#263 Colin Savage: The Frequent Flyer of Change Has Thoughts on AI—and Lifelong Learning — Part One

What are some of your favorite brands?

Mother, Farley, Zee Supply, ours too.

We're EverEve, the women's fashion retailer that loves all the brands you do.

So they're always here, which you love.

You'll also love 10% off at evereve.com slash podcast.

Do we know you or what?

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.
Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. This is a three-part series with Colin Selvich.
In part one, the first episode, will dive into Colin's fascinating journey as a self-proclaimed change addict turned change guru. Colin's career spans continents, cultures, and industries.

Seven countries lived in, seven more seek content to, and projects in over 70 nations. From organizational transformation to personal reinvention, he has mastered the art of embracing change and applying those lessons to life.
In this conversation, Colin unpacks his unique perspective on change. How throwing himself into the unknown led to unparalleled growth and insight.
From leaving Canada with nothing but a suitcase and ambition, to navigating industries from telecommunications to financial services, Colin shares how the constant evolution around him became his greatest teacher. In the next episodes, we'll explore the learning required for transformation, why Colin believes lifelong learning is outdated and skills decking is the future.
And finally, in part three, we'll tackle AI, human intelligence, and why every one of us needs a personal AI strategy. Buckle up.
This one is a ride. Colin, finally! I got you to my show.
Welcome to Chief Change Officer. Good morning to you.
Thank you so much for having me, Vince, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Colin is from Canada, the big north, a very cold place.
I used to live in Toronto myself. Colin is in another province or in America.

We call it... old place.
I used to live in Toronto myself. Colin is in another province, or in America,

we call it a state. So Colin, let's start with your story.
Who are you, what you're doing now,

but also what did you do in the past? Your past, your journey, and your history.

Fantastic. Thank you, Vince.
Happy to do. So I'm Colin, as you introduced, Colin Babbage.
I am hailing today from the Queen City, which was Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. And so I was born and raised here.
I lived here until I was probably just out of the university, and then I left and lived overseas for 20 years. That really isn't that uncommon.
During the early 90s in Saskatchewan, a lot of people looked for opportunities elsewhere. And even if I look at sort of my high school graduating class, 60-70% of them stayed in the city and went to our local university.
Another chunk maybe went to a university nearby or in a neighboring province, and a very small bit even left elsewhere in Canada, like you mentioned, Ontario. But very few people went further than that.
I finished university armed with a great liberal arts degree and a degree in English literature, which obviously at the time when everybody was banging down my door to give me a job. But I needed to go.
I needed to go somewhere else. So I left with that degree and with some other experience and decided to test Asia.
There's a long story and it's all through my LinkedIn profile. People can read it, but I managed to, over the 20 years, build up what I call 7-7-70.
So I lived in seven countries, I was seconded to seven others, and I worked in Project 70 Nations Around the World. Put it up and make it simple for others to follow.
There's three threads that go through my background. One of them was academics and education.
I was heavily involved in my own academics. I studied for three master's degrees in various areas.
I worked as a lecturer in universities and countries across Southeast Asia and Japan, where I spent almost nine years. Then there was more of a business thread, which involved business development, marketing, market research in a number of industries, which all, looking back, link a little bit to each other, but at times were also quite different, particularly because they also not include just all over the private sector, but also working with

government and governments across different countries I lived in.

And then finally, the other thread would probably be something where I would think, and it's

more aligned with this podcast almost directly, is strategy and change.

While I'm working in industries or moving from one to the other, I noticed that things were evolving. An example would be, I spent time leading a team of analysts out of London in the UK that focused on telecommunications across me.
So a team of 40 people, they were all dedicated and focused on individual countries or market.

And they were all coming back to me with similar, but also at times very different analysis of how those markets were changing. Data was becoming part of what you could put on your mobile phone or you could start searching the internet.
And this led me into financial services where, while I was with quite a traditional Japanese major licensure, there was fintech visible. And fintech led to things like regtech, where we're doing regulation.
Through all of these different evolutions and changes, there were little things that led me from one to the other. but also I'm really honest to say that a little bit of looking in the rear view of your and seeing you afterward.

At the time, it was just a lot of change.

And I know today, Vince, we're going to talk about something that I mentioned in Change Addict to Change Guru.

I really was a change addict in a sense.

When I left Canada in 1994, I just threw caution to the wind and went.

Picked Thailand, I packed the suitcase, I went there.

I knew nothing about the language, culture, the working environment or anything.

