Category Archives: Change

An Innovation Lesson From The Rolling Stones

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An Innovation Lesson From The Rolling Stones

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

If you’re like most people, you’ve faced disappointment. Maybe the love of your life didn’t return your affection, you didn’t get into your dream college, or you were passed over for promotion.  It hurts.  And sometimes, that hurt lingers for a long time.

Until one day, something happens, and you realize your disappointment was a gift.  You meet the true love of your life while attending college at your fallback school, and years later, when you get passed over for promotion, the two of you quit your jobs, pursue your dreams, and live happily ever after. Or something like that.

We all experience disappointment.  We also all get to choose whether we stay there, lamenting the loss of what coulda shoulda woulda been, or we can persevere, putting one foot in front of the other and playing The Rolling Stones on repeat:

“You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes, well, you might just find

You get what you need”

That’s life.

That’s also innovation.

As innovators, especially leaders of innovators, we rarely get what we want.  But we always get what we need (whether we like it or not)

We want to know. 
We need to be comfortable not knowing.

Most of us want to know the answer because if we know the answer, there is no risk. There is no chance of being wrong, embarrassed, judged, or punished.  But if there is no risk, there is no growth, expansion, or discovery.

Innovation is something new that creates value. If you know everything, you can’t innovate.

As innovators, we need to be comfortable not knowing.  When we admit to ourselves that we don’t know something, we open our minds to new information, new perspectives, and new opportunities. When we say we don’t know, we give others permission to be curious, learn, and create. 

We want the creative genius and billion-dollar idea. 
We need the team and the steady stream of big ideas.

We want to believe that one person blessed with sufficient time, money, and genius can change the world.  Some people like to believe they are that person, and most of us think we can hire that person, and when we do find that person and give them the resources they need, they will give us the billion-dollar idea that transforms our company, disrupts the industry, and change the world.

Innovation isn’t magic.  Innovation is team work.

We need other people to help us see what we can’t and do what we struggle to do.  The idea-person needs the optimizer to bring her idea to life, and the optimizer needs the idea-person so he has a starting point.  We need lots of ideas because most won’t work, but we don’t know which ones those are, so we prototype, experiment, assess, and refine our way to the ones that will succeed.   

We want to be special.
We need to be equal.

We want to work on the latest and most cutting-edge technology and discuss it using terms that no one outside of Innovation understands. We want our work to be on stage, oohed and aahed over on analyst calls, and talked about with envy and reverence in every meeting. We want to be the cool kids, strutting around our super hip offices in our hoodies and flip-flops or calling into the meeting from Burning Man. 

Innovation isn’t about you.  It’s about serving others.

As innovators, we create value by solving problems.  But we can’t do it alone.  We need experienced operators who can quickly spot design flaws and propose modifications.  We need accountants and attorneys who instantly see risks and help you navigate around them.  We need people to help us bring our ideas to life, but that won’t happen if we act like we’re different or better.  Just as we work in service to our customers, we must also work in service to our colleagues by working with them, listening, compromising, and offering help.

What about you?
What do you want?
What are you learning you need?

Image Credit: Unsplash

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3 Ways to View Your Innovation Basket

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(including one that makes Radical Innovation easy)

3 Ways to View Your Innovation Basket

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You are a rolling stone, and that means you gather no moss!  You read the September issue of HBR (and maybe last week’s article), tossed out your innovation portfolio, and wove yourself an innovation basket to “differentiate the concept from finance and avoid the mistake of treating projects like financial securities, where the goal is usually to maximize returns through diversification [and instead] remember that innovation projects are creative acts.”   

Then you explained this to your CFO and received side-eye so devastating it would make Sophie Loren proud.

The reality is that the innovation projects you’re working on are investments, and because they’re risky, diversification is the best way to maximize the returns your company needs.

But it’s not the only way we should communicate, evaluate, and treat them.

Different innovation basket views for different customers

When compiling an innovation basket, the highest priority is having a single source of truth.  If people in the organization disagree on what is in and out of the basket, how you measure and manage the portfolio doesn’t matter.

But a single source of truth doesn’t mean you can’t look at that truth from multiple angles.

Having multiple views showing the whole basket while being customized to address each of your internal customer’s Jobs to be Done will turbocharge your ability to get support and resources.

