Monthly Archives: August 2021

Digital Transformation Virtual Office Hours – Session One

84% of digital transformations fail, according to research by Michael Gale of PulsePoint Group.

A digital transformation is the journey between a company’s current business operations to a reimagined version of itself from the perspective of how a digital native would build the same business operations leveraging the latest technology and scientific understandings of management science, leadership, decision science, business and process architecture, design, customer experience, etc.

Here is a quick review list of ten things to keep in mind for a successful digital transformation:

Reimagine your business from a digital native perspective
A Human-Centered Data Model (customers & employees)
Put your customers and employees at the center
Identify intersection of what’s needed & what’s possible
Simplify processes
Reduce complexity
Design elegant experiences
Technology comes at the END – not the beginning
Start by making strategic choices
Build capabilities needed to achieve your transformation

LinkedIn Virtual Office Hours – Digital Transformation – Session One

On Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 11am EDT I opened up a Virtual Office Hours session on LinkedIn about Digital Transformation.

To participate in this first in a series of virtual office hours, you only need do two things:

Follow me on LinkedIn
Visit this LinkedIn post, add a comment with your question and I will answer it!

Here is an example of how these Digital Transformation Virtual Office Hours will go:

QUESTION ONE from Howard Tiersky:

How can you determine if your data model is human centered?

Can you talk more about that idea?

ANSWER from Braden Kelley:

Great question Howard! The best way to evaluate whether your data model is human-centered is to look at the most frequent actions driven by your data.

The first mistake people make in building their data model is to not start with the end in mind.

The second mistake people make in building their data model is to not be brutal in insisting that nearly 100% of the data gathered is actionable and not just nice to have. BUT, it is far more difficult to make the decision not to gather a piece of data than it is to just make your forms one field longer.

To try and create a human-centered data model you want to focus on making sure you’re only gathering actionable data and that it is being used to drive outcomes for humans (customers, employees, partners, etc.).

Finally, one side effect that people don’t consider when building their data model and gathering non-actionable data is that they end up inflating the number of reports that get built and that people have to sort through to find the ones that are human-centered and do contain actionable data.

So, design your data models from value derived for humans and the actions necessary to execute, evolve and deliver – backwards!

QUESTION TWO from Mark Schaefer:

In my experience across many verticals, it seems like digital transformation usually occurs only when the pain in business necessitates it. In other words, the cost of avoiding change becomes greater than the cost of implementing solutions.

Do think this is still the case or are companies outside of tech beginning to think more long-term and strategically about these transformations?

ANSWER from Braden Kelley:

While it is definitely true that most companies only engage in the perceived pain of transformation when it is less than the perceived pain of avoiding change, an increasing number of organizations are recognizing that doing nothing is no longer a viable option.

A true digital transformation not only has the potential of equipping the organization to better fight off entrance by digital natives, but also to deliver improved customer and employee experiences and to improve employee retention and recruitment in this tight labor market.

And yes, companies outside of tech are beginning to think more strategically about these transformations as I am about to begin working with a company in the natural resources industry.

Companies in every industry can no longer put off this important work, and in fact a true digital transformation has the side benefits of increasing innovation capabilities and capacity when done well.

Click to Add Your Question on LinkedIn

p.s. If you’re interested in Digital Transformation, you’ll also enjoy some of the articles I’ve written for a number of publications including CEO World, the HCL Technologies Blog, and of course Human-Centered Change and Innovation:

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Co-creating Future-fit Organizations

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Co-creating Future-fit Organizations

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our second blog in this series of three, we opened the door to a threshold for a new kind of co-creative, collaborative and cohesive team spirit that catalyzes change through “innovation evangelism”. Focusing on building both internal and external talent, through empowering, equipping, and enabling internally cohesive and effective innovation teams. They apply their collaborative and collective intelligence towards initiating open innovation initiatives co-creating future-fit organizations that are human-centric, adaptive, engaging, inclusive, collaborative, innovative, accountable, and digitally enabled.

Innovation evangelists are change catalysts who courageously experiment with different business models and processes, to crowdsource broad and deep innovation capabilities. Usually in new ways that breakthrough corporate antibodies and barriers and deliver sustainable, meaningful, and purposeful change. Where, according to the recent Ideascale “Crowd Sourced Innovation Report 2021” “crowdsourced innovation capabilities have grown and innovation output indicators like implementation rate and time to implement have improved. In fact, businesses that were able to rapidly adapt and focus on innovation(in 2020) are poised to outperform their peers in the coming years”.

