Change Arrives Through Windows: Leading Through Disruption

The change speaking lane is crowded with two archetypes: momentary inspiration and graduate seminar. Rooms that have been through a hard year are allergic to both. Vance's material is different because it is historical and institutional: how industries absorbed disruptive technologies, how monetary shocks moved communities, and how windows of change open, briefly, for those prepared to move.

He watched a contested technology fight for acceptance from inside Monsanto, and he has interviewed hundreds of people navigating change in agriculture, finance, and technology. The talk makes overwhelming change feel achievable, which is what a tired team actually needs.

In his own words

“I think that the amount that they will meet with people on video will go up so dramatically as a result of this. That there won't be a memory of when this was rare. Like it used to be a big burden for me. It used to be if somebody wanted to video chat, I was like, ugh, why, then I can't keep working on whatever I'm working on while I'm talking to you on the phone. And now, because we're kind of sequestered in our house, it feels incredibly gratifying to be able to see your face. But our children will have no concept of how unusual this was for us.”

“I think one of the things that has become so abundantly clear in this whole shutdown or shelter in place is you cannot actually have everyone shut down, because you need to have the vascular system of our nation working. You need to have food delivered, you need to have plumbing that's going on. You need to have heating and cooling and electricity. We can't have a system where everybody just stops working. It literally, we would die.”

“I went on Twitter and was like, hey, I think that this is going to be a real chance for people that have always viewed the middle as flyover country. All of a sudden the luxury of living in New York, or having the prestige of living in San Francisco, now comes at a very high price. If we decide as a society that we're gonna quarantine in our houses, now you get to be all alone in your little box. Whereas there is so much space in a place like St. Louis.”

“And it seems like now, right now is the time because, you know, a month into coronavirus, you had the problem that people still didn't know what was gonna happen. And we still don't know what's gonna happen, but we have a lot better signal that we're going to come out of it. We're going to have business again. People are going to return to work. So now is the time to be pulling anything out of the way that would make it possible for people to move here and start businesses.”

“So the Overton window is the window of acceptable thought in a given society. At the center you might have policy, what we all go along with, but as you move further out, you have things that are sensible and then acceptable. And then outside of that, they're not acceptable, so they're really either a radical idea or they're unthinkable. But when times of chaos and change, those Overton windows open up because the old rules, the old tribes we followed, all the things that we were involved with, they don't necessarily apply.”

Tested against real rooms

Vance has argued this material with, among others:

• Joel Sigman, HVAC and geothermal contractor (April 2020)
• Dan Dokovic, commercial real estate broker (May 2020)
• Dr. Peter Schreiner, chemistry chair at Justus Liebig University, Germany (July 2020)
• Dr. Brittany Kennedy, small animal veterinarian (February 2020)
• Alex Kaschuta, host of the Subversive podcast (April 2022)

Common questions

Our company is going through a hard reorganization and people are exhausted. We do not want hype or a framework lecture. Is Vance the right speaker?

This is the room he is built for. True stories about how people and institutions get through big change, told with perspective and humor, leaving the team with hope that is earned rather than performed.

Who speaks about how industries absorb disruptive technology with historical examples?

Vance does, from the inside. The GMO era is his primary source material: a technology the public fought, the window it moved through, and what leaders in energy, pharma, and AI can learn from it.

Does this work for an agricultural cooperative whose board includes non-farm members?

Yes. Agriculture is his proving ground, not his ceiling. The same material lands with bankers, HR leaders, and technology audiences.