The CFO: What returns will we get and when?

The classic core/adjacent/transformational portfolio is your answer.  By examining each project based on where to play (markets and customers) and how to win (offerings, profit models, key resources and activities), you can quickly assess each project’s relative riskiness, potential return, time to ROI, and resource requirements.

The CEO: How does this support and accelerate our strategic priorities?

This is where the new innovation basket is most helpful.  By starting with the company’s strategic goals and asking, “What needs to change to achieve our strategy?” leadership teams immediately align innovation goals with corporate strategic priorities.  When projects and investments are placed at the intersection of the goal they support, and the mechanism of value creation (e.g., product, process, brand), the CEO can quickly see how investments align with strategic priorities and actively engage in reallocation decisions.

You: Will any of these ever see the light of day?

As much as you hope the answer is “Yes!”, you know the answer is “Some.  Maybe.  Hopefully.”  You also know that the “some” that survive might not be the biggest or the best of the basket.  They’ll be the most palatable.

Ignoring that fact won’t make it untrue. Instead, acknowledge it and use it to expand stakeholders’ palates.

Start by articulating your organization’s identity, the answers to “who we are” and “what we do.” 

Then place each innovation in one of three buckets based on its fit with the organization’s identity:

  • Identity-enhancing innovations that enhance or strengthen the identity
  • Identity-stretching innovations that “do not fit with the core of an organization’s identity, but are related enough that if the scope of organizational identity were expanded, the innovation would fit.”
  • Identity-challenging innovations that are “in direct conflict with the existing organizational identity.”

It probably won’t surprise you that identity-enhancing innovations are far more likely to receive internal support than identity-challenging innovations.  But what may surprise you is that core, adjacent, and transformational innovations can all be identity-enhancing.

For example, Luxxotica and Bausch & Lomb are both in the vision correction industry (eyeglasses and contact lenses, respectively) but have very different identities.  Luxxotica views itself as “an eyewear company,” while Bausch & Lomb sees itself as an “eye health company” (apologies for the puns). 

When laser-vision correction surgery became widely available, Bausch & Lomb was an early investor because, while the technology would be considered a breakthrough innovation, it was also identity-enhancing.  A decade later, Bausch & Lomb’s surgical solutions and ophthalmic pharmaceuticals businesses account for 38% of the company’s revenue and one-third of the growth.

One basket.  Multiple Views.  All the Answers.

Words are powerful, and using a new one, especially in writing,  can change your behavior and brain. But calling a portfolio a basket won’t change the results of your innovation efforts.  To do that, you need to understand why you have a basket and look at it in all the ways required to maximize creativity, measure results, and avoid stakeholder side-eye.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Avoid These Four Myths While Networking Your Organization

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Avoid These Four Myths While Networking Your Organization

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In an age of disruption, everyone has to adapt eventually. However, the typical organization is ill-suited to change direction. Managers spend years—and sometimes decades—working to optimize their operations to deliver specific outcomes and that can make an organization rigid in the face of a change in the basis of competition.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the idea of a networked organizations have come into vogue. While hierarchies tend to be rigid, networks are highly adaptable and almost infinitely scalable. Unfortunately, popular organizational schemes such as matrixed management and Holacracy have had mixed results, at best.

The truth is that networks have little to do with an organization chart and much more to do with how informal connections form in your organization, especially among lower-level employees. In fact, coming up with a complex scheme is likely to do little more than cause a lot of needless confusion. Here are the myths you need to avoid.

Myth #1: You Need To Restructure Your Organization

In the early 20th century, the great sociologist Max Weber noted that the sweeping industrialization taking place would lead to a change in how organizations operated. As cottage industries were replaced by large enterprises, leadership would have to become less traditional and focused on charismatic leaders and more organized and rational.

He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into small, specific tasks and be governed by a system of hierarchy, authority and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Later, executives such as Alfred Sloan at General Motors perfected the model.

Most enterprises are still set up this way because it remains the most efficient way to organize tasks. It aligns authority with accountability and optimizes information flow. Everybody knows where they stand and what they are responsible for. Organizational restructures are painful and time consuming because they disrupt and undermine the normal workflow.

