Category Archives: Change

Stealing From the Garden of Eden

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The story of the Garden of Eden is one of the oldest in recorded history, belonging not only to the world’s three major Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also having roots in Greek and Sumerian mythology. It’s the ultimate origin archetype: We were once pure, innocent and good, but then were corrupted in some way and cast out.

As Timothy Snyder points out in his excellent course on The Making of Modern Ukraine, this template of innocence, corruption and expulsion often leads us to a bad place, because it implies that anything we do to remove that corrupting influence would be good and just. When you’re fighting a holy war, the ends justify the means.

The Eden myth is a favorite of demagogues, hucksters and con artists because it is so powerful. We’re constantly inundated with scapegoats— the government, big business, tech giants, the “billionaire” class, immigrants, “woke” society — to blame for our fall from grace. We need to learn to recognize the telltale signs that someone is trying to manipulate us.

The Assertion Of Victimhood

In 1987, a rather drab and dull Yugoslavian apparatchik named Slobodan Milošević was visiting Kosovo field, the site of the Serbs humiliating defeat at the hands of the Ottoman empire in 1389. While meeting with local leaders, he heard a commotion outside and found police beating back a huge crowd of Serbs and Montenegrins.

“No one should dare to beat you again!” Milošević is reported to have said and, in that moment, that drab apparatchik was transformed into a political juggernaut who left death and destruction in his path. For the first time since World War II, a genocide was perpetrated in Europe and the term ethnic cleansing entered the lexicon.

In Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, which chronicled the twin horrors of Hitler and Stalin, he points out that if we are to understand how humans can do such atrocious things to other humans, we first need to understand that they saw themselves as the true victims. When people believe that their survival is at stake, there is very little they won’t assent to.

The assertion of victimhood doesn’t need to involve life and death. Consider the recent Twitter Files “scandal,” in which the social media giant’s new owner leaked internal discussions about content moderation. The journalists who were given access asserted that those discussions amounted to an FBI-Big Tech conspiracy to censor important information. They paint sinister pictures of dark forces working to undermine our access to information.

When you read the actual discussions, however, what you see is a nuanced discussion about how to balance a number of competing values. How do we balance national security and public safety with liberty and free speech? At what point does speech become inciteful and problematic? Where should lines be drawn?

The Dehumanization Of An Out-group

Demagogues, hucksters and con men abhor nuance because victimhood requires absolutes. The victim must be completely innocent and the perpetrator must be purely evil for the Eden myth sleight of hand to work. There are no innocent mistakes, only cruelty and greed will serve to build the narrative.

Two years after Milošević political transformation at Kosooe field he returned there to commemorate the 600 anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, where he claimed that “the Serbs have never in the whole of their history conquered and exploited others.” Having established that predicate, the stage was set for the war in Bosnia and the atrocities that came with it.

Once you establish complete innocence, the next step is to dehumanize the out-group. The media aren’t professionals who make mistakes, they are “scum who spread lies.” Tech giants aren’t flawed organizations, but ones who deliberately harm the public. Public servants like Anthony Fauci and philanthropists like Bill Gates are purported to engage in nefarious conspiracies that undermine the public well-being.

The truth is, of course, that nothing is monolithic. People have multiple motivations, some noble, others less so. Government agencies tend to attract mission-driven public servants, but can also be prone to overreach and abuse of power. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk can have both benevolent aspirations to serve mankind and problematic character flaws.

It is no accident that the states in the US with the fewest immigrants tend to have the most anti-immigrant sentiment. The world is a messy place, which is why real-world experience undermines the Manichean worldview that demagogues, hucksters and con artists need to prepare the ground for what comes next.

The Vow For Retribution

It is now a matter of historical record what came of Milošević. After the horrors of the genocides his government perpetrated, his regime was brought down in the Bulldozer Revolution, the first of a string of Color Revolutions that spread across Eastern Europe. He was then sent to The Hague to stand trial, where would die in his prison cell.

Milošević made a common mistake (and one Vladimir Putin is repeating today). Successful demagogues, hucksters and con artists know to never make good on their vows for retribution. In order to serve its purpose, the return to Eden must remain aspirational, a fabulous yonder that will never be truly attained. Once you actually try to get there, it will be exposed as a mirage.

Yet politicians who vow to bring down evil corporations can depend on a steady stream of campaign contributions. In much the same way, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who rail against government bureaucrats can be enthusiastically invited to speak to the media and at investor conferences.

It is a ploy that has continued to be effective from antiquity to the present-day because it strikes at our primordial tendencies toward tribalism and justice, which is why we can expect it to continue. It’s a pattern that recurs with such metronomic regularity precisely because we are so vulnerable to it.

