a journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posted to Facebook, “Okay guys, let’s get serious. Who’s ready to go to the Maidan today at midnight? ‘Likes’ will not be counted. Only comments under this post with the words ‘I’m ready.’ Once there are more than a thousand, we will organize it.”

Nothing needed to be explained. Everyone knew exactly what he meant. Nine years earlier, hundreds of thousands of people flooded Independence Square in Kyiv, locally known as “the Maidan,” to protest a falsified election in a movement called the Orange Revolution. Mustafa was now calling on his fellow citizens to do the same.

It was a moment that changed history. Yet it’s not that moment we should focus on, but what came before. It was what happened in those ensuing nine years — the development of unseen networks, the learning and the cultural change — that made the moment possible. The truth is that for genuine change to take place, significant cultural shifts need to come first.

1. From Preaching To Listening

The Orange Revolution got its name because orange was the campaign color of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. “It was not about social mobilization, it was not about…

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Greg Satell
Greg Satell

Written by Greg Satell

Co-Founder: ChangeOS | Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker, Wharton Lecturer, HBR Contributor, - Learn more at www.GregSatell.com

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