In fact, reorganizations can backfire if they cut informal ties that don’t show up on the organization chart. So a better path is to facilitate informal ties so that people can coordinate work that falls in between organizational boundaries. In his book One Mission, McChrystal Group President Chris Fussell calls this a “hybrid organization.”

Myth #2 You Have To Break Down Silos

In 2005, researchers at Northwestern University took on the age old question: “What makes a hit on Broadway.” They looked at all the normal stuff you would imagine to influence success, such as the production budget, the marketing budget and the track record of the director. What they found, however, was surprising.

As it turns out, the most important factor was how the informal networks of the cast and crew were structured. If nobody had ever worked together before, results were poor, but if too many people had previously worked together, results also suffered. It was in the middle range, where there was both familiarity and disruption, that produced the best results.

Notice how the study doesn’t mention anything about the formal organization of the cast and crew. Broadway productions tend to have very basic structures, with a director leading the creative team, a producer managing the business side and others heading up things like music, choreography and so on. That makes it easy for a cast and crew to set up, because everyone knows their place.

The truth is that silos exist because they are centers of capability. Actors work with actors. Set designers work with set designers and so on. So instead of trying to break down silos, you need to start thinking about how to connect them. In the case of the Broadways plays, that was done through previous working relationships, but there are other ways to achieve the same goal.

Myth #3: You Need To Identify Influentials, Hubs And Bridges

In Malcolm Gladwell’s breakaway bestseller The Tipping Point, he wrote “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts,” which he called “The Law of the Few.” Before long, it seemed like everybody from marketers to organizational theorists were looking to identify a mysterious group of people called “influentials.”

Yet as I explain in Cascades, decades of empirical evidence shows that influentials are a myth. While it is true that some people are more influential than others, their influence is highly contextual and not significant enough to go to the trouble of identifying them. Also, a study that analyzed the emails of 60,000 people found that information does not need rely on hubs or bridges.

With that said, there are a number of ways to network your organization by optimizing organizational platforms for connection. For example, Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp found that “bootcampers tend to form bonds with their classmates who joined near the same time and those bonds persist even after each has joined different teams.”

One of my favorite examples of how even small tweaks can improve connectivity is a project done at a bank’s call center. When it was found that a third of variation in productivity could be attributed to informal communication outside of meetings, the bank arranged for groups to go on coffee break together, increasing productivity by as much as 20% while improving employee satisfaction at the same time.

Myth #4: Networks Don’t Need Leadership

Perhaps the most damaging myth about networks is that they don’t need strong leadership. Many observers have postulated that because technology allows people to connect with greater efficiency, leaders are no longer critical to organizing work. The reality is that nothing can be further from the truth.

The fact is that it is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drive change. While individuals can form loosely connected small groups, they can rarely form a shared purpose by themselves. So the function of leadership these days is less to plan and direct action than it is to empower and inspire belief.

So perhaps the biggest shift is not one of tactics, but of mindset. In traditional hierarchies, information flows up through the organization and orders flow down. That helps leaders maintain control, but it also makes the organization slow to adapt and vulnerable to disruption.

Leaders need to learn how to facilitate information flow through horizontal connections so people lower down in the organization can act on it without waiting for approval. That’s where shared purpose comes in. Without a common purpose and shared values, pushing decision making down will only result in chaos. It’s much easier to get people to do what you want if they already want what you want.

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

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How to Defeat Corporate Antibodies

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A Guide to Beating Resistance

How to Defeat Corporate Antibodies

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Imagine yourself as the CEO of a mid-sized organization that’s struggling to grow and adapt to the ever-changing business landscape. You decide that it’s time for a significant transformation, which will involve new partnerships, revamped processes, and a shift in the company’s culture.

Despite the potential benefits, the proposed changes are met with strong resistance from within the organization. Corporate antibodies, individuals who fight against innovation and maintain the status quo, are now the biggest challenge to overcome.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through a story that illustrates the impact of corporate antibodies on organizational development and explores the role of organizational culture, leadership, and employee engagement in fostering a supportive environment for change.

A Tale of Two Teams

In our fictional organization, there are two departments that perfectly illustrate the impact of corporate antibodies on organizational development: the marketing team, led by an open-minded and forward-thinking manager named Susan, and the finance department, led by a risk-averse and conservative manager named Mark.

