Chief Change Officer - #395 Colin Savage: Why Skill Stacking Is the New Lifelong Learning — Part One

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

If reinvention were a passport, Colin Savage’s pages would be full. From global projects across seven countries to helping old-school industries like Japanese insurers modernize with tact, Colin’s career isn’t just built on change—it thrives on it.In Part One, we go deep on the difference between chasing novelty and building purpose. Colin dismantles the dated idea of “lifelong learning” and replaces it with something sharper: skill stacking. You’ll also hear how he developed change muscles by moving countries, industries, and ideas—without ever losing sight of what matters.Key Highlights of Our Interview:The Purpose Behind the Pivot“Change is exciting—but if there’s no deeper reason behind it, it’s just noise.” Why purpose should lead, not lag, behind transformation.Skill Stacking vs. Lifelong Learning“Lifelong learning sounds noble—but it’s often aimless. Skill stacking is intentional.” Colin’s case for mastering combinations over collecting badges.Japan: Where Change Means Patience“In the Japanese life insurance industry, I learned that fast isn’t always smart.” Why transformation in traditional sectors demands humility and consensus.The Trap of Unfinished Adventures“You can jump into change for the thrill—but it’s the follow-through that matters.” Why Colin says completion is underrated in careers.Addicted to Change? Own It.“I love novelty—but I’ve learned to pair it with discipline.” Colin’s method for staying curious without burning out._________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Colin Savage  --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<

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 Selvidge. In part one, the first episode, we'll 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 seconded to, and projects in over 70 nations. From organizational transformation to personal reinvention, re-inventioned. 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 3, 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. Cullen is in another province or in America, we call it a state. So Cullen, let's start with your story. Who are you? What are you doing now? But also what did you do in the past? Your path, your journey, and your history. Fantastic. Thank you, Vince. Happy to hear. 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 Gatchawin, 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 their neighbouring province. And a very small bit even left and moved elsewhere in Canada, as 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, 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 I know 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 different, particularly because they also not include just all over the private sector, but also working with government and governments across different countries they lived in. And then finally, the, the other thread would probably be something where I would

add it 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 and the UK that focused on telecommunications across the entire 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 a quite a traditional Japanese major like insurer, there was FinTech with them.

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 and 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 had no, 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 one. 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 one,

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 countries, I've enrolled in 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 can take up for an hour on myself if you want. In your self-introduction, two words caught my attention. Change edit 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 look the same. There wasn't a whole lot of ways to get 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 were a government talent, you go work for the government, you find your partner, start a family and so on. So path 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. my radar on high alert for anything that sort of caught my interest. And that's where I get to the change addict. 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 what thing, 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 and I'm in a Regina. We're doing very easily. We can do whatever we want. Well, why do you need to go there and do that? And if the answer that comes back, the lot of Well, why do you need, why do you need to go there and do that? And if the answer that comes back, the lot of, I don't know, I saw it movie and China looks really neat or, Oh, I thought that one person

thought the media that they do this and they're being super successful. So why would not be me? And I don't think that'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 addict lifestyle. Like I said, I moved, picked up and moved to Thailand. And then one day in Thailand, I was really teaching English to adults 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 aid. Where can I go? But I poured, and she said, go to Myanmar. So I did. I went to Myanmar and there was nothing about it, took a suitcase, and then I lived there for a year and a half, learning my way. 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, how important. I've done this. I've learned these things. They're 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 shipped 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, well, I've started this degree, I got to finish it. Or started in this job, I got to be here at least this amount of time. Or started learning this language, I'm focused 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 gonna get there so the way that I came about the concept of change addict and addict is the harsh word but you really can be to change it at all. So being a change addict, individually, 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 I began to talk to him 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 the one that's responsible for myself. I got to feed, close, 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 don'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 okay. Now I live a very good life, but I'm never gonna 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, moved to so many places and have done whatever. Maybe that's not gonna be the way to 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 What do I really want to do? Okay. I don't know what I want to do. Where is something 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 we do it? Am I going to regret it? Regret is 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 you'll 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 Cogniz 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? Yeah, and I think so there's... This is 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 those are some

misconceptions and common misconceptions that you 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, and then how are we defining success?

Is it, 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 wildly successful? Is it keeping status quo? There's a whole variety of different ways to do it and embracing change for success is fine,

but don't do it just for the sake of success. Because the true impact really come when you are, you're guiding strategic and focused change. And that's a whole different arena with a lot of complicated parameters. And you're talking about some specific examples. So I think I've got two and I'm going to make them personal to me because changes 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 period. And I have 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, light drinker, but from the outside, it does look like it's stuck. Practices are the same. They move along. So when I was working for one of these big organizations,

there wasn't a lot of air time 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, 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 thought and then thinking, okay, we could connect these thoughts to make something unique.

And with the Japanese Bike Insurance Company, we're in Brazil, we're seeing something that's a 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. They learn things like, hey life insurance is

important, you need to have it. The discussion went, how are we gonna go build this business idea? And what came about was I learned that change, individual, team, and otherwise, comes from talk, 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 acutely. 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 site. 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 it would benefit them if they stayed where they are. Or then when they moved back, this is how we could link 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 a reason. We, 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, you know, from 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 ground swell 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 a potential change and have it fuel you due to 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 idea 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? And they said, absolutely, if 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 tried, I had built up good will,

I'd got some champion. I was doing everything that change management told you to do, pushing the needle here, tape scaling it back here. And for the time period that I was there, the tapes were wholly unwilling to tape on. At a certain point, I had to, you know what, it isn't going to work for me.

I'm pushing the rock, I'm ill, whatever the Greek do, and I'm not getting anywhere. And I'm being told two different stories. So we dig into it with my, to really 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, I've taken on and I've learned a lot of really good lessons from it and frankly 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 that 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 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 a little more speed 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, less 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 gonna 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 evolve and change for the better.

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 2, 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 skills-decking is the future. And part 3 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 to subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.