Innovation teams don’t innovate

The purpose of an innovation team is to create a safe environment that unlocks organizational and its key external stakeholder’s collective intelligence and innovation agility (capacity, competence, and confidence) to build the capability to change as fast as change itself.

Where the goal is to create a high performing, connected, and networked workplace culture where people:

Understand and practice the common language of innovation, what exactly it means in their organizational context, as well as exactly what value means to current and potential customers as well as to the organization,
Develop a shared narrative or story about why innovation is crucial towards initiating and sustaining future success,
Have the time and space to deeply connect, collaborate, and co-create value, internally and externally with customers, suppliers, and other primary connection points to build external talent communities and value-adding ecosystems,
Maximize differences and diversity of thought within customers as well as within communities and ecosystems,
Generate urgency and creative energy to innovate faster than competitors,
Feel safe and have permission to freely share ideas, wisdom, knowledge, information, resources, and perspectives, with customers as well as across communities and ecosystems.

How innovation teams learn and develop

Sustaining success in today’s uncertain, unstable, and highly competitive business environment is becoming increasingly dependent on people’s and team’s abilities to deeply learn, adapt and grow. Yet most people and a large number of organizations don’t yet seem to value learning and adaptiveness as performance improvement enablers, especially in enabling people and teams to thrive in a disruptive world. Nor do they understand how people learn, nor how to strategically develop peoples’ learning agility towards potentially co-creating future-fit organizations that sustain high-impact in VUCA times.

At ImagineNation™ we have integrated the four E’s of learning at work; Education, Experience, Environment, and Exposure with 12 key determining factors for co-creating future-fit organizations that sustain high-impact in VUCA times through our innovation team development, change, learning, and coaching programs.

Case Study Example

Educational customisation and alignment

After conducting desktop research and key stakeholder sensing interviews, we customized our innovation education curriculum specifically to align with the learning needs of the innovation team.

We aligned the program design to the organization’s strategic imperatives, values, and leadership behaviors, we reviewed the results of the previous culture, climate and engagement surveys, as well as the range of business transformation initiatives. We then applied design thinking principles to “bring to life” the trends emerging, diverging, and converging in our client’s and their customer’s industry sectors.

Focusing on:

enabling people to perform well in their current roles,
building people’s long-term career success,
developing their long-term team leadership and membership development capabilities,
laying the foundations for impacting collectively towards co-creating future-fit organizations.

Experiential learning a virtual and remote environment

We designed and offered a diverse and engaging set of high-value learning and development experiences that included a range of stretch and breakthrough assignments as part of their personal and team development process.

Focusing on:

encouraging people to engage in a set of daily reflective practices,
offering a series of customized agile macro learning blended learning options, that could be viewed or consumed over short periods of time,
engaging playful activities and skills practice sessions, with structured feedback and debrief discussions,
providing an aligned leadership growth individual and team assessment process,
introducing key criteria for establishing effective team cohesion and collaboration,
linking team action learning activities and evidence-based assignments to their strategic mandate ensuring their collective contribution towards co-creating future-fit organizations.

Environment to support and encourage deep learning

We aimed at creating permission, tolerance, and a safe learning environment for people to pause, retreat, reflect, and respond authentically and effectively, to ultimately engage and upskill people in new ways of being, thinking, and acting towards co-creating future-fit organizations.

Focusing on:

developing peoples discomfort resilience and change readiness,
encouraging people to be empathic, courageous, and compassionate with one another, to customers as well as to those they were seeking to persuade and influence,
allowing and expecting mistakes to be made and valued as learning opportunities and encouraging smart risk-taking,
reinforcing individual learning as personal responsibility and team learning as a mutual responsibility and establishing a learning buddy system to support accountability,
offering a series of one-on-one individual coaching sessions to set individual goals and support people and the teams’ “on the job” applications.

Exposure to different and diverse learning modalities

We designed a range of immersive microlearning bots by providing regular, consistent, linked, multimedia learning options and a constantly changing range of different and diverse learning modalities.