Being Aware Is Half The Battle

In my friend Bob Burg’s wonderful book, Adversaries into Allies, he makes the distinction between persuasion and manipulation. Bob says that persuasion involves helping someone to make a decision by explaining the benefits of a particular course of action, while manipulation takes advantage of negative emotions, such as anger, fear and greed.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that those who want to manipulate us tell origin stories in which we were once innocent and good until a corrupting force diminished us. It is that narrative that allows them to assert victimhood, dehumanize an out-group and promise, if given the means, that they will deliver retribution and a return to our rightful place.

These are the tell-tale signs that reveal demagogues, hucksters and con artists. It doesn’t matter if they are seeking backing for a new technology, belief in a new business model or public office, there will always be an “us” and a “them” and there can never be a “we together,” because “they,” are trying to deceive us, take what is rightfully ours and rob us of our dignity.

Yet once we begin to recognize those signs, we can use those emotional pangs as markers that alert us to the need to scrutinize claims more closely, seek out a greater diversity of perspectives and examine alternative narratives. We can’t just believe everything we think. It is the people who are telling us things that we want to be true that are best able to deceive us.

Those who pursue evil and greed always claim that they are on the side of everything righteous and pure. That’s what we need to watch out for most.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Gemini

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2025 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are October’s ten most popular innovation posts:

AI, Cognitive Obesity and Arrested Development — by Pete Foley
Making Decisions in Uncertainty – This 25-Year-Old Tool Actually Works — by Robyn Bolton
The Marketing Guide for Humanity’s Next Chapter – How AI Changes Your Customers — by Braden Kelley
Don’t Make Customers Do These Seven Things They Hate — by Shep Hyken
Why Best Practices Fail – Five Questions with Ellen DiResta — by Robyn Bolton
The Need for Organizational Learning — by Mike Shipulski
You Must Accept That People Are Irrational — by Greg Satell
The AI Innovations We Really Need — by Art Inteligencia
Three Reasons You Are Not Happy at Work – And What to Do to Become as Happy as You Could Be — by Stefan Lindegaard
The Nuclear Fusion Accelerator – How AI is Commercializing Limitless Power — by Art Inteligencia

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in September that continue to resonate with people:

McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI — by Robyn Bolton
The Most Challenging Obstacles to Achieving Artificial General Intelligence — by Art Inteligencia
The Great American Contraction – Population, Scarcity, and the New Era of Human Value — by Art Inteligencia
Three Steps from Stuck to Success – Managing Uncertainty — by Robyn Bolton
Building a Learning Organization — by Stefan Lindegaard

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Moving From Disruption to Resilience

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Moving From Disruption To Resilience

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the 1990s, a newly minted professor at Harvard Business School named Clayton Christensen began studying why good companies fail. What he found was surprising. They weren’t failing because they lost their way, but rather because they were following time-honored principles, such as listening to their customers, investing in R&D and improving their products.

As he researched further he realized that, under certain circumstances, a market becomes over-served, the basis of competition changes and firms become vulnerable to a new type of competitor. In his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive technology.

It was an idea whose time had come. The book became a major bestseller and Christensen the world’s top business guru. Yet many began to see disruption as more than a special case, but a mantra; an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Today, we’ve disrupted ourselves into oblivion and we desperately need to make a shift. It’s time to move toward resilience.

The Disruption Gospel

We like to think of ourselves as living in a fast-moving age, but that’s probably more hype than anything else. Before 1920 most households in America lacked electricity and running water. Even the most basic household tasks, like washing or cooking a meal, took hours of backbreaking labor to haul water and cut firewood. Cars were rare and few people traveled more than 10 miles from home.

That would change in the next few decades as household appliances and motorized transportation transformed American life. The development of penicillin in the 1940s would bring about a “Golden Age” of antibiotics and revolutionize medicine. The 1950s brought a Green Revolution that would help expand overseas markets for American goods.

By the 1970s, innovation began to slow. After half a century of accelerated productivity growth, it would enter a long slump. The rise of Japan and stagflation contributed to an atmosphere of malaise. After years of dominance, the American model seemed to have its best days behind it. For the first time in the post-war era, the future was uncertain.

That began to change in the 1980s. A new president, Ronald Reagan, talked of a “shining city on a hill”, and declared that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” A new “Washington Consensus,” took hold that preached fiscal discipline, free trade, privatization and deregulation.

At the same time a management religion took hold, with Jack Welch as its patron saint. No longer would CEO’s weigh the interests of investors with customers, communities, employees and other stakeholders, everything would be optimized for shareholder value. General Electric, and then broader industry, would embark on a program of layoffs, offshoring and financial engineering in order to trim the fat and streamline their organizations.

The End Of History?

