Category Archives: Change

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Identity

Don't Underestimate the Power of Identity

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the 1990s, western-style liberal democracy was triumphant. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War had been won. Teams of diplomats and consultants rushed to spread the Washington Consensus, an agreed upon set of reforms that poor countries were pressured to undertake by their richer brethren.

Francis Fukuyama noted at the time that we had reached an endpoint in history, when one model had achieved dominance over all others. Yet even as he laid out the rational case, he invoked the ancient Greek concept of thymos, or “spiritedness,” to warn that even at the end of history, there would be some who would insist on going their own way, no matter the consequences.

That’s why any change, even if provably good, noble and just, will inevitably incur resistance. It’s a simple truth that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened, we see it as an outright attack on our identity and lash out. That’s why identity needs to be at the center of any change strategy, if it is to succeed.

Triggering Resistance

Imagine this scene. You are in a meeting to discuss a proposal. There is an active discussion and, over the course of an hour, the group steadily moves toward a consensus. Then, as you’re moving on to discuss next steps and close the meeting, somebody who hadn’t spoken up during the entire hour suddenly has a hissy fit and melts down in the middle of the conference room.

Let’s think about what happened underneath the surface. When the idea was initially proposed, that person had such a visceral reaction to it that they couldn’t even articulate why they were so against it. Nevertheless, being such a disastrous idea in their eyes, they were sure it would get derailed along the way. When that didn‘t happen, it triggered an explosion.

There’s a couple of things that we can take away from this. The first is that it was the initial success of moving to next steps that triggered them and their inappropriate reaction pretty much assured that the proposal would move forward. So one way of dealing with resistance is to quietly build traction. If you can resist the urge to engage or attack your opposition directly, they will eventually feel the need to lash out and discredit themselves.

Another important point to consider is that people rarely melt down in conference rooms. Usually, they hold their composure and then go quietly sabotaging the idea in the hallways. Your most active opposition are usually not the ones voicing concerns. Most often, they find more surreptitious ways of undermining an initiative.

Shifting Identities

Just because people build attachments doesn’t mean that they need to be permanent aspects of their identity. In Immunity to Change, Harvard’s Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, discuss their decades of research into how people build competing commitments based on how they see themselves. Their work shows that greater self awareness can break the spell.

For example, “David” was a senior leader who had taken on greater responsibility and desperately needed to delegate. As much as he saw how important it was for him to hand off projects and give more autonomy to his people, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was almost as if he was actively sabotaging his own objective.

As it turned out, David had a somewhat hardscrabble upbringing and identified himself as a “hands on” manager. It was important for him to do “real work” and not just be “overhead.” So every time he tried to delegate, it felt like he was getting away from his hardworking roots and becoming something he didn’t want to be.

The problem was solved once David saw that the change he needed to undertake involved his own identity. He began to see another role for himself, that of an enabler and a coach, empowering his people. He was able to see their accomplishments as his own. It didn’t happen automatically—it took real work—but it can be done.

Designing A Dilemma

I once had a six-month assignment to restructure the sales and marketing operations of a troubled media company and the sales director was a real stumbling block. She never overtly objected, but would just nod her head and then quietly sabotage progress. For example, she promised to hand over the clients she worked directly with to her staff, but never seemed to get around to it.

It was obvious that she intended to slow-walk everything until the six months were over and then return everything back to the way it was. As a longtime senior employee, she had considerable political capital within the organization and, because she was never directly insubordinate, creating a direct confrontation with her would be risky and unwise.

So rather than create a conflict, I designed a dilemma. I arranged with the CEO of a media buying agency for one of the salespeople to meet with a senior buyer and take over the account. The sales director had two choices. She could either let the meeting go ahead and lose her grip on the department or try to derail the meeting. She chose the latter and was fired for cause. Once she was gone, her mismanagement became obvious and sales shot up.

Dilemma actions have been around for at least a century. One early example was Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels, who picketed the Woodrow Wilson’s White House with his own quotes in 1917. More recently, the tactic has been the subject of increasing academic interest. What’s becoming clear is that these actions share clear design principles that can be replicated in almost any context.

Key to the success of a dilemma action is that it is seen as a constructive act rooted in a shared value. In the case of the Sales Director, she had agreed to give up her accounts and setting up the meeting was aligned with that agreement. That’s what created the dilemma. She had to choose between violating the shared value or giving up her resistance.

Creating A Larger, Integrated Identity

Our identity and sense of self drives a lot of what we see and do, yet we rarely examine these things because we spend most of our time with people who are a lot like us, who live in similar places and experience similar things. Our innate perceptions and beliefs seem normal and those of outsiders strange, because our social networks shape us that way.

That’s why we often see so much resistance to change. People get invested in the status quo. They work within it, follow its rules and achieve some things. Those achievements become part of their identity and to reject the means in which their present self arose is, in some sense, to reject a part of themselves.

Yet our identities aren’t fixed. They grow and evolve over time. We routinely choose to add facets to our identity, while shedding others, changing jobs, moving neighborhoods, breaking off some associations as we take on others. “Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book on the subject.

It is at this nexus of identity and purpose that creativity and innovation reside, because when we learn to collaborate with others who possess knowledge, skills and perspectives that we don’t, new possibilities emerge to achieve greater things. To make that possible, however, we need to support the identities of those around us, so that we can build the shared purpose upon which we can build a shared future.

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

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Storytelling Determines the Change We Can Achieve

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Storytelling Determines the Change We Can Achieve

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

At some level, change is always about the stories we tell. We like to think that we humans are objective arbiters of the facts, but that’s not really true. We think in narratives. In one study, juries considered experts that shared stories far more credible than those that merely offered an analysis of the relevant facts.

Every organization tells stories, some deliberate, some not. General Electric was able to tell successful stories for decades, yet it was a false narrative and, when the facts caught up, the firm collapsed. On the other hand, Satya Nadella was able to change the narrative at Microsoft even though, objectively, the company was already doing well.