Focusing on:

providing an informative and targeted reading list and set of website links,
setting a series of coordinated thought leading webinars, videos, podcasts, and magazine articles aligned to deliver the desired learning outcomes,
outlining fortnightly targeted team application and reinforcement tasks,
helping the team to collaborate and set and communicate their passionate purpose, story, and key outputs to the organization to build their credibility and self-efficacy,
designing bespoke culture change initiatives that the innovation team could catalyse across the organization to shift mindsets and behaviors to make innovation a habit for everyone, every day.

Collectively contributing to the good of the whole

Co-creating future-fit organizations require creativity, compassion, and courage to co-create the space and freedom to discuss mistakes, ask questions, and experiment with new ideas. To catalyse change and help shift the workplace culture as well as crowdsource possibilities through open innovation.

In ways, that are truly collaborative, and energize, catalyze, harness, and mobilize people’s and customers’ collective genius, in ways that are appreciated and cherished by all. To ultimately collectively co-create a future-fit organization that contributes to an improved future, for customers, stakeholders, leaders, teams, organizations as well as for the good of the whole.

This is the final blog in a series of three about catalyzing change through innovation teams, why innovation teams are important in catalyzing culture change, and what an innovation team does, and how they collectively contribute toward co-creating the future-fit organization.

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 8-weeks, starting Tuesday, October 19, 2021.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centred approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more

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Scaling-up, the next frontier for innovation organization

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Guest Post from Nicolas Bry

How to transform innovative bottom-up initiatives into a movement spread across the company? How to scale your innovation program widely? Here are a few lessons learned from creating innovation programs in Europe, and tweaking them to Africa and Middle-East contexts.

Leveraging local and global innovation

Supplementing wisely central techno-pushed innovation with local innovation, closer to the fields and to the user needs, opening new windows of opportunities, is the goal of the open and local innovation approach developed for Orange Africa.

The purpose is to balance the technical expertise from a central innovation division, with the possibility of bottom-up initiatives, experimenting locally up to 100 innovative solutions every semester with the circa 20 countries where Orange operates in Africa and Middles-East.

The local innovation focus is on agility, pragmatism, and value created for the users and for Orange business, while leveraging a key technological asset that Orange can bring to the innovative service.

Smartphone Noir

One emblematic story is the birth of Orange Money, a mobile money service solving the problem of money transfer and payment for unbanked people. The idea was born in Kenya, and it clearly could not have emerged in Europe where everyone is banked, even kids! Orange developed centrally a platform capable of supporting all African countries in their progressive roll-out over 18 countries: ten years later, 50 millions users signed in for Orange Money. Furthermore, the central Orange Money platform enables local developments blossom, tailored to each country needs, and being picked-up, and replicated from one country to another over the region.

This is probably the most brilliant innovation of Orange over the decade, still no cutting-edge tech embedded: it’s low tech (SMS). As it solves a real user problem, it transforms people’s life, and got a massive adoption rate.

Orange Money map

Conducting short experiments in connection with business units

I created Orange intrapreneurship program 5 years ago, with a view to help innovative ideas transition more fluently into business, with the help of a sponsoring business unit, and to open the innovation doors to every Orange employee, letting them benefit from a tunnel of goodwill around their idea. The program acted like an innovation center of expertise or incubator. It clearly involved the business units very upstream: I’m a strong believer in co-developing innovations that create opportunities for business units, giving them a competitive advantage or solving one of their problems. “Find out the business unit problem that your innovation is solving”, I kept saying to the innovators I mentored!

Now we are adapting the process for the 20 countries of Orange Africa taking into account contextual particularities. We keep the employees participation and the business unit ownership aspects, but we also try to test refinements on the exploration stage. The key here is to conduct innovation exploration with short experiments in connection with business units:

achieving quick business wins with innovative process improvement, impacting internal organization, and not only new product and services: for instance, streamlining the authentification process for new customers;
mixing employees and business representatives with startups that help experimenting quickly; this has been pioneered by Orange Belgium, and these teams are called innovation squads like in the Spotify vocabulary;
keeping the process nimble, in a stretched time frame of a few weeks, so as to conduct a high number of experiments, confronting mock-ups to users, and collecting a maximum of users’ feedback, finding The Right IT before any product development.