There were early signs that we were on the wrong path. Despite the layoffs that hollowed out America’s industrial base and impoverished many of its communities, productivity growth, which had been depressed since the 1970s, didn’t even budge. Poorly thought out deregulation in the banking industry led to a savings and loan crisis and a recession.

At this point, questions should have been raised, but two events in November 1989 would reinforce the prevailing wisdom. First, The fall of the Berlin Wall would end the Cold War and discredit socialism. Then Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web and usher in a new technological era of networked computing.

With markets opening across the world, American-trained economists at the IMF and the World Bank traveled the globe preaching the market discipline prescribed by the Washington Consensus, often imposing policies that would never be accepted developed markets back home. Fueled by digital technology, productivity growth in the US finally began to pick up in 1996, creating budget surpluses for the first time in decades.

Finally, it appeared that we had hit upon a model that worked. We would no longer leave ourselves to the mercy of bureaucrats at government agencies or executives at large organizations who had gotten fat and sloppy. The combination of market and technological forces would point the way for us.

The calls for deregulation increased, even if it meant increased disruption. Most notably, Glass-Steagall Act, which was designed to limit risk in the financial system, was repealed in 1999. Times were good and we had unbridled capitalism and innovation to thank for it. The Washington Consensus had been proven out, or so it seemed.

The Silicon Valley Doomsday Machine

By the year 2000, the first signs of trouble began to appear. The money rushing into Silicon Valley created a bubble which bursted and took several notable corporations with it. Massive frauds were uncovered at firms like Enron and WorldCom, which also brought down their auditor, Arthur Anderson. Calls for reform led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that increased standards for corporate governance.

Yet the Bush Administration concluded that the problem was too little disruption, not too much, and continued to push for less regulation. By 2005, the increase in productivity growth that began in 1996 dissipated as suddenly as it had appeared. Much like in the late 80s, the lack of oversight led to a banking crisis, except this time it wasn’t just regional savings and loans that got caught up, but the major financial center institutions left exposed.

That’s what led to the Great Recession. To stave off disaster, central banks embarked on an extremely stimulative strategy called quantitative easing. This created a superabundance of capital which, with few places to go, ended up sloshing around in Silicon Valley helping to create a new age of “unicorns,” with over 1000 startups valued at more than $1 billion.

Today, we’re seeing the same kind of scandals we saw in the early 2000’s, except the companies being exposed aren’t established firms like Enron, Worldcom and Arthur Anderson, but would-be disrupters like WeWork, Theranos and FTX. Unlike those earlier failures, there has been no reckoning. If anything, tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk billionaires seem emboldened.

At the same time, there is growing evidence that hyped-up excesses are crowding out otherwise viable businesses in the real economy. When WeWork “disrupted” other workspaces it wasn’t because of any innovation, technological or otherwise, but rather because huge amounts of venture capital allowed it to undercut competitors. Silicon Valley is beginning to look less like an industry paragon and more like a doomsday machine.

Realigning Prosperity With Security

It’s been roughly 25 years since Clayton Christensen inaugurated the disruptive era and what he initially intended to describe as a special case has been implemented as a general rule. Disruption is increasingly self-referential, used as both premise and conclusion, while the status quo is assumed to be inadequate as an a priori principle.

The results, by just about any metric imaginable, have been tragic. Despite all the hype about innovation, productivity growth remains depressed. Two decades of lax antitrust enforcement have undermined competitive markets in the US. We’ve gone through the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and the worst pandemic since the 1910s.

At the same time, social mobility is declining, while anxiety and depression are rising to epidemic levels. Wages have stagnated, while the cost of healthcare and education has soared. Income inequality is at its highest level in 50 years. The average American is worse off, in almost every way, than before the cult of disruption took hold.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change course and invest in resilience. There have been positive moves. The infrastructure legislation and the CHIPS legislation both represent huge investments in our future, while the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act represents the largest investment in climate ever. Businesses have begun reevaluating their supply chains.

Yet the most important shift, that of mindset, has yet to come. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not every cost needs to be cut. We cannot embark on changes just for change’s sake. We need to pursue fewer initiatives that achieve greater impact and, when we feel the urge to disrupt, we need to ask, disruption in the service of what?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Reclaiming a Vision of a World That Works

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Reclaiming a Vision of a World That Works

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If it feels to you like the world has shifted into overdrive of late, you’re not alone. As a futurist, I observe that we’ve crossed over from the familiar Information Age and have entered the Age of Acceleration. Since COVID, the pace of change has become exponential, rather than linear, increasing at an ever-increasing rate.

In the next ten years, we will experience more change than in the past hundred. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the reality of compounding and converging technological, geopolitical, social, and environmental forces.