Hollywood mogul Peter Guber describes stories as “emotional transport” and that’s why we need to be purposeful about the ones we tell if we are to bring about genuine transformation. Stakeholders need to be able to see themselves as heroes in the stories we tell, working within shared values to achieve a common purpose. Our story needs to be their story.

What Makes A Story?

The first element of any story is its exposition, which is the world you build around the story and includes the setting, the characters and other background information. This often comes at the beginning of the story, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, elements of the setting or details about the characters are leaked out as the plot develops.

The most important aspect of any story is the tension or conflict to be resolved. That’s what keeps the audience’s interest. Will the hero survive? Does the boy end up with the girl? Will justice prevail? It is the uncertainty surrounding the tension that makes a story interesting. A preordained story is a bore.

Another way to look at a story is an intention or ambition and an obstacle. If you can identify an ambition that people actually have—even if they aren’t aware of their intention—and then show that you can overcome the obstacles preventing them from achieving that ambition, you have a powerful narrative. Steve Jobs was a master at telling those kinds of stories (and then adding “one more thing.”)

There are, essentially, two ways to start a story. The first and less effective way is with the exposition, laying out the setting and characters, like when your mom tells the tale of meeting someone at the drug store and 10 minutes later you’re still hearing about their grandchildren. The other is to start with the tension, like when a James Bond movie begins with him hanging off a helicopter and you only find out why only later.

Start with the tension. Identify a problem to be solved. Learning how the obstacles to solving the problem will be overcome is what makes a story interesting.

The Hero’s Journey

One of the most common narrative devices is the “hero’s journey“, which involves different variations of a departure, an initiation, and a return. For example, in the Star Wars trilogy, we met Luke Skywalker as a restless boy on Tatooine. The hologram he unlocked in R2D2 kicked off his departure on a journey, in which he learned about “The Force.”

In a hero’s journey, the primary struggle is internal and the righteousness of your cause is your salvation. In order for Luke to prevail against Darth Vader and the evil empire, he first needed to conquer himself. Once he was able to do that, victory became, in some sense, inevitable.

We often like to think about change in this way because, in some sense, it’s easy. After all, who can oppose us when we are so diligently working for the greater good? If we are just good and pure and true, then success should become inevitable. We just need to keep the faith, endure any hardship that comes our way and we will be rewarded in the end.

Unfortunately, like Star Wars, this story is a fantasy and the stubborn belief in it will almost guarantee failure. Some people mistakenly see nobility in this type of defeat, because they can tell themselves that they fought “the good fight” and the deck was simply stacked against them. That way, they can blame everyone else instead of their “heroic” selves.

Change As A Strategic Conflict

The true story of change is that of strategic conflict between a future vision and the status quo. There are sources of power keeping the status quo in place and that’s where the battle lies. If you can remove—or even mitigate—those sources of power the status quo cannot survive and transformation can take place. As long as they remain, nothing will change.

Once you understand this story, you can begin to build an effective strategy. Power always lies in institutions and you can begin to identify which ones support the status quo, which support the future vision and which are on the fence. Those institutional targets will determine how you develop tactics.

Notice how differently the two stories affect actions. If you believe that you’re on a hero’s journey, then your primary goal is to communicate your virtue. You assume that once everyone understands your idea, they will embrace it. So you spend your time coming up with slogans, convinced that the right message will help others see the light.

When you begin to internalize the story of change as a strategic conflict it becomes clear that it’s more important to make a difference than to make a point. Demonstrating the righteousness of your cause is not nearly as important as letting others see their place in your story, how they too can be heroes in it and how they will be better off for it.

Creating A Shared Journey

Change always begins with a grievance. There’s something people don’t like and they want it to be different. We like to see ourselves as heroes fighting for everything that’s right and we question the motivations of those who oppose our cause. When we believe in something passionately, it’s hard to see how anyone, in good conscience, can see it another way.

Yet consider recent research that finds our conceptions of even something so simple as a penguin vary so widely that the mention of the word evokes very different associations in all of us. Clearly, more emotionally-laden content, such as a policy issue or a business strategy is going to spark vigorous debates.

The stories we tell need to create a sense of safety around transformation, to emphasize a shared future. Yet all too often we begin our stories with silly talk about “disruption” or burning platforms. The storytellers seek to ennoble themselves as champions and demonize others who see things differently.

Yet if we truly care about change, we need to hold ourselves accountable to be effective messengers. That’s why the narratives we build about change need to focus on shared values and establish common ground upon which we can build a shared future.

The stories we tell are important. We need to choose them wisely and tell them well.

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

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How to Diagnose Your Change Type Before You Plan Your Approach

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How to Diagnose Your Change Type Before You Plan Your Approach

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Organizations that struggle with change almost always share one critical blind spot: they treat all change as the same. They apply the same planning process, the same communication strategy, the same timeline expectations, and the same leadership approach to a technology rollout as they would to a cultural transformation — and they wonder why results are so unpredictable.

The reality is that different types of organizational change require fundamentally different approaches. The change management process that works brilliantly for a planned, incremental process improvement will fail almost completely when applied to an unplanned structural disruption. Understanding which type of change you are actually managing — before you decide how to manage it — is one of the highest-leverage decisions a change leader can make.

This article explores how to diagnose your change type, why the diagnosis matters, and how it should shape your planning approach. For a complete treatment of all the major types of organizational change and their specific characteristics, see our definitive guide to the different types of organizational change.

The Two Dimensions That Define Change Type

Every organizational change can be positioned on two dimensions that together determine how it should be managed:

Dimension 1: Scope — Incremental vs Transformational
Incremental change improves or extends what already exists — a process becomes more efficient, a product gains a new feature, a team adds a new member. The underlying model stays intact; execution quality improves. Transformational change creates something genuinely new — a different business model, a fundamentally restructured organization, a cultural shift that requires people to behave differently in their daily work. The existing model doesn’t just improve; it changes in ways that make the past a less useful guide to the future.