I not only changed the city I lived in, but the country, the culture, the language, the industry, and everything at once. And that really put me on the path.
To do it repeatedly until before I moved back to Canada, I joked to myself that, look, if I change everything at once and I'm addicted to doing that, the only thing I can do next is maybe move to the moon. There's no more I can add into the mix to make it harder on myself.
So I think full circle, all of the different industries and markets and cultures and country, roles and people that I've dealt with, you can put a lot of energy into promoting it and encouraging it, but to a point before it gets a little bit dangerous. So hopefully that's a good interview, Vince.
If you've got any other questions for me on that, I'd be happy to delve into it. I could take it for a whole hour on myself, QR.
In your self-introduction, two words caught my attention. Change addict and change guru.
How do you define these two terms? Regina is a lovely city. And like I said, I grew up here.
And I grew up at a time when it was pretty traditional. Most of us looked the same.
There wasn't a whole lot of ways to escape it. The right word to use.
And so there wasn't a lot of novelty. At least from my perspective.
If you wanted to, you could, you grew up here, you went to university, you got a degree in administration and we're a government now. So you'd go work for the government, you'd find your partner, start a family and so on.
So that was pretty, pretty much laid out. And that really wasn't me.
And at the time I didn't know, I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I knew that wasn't the path that I wanted to take. And so the only thing I could do is basically have my radar on high alert for anything that sort of caught my interest.
And that's where I get to the change addict is it's a lot about novelty. Oh, wouldn't it be neat if I moved to Kenya and I worked for a bank? Or wouldn't it be cool if I went to China and I studied?

And when I hear people say that, I'm always encouraging them to consider it.

But the question afterwards is, for what purpose?

If you go and you could study where you live now, because of all the opportunities we have,

and online and the virtual world has made it easy for example us today you're in Hong Kong I'm in a redondo we're doing very easily we can do whatever we want well why do you need why do you need to go there and do that and if the answer that comes back a lot of I don't know I saw a movie and China looks really neat or, oh, I saw that one person in social media that they do this and they're being super successful. So why would that be neat? And I don't think it's a bad answer, but the reality is that you've got to have a little bit more planning behind it.
And I lived the attic lifestyle. Like I said, I moved, picked up and moved to Thailand.
And then one day in Thailand, I don't really teach English to adults and at the university. I want to go somewhere where there's no Burger King, there's no 7-Eleven, there's no this, there's no that.
And I basically walked into a travel, where can I go? But I poured, and she said, go to Myanmar. So I did.
I went to Myanmar and did nothing about it. Just took a suitcase, and then I lived there for a year and a half, learning my way as I was there.
But looking back, that was just novel. Oh, it's foreign.
It's new. It's different.
It's unknown. I'll let leap into it and don't do it.
And a single person now, anywhere can do that. But it didn't really have a purpose in mind.
And the thing is, novelty is great, but novelty wears off. You're there for a year and a half, and then you wake up one morning and it happens again.
Oh, I'm bored. I've done this.
I've learned these things that are really cool and interesting. And okay, let's go move here or let's go try this or let's do whatever.
The other thing that I might have is that change addict, like whenever you're with some kind of adversity, it takes as much, if not more, focus to get through to the end. The lucky thing for me was, oh, I've started this degree, I've got to finish it.
Or I've started in this job, I've got to be here at least this amount of time. I've started learning this language, I've got to focus at least enough so I can do some kind of benchmark.
And it's a lot harder when you have to do that when it is just chasing novelty. So I think, yeah, like the change addict part, there's a lot of people that will do that.
And actually, I'm a little bit different. If you start something and it's not for you, you should really just chuck it in and go find the thing that you want.
There's opportunity cost, as we all know, right? But if you don't wrap things up or if you don't complete them to a certain extent, later on, I don't really know how you could pull out the value. And as we get into other topics, but maybe you can apply it to more.
But if you haven't finished it, you're never going to get there. So the way that I came about the concept of change addicts, and addict is a harsh word, but you really can be addicted to change and to numb.
So being a change addict, would you say you're one of those who puts in a good amount of calculation behind each change? Or is it more like, oh, it's just them feeling? What type are you? Have you ever thought about that? No, that's a great question, Vince. And I think if it began I thought it would be in hindsight, which is lovely to have.
But I think at the time, it was, like, I mentioned adversity, but, and I also mentioned boredom.

For me, like, when I didn't have responsibility, right, it's just me.

I'm the one that's responsible for myself.

I got to feed, clothe, house me.

There were many times where I was just like, you know what?