These MegaForces of Change are rewriting the future in real time. They are creating new winners and losers, reshaping industries and institutions overnight. They are exposing how ill-prepared we are to navigate the whitewater rapids just ahead.

At such an inflection point in human history, it’s easy to feel powerless. It’s natural to feel as if events are happening to us rather than because of us. But that’s why I wrote Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for the Age of Acceleration.

After three decades advising corporate managers around the world on strategies for driving growth through innovation, I’m shifting my practice. My new passion is to accelerate human flourishing in light of this accelerated age. My goal is simple: I want to assist not just managers but everybody to regain a sense of agency, purpose, and hope amidst the biggest deluge of change we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. In short, I aspire to change the direction of humanity by helping people change their mindset.

The World Is Changing — But So Can We

Yes, the world is changing crazily, but here’s the good news: the same forces that threaten to destabilize us also contain the seeds of renewal and abundance. From my research with hundreds of innovators, entrepreneurs, and futurists, I’ve found that what separates those who flourish from those who falter isn’t intelligence, resources, or position — it’s mental hygiene.

Among the seven mindsets I explore in Build a Better Future, two feel especially urgent today.

The first is the Preparedness Mindset — the discipline of scanning the horizon, challenging assumptions, and thinking several moves ahead. Prepared leaders don’t wait for the next crisis; they actively anticipate it. They train themselves and their teams to see weak signals of change before they become tidal waves.

When you start thinking like a futurist, something remarkable happens: you start thinking about the direction, implications, threats, and opportunities in change. You begin to see the connections between events rather than reacting to them one headline at a time. You learn to differentiate signals from noise. You stop being a passive consumer of the future and start proactively shaping it.

The discipline of forward-thinking prepares you to make decisions, manage risk, and allocate your attention to what matters most. You begin to pounce on opportunities earlier, adapt faster, and feel less anxious because you have a framework for making sense of the chaos. The future stops being an abstraction — and becomes something you influence, moment by moment.

From Overwhelm to Agency

The second mindset is what I call the Human Agency Mindset. As A.I. grows ever more capable, the winners will be those who focus on nurturing what makes us uniquely human: our empathy, creativity, moral judgment, and the ability to imagine future possibilities no machine can conceive.

We now possess technologies that our ancestors could scarcely imagine. We can split atoms, edit genes, and train machines to mimic human cognition. But as technological capabilities soar, our wisdom capabilities have lagged. The real question isn’t whether we can unleash a certain technology, but whether we should, and what the implications are. How to ensure that progress serves humanity, not the other way around, will be a huge issue going forward because we can’t outsource wisdom. We must cultivate it. The danger isn’t that AI will become “smarter” than us — it’s that we’ll stop exercising our own capacity for creative thought and reflection.

Reclaiming Our Dreams

At the book launch party in Santa Barbara, I told a story about starting as a young journalist working from a tiny San Fernando Valley apartment. It was so small, the joke was you had to go outside to change your mind. But I didn’t mind because I was on fire with how journalism allowed me to subsidize my curiosity. I interviewed and profiled the visionaries and thought leaders of that era, and the experience of being around these tomorrow-builders changed my life. The big thing I became aware of was the importance of mindset in realizing your potential, and in turning visions into reality.

Today, 40 years later, I believe we all need new mindsets for what’s ahead. We need loftier visions that transcend fear and fatalism and misinformation. We need to reclaim a vision of a world that works for all — a world where technology amplifies human creativity, where wisdom keeps pace with innovation, and where we dare to believe that we can solve even the most vexing problems.

With a new set of mindsets, we can see that our best days lie ahead. That our children and grandchildren are not resigned to live lives of quiet desperation. With renewed mindsets, we can believe that nothing about the future is written in stone. The future is what we make it. It’s not something to fear or flee from. It’s something we can build — one mindset, one decision, one act of imagination at a time.

Image credits: Pexels

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Making Decisions in Uncertainty

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This 25-Year-Old Tool Actually Works

Making Decisions in Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Just as we got used to VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) futurists now claim “the world is BANI now.” BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) is much worse than VUCA and reflects “the fractured, unpredictable state of the modern world.”

Not to get too Gen X on the futurists who coined and are spreading this term but…shut up.

Is the world fractured and unpredictable? Yes.

Does it feel brittle? Are we more anxious than ever? Are things changing at exponential speed, requiring nonlinear responses? Does the world feel incomprehensible? Yes, to all.

Naming a problem is the first step in solving it. The second step is falling in love with the problem so that we become laser focused on solving it. BANI does the first but fails at the second. It wallows in the problem without proposing a path forward. And as the sign says, “Ain’t nobody got time for this.”