Dimension 2: Origin — Planned vs Unplanned
Planned change is deliberately initiated — a leadership decision to restructure, a strategic choice to implement new technology, a deliberate effort to shift culture. Unplanned change is imposed by external events — a competitor disrupts the market, a regulation changes, a crisis forces rapid response. Planned change allows preparation; unplanned change requires adaptation.

These two dimensions create a 2×2 matrix of change types that most organizations encounter at some point — and each quadrant requires a meaningfully different management approach.

Why Most Change Programs Misdiagnose Their Change Type

The most common misdiagnosis is treating transformational change as if it were incremental — assuming that because you have a clear destination, the path there will look like a more intense version of what you’ve done before. It won’t. Transformational change requires different leadership behaviors, different communication strategies, different timelines, and a fundamentally different relationship with uncertainty than incremental change does.

The second most common misdiagnosis is treating unplanned change as if it were planned — spending time on elaborate planning processes and detailed roadmaps when the situation is actually demanding rapid adaptation. Rigorous planning is valuable. But when circumstances are changing faster than plans can track, the discipline of rapid diagnosis and agile response matters more than the discipline of comprehensive planning.

Three diagnostic questions help leaders identify which type of change they’re actually managing:

Does this change require people to give up something they value — a role, a skill, a process, an identity — or just learn something new while keeping what they have? If people are losing something, you’re in transformational territory regardless of how the initiative is framed.
Do we know what success looks like in enough detail to plan toward it, or are we navigating genuine uncertainty about both the destination and the path? If the answer is the latter, incremental project management tools will frustrate more than they help.
How much time do we have to prepare? Planned change allows the luxury of impact assessment, stakeholder engagement, and communication planning before implementation begins. Unplanned change compresses or eliminates that preparation window — which changes what’s possible and what’s necessary.

How Change Type Should Shape Your Change Management Approach

Incremental Planned Change

This is the home territory of most formal change management methodologies. Structured planning, phased implementation, training programs, and progress metrics all work well here because the destination is known, the timeline is manageable, and the resistance — while real — is generally about disruption to habit rather than threat to identity. The risk to avoid: over-engineering the change management process for what is actually a relatively contained improvement initiative.

Transformational Planned Change

This is where most major change programs live — and where most fail. The planning feels similar to incremental change (there is a destination, there is a timeline, there is a project plan), but the human experience is categorically different. People are not just learning new skills or adjusting to new processes; they are being asked to give up aspects of how they work, what they value, and sometimes who they are professionally. This requires the full toolkit of change management — Bridges’ transition model for understanding the emotional journey, deep resistance management planning, extensive leadership modeling of the new behaviors, and sustained investment well past the technical “go live” date.

Incremental Unplanned Change

A competitive move requires a tactical response, a supplier fails and processes need adjusting, a team member departs unexpectedly. These situations require quick mobilization and clear decision-making, but the scope is contained enough that structured response is possible. The key discipline: resist the temptation to treat every unplanned change as a crisis requiring heroic leadership, which creates change fatigue and undermines the organizational resilience you need for genuinely serious disruptions.

Transformational Unplanned Change

This is the hardest category — fundamental change that arrives without the preparation window that planned transformation allows. Organizational crises, industry disruptions, regulatory upheavals. The change management principles that apply to planned transformation still matter here, but they must be compressed: faster diagnosis, faster stakeholder alignment, faster communication, and higher tolerance for making consequential decisions under genuine uncertainty. Leaders who have built strong organizational change capability through earlier planned change investments handle this category significantly better than those who haven’t.

The Role of the Change Planning Canvas™ in Diagnosing Change Type

One of the most valuable uses of the Change Planning Canvas™ — the central tool of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology — is in the earliest stages of change planning, before any tactical decisions have been made. The Canvas forces the change team to explicitly characterize the change they are managing across multiple dimensions — including scope and origin — which surfaces the diagnostic clarity that most change programs skip in the rush to action.

Teams that spend time on this diagnosis consistently make better downstream decisions: they select the right change management models, they calibrate their communication approaches to the actual emotional journey their people will experience, and they build realistic timelines that account for the full complexity of the change type they’re actually managing rather than the simpler change type they wish they were managing.

For a complete guide to the different types of organizational change and their specific characteristics, impacts, and management requirements, see our comprehensive resource: Organizational Change: The Different Types and Their Impact.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you identify the type of organizational change you’re dealing with?

Identifying your change type starts with two diagnostic dimensions: scope (is this change incremental — improving what exists — or transformational — creating something genuinely new?) and origin (is this planned — deliberately initiated — or unplanned — imposed by external events?). Three key questions help clarify: Does this change require people to give up something they value, or just learn something new? Do we know what success looks like clearly enough to plan toward it? How much time do we have to prepare? The answers position the change in one of four quadrants — incremental planned, transformational planned, incremental unplanned, or transformational unplanned — each of which requires a meaningfully different management approach.

Why does change type matter for change management?

Change type matters because different types of organizational change require fundamentally different management approaches. The most common and costly change management mistake is treating transformational change as if it were incremental — applying structured project management and training program approaches to situations that actually require deep stakeholder engagement, leadership behavior modeling, resistance management, and sustained investment well past the technical implementation date. Misdiagnosing change type leads to under-resourcing the human dimensions of change, applying the wrong models, and building unrealistic timelines — all of which increase the probability of implementation failure.

What is the difference between incremental and transformational organizational change?

Incremental change improves or extends what already exists — processes become more efficient, products gain new features, teams add capabilities. The underlying organizational model stays intact. Transformational change creates something genuinely new that requires people to work, think, and behave differently in fundamental ways. The distinction matters practically because incremental change primarily requires skill development and habit adjustment, while transformational change also requires people to let go of something they valued — a role, an identity, a way of working — which triggers a different and more emotionally complex human response that standard project management approaches don’t address.

Image Credit: Pexels

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article, add images and create infographics.

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Framework • 2×2 Diagnostic

How to Diagnose
Your Change Type

Two dimensions shape your approach: Scope × Origin. Locate your initiative to choose the right method, not just a bigger version of the wrong one.