Susan’s marketing team is known for embracing new ideas and encouraging collaboration. She has created a culture where employees are motivated to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and learn from failures. On the other hand, Mark’s finance team resists any proposed changes and defends the status quo. Mark is wary of any initiatives that could disrupt the stability of his department and is often skeptical of suggestions coming from outside his team.

The Power of Culture

One day, during a company-wide meeting, the CEO announces a new partnership with a cutting-edge technology company to streamline processes, reduce costs, and drive innovation across the organization.

Susan’s marketing team quickly embraces the idea, eager to explore the opportunities this partnership could bring. They begin brainstorming ways to integrate the new technology into their work and share their ideas with other teams.

In contrast, Mark’s finance team reacts with apprehension and skepticism. They question the need for such a drastic change and raise concerns about potential disruptions to their well-established processes. Mark himself is hesitant to support the initiative, fearing that it might expose weaknesses within his department and lead to a loss of control.

Detecting Corporate Antibodies

The stark difference between the two teams becomes apparent during meetings and discussions about the upcoming transformation. The finance team, led by Mark, expresses their resistance through statements like:

  • “We already tried something similar, and it didn’t work.”
  • “Our current process has worked fine for years; there’s no need to change.”
  • “If that were a good idea, we’d already have thought of it.”

Some individuals in the finance team genuinely believe they’re looking out for the company’s best interests, while others prioritize their personal interests or fear the potential consequences of change.

The Battle Begins

As the transformation moves into the incubation phase, the tensions between the two teams escalate. Susan’s marketing team starts working closely with the new technology partner, sharing their progress and achievements with the rest of the organization. They demonstrate the positive impact of the change initiative and inspire other departments to get on board.

Meanwhile, Mark’s finance team continues to resist the change, erecting roadblocks and questioning every decision made by the marketing team and the technology partner. Their relentless negativity creates a tense atmosphere and slows down the progress of the transformation.

The Turning Point

As the organization enters the Acceleration stage, the CEO recognizes the need to address the corporate antibodies that are hindering the company’s growth. She decides to implement the following strategies to manage resistance and foster a more supportive environment for change:

  1. Engage potential blockers: The CEO invites Mark and key members of his finance team to participate in decision-making processes, ensuring they feel valued and included. By involving them in shaping the transformation, she gradually turns some of the blockers into backers.
  2. Encourage open communication: The CEO fosters a culture where employees can voice their concerns and suggestions without fear of backlash. This allows the organization to identify and address potential issues early on, reducing the likelihood of resistance emerging later in the process.
  3. Provide support and resources: The CEO allocates resources to offer training and support to employees who need help navigating the change process. This alleviates anxieties and creates a more positive attitude towards the change initiatives.
  4. Celebrate successes: The CEO acknowledges the achievements of Susan’s marketing team and other departments that have embraced the change. Recognizing progress and milestones helps maintain morale and motivation while demonstrating the benefits of the transformation.
  5. Foster collaboration across departments: The CEO organizes cross-functional workshops and team-building activities that encourage employees from different departments to work together. This helps break down silos and promotes a greater understanding of the benefits of the change initiative across the organization.
  6. Appoint change champions: The CEO identifies key influencers within the organization who can help advocate for the change and address concerns from their peers. These change champions play a critical role in maintaining momentum and enthusiasm for the transformation.
  7. Establish a feedback loop: The CEO implements a system for collecting regular feedback from employees about the progress of the transformation. This allows the leadership team to monitor the effectiveness of their strategies, make necessary adjustments, and address any emerging concerns promptly.

With these additional strategies in place, the organization begins to witness significant progress in its transformation journey. The impact of the corporate antibodies is gradually diminished, and a culture of innovation and adaptability starts to flourish.

Monitoring Progress and Ensuring Long-term Success

The CEO understands the importance of monitoring progress and adjusting strategies as needed to ensure the long-term success of the transformation. To do this, she establishes a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help track the progress of the change initiatives and their impact on the organization. These KPIs may include employee engagement, cross-functional collaboration, efficiency gains, and financial performance.