(Re)Introducing the Cynefin Framework

The Cynefin framework recognizes that leadership and problem-solving must be contextual to be effective. Using the Welsh word for “habitat,” the framework is a tool to understand and name the context of a situation and identify the approaches best suited for managing or solving the situation.

It’s grounded in the idea that every context – situation, challenge, problem, opportunity – exists somewhere on a spectrum between Ordered and Unordered. At the Ordered end of the spectrum, cause and affect are obvious and immediate and the path forward is based on objective, immutable facts. Unordered contexts, however, have no obvious or immediate relationship between cause and effect and moving forward requires people to recognize patterns as they emerge.

Both VUCA and BANI point out the obvious – we’re spending more time on the Unordered end of the spectrum than ever. Unlike the acronyms, Cynefin helps leaders decide and act.

Five Contexts, Five Ways Forward

The Cynefin framework identifies five contexts, each with its own best practices for making decisions and progress.

On the Ordered end of the spectrum:

Simple contexts are characterized by stability and obvious and undisputed right answers. Here, patterns repeat, and events are consistent. This is where leaders rely on best practices to inform decisions and delegation, and direct communication to move their teams forward.
Complicated contexts have many possible right answers and the relationship between cause and effect isn’t known but can be discovered. Here, leaders need to rely on diverse expertise and be particularly attuned to conflicting advice and novel ideas to avoid making decisions based on outdated experience.

On the Unordered end of the spectrum:

Complex contexts are filled with unknown unknowns, many competing ideas, and unpredictable cause and effects. The most effective leadership approach in this context is one that is deeply uncomfortable for most leaders but familiar to innovators – letting patterns emerge. Using small-scale experiments and high levels of collaboration, diversity, and dissent, leaders can accelerate pattern-recognition and place smart bets.
Chaos are contexts fraught with tension. There are no right answers or clear cause and effect. There are too many decisions to make and not enough time. Here, leaders often freeze or make big bold decisions. Neither is wise. Instead, leaders need to think like emergency responders and rapidly response to re-establish order where possible to bring the situation into a Complex state, rather than trying to solve everything at once.

The final context is Disorder. Here leaders argue, multiple perspectives fight for dominance, and the organization is divided into fractions. Resolution requires breaking the context down into smaller parts that fit one of the four previous contexts and addressing them accordingly.

The Only Way Out is Through

Our VUCA/BANI world isn’t going to get any simpler or easier. And fighting it, freezing, or fleeing isn’t going to solve anything. Organizations need leaders with the courage to move forward and the wisdom and flexibility to do so in a way that is contextually appropriate. Cynefin is their map.

Image credit: Pexels

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Learning Business and Life Lessons from Monkeys

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Learning Business and Life Lessons from Monkeys

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Franz Kafka was especially skeptical about parables. “Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life,” he wrote. “When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place… he means some fabulous yonder…that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.

Business pundits, on the other hand, tend to favor parables, probably because telling simple stories allows for the opportunity to seem both folksy and wise at the same time. When Warren Buffet says “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked,” it doesn’t sound so much like an admonishment.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some of the best business parables involve monkeys. I’m not sure why that is, but I think it has something to do with taking intelligence out of the equation. We’re often prone to imagining ourselves as the clever hero of our own story and we neglect simple truths. That may be why monkey parables have so much to teach us.

1. Build The #MonkeyFirst

When I work with executives, they often have a breakthrough idea they are excited about. They begin to tell me what a great opportunity it is and how they are perfectly positioned to capitalize on it. However, when I begin to dig a little deeper it appears that there is some major barrier to making it happen. When I try to ask about it, they just shut down.

One reason that this happens is that there is a fundamental tension between innovation and operations. Operational executives tend to focus on identifying clear benchmarks to track progress. That’s fine for a typical project, but when you are trying to do something truly new and different, you have to directly confront the unknown.

At Google X, the tech giant’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.

The problem is that most people start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.

The moral: Make sure you address the crux of the problem and don’t waste time with peripheral issues.

2. Don’t Get Taken In By Coin Flipping Monkeys

We live in a world that worships accomplishment. Sports stars who have never worked in an office are paid large fees to speak to corporate audiences. Billionaires who have never walked a beat speak out on how to fight crime (even as they invest in gun manufacturers). Others like to espouse views on education, although they have never taught a class.

Many say that you can’t argue with success, but consider this thought experiment: Put a million monkeys in a coin flipping contest. The winners in each round win a dollar and the losers drop out. After twenty rounds, there will only be two monkeys left, each winning $262,144. The vast majority of the other monkeys leave with merely pocket change.

How much would you pay the winning monkeys to speak at your corporate event? Would you invite them to advise your company? Sit on your board? Would you be interested in their views about how to raise your children, invest your savings or make career choices? Would you try to replicate their coin-flipping success? (Maybe it’s all in the wrist).