Incremental: Improves what exists Transformational: Creates new Unplanned: Imposed, adapt fast

Planned Deliberately initiated, allows preparation

← ORIGIN →

Unplanned Imposed by external events, requires adaptation

◧

Transformational Planned Change

Major Programs That Most Often Fail

Feels plannable but human experience is categorically different. People give up roles, identity, and ways of working.

✓ What Works

Bridges’ transition model
Deep resistance management
Leadership modeling
Sustained investment past go-live

⚠ Risk to Avoid

Treating transformational as just bigger incremental

⬢

Transformational Unplanned Change

Hardest Category

Crises, industry disruption, regulatory upheaval. Fundamental change without a preparation window.

✓ What Works

Compressed transformation principles
Faster diagnosis and alignment
Relentless communication
High tolerance for uncertainty

⚠ Risk to Avoid

Slow planning when adaptation is needed

☰

Incremental Planned Change

Structured Improvement

Home territory for most formal methodologies. Destination known, timeline manageable.

✓ What Works

Phased implementation
Training programs
Progress metrics

⚠ Risk to Avoid

Over-engineering for a contained initiative

⚡

Incremental Unplanned Change

Tactical Response

Competitive move, supplier failure, unexpected departure. Contained scope but needs speed.

✓ What Works

Quick mobilization
Clear decision-making

⚠ Risk to Avoid

Treating every surprise as a crisis, creates change fatigue

Incremental Improves, model stays intact Scope ↑ Transformational Creates new, past less useful

Source: Braden Kelley — How to Diagnose Your Organizational Change Type (2026) | Human-Centered Change™bradenkelley.com

FLASH SALE — 50% OFF the Key to Human-Centered Change

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How to Ensure a Successful Digital Transformation (Charting Change)

Why do over 70% of digital transformations and change initiatives fail? Most organizations focus purely on the technology or the project timeline, while completely neglecting the human element and business architecture required to sustain it.

To successfully drive organizational agility, leadership must treat digital transformation, portfolio management, and human-centered design as a single, unified framework.

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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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Use Failure as Rocket Fuel for Success Like SpaceX

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Use Failure as Rocket Fuel for Success Like SpaceX

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

SUMMARY: SpaceX’s early success, despite three rocket failures, exemplifies how embracing setbacks as learning opportunities drives innovation. Elon Musk fostered a culture of rapid “test, learn, redesign,” where organizational risks, not individual blame, fueled progress. This approach, contrasting with the common fear of mistakes, allowed SpaceX to overcome near collapse and achieve orbit. The article argues that true failure isn’t making errors, but failing to learn from them. Leaders must create environments encouraging prudent risk-taking, where post-mortems focus on lessons, not culprits. Adopting “fail fast and fail cheap” through small experiments helps organizations learn quickly, transforming setbacks into wisdom and better decisions for ultimate success.

Before SpaceX became one of the most valuable companies in the world, it suffered three consecutive rocket failures. By 2008, Elon Musk had invested nearly everything he had. The fourth launch wasn’t merely important — it was a matter of survival.

After Falcon 1 failed three consecutive times between 2006 and 2008, Musk did not conduct a witch hunt. Heads did not roll. Instead, he assembled his engineers, dissected the technical causes, and focused relentlessly on fixing problems and building morale before the next launch. The emphasis was always on emphasizing rapid learning and pushing ahead.

The successful fourth Falcon 1 launch took place on September 28, 2008. On that flight, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth’s orbit, a milestone many experts had considered nearly impossible for a startup company.

Had Falcon 1 failed a fourth time there might be no SpaceX today. Instead, that launch succeeded, NASA came calling, and a company that was weeks from collapse began its ascent toward bending history.

The lesson for leaders is profound: if you want people to innovate, you must create an environment where failure is an option, and where prudent risk-taking and rapid learning pervade your culture. SpaceX routinely tested rockets knowing they might explode because Musk believed real-world learning happened faster than endless analysis.

Early on, the fledgling start-up adopted a rapid “test, learn, redesign” cycle rather than trying to eliminate every possible risk before launch. Each unsuccessful launch produced engineering insights that were incorporated into the next design. In that sense, the first three launches were not really failures at all. They were expensive tuition payments on the road to success.

Take Away the Safety Net

Another of Elon Musk’s most important innovations wasn’t technological at all. It was organizational. In an industry long dominated by cost-plus contracts, where the federal government pays defense contractors for effort and expenses, plus a guaranteed margin of profit, regardless of results. Instead, Musk embraced milestone-based agreements with the government that essentially said, “Only pay us when we succeed.”

Taking away the safety net created enormous pressure on SpaceX. But it also unleashed extraordinary creativity and drive. Engineers were encouraged to think boldly, challenge “that’s the way we’ve always done it” thinking, and test ideas rapidly. The risks were borne by the organization, not by individual engineers. As a result, failure became rocket fuel rather than stigma.

One of the defining challenges facing young people today is an exaggerated fear of failure. Research shows that today’s students are significantly more anxious about making mistakes than previous generations. Many have come to believe that one wrong decision can derail a career, a reputation, or a future.

In today’s organizations, failure has become a taboo topic. We fear it. We hide it. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to avoid it. Employees learn quickly which mistakes are acceptable and which ones can damage careers. As a result, people become cautious. They play defense instead of offense. They stop experimenting and growing in their careers. Obsolescence sets in.

Yet history tells us a different story. Almost every meaningful achievement — whether in business, innovation, politics, science, or personal growth — has been preceded by setbacks, disappointments, and outright failures.

Thomas Edison famously tested thousands of materials before finding a workable filament for his electric light bulb. When asked about his failures, he replied that he hadn’t failed at all. He had simply discovered thousands of ways that didn’t work.

Abraham Lincoln’s early career reads like a catalog of disappointments. He lost elections, suffered business failures, endured personal tragedies, and faced repeated public setbacks. Yet those experiences shaped the resilience and wisdom that ultimately carried him to the presidency during one of the most difficult periods in American history.

