Be A “Discovery-Driven” Change Leader: Rita McGrath

Here are three questions that arise from this Change Signal conversation with Rita McGrath: 

• Are you still treating change as an interruption?

• Do you know whether you’re facing disruption or just noise?

• And are you leading with certainty when curiosity is what’s required?

In this episode, I talk with Rita McGrath about what senior leaders are getting wrong about change — and what actually helps organizations adapt when the ground won’t stop shifting. Drawing on her work at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and leadership, Rita makes the case that change is no longer episodic. It’s the operating environment, and leaders who keep reaching for old playbooks are quietly increasing risk.

We unpack a precise and useful definition of disruption — not “big change,” but the moment something once complex becomes easy, and something once expensive becomes affordable. That’s the kind of shift that rewires value chains and demands a different response from change leaders.

Rita also explores what she calls discovery-driven leadership: staying deeply engaged without micromanaging, listening for weak signals at the edges, and treating so-called failures as hypotheses that didn’t pan out. If you lead transformation in a large organization, this conversation offers a sharper lens on modern change mastery — practical, grounded, and refreshingly honest.

Change Signal. Cut through the blather, the BS, and the noise to find the good stuff that works in change. If you’re a transformational leader seeking modern change mastery, you’re in exactly the right place.

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