Skip to content

IMPACT 2024 Speaker

walt carter

We Can't Stay Here: Becoming A Great Change Captain

Over his extraordinary career, Walt Carter learned and developed a remarkable ability to lead people, teams, and organizations through massive, transformational changes. Many of these were turnaround efforts, where the teams had gotten off course and needed help to re-orient and re-align to the original mission charter. Some of these were “blue ocean” journeys, where there were many unknowns and uncharted waters. A few were do-overs with a new crew to take on someone else’s mission. In all of them, Walt logged the lessons learned and kept track of what worked and what didn’t. Those lessons are available to you, the new change leader, and can get you set up for success on your changes.

Explore the Seven C’s of Effective Change Leadership – Charting your course, Controlling and navigating the journey, Choosing your crew, Casting-off with clarity and alignment, Connecting the crew to the mission and each other, Communicating for calm seas and for storms, and Collaborating for survival and for successful end of mission.

Walt Carter shares lessons and powerful tools to ensure that you can get yourself and your crew all the way through your big transformational changes and not only survive the journey but learn and grow along the way while delivering the goods for your organization. You’ll learn how to complete your success storyboard before you launch, how to use that storyboard to guide you through the journey and navigate the unknowns and unknowable. You’ll get tips on how to choose a “sea-worthy” crew, and how to conduct a launch ceremony that cements the value and power of a successful journey with the crew and the sponsors and other stakeholders. You’ll gain an understanding of how people operate in groups and teams and how you can help connect them to each other and the mission in powerful ways (the true art of the Great Captains!), and you’ll understand the frameworks necessary for communicating throughout a long, hard journey. Lastly, you’ll know why working together is so hard and yet absolutely necessary and uplifting a strong team can be to successful mission accomplishment.

Presented by

Walt Carter, Chief Transformation Officer, Visionographers, LLC

Walt is a seasoned technology leader with over 30 years of experience in aligning technology choices to business strategy and driving results-focused innovation. He has a proven track record of delivering technology upgrades that enable rapid and scalable growth, improve customer experience, and enhance data security and governance. He is passionate about leadership development, technology acquisition and support, IT risk management, and digital disruption. Walt is an author, a board member, a keynote speaker, and an amazing podcast guest. He holds a BS in Physics from Guilford College and a Master’s degree in Public and Private Administration from Central Michigan University and an Honorary Doctorate in Digitalization and Infrastructure Leadership from the Mission Critical Infrastructure Institute. He has won num