Additionally, the CEO remains vigilant for signs of lingering resistance or the re-emergence of corporate antibodies. By maintaining open lines of communication and actively soliciting feedback from employees, she can quickly identify and address any issues that might hinder the organization’s development.

The conclusion is that identifying and tackling corporate antibodies is essential for successful organizational growth and transformation. By understanding the reasons behind their emergence and applying effective strategies to manage them, organizations can build a positive environment for change and promote long-lasting progress.

Emphasizing a strong organizational culture, good leadership, and employee engagement can help ensure your organization’s development efforts succeed, leading to a more resilient and adaptable business in a constantly changing world.

Image Credit: Stefan Lindegaard

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The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Not That Hard

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The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Not That Hard

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

We human beings like to believe we are special—and we are, but not as special as we might like to think. One manifestation of our need to be exceptional is the way we privilege our experience of consciousness. This has led to a raft of philosophizing which can be organized around David Chalmers’ formulation of “the hard problem.”

In case this is a new phrase for you, here is some context from our friends at Wikipedia:

“… even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?”

— David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness

The problem of consciousness, Chalmers argues, is two problems: the easy problems and the hard problem. The easy problems may include how sensory systems work, how such data is processed in the brain, how that data influences behavior or verbal reports, the neural basis of thought and emotion, and so on. The hard problem is the problem of why and how those processes are accompanied by experience.3 It may further include the question of why these processes are accompanied by that particular experience rather than another experience.

The key word here is experience. It emerges out of cognitive processes, but it is not completely reducible to them. For anyone who has read much in the field of complexity, this should not come as a surprise. All complex systems share the phenomenon of higher orders of organization emerging out of lower orders, as seen in the frequently used example of how cells, tissues, organs, and organisms all interrelate. Experience is just the next level.

The notion that explaining experience is a hard problem comes from locating it at the wrong level of emergence. Materialists place it too low—they argue it is reducible to physical phenomena, which is simply another way of denying that emergence is a meaningful construct. Shakespeare is reducible to quantum effects? Good luck with that.

Most people’s problems with explaining experience, on the other hand, is that they place it too high. They want to use their own personal experience as a grounding point. The problem is that our personal experience of consciousness is deeply inflected by our immersion in language, but it is clear that experience precedes language acquisition, as we see in our infants as well as our pets. Philosophers call such experiences qualia, and they attribute all sorts of ineluctable and mysterious qualities to them. But there is a much better way to understand what qualia really are—namely, the pre-linguistic mind’s predecessor to ideas. That is, they are representations of reality that confer strategic advantage to the organism that can host and act upon them.

Experience in this context is the ability to detect, attend to, learn from, and respond to signals from our environment, whether they be externally or internally generated. Experiences are what we remember. That is why they are so important to us.

Now, as language-enabled humans, we verbalize these experiences constantly, which is what leads us to locate them higher up in the order of emergence, after language itself has emerged. Of course, we do have experiences with language directly—lots of them. But we need to acknowledge that our identity as experiencers is not dependent upon, indeed precedes our acquisition of, language capability.

With this framework in mind, let’s revisit some of the formulations of the hard problem to see if we can’t nip them in the bud.

  • The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia or phenomenal experiences. Our explanation is that qualia are mental abstractions of phenomenal experiences that, when remembered and acted upon, confer strategic advantage to organisms under conditions of natural and sexual selection. Prior to the emergence of brains, “remembering and acting upon” is a function of chemical signals activating organisms to alter their behavior and, over time, to privilege tendencies that reinforce survival. Once brain emerges, chemical signaling is supplemented by electrical signaling to the same ends. There is no magic here, only a change of medium.
  • Annaka Harris poses the hard problem as the question of “how experience arise[s] out of non-sentient matter.” The answer to this question is, “level by level.” First sentience has to emerge from non-sentience. That happens with the emergence of life at the cellular level. Then sentience has to spread beyond the cell. That happens when chemical signaling enables cellular communication. Then sentience has to speed up to enable mobile life. That happens when electrical signaling enabled by nerves supplements chemical signaling enabled by circulatory systems. Then signaling has to complexify into meta-signaling, the aggregation of signals into qualia, remembered as experiences. Again, no miracles required.
  • Others, such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland believe that the hard problem is really more of a collection of easy problems, and will be solved through further analysis of the brain and behavior. If so, it will be through the lens of emergence, not through the mechanics of reductive materialism.
  • Consciousness is an ambiguous term. It can be used to mean self-consciousness, awareness, the state of being awake, and so on. Chalmers uses Thomas Nagel’s definition of consciousness: the feeling of what it is like to be something. Consciousness, in this sense, is synonymous with experience. Now we are in the language-inflected zone where we are going to get consciousness wrong because we are entangling it in levels of emergence that come later. Specifically, to experience anything as like anything else is not possible without the intervention of language. That is, likeness is not a qualia, it is a language-enabled idea. Thus, when Thomas Nagel famously asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” he is posing a question that has meaning only for humans, never for bats.