Our target is to build proximity with our target users, rather than falling in love with our product, to explore and conduct short experiments, and pave the way to exploitation capitalizing on users’ feedback.

Personne Pointant Sur Un Appareil Photo Noir Et Gris Près De Macbook Pro

Designing innovation program, boosting innovation community

I’ve been through 10 steps to design an corporate entrepreneur program in my book The Intrapreneurs’ Factory. These 10 milestones are also an appropriate framework to design the innovation process with the countries of Orange Africa.

10 steps

It’s important first of all to define the reason why you start the program, what problem you’re trying to solve, what goals and KPIs will make the management team satisfied if they are reached. Then, some delicate gates are:

Finding out the right sponsor, both visible and accessible; sometimes a deputy sponsor can compensate a lack of avaibility!
Involving the business side soon enough in the process to trigger ownership, and further facilitate the exit, aka the transition from exploration to exploitation;
Closely coaching the process along the way, sharing the innovation tools from design thinking and lean start-up, bespoke tools to design mock-ups, and conduct experiment, but also the very peculiar mindset of the successful innovator: flexible and stubborn at the same time as says Jeff Bezos, as the key relies in the management of iteration in short cycles.

To operate this innovation process, we move together with a community of 20 staggering innovation champions, representing the countries of Orange Africa. Not only we discuss the innovation process to test locally, but we share view on innovation organization, and share success stories during a weekly Radio Innovation.

Radio Innovation

Weekly Radio Innovation also puts forward tremendous testimonials to inspire the innovation community:

from innovation managers and communities connected to Africa: Seedstars startups competition and programs for African entrepreneurs; Make Sense Africa incubator and the Dakar Citylab; Norrsken Kigali innovation hub, the startups gateway to East Africa; YUX Design Agency from Senegal, validating innovation ideas with users; innovation in the informal sector in Africa with GoodPoint/Archipel-co.com; Total Africa open innovation in Chad; Entrepreneurship Communities for innovation in Africa, with Archipel&Co and Africa Farmers Club; Liferay digital platform, and an Africa’s approach to tech and innovation; Innovation in Africa with Vodafone;
from startups growing their business in Africa: cloud telephony for SMEs, with Mteja from Kenya, and AfricaTalks; South-African MFS Africa: moving money across countries with one API that makes Africa look like one country; Kenya Pezesha loan marketplace for small African businesses; Chari.ma from Morocco, market place for local businesses; African startups investment report by Briter Bridges;
from Orange collaborators illustrating the group assets: Orange Ventures Africa seeds challenge; Social listening with Orange Data Studio in Guinea; Orange Fab Belgium innovation squads; Orange Senegal design thinking toolbox; Orange Slovakia open innovation; Orange Amman innovation team; First 100% digital mobile offer Flex by Orange Polska; Orange Romania innovation ecosystem, and cooperation with startups;
from broader innovation experts: innovation community management at Gefco; Booster incubation studio at Total; innovation in the energy industry, Innovation Vesta Wind Systems; collaborating with startups through the Venture Client Model, by 27pilots.

For these innovation champions in charge of setting-up an organization for innovation in their country, the challenge is to seek for integration (integrating seamlessly innovation with the business) before seeking for success. These mind-boggling testimonials feed them, upgrade their skills, and consolidate their innovation culture.

Scaling-up innovation oragnization

Once the innovation program gets traction, the next step is about scaling-up the approach, engaging progressively all participants. If all Orange countries commit to the innovation process in Africa, that will lead to the tremendous portfolio of 100 creative solutions experimented per semester, 200 on a yearly basis on the regional footprint: what a eye-catching achievement!

At the innovation project level, one can use the scale-up canvas to check whether the project is ready to grow, and move from a start-up to a scale-up stage.

At the program level, Is your innovation organization resilient? is the topic of a short assessment I have designed to know how your innovation organization fare across 10 key areas, and cements its resilience. Whether you are leading open innovation, internal innovation, participative innovation and intrapreneurship, digital factory or disruptive labs, you will learn from this tool which works like an innovation calculator, it’s actually quite fun to run it! To start, click here, see how you rank, and get pieces of advice for improvement.