I'm going to change it. I quit my job, and I't have anything else or I don't really have a plan to do anything else and I'll just see what happens.
And that's dangerous. There are people that can do it, but I don't like it, so I'm not going to push through the adversity.
It's not going to help you later on in life. Absolutely.
If you're not happy with where you are and you're not, you don't think you're where you can be or you're not being supported the way that you would like, then you certainly should look for other avenues and talk to a lot of people and try different things. But you can try different things while you're doing something else that allows you to do that exploration.
If you're just doing it because somebody has slighted you. When I was in Myanmar, I just woke up one day and said, I have $300.
I'm now living a very good life, but I'm never going to have anything if I ever decided to leave here. So why don't I just go and I was out in a week but it's not I could have done it in a much more thoughtful way and I might be an odd cat in that move to so many places and I've done whatever maybe that's not going to be the way of the world in the future but you only get I would think in your life a bunch of major changes.
So you really shouldn't minimize the impact and the importance of the change of the time. Really give yourself some time to think about, like, why am I really unhappy? What do I really want to do? I don't know what I want to do.
What are some things I can figure out that might lead me? Have I thought in my head and built some scenario planning or I'm like, what's going to happen if they do it? Am I going to regret it? Regret's an awful thing or we're always going to have it. But I think you can minimize it if you've got a little bit of thoughtfulness around why you're leaping to change something.
Is it really just today I'm having a bad day and I had a bad interaction? Or is it, you know what, it's been building up for a long time and I shouldn't be here. I need to go find a place in my tribe.
So I think, yeah, like a lot of those different components are really important for figuring out, am I addicted to change or am I welcoming of it? And I'm using it as fuel to help me find a better place to rise. Like you said, one of the threats running through your experience is change and strategy.
You've worked with so many firms and organizations, guiding them through their transformations. So you must have seen countless business cases unfold.

What have you learned from these consulting projects and organizational change initiatives that could apply to individual situations?

Are there lessons from these business cases that also resonate on a personal level, especially when we face dilemmas or crossroads in our own lives. If you're like most of us, you start shopping for a dress at T minus the thing you need the dress for.
And if that's a fail, Standback says it's not pretty. Gratefully, there's EverEve.
If you know, you know. And if you don't, you're welcome.
EverEve is the women's fashion retailer that understands your lifestyle and has the best brands and the latest trends you need to look great, which is why your favorite new dress is here. New customers save 10% right now at evereve.com slash podcast.
Yeah, and I think so there is, this is a great question a great question again, Rin. And I did some soul searching in that I have worked in a number of both the mainstream and odd cases of change in a variety of different countries and industries.
Potentially, there's two things I would want to start off with, and there's some misconceptions, some common misconceptions I see about change. And again, we're talking like in an organizational or a business or even a personal professional way.
And the first one is we have these people and I support them. Embrace change.
Embrace change. It's the same thing as like you're embracing change for success.
And then how are we defining success? Is it simply a bunch of key performance indicators and some sales bigger than revenue? Is it just keeping people? Is it launching ourselves into a brand new space to be quality success? Is it keeping diets called quality? There's a whole variety of different ways to do it. And embracing change to success is fine, but don't do it just for the sake of success.
Because the true impact really comes when you are guiding, strategic, and focused change. And that's a whole different arena with a lot of complicated parameters.
And you want to hear about some specific examples. So I think I've got two and I'm going to make them personal to me because change is person.
One example is going to be a bit of a surprise to people because they will have read, potentially, how traditional this country is. And this was Japan.
So I lived in Japan, as I mentioned, for quite a long time. And then they worked with Japanese organizations, for machines, for an equally long-created.
And I found, yes, value and worth put on traditional practice. And that also varies across industry.
And lo and behold, I also worked in a very traditional industry, literature. But from the outside, it does look like it's stuff.
Practices

are the same. They move along.
So when I was working for one of the big organizations,

yeah, there wasn't a lot of airtime given to, hey, why don't we try this? Or,

hey, why don't we consider something completely different? There was incremental change, change or introduction of new things. And then luck would have it.
I ended up traveling to a developing market, looked at senior people from that city and looked around and just started noticing thoughts. And then thinking, hey, we could connect these dots to make something unique.
And with the Japanese Life Insurance Company, we're in Brazil. We're seeing something that's a bit unique.
In Japan, one of the largest minorities are really, and they are people who travel to Japan as youth, they have access to visas and other things, and they start their working life in Japan. So they're actually indoctrinated.
They learn working culture from being in Japanese companies, while other men. Otherwise, they learn things like, hey, life insurance is important.
You need to have it. The discussion was, how are we going to go build this business by here? And what came about was, I learned that change, individual, team, and otherwise, comes from doing a lot of promotion.
So Japan is a lot about individual conversations to get support or get direction. Big organizations are great at providing that direction, but often indirect.
You have to be a cute person. So, hey, why don't we consider this? Why don't we do that? But also, it's measured and it's planned to change.
You can't just come up with an idea and throw it at people and get them to say yes or no. You've got to research your idea.

This is the market side.

These are the people.

This is what they would buy.

This is how it would benefit them if they stayed where they are or then when they moved back.

This is how we could link a dovetail or a pipeline

into getting new people in a new market we might make.