The truth is that chance and luck play a much bigger part in success than we like to admit. Einstein, for example, became the most famous scientist of the 20th century not just because of his discoveries but also due to an unlikely coincidence. True accomplishment is difficult to evaluate, so we look for signals of success to guide our judgments.

The moral: Next time you judge someone, either by their success or lack thereof, ask yourself whether you are judging actual accomplishment or telltale signs of successful coin flipping. It’s harder to tell the difference than you’d think.

3. The Infinite Monkey Theorem

There is an old thought experiment called the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which is eerily disturbing. The basic idea is that if there were an infinite amount of monkeys pecking away on an infinite amount of keyboards they would, in time, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and every other literary masterpiece.

It’s a perplexing thought because we humans pride ourselves on our ability to recognize and evaluate patterns. The idea that something we value so highly could be randomly generated is extremely unsettling. Yet there is an entire branch of mathematics, called Ramsey Theory, devoted to the study of how order emerges from random sets of data.

While the infinite monkey theorem is, of course, theoretical, technology is forcing us to confront the very real dilemma’s it presents. For example, music scholar and composer David Cope has been able to create algorithms that produce original works of music that are so good even experts can’t tell they are computer generated. So what is the value of human input?

The moral: Much like the coin flipping contest, the infinite monkey theorem makes us confront what we value and why. What is the difference between things human produced and identical works that are computer generated? Are Tolstoy’s words what give his stories meaning? Or is it the intent of the author and the fact that a human was trying to say something important?

Imagining Monkeys All Around Us

G. H. Hardy, widely considered a genius, wrote that “For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.” What he meant was that even in purely intellectual pursuits, such as his field of number theory, there are things that are far more important. It was, undoubtedly, intellectual humility that led Hardy to Ramanujuan, perhaps his greatest discovery of all.

Imagining ourselves to be heroes of our own story can rob us of the humility we need to succeed and prosper. Mistaking ourselves for geniuses can often get us into trouble. People who think they’re playing it smart tend to make silly mistakes, both because they expect to see things that others don’t and because they fail to look for and recognize trouble signs.

Parables about monkeys can be useful because nobody expects them to be geniuses, which demands that we ask ourselves hard questions. Are we doing the important work, or the easiest tasks to show progress on? If monkeys flipping coins can simulate professional success, what do we really celebrate? If monkeys tapping randomly on typewriters can create masterworks, what is the value of human agency?

The truth is that humans are prone to be foolish. We are unable, outside a few limited areas of expertise, to make basic distinctions in matters of importance. So we look for signals of prosperity, intelligence, shared purpose and other things we value to make judgments about what information we should trust. Imagining monkeys around us helps us to be more careful.

Sometimes the biggest obstacle between where we are now and the fabulous yonder we seek is just the few feet in front of us.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are September’s ten most popular innovation posts:

McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI — by Robyn Bolton
Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers — by Robyn Bolton
Growth is Not the Answer — by Mike Shipulski
The Most Challenging Obstacles to Achieving Artificial General Intelligence — by Art Inteligencia
Charlie Kirk and Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
You Just Got Starbucked — by Braden Kelley
Metaphysics Philosophy — by Geoffrey Moore
Invention Through Co-Creation — by Janet Sernack
Sometimes Ancient Wisdom Needs to be Left Behind — by Greg Satell
The Crisis Innovation Trap — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in August that continue to resonate with people:

This AI Creativity Trap is Gutting Your Growth — by Robyn Bolton
How Neuromorphic Computing Will Unlock Human-Centered Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
Why Context Engineering is the Next Frontier in AI — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
The Nordic Way of Leadership in Business — by Stefan Lindegaard
Three Strategies for Overcoming Change Resistance — by Greg Satell

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P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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FLASH SALE – 50% off the best book for Planning Change & Transformation

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48 hours only!

Exciting news!

The publisher of my second book – Charting Change – is having a 24-hour FLASH SALE and so you can get the hardcover, softcover or the eBook for 50% off the list price using CODE 50FLSH until October 3, 2025, 11:59PM EDT. The new second edition includes loads of new content including additional guest expert sections and chapters on business architecture, project and portfolio management, and digital and business transformations!

I stumbled across this and wanted to share with everyone so if you haven’t already gotten a copy of this book to power your digital transformation or your latest project or change initiative to success, now you have no excuse!

Click here to get your copy of Charting Change for 50% off using CODE 50FLSH

Of course you can get 10 free tools here from the book, but if you buy the book and contact me I will send you 26 free tools from the 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ – including the Change Planning Canvas™!