Image credits: Pexels.com 1, Pexels.com 2

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Digital Transformation – Ask Me Anything on LinkedIn

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Ask Me Anything on LinkedIn about Digital Transformation

On Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 11am EDT I will we be hosting an Ask Me Anything session on LinkedIn about Digital Transformation.

To participate in this first in a series of virtual office hours, you only need do two things:

Follow me on LinkedIn
Visit my LinkedIn profile at 11am EDT this Tuesday, August 31, 2001 and post a comment on the 11am EDT post with your question and I will answer it!

I’ve written extensively about Digital Transformation for a number of publications including CEO World, the HCL Technologies Blog, and of course Human-Centered Change and Innovation. Please feel free to check out some of my writings to inspire your questions August 31st at 11am EDT!

Join me with your questions Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 11am EDT on LinkedIn!
(watch for the post and add your question as a comment)

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What is your sickcare technology burnout impact factor (BIF)?

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What is your sickcare technology burnout impact factor (BIF)?

Guest Post from Arlen Meyers

A group of former and current providers convened recently to discuss how digital transformation can be both contributing to and alleviating burnout.

Technofatigue, innovation fatigue and change fatigue are as ubiquitous as the Delta variant in unvaccinated people.

It’s time for sickcare delivery organizations to demand a burnout impact statement from vendors as part of the vetting, piloting and implementation process. We should call a time out to deal with the systemic causes of sickcare professional burnout attributable to technology.

John Elkington coined the “Triple Bottom Line” of People, Planet and Profit (also known as the 3Ps, TBL or 3BL). Up to today it is still gaining popularity and it has become part of everyday business language. All reason to be satisfied, one would think. However, despite its increasing popularity, Elkington has “recalled” the 3BL in a short article in Harvard Business Review. The reason, so we can extract from his comments, is the rhetorical misuse of the framework as an accounting and reporting tool, while profit still remains center stage.

There are many tools to measure the specific impact on people, planet and profits of a specific intervention.

The environmental impact statement (EIS) is a government document that outlines the impact of a proposed project on its surrounding environment. In the United States, these statements are mandated by federal law for certain projects. Environmental impact statements are meant to inform the work and decisions of policymakers and community leaders.

The Economic Impact Analysis (EIA) tool shows how your community health project’s spending on staff, supplies, equipment, and other expenses benefits your community. The EIA Tool can be used by any community health organization wanting to understand how its activities affect the community.

The burnout impact statement (BIS) would likewise outline the impact of a proposed digital health project on sickcare stakeholders, particularly end user sickcare professionals.

Some useful parts of the BIS process would include:

A national BIS database
An evidence based registry of results
Including the BIS as a KPI during pilots
Mandatory input by end users during the evaluation and vetting stages by care innovation centers
A standardized pre and post pilot/implementation measurement tool
A BIS adverse events reporting system
A BIS risk management evaluation and mitigation strategy
A patient engagement and communications strategy to clarify expectations about when, how and who will respond to electronic requests for information
Reimbursement and payment for electronic communications and a new revenue model for responding to them. You pay more for same day delivery from Amazon don’t you?
Creating third parties as data and information delivery managers or a data concierge service

If you are not burned out, digital health will probably make you cooked but not fried. Sorry, but EMRs were only the start. The bad news of the BIS requirement, though, is we would have to hire even more MD/MBAs, who left practice because they were burned out by technology, to manage all of this.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Thank You for Your Thinkers50 Nominations

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Thinkers 50 - Nominations and Votes Needed

Just wanted to write a quick post to thank you all for your support over the years as I’ve done my best to make innovation insights accessible for the greater good.

Whether you started following along when I launched Blogging Innovation back in 2006 or became part of the world’s most popular global innovation community when we launched Innovation Excellence, your support has been greatly appreciated.

Many of you have been kind enough to nominate me again this year for the Thinkers50 ranking.

There is still time to nominate me or any of your other favorite innovation authors for the 2021 edition of the Thinkers50 rankings.

Nominations close September 1, 2021 at 9am GMT.

Blogging Innovation, and then Innovation Excellence, became home to more than 8,000 innovation-related articles from 400+ contributing authors.

I’m super excited about The Rebirth of Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change and Innovation as a place to share with you a multitude of different voices and perspectives from super-talented authors from around the globe on a range of innovation and transformation-related topics.