The lesson is not that failure is desirable. The lesson is that failure is often the price of admission for meaningful success.

The first step toward building a healthier attitude toward failure is being able to talk about them. I was fired from a dead-end corporate job early in my career and for years I hid my shame. Nowadays I realize I wasn’t fired but fired up! I realized that if I was ever going to become a self-supporting independent journalist, that I should seize that moment and dive in. I went on to become an expert in innovation, and a lucrative career that has taken me all over the world.

What I’ve found in teaching managers how to drive growth through innovation is that when mistakes are hidden, their value is lost. Others cannot learn from them. Valuable insights remain trapped inside individuals or departments. The organization pays the cost of the mistake but receives none of the educational benefit.

What I teach is that when there is a “failure,” that’s a good time to conduct a post-mortem after unsuccessful projects. Ask simple questions: What happened and why? What assumptions proved wrong? What can we learn? Most importantly, objective in-depth debriefs remove blame from the discussion. The goal is not to identify a culprit. The goal is to uncover lessons.

Organizations that openly discuss failures build institutional wisdom. Organizations that conceal failures repeat them.

True failure, therefore, is not making a mistake. True failure occurs when we fail to learn from mistakes — either our own or those of others.

Every industry is littered with examples of organizations that ignored warning signs that should have been visible to management. Kodak invented much of the technology behind digital photography yet failed to act on what it had learned. Blockbuster dismissed the significance of streaming. Nokia allowed a top down, risk adverse culture to congeal such that, when the iPhone hit the market, they were unable to pivot fast enough. Countless companies have repeated mistakes that competitors had already paid dearly to discover.

The most successful professionals cultivate the opposite habit. They become students of failure. They study what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how similar mistakes can be avoided in the future.

The risks associated with failure must be borne by the organization, not by individuals within the organization. When employees feel that every unsuccessful initiative could become a career-limiting event, innovation dies. Fear becomes the dominant operating system.

Leaders must create environments where people know that responsible experimentation is encouraged and protected. That does not mean tolerating carelessness or repeated mistakes. Accountability still matters. Preparation still matters. Execution still matters.

But when a well-conceived initiative fails despite thoughtful planning and diligent effort, the organization should absorb the risk and harvest the lessons.

People should not have to choose between innovation and job security.

This brings us to one of the most useful principles in modern business: fail fast and fail cheap.

Rather than investing years and millions of dollars pursuing untested assumptions, successful organizations run small experiments. They test ideas early. They gather feedback quickly. They adjust before costs escalate.

A small failure today can prevent a catastrophic failure tomorrow.

Think of it as buying information. Every experiment produces data. Some experiments confirm assumptions. Others disprove them. Both outcomes are valuable because they reduce uncertainty and improve future decisions.

The organizations that learn the fastest often outperform those with the greatest resources.

Ultimately, success is not achieved by avoiding failure. Success is achieved by creating systems that transform failure into learning, learning into wisdom, and wisdom into better decisions.

Edison understood this. Lincoln understood this. Musk understood this. Every accomplished entrepreneur, inventor, executive, and leader eventually learns the same lesson. Failure itself is rarely fatal. Refusing to learn from it often is.

The organizations that thrive in the future will not be those that make the fewest mistakes. They will be the ones that learn the fastest, adapt the quickest, and create cultures where intelligent risk-taking is not feared but encouraged.

After all, the opposite of failure is not success. The opposite of failure is learning.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Illuminate to Innovate

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Illuminate to Innovate

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Being consciously innovative involves expanding your awareness and opening your heart and mind to disrupt habitual feelings and thinking, allowing for deeper, more holistic decision-making and innovative problem-solving. It allows us to play in the space of possibility by cultivating consciousness – illuminating the state of being aware of your surroundings, internal thoughts, and subjective experiences. This encompasses everything you perceive, feel, and think, ranging from basic sensory awareness to complex self-reflection, decision-making and problem-solving. Developing people’s consciousness involves strengthening a person’s ability to sense and connect with awareness-based systems and respond appropriately to achieve desired outcomes. Conscious innovation is a mandatory way of being, thinking, and acting that makes people matter and enables them to survive and thrive in the emerging, uncertain and disruptive world of AI, where leaders must know how to illuminate to innovate.

What is consciousness?

According to Dr Dan Seigal[1], consciousness has two elements that shape a person’s inner state or interior condition. There is the knowing, which is awareness itself. And there are the knowns, which are everything that enters awareness. To integrate consciousness means to differentiate these two elements from each other, and then to differentiate the knowns from one another.

Knowns consist of people’s thoughts, feelings, and memories, while sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch bring the outside world in as a constant stream of sensation. They also include intuition, inner wisdom, and awareness of mental and emotional processes, such as memories, beliefs, intentions, and hopes. As well as the relational self, the awareness of connection to other people, to living beings, and to something larger than the individual self.

What is conscious innovation?

Our approach to conscious innovation creates the conditions for individuals and teams to move and focus their attention, develop conscious awareness, and become intentional and passionately purposeful in solving challenging problems. People illuminate to innovate by advancing through the three levels of self to make the world a better place by balancing people, profit, and the planet.

Conscious innovation integrates the key principles and methodologies of emergence, systems thinking, human-centered design, sustainability and technology to empower people to realize their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation.

Conscious innovation includes being able to understand and improve a person’s inner state or interior condition, and illuminate to innovate by:

Focusing on expanding who they are as human beings by creating the conditions to develop people’s metacognition[2] and brain health[3], enabling them to experience what it means to be responsible, passionately purposeful, and agile, and to build an adaptive capacity to flourish in an uncertain world.
Developing an awareness of the potential of cognitive dissonance and harnessing creative tension that enables people to safely learn and grow as humans who act in ways that build their capability to be creative, inventive, innovative and resilient in the face of chaos and disruption.
Creating the conditions by clarifying an aligned strategy and developing a safe, trusted, and aligned culture that enables and supports people and teams to collaborate, experiment, and innovate by willingly partnering human potential with AI.