*If discount is not applied automatically, please use this code: 50FLSH. The discount is available through October 3, 2025. This offer is valid for English-language Springer, Palgrave & Apress books & eBooks. The discount is redeemable on link.springer.com only. Titles affected by fixed book price laws, forthcoming titles and titles temporarily not available on link.springer.com are excluded from this promotion, as are reference works, handbooks, encyclopedias, subscriptions, or bulk purchases. The currency in which your order will be invoiced depends on the billing address associated with the payment method used, not necessarily your home currency. Regional VAT/tax may apply. Promotional prices may change due to exchange rates.

This offer is valid for individual customers only. Booksellers, book distributors, and institutions such as libraries and corporations please visit springernature.com/contact-us. This promotion does not work in combination with other discounts or gift cards.

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Identity is Crucial to Change

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Identity is Crucial to Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In an age of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt. Today, we are undergoing major shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography that will demand that we make changes in how we think and what we do. The last time we saw this much change afoot was during the 1920s and that didn’t end well. The stakes are high.

In a recent speech, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell highlighted the need for Europe to change and adapt to shifts in the geopolitical climate. He also pointed out that change involves far more than interests and incentives, carrots and sticks, but even more importantly, identity.

“Remember this sentence,” he said. “’It is the identity, stupid.’ It is no longer the economy, it is the identity.” What he meant was that human beings build attachments to things they identify with and, when those are threatened, they are apt to behave in a visceral, reactive and violent way. That’s why change and identity are always inextricably intertwined.

“We can’t define the change we want to pursue until we define who we want to be.” — Greg Satell

The Making Of A Dominant Model

Traditional models come to us with such great authority that we seldom realize that they too once were revolutionary. We are so often told how Einstein is revered for showing that Newton’s mechanics were flawed it is easy to forget that Newton himself was a radical insurgent, who rewrote the laws of nature and ushered in a new era.

Still, once a model becomes established, few question it. We go to school, train for a career and hone our craft. We make great efforts to learn basic principles and gain credentials when we show that we have grasped them. As we strive to become masters of our craft we find that as our proficiency increases, so does our success and status.

The models we use become more than mere tools to get things done, but intrinsic to our identity. Back in the nineteenth century, the miasma theory, the notion that bad air caused disease, was predominant in medicine. Doctors not only relied on it to do their job, they took great pride in their mastery of it. They would discuss its nuances and implications with colleagues, signaling their membership in a tribe as they did.

In the 1840s, when a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis showed that doctors could prevent infections by washing their hands, many in the medical establishment were scandalized. First, the suggestion that they, as men of prominence, could spread something as dirty as disease was insulting. Even more damaging, however, was the suggestion that their professional identity was, at least in part, based on a mistake.

Things didn’t turn out well for Semmelweis. He railed against the establishment, but to no avail. He would eventually die in an insane asylum, ironically of an infection he contracted under care, and the questions he raised about the prevailing miasma paradigm went unanswered.

A Gathering Storm Of Accumulating Evidence

We all know that for every rule, there are exceptions and anomalies that can’t be explained. As the statistician George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The miasma theory, while it seems absurd today, was useful in its own way. Long before we had technology to study bacteria, smells could alert us to their presence in unsanitary conditions.

But Semmelweis’s hand-washing regime threatened doctors’ view of themselves and their role. Doctors were men of prominence, who saw disease emanating from the smells of the lower classes. This was more than a theory. It was an attachment to a particular view of the world and their place in it, which is one reason why Semmelweis experienced such backlash.

Yet he raised important questions and, at least in some circles, doubts about the miasma theory continued to grow. In 1854, about a decade after Semmelweis instituted hand washing, a cholera epidemic broke out in London and a miasma theory skeptic named John Snow was able to trace the source of the infection to a single water pump.

Yet once again, the establishment could not accept evidence that contradicted its prevailing theory. William Farr, a prominent medical statistician, questioned Snow’s findings. Besides, Snow couldn’t explain how the water pump was making people sick, only that it seemed to be the source of some pathogen. Farr, not Snow, won the day.

Later it would turn out that a septic pit had been dug too close to the pump and the water had been contaminated with fecal matter. But for the moment, while doubts began to grow about the miasma theory, it remained the dominant model and countless people would die every year because of it.

Breaking Through To A New Paradigm

In the early 1860s, as the Civil War was raging in the US, Louis Pasteur was researching wine-making in France. While studying the fermentation process, he discovered that microorganisms spoiled beverages such as beer and milk. He proposed that they be heated to temperatures between 60 and 100 degrees Celsius to avoid spoiling, a process that came to be called pasteurization

Pasteur guessed that the similar microorganisms made people sick which, in turn, led to the work of Robert Koch and Joseph Lister. Together they would establish the germ theory of disease. This work then led to not only better sanitary practices, but eventually to the work of Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain and development of antibiotics.