ESPECIALLY those coming at change and innovation from a human-centered perspective.

If you’ve contributed articles to Blogging Innovation or Innovation Excellence in the past or know someone who has, or know someone who should, please point your browser or their browser to my contact page and we’ll turn the initial trickle of innovation content back into a true Human-Centered Change and Innovation river.

Here are the first GUEST POSTS from Arlen Meyers, Janet Sernack, Paul Sloane, and Nicolas Bry:

Innovation Teams Do Not Innovate — by Janet Sernack
Why so much medical technoskepticism? — by Arlen Meyers
Avoid the Addition Bias — by Paul Sloane
Catalysing Change Through Innovation Teams — by Janet Sernack
Innovation organization only thrives along with innovation culture — by Nicolas Bry
How to Conduct Virtual Office Hours — by Arlen Meyers

Keep innovating!

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Innovation Teams Do Not Innovate

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Innovation Teams Do Not Innovate

Guest Post from Janet Sernack

In our first blog in this series of three blogs, we reinforced and validated the importance and role of collaboration. We then described the range of emerging new, inspirational, and adaptive models that lean into complexity and catalyze and embed sustainable innovative workplace culture change. Where some organizations, like Alibaba, Disney, Google, Salesforce, and GE, developed their future fitness by courageously investing in catalyzing, igniting, and leading change through innovation teams.

Innovation teams are teams that don’t innovate!

Conventional team collaboration performance and development approaches are still relevant and foundational to long-term organizational success. And, a new range of organizational needs are emerging in our fast-changing and disruptive world, that complement conventional team development processes including the importance of:

Providing a unified and holistic and systemic “collective mind” focussed on adding value to customers,
Being agile, focused, and in charge to make faster decisions,
Sharing resources and insights to reduce costs,
Working interdependencies to improve efficiencies and productivity,
Shifting focus from being competitive towards co-creating ecosystems to solve bigger, more complex problems, to lead, embed, and sustain value-adding change in a disruptive world.

According to the authors of Eat, Sleep Innovate, an innovation team is formed to develop “something different that creates value” and do this best in a culture where such behaviors come naturally.

These behaviors include:

Curiosity
Customer obsession
Adeptness to ambiguity
Collaboration
Empowerment
Accountability

Purpose of innovation teams

The purpose of an innovation team is to create an environment that unlocks an organization’s collective intelligence (capacity, competence, and confidence) and builds the capability to change as fast as change itself.

Usually, through providing mentorship, coaching, and learning process in ways that align, engage, enable, equip and leverage peoples’ collective intelligence to:

Adapt to higher levels of ambiguity and uncertainty,
Challenge the status quo and help break a conventional business as usual habits, leadership styles, and comfortable ways of working,
Provoke future “fast forward” (horizon three) thinking,
Support the implementation of digital and organizational transformational efforts,
Collectively and collaboratively drive innovation across organizations pragmatically and make it a reality,
Leverage synergies across ecosystems to solve complex problems and deliver increased value to customers.

Ultimately, to provoke and evoke future “fast forward” creative discoveries and experiment with new platforms and possible future business models to help guide future renewal and reinventions.

Delivering these, as smart and multi-disciplinary teams in ways that are timely, agile, and disciplined that potentially support and bring significant value to customers, the market, and to the organization.

Unconventional stretch collaboration requires connection, cognitive dissonance, and conflict

Experimenting with, iterating, and adapting new collaborative models, enables organizations and their leaders, to shift their focus – from being defensively competitive towards being creatively constructive.

Where the goal is to create a high performing, connected, and networked workplace culture where people:

Have the time and space to deeply connect, collaborate, and co-create value,
Maximize differences and diversity of thought,
Generate the urgency and creative energy to innovate,
Feel safe and have permission to freely share ideas, wisdom, knowledge, information, resources, and perspectives.

Innovation teams create discord and generate conflict

At ImagineNation™ we have found that the best way for innovation teams to perform is through building safety and trust, whilst simultaneously being safely provocative and evocative in creating discord and conflict to disrupt peoples conventional thought processes, behaviors, and habits.

To engage people in maximizing differences and diversity to generate creative ideas, and experiment with inventive prototypes, that ultimately solve big and complex problems and deliver commercially astute, innovative solutions.