Going back to the first sentence above, self-consciousness is another concept that has been language-inflected in that only human beings have selves. Selves, in other words, are creations of language. More specifically, our selves are characters embedded in narratives, and use both the narratives and the character profiles to organize our lives. This is a completely language-dependent undertaking and thus not available to pets or infants. Our infants are self-sentient, but it is not until the little darlings learn language, hear stories, then hear stories about themselves, that they become conscious of their own selves as separate and distinct from other selves.

On the other hand, if we use the definitions of consciousness as synonymous with awareness or being awake, then we are exactly at the right level because both those capabilities are the symptoms of, and thus synonymous with, the emergence of consciousness.

  • Chalmers argues that experience is more than the sum of its parts. In other words, experience is irreducible. Yes, but let’s not be mysterious here. Experience emerges from the sum of its parts, just like any other layer of reality emergences from its component elements. To say something is irreducible does not mean that it is unexplainable.
  • Wolfgang Fasching argues that the hard problem is not about qualia, but about pure what-it-is-like-ness of experience in Nagel’s sense, about the very givenness of any phenomenal contents itself:

Today there is a strong tendency to simply equate consciousness with qualia. Yet there is clearly something not quite right about this. The “itchiness of itches” and the “hurtfulness of pain” are qualities we are conscious of. So, philosophy of mind tends to treat consciousness as if it consisted simply of the contents of consciousness (the phenomenal qualities), while it really is precisely consciousness of contents, the very givenness of whatever is subjectively given. And therefore, the problem of consciousness does not pertain so much to some alleged “mysterious, nonpublic objects”, i.e. objects that seem to be only “visible” to the respective subject, but rather to the nature of “seeing” itself (and in today’s philosophy of mind astonishingly little is said about the latter).

Once again, we are melding consciousness and language together when, to be accurate, we must continue to keep them separate. In this case, the dangerous phrase is “the nature of seeing.” There is nothing mysterious about seeing in the non-metaphorical sense, but that is not how the word is being used here. Instead, “seeing” is standing for “understanding” or “getting” or “grokking” (if you are nerdy enough to know Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land). Now, I think it is reasonable to assert that animals “grok” if by that we mean that they can reliably respond to environmental signals with strategic behaviors. But anything more than that requires the intervention of language, and that ends up locating consciousness per se at the wrong level of emergence.

OK, that’s enough from me. I don’t think I’ve exhausted the topic, so let me close by saying…

That’s what I think, what do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Malcolm Gladwell Trap

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The Malcolm Gladwell Trap

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

A few years ago I bought a book that I was really excited about. It’s one of those books that created a lot of buzz and it was highly recommended by someone I respect. The author’s pedigree included Harvard, Stanford, McKinsey and a career as a successful entrepreneur and CEO.

Yet about halfway in I noticed that he was choosing facts to fit his story and ignoring critical truths that would indicate otherwise, much like Malcolm Gladwell’s often does in his books. Once I noticed a few of these glaring oversights I found myself not being able to fully trust anything the author wrote and set the book aside.

Stories are important and facts matter. When we begin to believe in false stories, we begin to make decisions based on them. When these decisions go awry, we’re likely to blame other factors, such as ourselves, those around us or other elements of context and not the false story. That’s how many businesses fail. They make decisions based on the wrong stories.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

Go to just about any innovation conference and you will find some pundit on stage telling a story about a famous failure, usually Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox. In each case, the reason given for the failure is colossal incompetence by senior management: Blockbuster didn’t recognize the Netflix threat. Kodak invented, but then failed to market, a digital camera. Xerox PARC developed technology, but not products.