To break free of the miasma theory, doctors needed to change the way they saw themselves. The miasma theory had been around since Hippocrates. To forge a new path, they could no longer be the guardians of ancient wisdom, but evidence-based scientists, and that would require that everything about the field be transformed.

None of this occurred in a vacuum. In the late 19th century, a number of long-held truths, from Euclid’s Geometry to Aristotle’s logic, were being discarded, which would pave the way for strange new theories, such as Einstein’s relativity and Turing’s machine. To abandon these old ideas, which were considered gospel for thousands of years, was no doubt difficult. Yet it was what we needed to do to create the modern world.

Moving From Disruption to Resilience

Today, we stand on the precipice of a new paradigm. We’ve suffered through a global financial crisis, a pandemic and the most deadly conflict in Europe since World War II. The shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography are already underway. The strains and dangers of these shifts are already evident, yet the benefits are still to come.

To successfully navigate the decade ahead, we must make decisions not just about what we want, but who we want to be. Nowhere is this playing out more than in Ukraine right now, where the war being waged is almost solely about identity. Russians want to deny Ukrainian identity and to defy what they see as the US-led world order. Europeans need to take sides. So do the Chinese. Everyone needs to decide who they are and where they stand.

This is not only true in international affairs, but in every facet of society. Different eras make different demands. The generation that came of age after World War II needed to rebuild and they did so magnificently. Yet as things grew, inefficiencies mounted and the Boomer Generation became optimizers. The generations that came after worshiped disruption and renewal. These are, of course, gross generalizations, but the basic narrative holds true.

What should be clear is that where we go from here will depend on who we want to be. My hope is that we become protectors who seek to make the shift from disruption to resilience. We can no longer simply worship market and technological forces and leave our fates up to them as if they were gods. We need to make choices and the ones we make will be greatly influenced by how we see ourselves and our role.

As Josep Borrell so eloquently put it: It is the identity, stupid. It is no longer the economy, it is the identity.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Don’t Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

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Don't Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Last night, I lied to a room full of MBA students. I showed them the Design Squiggle, and explained that innovation starts with (what feels like) chaos and ends with certainty.

The chaos part? Absolutely true.

The certainty part? A complete lie.

Nothing is Ever Certain (including death and taxes)

Last week I wrote about the different between risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty occurs when we cannot predict what will happen when acting or not acting. It can also be broken down into Unknown uncertainty (resolved with more data) and Unknowable uncertainty (which persists despite more data).

But no matter how we slice, dice, and define uncertainty, it never goes away.

It may be higher or lower at different times,

More importantly, it changes focus.

Four Dimensions of Uncertainty

Something new that creates value (i.e. an innovation) is multi-faceted and dynamic. Treating uncertainty as a single “thing” therefore clouds our understanding and ability to find and addresses root causes.

That’s why we need to look at different dimensions of uncertainty.

Thankfully, the ivory tower gives us a starting point.

WHAT: Content uncertainty relates to the outcome or goal of the innovation process. To minimize it, we must address what we want to make, what we want the results to be, and what our goals are for the endeavor.

WHO: Participation uncertainty relates to the people, partners, and relationships active at various points in the process. It requires constant re-assessment of expertise and capabilities required and the people who need to be involved.

HOW: Procedure uncertainty focuses on the process, methods, and tools required to make progress. Again, it requires constant re-assessment of how we progress towards our goals.

WHERE: Time-space uncertainty focuses on the fact that the work may need to occur in different locations and on different timelines, requiring us to figure out when to start and where to work.

It’s tempting to think each of these are resolved in an orderly fashion, by clear decisions made at the start of a project, but when has a decision made on Day 1 ever held to launch day?

Uncertainty in Pharmaceutical Development

Let’s take the case of NatureComp, a mid-sized company pharmaceutical company and the uncertainties they navigated while working to replicate, develop, and commercialize a natural substance to target and treat heart disease.

What molecule should the biochemists research?
How should the molecule be produced?
Who has the expertise and capability to synthetically poduce the selected molecule because NatureComp doesn’t have the experience required internally?
Where to produce that meets the synthesization criteria and could produce cost-effectively at low volume?
What target disease specifically should the molecule target so that initial clincial trials can be developed and run?
Who will finance the initial trials and, hopefully, become a commercialization partner?
Where would the final commercial entity exist (e.g. stay in NatureComp, move to partner, stand-alone startup) and the molecule produced?

And those are just the highlights.

It’s all a bit squiggly

The knotty, scribbly mess at the start of the Design Squiggle is true. The line at the end is a lie because uncertainty never goes away. Instead, we learn and adapt until it feels manageable.

Next week, you’ll learn how.

Image credit: The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com

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