By connecting, networking, and focussing on co-creation and emphasizing collaboration, inclusion, and mutual accountability, and not on being competitive.

Dealing with the organizational blockers – Innovation teams

At ImagineNation™ our experience has enabled us to understand and reduce the range of key common blockers to transformational and innovation-led change initiatives.

Where we support clients identify, and resolve and remove them by enabling and equipping innovation teams to:

Develop agile and innovation mindsets: building capability in safely exposing and disrupting rigid mindsets through customized mindset shifting, behavioral-based, skills development programs.
Understand the impact of the organization’s collective mindset: supporting teams to develop an empathic understanding of one another, then shifting how they feel and think to act differently, and cultivate the discomfort resilience when facing the challenges and failures in the innovation rollercoaster ride.
Enable leadership development: through educating, mentoring, and coaching leaders to grow their adaptive, collaborative, engaging, and innovative team leadership and membership capabilities.
Foster the development of an adaptive and innovative culture: by applying the cultural assessment and diagnostic processes that result in pragmatic culture change initiatives.
Ensure strategic alignment: sensing, perceiving, and developing a mutual focus, common language and understanding, and a collaborative networked way of working, that bridges the gap between the current and desired states.

Setting up an innovation team – the critical success factors

At ImagineNation™ we have also helped our clients identify, and embed the critical success factors, that enable innovation teams to drive and embed innovation-led change and transformational initiatives by ensuring:

Alignment to the mission, vision, purpose, values.
Strategic allocation of resources.
Leadership team sponsorship and mentorship.
Investment in team members and leader’s capability development.
Thinking big and focussing on clarifying and delivering future “fast forward” far-reaching solutions to highly impactful challenges.
Organization engagement and enrolment in implementing changes and creating, inventing, and delivering innovative solutions.
Lines of sight to stakeholders, eco-system players, and customers, taking an empathic value-adding perspective at all times.

Innovation teams – an unfreezing opportunity to co-create future-fit organizations

Embracing this type of collaborative approach creates an unprecedented opportunity for organizations, who have been upended as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, to develop a sense of urgency toward unfreezing and eliminating their corporate antibodies.

Empathizing with the range of challenges leaders are facing right now, where many are slowly waking up to a post-covid world, where there is an unprecedented and urgent opportunity to co-create a “new normal” that is well-designed to lift any of the emotional barriers to teamwork, locked-down relationships and online fatigue.

Opening the door to a new kind of co-creative, collaborative and cohesive team spirit that allows and encourages people to re-imagine, re-learn, reinvent and co-create new, fresh future fit, adaptive and innovative, people and customer-centric systems, structures, business models, and ecosystems.

All of which are mandatory for delivering future “fast forward” strategies for applying the collaborative and collective intelligence required for increasing value in innovative ways that people and customers appreciate and cherish, in ways we have not previously imagined, that connect with and contribute to, the good of the whole.

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Why so much medical technoskepticism?

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Why so much medical technoskepticism?

Guest Post from Arlen Meyers

Medicine has transitioned from high touch to high tech to low trust. The explosion of post COVID technology “innovations” is leaving a wake of skepticism from the healing class.

As noted, Covid-19 let virtual medicine out of the bottle. Now it’s time to tame it. If we don’t, there is a danger that it will stealthily become a mainstay of our medical care. Deploying it too widely or too quickly risks poorer care, inequities and even more outrageous charges in a system already infamous for big bills.

Medical technoscepticism is driven by:

Unresolved conflicts between the ethics of medicine and the ethics of business
False promises and marketing hype
Resistance to change
Faulty thinking leading to technology adoption errors
The halo from BIG TECH shenanigans and the resulting distrust
Social media misinformation and infodemics
Not addressing the needs of end user healthcare professionals and what they value
Rules, legislation and administrative mandates and that interfere with dissemination and implementation and the resulting unintended consequences
Inequitable access and lack of clinical validation to solutions
Inadequate professional and patient education and training about present and future medical technologies and their value
Fear about artificial intelligence and its effect on society
Security, privacy and confidentiality concerns

The pandemic resulted in an increase in virtual care. But its place and value in the post-pandemic world is up in the air. To help policymakers, payers, providers assess the various ways in which virtual care programs could have a positive impact for patients, clinicians, payers, and society going forward, the American Medical Association and Manatt Health developed a framework. It can be used by care providers to develop and evaluate new digitally-enabled-care models, by payers to inform coverage and payment decisions, and by policymakers to establish regulations.