These invisible elements of conscious innovation affect how people interact with, relate to, and lead people and teams; how they communicate, learn, make decisions, solve problems, manage, implement, and embed change; and how they execute innovation or transformational projects and initiatives.

Illuminate to Innovate – The three levels of self

The three levels of self-illustrate the deep learning and change journey involved in illuminating and harnessing human potential on the people side of innovation. At a time when companies are required to rethink the very nature of the corporation, especially how to integrate human accountability with virtual and physical AI agents.

Self-regulation involves developing awareness of one’s automatic responses, understanding their sources and effects on one’s physiology and neurology, owning one’s responses, and ensuring they have a positive impact on oneself and those with whom one interacts.
Self-management involves close observation and management of people’s knowns: being attentively present to neurological and physiological factors, including emotional states, traits, thoughts, feelings, mindsets, behaviours, and skills in how people use time to make decisions, communicate, and resolve business challenges.
Self-leadership involves deepening and illuminating known skills: open awareness, knowledge, and the ability to intentionally master one’s own neurology and physiology, as well as others’, in interactions and challenging situations, to mindfully evaluate and successfully create, invent, deliver, and execute innovative solutions.

The intent is to create strategic and cultural alignment that delivers execution excellence by enabling leaders and engaging people to solve problems in generative ways, consciously prioritizing human relationships through collaboration and experimentation in partnership with AI, and steadily moving towards goals in deliberate, focused, systemic, kind and honorable ways.

What are the benefits of being consciously innovative?

Being consciously innovative involves learning to be, think, and act differently; people learn to stop trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it and to stop reproducing the same results they no longer want.

At the same time, the emergence of AI requires a major brain shift to maximize human potential by building foundational cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and technological literacy abilities that enable people to adapt, relate, and contribute meaningfully, integrating an awareness-based systems approach and a holistic focus.

The benefits of being consciously innovative include improving leaders’ and people’s abilities to:

Replace short-term, reactive, and conventional linear thinking processes that initially created and now sustain problems, and embrace change as a circular, creative, continuous, and systemic process.
Courageously adopt long-term, sustainable strategies for the organization’s growth and the impact it seeks to have on clients or customers and wider communities.
Make better-informed decisions by considering potential scenarios, anticipating risks, identifying interdependencies, and making decisions that meet needs while keeping the bigger picture in view.
Cease overlaying new structures onto people’s unchanged ways of perceiving and experiencing their world by creating the conditions for people to help people make sense of new structures and processes, show up differently, and take new and right actions.
Combine futures thinking and systems thinking, emphasizing ethical considerations, social responsibility, and sustainability.
Be empathetic and compassionate by discerning, understanding, and considering the needs, values, and perspectives of all stakeholders involved in a problem or a system, not just those present in a room.
Improve people’s capacity to attend, observe, inquire, listen to each other, and differ in generative ways, and to feel empowered to think independently and act differently.
Embrace AI strategically, using AI and new technologies to assist, help, and empower human agency, to partner, collaborate, and experiment with AI to rebuild engagement and deliver execution excellence.

Illuminate to innovate

Being consciously innovative requires actively illuminating and integrating the ways leaders and coaches bring clarity, creativity, compassion, courage, and meaning to their decisions, roles, and teams. This involves expanding your awareness and opening your hearts and minds to disrupt habitual thinking, allowing for deeper, more holistic decision-making and innovative problem-solving. It involves cultivating consciousness – illuminating the state of being aware of your surroundings, internal thoughts, and subjective experiences and encompasses everything you perceive, feel, and think, ranging from basic sensory awareness to complex self-reflection, decision-making and problem-solving.

[1]The Developing Mind (The foundation of Interpersonal Neurobiology) [1]

[2] Metacognition is “thinking about thinking”—the awareness, understanding, and control of one’s own cognitive processes, like learning and problem-solving, to improve performance.

[3]https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/the-human-advantage-stronger-brains-in-the-age-of-ai?cid=mgp_opr-eml-nsl-ofl-mgp-glb–&hlkid=507fe91b220d4915bbcd198daaeb857a&hctky=1766168&hdpid=bfbfe441-95e5-45b4-9dc7-c32cd1789c2f#/

Image Credit: Pexels

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Why Students Are Booing Silicon Valley’s AI Vision

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Why Students Are Booing Silicon Valley's AI Vision

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

A curious thing happened at the University of Arizona’s commencement ceremony.

The speaker was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, one of the most influential figures in the development of the digital economy. Addressing thousands of graduates, Schmidt spoke enthusiastically about artificial intelligence and the transformative role it will play in their lives and careers.

Then something unexpected happened. Students began to boo.

For many observers, the moment was jarring. Why would graduates reject a future of technological abundance, economic growth, and unprecedented innovation? Aren’t young people supposed to be technology’s biggest boosters?

Not anymore, apparently. As a futurist who has spent more than three decades advising leaders on adapting to change and innovation, I see this moment as an inflection point. I think what they were rejecting was a vision of the future being jammed down their throats. Looking at a bleak employment market, these young people were saying en masse, “Your vision of our future is not our vision of our future, and we don’t feel you really have our interest at heart.”

The question at this juncture is: What kind of future are we rushing headlong to build, and who will benefit?

The tech industrial complex spins an appealing vision. But it’s beginning to wear thin. Students and other segments of society are pushing back. They are asking tough questions: Will AI really solve humanity’s greatest challenges? Will it cure diseases, eliminate drudgery, unlock extraordinary productivity gains, and usher in a new era of prosperity, as the so-called tech visionaries proudly claim?

Or could it be that the underlying premise is faulty: that the more intelligence we can automate, the better off society will become. The young people are waking up to the possibility that this is hot air.

Across college campuses, among young professionals, and increasingly among the broader public, there is another narrative taking shape. It is one that many technology leaders seem to want to dismiss: growing unease about where all of this is headed.