In each case, the main assertion is demonstrably untrue. Blockbuster did develop and successfully execute a digital strategy, but its CEO left the company due a dispute and the strategy was reversed. Kodak’s EasyShare line of digital cameras were top sellers, but couldn’t replace the massive profits the company made developing film. The development of the laser printer at Xerox PARC actually saved the company.

None of this is very hard to uncover. Still, the author fell for two of these bogus myths (Kodak and Xerox), even after obviously doing significant research for the book. Most probably, he just saw something that fit with his narrative and never bothered to question whether it was true or not, because he was to busy validating what he already knew to be true.

This type of behavior is so common that there is a name for it: confirmation bias. We naturally seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs. It takes significant effort to challenge our own assumptions, so we rarely do. To overcome that is hard enough. Yet that’s only part of the problem.

Majorities Don’t Just Rule, They Also Influence

In the 1950’s, Solomon Asch undertook a pathbreaking series of conformity studies. What he found was that in small groups, people will conform to a majority opinion. The idea that people have a tendency toward conformity is nothing new, but that they would give obviously wrong answers to simple and unambiguous questions was indeed shocking.

Now think about how hard it is for a more complex idea to take hold across a broad spectrum of people, each with their own biases and opinions. The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence. More recent research suggests that the effect applies not only to people we know well, but that we are also influenced even by second and third degree relationships.

We tend to accept the beliefs of people around us as normal. So if everybody believes that the leaders of Blockbuster, Kodak and Xerox were simply dullards who were oblivious to what was going on around them, then we are very likely to accept that as the truth. Combine this group effect with confirmation bias, it becomes very hard to see things differently.

That’s why it’s important to step back and ask hard questions. Why did these companies fail? Did foolish and lazy people somehow rise to the top of successful organizations, or did smart people make bad decisions? Was there something else to the story? Given the same set of facts, would we act any differently?

The Inevitable Paradigm Shift

The use of the term “paradigm shift” has become so common that most people are unaware that it started out having a very specific meaning. The idea of a paradigm shift was first established by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to describe how scientific breakthroughs come to the fore.

It starts with an established model, the kind we learn in school or during initial training for a career. Models become established because they are effective and the more proficient we become at applying a good model, the better we perform. The leaders in any given field owe much of their success to these models.

Yet no model is perfect and eventually anomalies show up. Initially, these are regarded as “special cases” and are worked around. However, as the number of special cases proliferate, the model becomes increasingly untenable and a crisis ensues. At this point, a fundamental change in assumptions has to take place if things are to move forward.

The problem is that most people who are established in the field believe in the traditional model, because that’s what most people around them believe. So they seek out facts to confirm these beliefs. Few are willing to challenge what “everybody knows” and those who do are often put at great professional and reputational risk.

Why We Fail To Adapt

Now we can begin to see why not only businesses, but whole industries get disrupted. We tend to defend, rather than question, our existing beliefs and those around us often reinforce them. To make matters worse, by this time the idea has become so well established that we will often incur switching costs if we abandon it. That’s why we fail to adapt.

Yet not everybody shares our experiences. Others, who have not grown up with the conventional wisdom, often do not have the same assumptions. They also don’t have an existing peer group that will enforce those assumptions. So for them, the flaws are much easier to see, as are the opportunities to doing things another way.

Of course, none of this has to happen. As I describe in Mapping Innovation, some companies, such as IBM and Procter & Gamble, have survived for over a century because they are always actively looking for new problems to solve, which forces them to look for new ideas and insights. It compels them to question what they think they know.

Getting stories right is hard work. You have to force yourself. However, we all have an obligation to get it right. For me, that means relentlessly checking every fact with experts, even for things that I know most people won’t notice. Inevitably, I get things wrong—sometimes terribly wrong— and need to be corrected. That’s always humbling.

I do it because I know stories are powerful. They take on a life of their own. Getting them right takes effort. As my friend Whitney Johnson points out, the best way to avoid disruption is to first disrupt yourself.

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

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Back to School Sale on Charting Change

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Charting Change for an Outstanding 2023

Wow! Exciting news!