Much like addressing vaccine skepticism, technoskepticism will require a multipronged approach. . Maybe you should just take all those worthless vitamins and supplements and forget about all the technology snake oil.

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Avoid the Addition Bias

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Avoid the Addition Bias

Guest Post from Paul Sloane

Have you noticed that almost every photo that you take with your camera or mobile phone can be improved by cropping? As we take away extraneous background details, we bring the subject into clearer view. The same is true in many other fields – taking things out can seriously improve performance. But there is a strong human tendency to do the opposite – to add features rather than to subtract – even when subtraction is an easier and better solution.

Nature magazine recently published a paper with the headline – People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes. The study was carried out by Adams, Converse, Hales and Klotz at the University of Virginia. Here is an abstract of what they found.

‘We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components. People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives^. Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. Across eight experiments, with different conditions, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape and damaging effects on the planet.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y

In one experiment, people were asked to change a pattern on a grid of coloured squares so as to make it symmetrical. Fully 78% chose to add squares even though taking away existing squares was an equally good solution. In another study, participants were asked to improve an essay – 80% added material while only 16% cut words out. We see something similar in the many books which could have been much more concise. They would have benefited from pruning, yet the author and editor chose to add rather than subtract.

It is generally agreed that the tax codes in most countries (and certainly in the USA and UK) are far too complex and provide many provisions and loopholes that can be exploited by clever accountants. A simplified tax code would be easier to administer and would collect more revenue. Yet each new finance minister tends to add new clauses and tax breaks rather than eliminating them.

Innovation efforts tend to follow similar lines. When people are asked for ideas on how to improve a product or service, they typically add more features. But many products suffer from feature bloat today – which makes them unwieldy and complex to use. It is rare for people to suggest slimming down a product by eliminating little-used functions. I dare say that your mobile device is overloaded with apps that are rarely used.

The next time you run a meeting to improve efficiency, processes, methods, products or services start by asking, ‘What can we take away?’ Crop the photo to make it better.

Image Credit: Pexels.com

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The Rebirth of Blogging Innovation

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The Rebirth of Blogging Innovation

Join Us Here at Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Fifteen years ago I started writing Blogging Innovation on a cumbersome platform called Blogger.

It started as a place to share my observations and insights about business and innovation. Leveraging what I learned operating and optimizing the marketing engine powering what is now VRBO.com from Expedia, Blogging Innovation grew.

Blogging Innovation drew an increasingly large audience and its mission grew into:

“Making innovation insights accessible for the greater good.”

This led me to invite other leading innovation voices onto this growing platform to broaden the chorus of voices across a range of innovation-related specialties and topics.

I had the opportunity to go out and do video interviews with luminaries like Dean Kamen, Seth Godin, Dan Pink, John Hagel, and many others, sharing them with you on the blog and via my YouTube channel.

A global innovation community was born with Blogging Innovation transforming into Innovation Excellence and then into Disruptor League before I stepped away.

Recently I posted a slideshow on LinkedIn of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020 and in communicating with the authors recognized for their contributions on the list it surfaced that people would be interested in contributing guest posts here.

Please follow the link, give it a like or leave a comment on LinkedIn supporting your favorite author on the list or add a name of someone I should watch for this year’s list.

Because people expressed interest in contributing articles to Human-Centered Change and Innovation, I’ve decided to allow some guest posts from select authors.

Here are the first three:

1. How to Conduct Virtual Office Hours
by Arlen Meyers

2. Innovation organization only thrives along with innovation culture
by Nicolas Bry

3. Catalysing Change Through Innovation Teams
by Janet Sernack

If you’ve contributed articles to Blogging Innovation in the past and are interested in contributing to Human-Centered Change and Innovation, please contact me and I’ll set you up with a user account.

Topics of particular interest include:

Innovation Culture
Innovation Methods
Change and Transformation
Human-Centered Design
Behavioral Science and Economics
Customer Experience and Insights
Employee Experience and Engagement
Organizational Psychology

Keep innovating!

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