Many Americans view AI through the lens of issues much closer to home: skyrocketing electricity bills caused in part by data center proliferation; teen chatbot addiction, and looming job displacement. A recent Stanford study, Canaries in the Coal Mine?, found that young workers in the most AI-exposed occupations saw a 16% relative decline in employment from late 2022 through September 2025.

Over the past several years, I have spoken with educators, business leaders, and students around the world. Increasingly, I hear variations of the emerging narrative. I hear people questioning the tech industry’s vision more sharply. Are we building tools that expand human potential, or tools that gradually replace us? The concern isn’t that AI will become more capable. The concern is that humans will become less so.

Scot Rabe has taught design at Ventura College for decades. He recently described his growing frustration with students. Attendance remains high, but engagement is declining. There is little evidence that students are wrestling deeply with ideas. In his words, “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

That observation aligns with broader concerns about what I call human agency—the capacity to act intentionally, make decisions, solve problems, and shape one’s own future.

A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center explored the future of human agency in an increasingly digital world. Experts were deeply divided. Many predicted that emerging technologies would weaken individual autonomy rather than strengthen it.

Their concern deserves attention.

The challenge facing young people today is not simply learning how to use AI. It is learning how to remain fully human in a world increasingly designed to automate thinking, decision-making, and even creativity.

Tim Wu, author of The Age of Extraction, argues that many of today’s largest technology firms operate by extracting value from our attention, data, and behavior. The more time we spend scrolling, clicking, and consuming, the more profitable the system becomes.

But what happens when the same incentives are applied to intelligence itself? What happens when convenience becomes the highest value? What happens when every difficult task can be delegated to a machine? What happens to the development of judgment, wisdom, resilience, and imagination?

These are not anti-technology questions. They are profoundly human questions.

History suggests that societies thrive not when technology advances alone, but when human capability advances alongside it.

The printing press transformed civilization. Electricity transformed civilization. The internet transformed civilization. Yet none of these innovations eliminated the need for human initiative, purpose, or responsibility. If anything, they increased it.

The danger today is not that AI becomes more powerful. The danger is that we gradually surrender the very qualities that make us uniquely human. That may be what those students were trying to express.

Perhaps they were saying that they do not want a future in which every challenge is solved for them. Perhaps they do not want to become passive consumers of machine-generated answers. Perhaps they are pushing back against a worldview that sees efficiency as life’s highest goal.

And perhaps they are asking a deeper question: What role will humans play in the future being built around us?

One vision imagines a future that is increasingly automated, optimized, digitized, and controlled by a small number of powerful technology platforms. Another envisions a future where technology augments rather than replaces human capability. A future where innovation strengthens creativity, deepens relationships, expands opportunity, and reinforces human dignity.

The choice between these futures is being made right now. Every generation inherits a set of technologies. But every generation must also decide how those technologies will shape our lives.

The students who are booing Silicon Valley’s assumptions were doing more than expressing frustration at yet another out-of-touch billionaire. They were reminding us that progress is not simply about building smarter machines. Rather, it is about building a future worth inhabiting.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Take an Evidence-Based Approach for Transformation and Change

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Take an Evidence-Based Approach for Transformation and Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In The Knowing Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, the two Stanford professors show, in painstaking detail, that most enterprises fail to act on what they know. They point out that many are set up to reinforce the status quo, because mastering conventional wisdom is key to advancement.

There is a similar gap when it comes to transformation and change, but for somewhat different reasons. Decades of research and insights are largely ignored. Transformational initiatives are seen as exercises in persuasion, with practitioners designing slogans to “create a sense of urgency around change” and shift attitudes, assuming that will change behaviors.

Today we are in a change crisis. Businesses need to internalize new technologies like AI and adapt to new realities like hybrid work, but still struggle to adopt decades old skills related to lean manufacturing, agile development and cultural competency. If we are going to drive the transformations we need to compete, we need to take an evidence based approach.

The Diffusion Of Innovations

In 1962, Everett Rogers published the first edition of his now-famous book, The Diffusion of Innovations, which contained hundreds of studies of how change spreads. These ranged from the seminal study of the adoption of hybrid corn and the spread of hate crime laws in the US, to the doctors use of the antibiotic tetracycline and the uptake of mobile phones in Europe.

In some instances the same subject was studied in a number of different places. The spread of family planning methods was researched in a number of developing nations, including Taiwan, Korea and Egypt, among others. In others, the same effect was observed in very different contexts, like the importance of social ties in both recruiting civil rights activists during “Freedom Summer” and the spread of air conditioners in the 1950s.

The difference between this type of research and the case studies that underlie much change management thinking is that they are much more rigorous and transparent. In a typical case study, researchers interview a limited number of participants and interpret what they see and hear. These sometimes lead to genuine insights, but people often interpret events differently.

In the diffusion studies, there are typically hundreds of people surveyed, sometimes over a number of years. The questionnaires and data are published along with the findings, so that others can re-examine conclusions. Studies can be compared side by side. In some cases, such as this one, data from earlier work is made available to colleagues to see if they can come up with alternative insights.

There is a remarkable consensus on the basic principles of diffusion. Overwhelmingly, these studies find that new ideas come from outside the community and incur resistance; that there is a common and persistent KAP-gap, in which a shift in knowledge and attitudes do not result in changes in practice; that change follows an s-curve pattern (meaning it starts slow, hits a tipping point and accelerates) and ideas are transmitted socially.

Clearly, any change program needs to take these principles into account.

Changing Societies As Well As Organizations

In the early 1960s, around the time that Rogers began publishing his writings about the diffusion of innovations, Gene Sharp began to formulate his theories about changing societies. Sharp saw change as a strategic conflict in which the weapons weren’t military, but psychological, social, economic and political.

Sharp’s key insight was that the status quo isn’t monolithic, but derives its power from specific sources, such as legitimacy, popular support and institutional support. If you can undermine those sources of power, he reasoned, you can bring change about. To do that, however, you need focus strategically on bringing down what supports the current regime.

