NOTHING IS MORE EXCITING — OR SCARY — THAN CHANGE. 

Even powerful, established institutions can falter when the assumptions of their world fall away.

Even a small, scrappy organization can achieve great success if it catches hold of a big change before everyone else.

I’ve built a career helping organizations and their leaders think about this kind of fundamental change. With curiosity and candor, I help them come to terms with what’s happening to their world — whether they’re the ones instigating the change or whether they’re just trying to cope.

In particular, I am an authority in helping people and organizations understand changes in social norms and how they can use them to design a better future.

As an Innovator-in-Residence at the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, I helped create the nation’s first doctoral program in social innovation. I also tackled dozens of entrenched problems facing organizations as a principal of Insight Labs and GreenHouse: The Center of Social Innovation. These organizations include NASA, Harvard Medical School, Starbucks, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and others you’ve heard of.

WHAT I’M UP TO NOW…

I’m working as an external adviser for nursing strategy with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The premise of my engagement is that nurses are essential to building a society where everyone has a chance to be healthy. Specifically, I am helping figure out how we can tap into nurses’ experience and insight to better understand their patients’ unmet needs. As the son of one of the nation’s first nurse practitioners, it’s a dream gig. You can see how some of that work has come to fruition at www.shiftnursing.com.

I’m also working on nursing issues with the Center to Champion Nursing in America, an initiative of RWJF, AARP, and the AARP Foundation. I help out with strategy and editorial work on the Population Health in Nursing project. You can read about some of this work here.

Finally, I am continuing my long-time intellectual project of translating my work on changing social norms into tools anyone can use. To learn more, check out See Think Solve: A Simple Way to Tackle Tough Problems, the primer on norms change I wrote with Jeff Leitner. I’ve got a longer book on social change strategy in the works — to learn more, please contact me.

WORKING WITH ME…

If you’re interested in learning more about how to work with me, drop me a line at andrew@albnelson.com. If you do the social media thing, you can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Click here to read more about how I help health care clients in particular.

Click here to learn how I approach teaching and facilitation projects.