So it took a lot of time,

but I was very surprised and very proud that we actually managed to get this kind of release. I got support from lovely people within the organization.
They provided their time to me. We moved ahead.
It took two years, but the change did happen. And it was actually a real shining example of just because you think a culture and a group of people are traditional in their practices, doesn't mean they're averse to change.
You just need to be in that change addict thing we were talking about. Not willy nilly, not, hey, let's just do it for the sake of doing it.
Be measured, be strategic, be researched in what you want to change, and then find the kind and sport of voices. And if you find enough of them, you'll get groundswell and you'll be able to do it.
If you don't, maybe your idea really isn't that great. Maybe you need to go back to the drawing.
So learn to take the interest and the novelty and the energy that comes from potential change and have it fuel you to do the really important steps, the fundamental steps to maybe make that change happen. And the flip side would be actually back here in Canada.
I worked for a quite traditional marketing company.

Probably if I tell you who it is, people will know right away.

They brought me in as a changed person.

That's how I was recruited.

Please come here.

We know our industry is on the decline.

We're not really entirely sure where to go with it.

We've seen what you did in other places.

We're eager to change.

We want to change. They used all the right words.
They were very receptive to the ideas before I moved in-house. I got in there and I asked, do you want me to be disruptive? Would you like me to

push new initiatives? Absolutely, this is what we want. And within a month of me doing that, we don't really like it.
Or that was a little too much. The reality is they were a different kind of ad.
They were hooked on a legacy of very high revenue and high profit margin. And they weren't willing, they really weren't willing, and they hadn't done the time to figure out, do we want to change? Are we willing to forego some of that to potentially make it somewhere else? Or maybe not.
And even though they had all of the support, allegedly support from people above and their ownership and others, they were incredibly reluctant to do it. So I was sitting in a role where change was in my title, but I couldn't do anything.
And I had built up Goodwill. I'd got some champions.
I was doing everything that change management tells you to do. Pushing the needle here, scaling your time here.
And for the time period that I was there, they were wholly unwilling to take on. And at a certain point, I had to, you know what? It isn't going to work for me.
I'm pushing the rock up hill, whatever the the Greek myth do, and I'm not getting anywhere. And I'm being told two different stories.
So we dig into it, which might have really been like an external push from other people. So we don't want to do it.
And it ended up being a failure for myself. And it's something that I'd taken on and I accept sat.
And I learned a lot of really good lessons from it. And frankly, I had some work with the wonderful people that were driven to do it.
But when the entire organization has been dictated change and not really trusting of the person who's supposed to pilot it, then it's not going to happen. But in this instance, it's a little bit about, it's maybe less about the change addict thing, but learning how, in fact, change guru, if that's a good word, or change guide, which is, all right, maybe we need to take a step back and figure out, what is your definition of change? Is it collectively the same? Do we all think it's such a good idea? Okay, maybe we need to tailor it a little more specifically.
And then move on from there. And that's hopefully where I am now.
And how I actually go about it a little bit more. There's a little bit less, let's put on the gas.
More, let's put the car in park for a second and let's have a talk. We'll drive a block down the road and then we're going to have another talk.

And that way we can get to the kind of, again, change that we're all trying to achieve.

And back to that definition of six steps, not just keep that directed by the outside

or financial reasons, only the whole way that we're going to devolve and change for the day.

Just now, Colin unpacked his unique perspective on change. Change addict turned change guru.
from leaving Canada with nothing but a suitcase and ambition

to navigating industries from telecommunications to financial services. Colin shared how the constant evolution around him became his greatest teacher.
In part two, tomorrow, we'll explore the learning required for transformation. Colin has, I don't even know how many degrees under his belt.
Why Colin believes lifelong learning is outdated and skill stacking is the future. And part three for Friday will tackle AI, human intelligence, and why every one of us needs a personal AI strategy.
Come back tomorrow and join us. Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews,

check out our website, and follow me on social media.

I'm Vince Shen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.
If you're like most of us, you start shopping for a dress at T minus the thing you need the dress for. And if that's a fail, Standback says it's not pretty.
Gratefully, there's EverEve.

If you know, you know.

And if you don't, you're welcome.

EverEve is the women's fashion retailer that understands your lifestyle

and has the best brands and the latest trends you need to look great,

which is why your favorite new dress is here.

New customers save 10% right now at evereve.com slash podcast.

Amazon One Medical presents Painful Thoughts. Do they ever actually clean the ball pit at these kids' play gyms? Or is my kid just swimming in a vat of bacteria, catching whatever cootie of the day is breeding in there? A cootie that'll probably take down our whole family.
Luckily, one medical 24 7 virtual care you can get checked out for whatever baldpiditis you've contracted

amazon one medical health care just got less painful