While there’s no evidence that Sharp and Rogers ever met or were aware of each other’s work, there are striking similarities. For example, the Spectrum of Allies framework that is central to nonviolent conflict is eerily similar to the adoption groups in Rogers’ diffusion curve. Like Rogers, Sharp found that change was transmitted through social bonds.

The main difference is that Sharp and his revolutionary disciples focus, perhaps not surprisingly, on overcoming resistance, which isn’t emphasized in the diffusion research. For example, the global activist Srdja Popović developed the concept of a dilemma action, which has been the subject of increasing interest by researchers.

While Sharp’s legacy doesn’t have the intense academic rigor of the diffusion research, it has proven itself through the work of practitioners. Movements such as the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East were based on Sharp’s work and his ideas continue to be developed at his Albert Einstein Institution as well as the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS).

A Network Mechanism For Spreading Change

In the late 1990s, a young graduate student named Duncan Watts began to study coupled oscillation, how certain things, such as crickets, pacemaker cells in our hearts and electrical power grids can, under certain conditions, synchronize their collective behavior. That work led to his discovery of small world networks, a concept so important that in 2018 the prestigious journal Nature published a 20-year retrospective on it.

Where Rogers and Sharp both found that change spreads through social ties, Watts discovered the mechanism through which an idea travels. Many assumed that there were special “opinion leaders” that propagated change. Yet Watts found that it was the structure of the network that determined how far an idea could travel. In effect, it is small groups, loosely connected and united by a shared purpose that drive transformational change.

We know that people tend to conform to the opinions of those around them. The best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do. This effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape how we see things.

Practically speaking, the emergence of small-world networks means that change leaders need to focus more on shaping networks than shaping opinions. It is by empowering small groups, helping them to connect with and inspiring them with a sense of common endeavor that you can bring a change initiative to the exponential part of the s-curve and break out.

Acting On What We Know

The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. If you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.

The good news is that we have over a half-century of research and practice that can inform our efforts. Yet to be effective, we have to put that learning to work. It makes no sense, for example, to “create a sense of urgency” around change when we know that transformation follows an s-shaped curve, starting slowly and then accelerating after a tipping point. Doing so is more likely to trigger resistance than to move things forward.

In much the same way, if we know that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in practice and that ideas about change are transmitted socially, we should focus our efforts on empowering enthusiasts rather than wordsmithing and broadcasting slogans. People tend to adopt the ideas and actions of those around them.

We need to think about change as a strategic conflict between the present state and an alternative vision. The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. To bring about transformation we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 1,300+ FREE quotes available for presentations from http://misterinnovation.com

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Thinking From No to Yes for Top Line Growth

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Top line growth strategies and product applicability frameworks

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Bottom line growth is good, but top line growth is better. But if you want to grow the bottom line, ignore labor costs and reduce material costs. Labor cost is only 5-10% of product cost. Stop chasing it, and, instead, teach your design community to simplify the product so it uses fewer parts and design out the highest cost elements.

Where the factory creates bottom line growth, top line growth is generated in the market/customer domain. The best way I know to grow the top line is to broaden the applicability of your products and services. But, before you can broaden applicability, you’ve got to define applicability as it is. Define the limits of what your product can do – how much it can lift, how fast it can run a calculation and where it can be used. And for your service, define who can use it, where it can be used and what elements without customer involvement. And with the limits defined, you know where top line growth won’t come from.

Radical top line growth comes only when your products and services can be used in new applications. Sure, you can train your sales force to sell more of what you already have, but that runs out of gas soon enough. But, real top line growth comes when your services serve new customers in new ways. By definition, if you’re not trying to make your product work in new ways, you’re not going to achieve meaningful top line growth. And by definition, if you’re not creating new functionality for your services, you might as well be focusing on bottom line growth.

If your product couldn’t do it and now it can, you’re doing it right. If your service couldn’t be used by people that speak Chinese and now it can, you’re on your way. If your product couldn’t be used in applications without electricity and now it can, you’re on to something. If your service couldn’t run on a smartphone and now it can, well, you get the idea.

For the acid test, think no-to-yes.

If your product can’t work in application A, you can’t sell it to people who do that work. If your service can’t be used by visually impaired people, you’re not delivering value to them and they won’t buy it. Turning can’t into can is a big deal. But you’ve got to define can’t before you can turn it into can. If you want top line growth, take the time to define the limits of applicability.

No-to-yes is powerful because it creates clarity. It’s easy to know when a project will create no-to-yes functionality and when it won’t. And that makes it easy to stop projects that don’t deliver no-to-yes value and start projects that do.

No-to-yes is the key element of a compete-with-no-one approach to business.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Triggering Resistance

Shifting Identities

Designing A Dilemma

Creating A Larger, Integrated Identity

What Makes A Story?

The Hero’s Journey

Change As A Strategic Conflict

Creating A Shared Journey

The Two Dimensions That Define Change Type

Why Most Change Programs Misdiagnose Their Change Type

How Change Type Should Shape Your Change Management Approach

Incremental Planned Change

Transformational Planned Change

Incremental Unplanned Change

Transformational Unplanned Change

The Role of the Change Planning Canvas™ in Diagnosing Change Type

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you identify the type of organizational change you’re dealing with?

Why does change type matter for change management?

What is the difference between incremental and transformational organizational change?

How to DiagnoseYour Change Type

Transformational Planned Change

Transformational Unplanned Change

Incremental Planned Change

Incremental Unplanned Change

3 Diagnostic Questions

How to Ensure a Successful Digital Transformation (Charting Change)

Celebrating America’s 250th with a 48-Hour Flash Sale!

Take Away the Safety Net

What is consciousness?

What is conscious innovation?

Illuminate to Innovate – The three levels of self

What are the benefits of being consciously innovative?

Illuminate to innovate

The Diffusion Of Innovations

Changing Societies As Well As Organizations

A Network Mechanism For Spreading Change

Acting On What We Know

How to Diagnose
Your Change Type