My publisher is having a back to school sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 40% off!

Including FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! *

I created the Human-Centered Change methodology to help organizations get everyone literally all on the same page for change. The 70+ visual, collaborative tools are introduced in my book Charting Change, including the powerful Change Planning Canvas™. The toolkit has been created to help organizations:

  • Beat the 70% failure rate for change programs
  • Quickly visualize, plan and execute change efforts
  • Deliver projects and change efforts on time
  • Accelerate implementation and adoption
  • Get valuable tools for a low investment

You must go to SpringerLink for this Cyber Sale:

  • The offer is valid September 26, 2023 only using code FALL40

Click here to get this deal using code FALL40

Quick reminder: Everyone can download ten free tools from the Human-Centered Change methodology by going to its page on this site via the link in this sentence, and book buyers can get 26 of the 70+ tools from the Change Planning Toolkit (including the Change Planning Canvas™) by contacting me with proof of purchase.

*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. See web site for shipping details.






Why You Should Care About Service Design

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Why You Should Care About Service Design

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

What if a tool had the power to delight your customers, cut your costs, increase your bottom line, and maybe double your stock price? You’d use it, right?

That’s precisely the power and impact of Service Design and service blueprints. Yet very few people, especially in the US, know, understand, or use them. Including me.

Thankfully, Leala Abbott, a strategist and researcher at the intersection of experience, innovation, and digital transformation and a lecturer at Parsons School of Design, clued me in.

What is Service Design?

RB: Hi, Leala, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.

LA: My pleasure! I’m excited about this topic. I’ve managed teams with service designers, and I’ve always been impressed by the magical way they brought together experience strategy, UX, and operations.

RB: I felt the same way after you explained it to me. Before we get too geeked up about the topic, let’s go back to the beginning and define “service.”

LA: Service is something that helps someone accomplish a goal. As a result, every business needs service design because every business is in the service industry.

RB: I’ll be honest, I got a little agitated when I read that because that’s how I define “solution.” But then I saw your illustration explaining that service design moves us from seeing and problem-solving isolated moments to seeing an integrated process. And that’s when it clicked.

LA:  That illustration is from Lou Downe’s talk Design in Government Impact for All . Service Design helps us identify what customers want and how to deliver those services effectively by bringing together all the pieces within the organization. It moves us away from fragmented experiences created by different departments and teams within the same company to an integrated process that enables customers to achieve their goals.

Why You Need It

RB: It seems so obvious when you say it. Yet so often, the innovation team spends all their time focused on the customer only to develop the perfect solution that, when they toss it over the wall for colleagues to make, they’re told it’s not possible, and everything stops. Why aren’t we always considering both sides?

LA: One reason, I think, is people don’t want to add one more person to the team. Over the past two decades, the number of individuals required to build something has grown exponentially. It used to be that one person could build your whole website, but now you need user experience designers, researchers, product managers, and more. I think it’s just overwhelming for people to add another individual to the mix. We believe we have all the tools to fix the problem, so we don’t want to add another voice, even if that voice explains the huge disconnect between everything built and their operational failures.

RB: Speaking of operational failures, one of the most surprising things about Service Design is that it almost always results in cost savings. That’s not something most people think about when they hear “design.”

LA: The significant impact on the bottom line is one of the most persuasive aspects of service design. It shifts the focus from pretty pictures to the actual cost implications. Bringing in the operational side of the business is crucial. Building a great customer journey and experience is important, but it’s also important to tie it back to lost revenue and increased cost to serve

Proof It Works 

LA: One of the most compelling cases I recently read was about Autodesk’s transition to SaaS, they brought in a service design company called Future Proof. Autodesk wanted to transition from a software licensing model to a software-as-a-service model. It’s a significant transition not just in terms of the business model and pricing but also in how it affects customers.

If you’re a customer of Autodesk, you used to pay a one-time fee for your software, but now you are paying based on users and services. Budgeting becomes messy. The costs are no longer simple and predictable. Plus, it raises lots of questions about the transition, cost predictability, control over access, managing subscriptions, and flexibility. Notice that these issues are about people managing their money and increasing costs. These are the areas where service design can truly help. 

Future Proof conducted customer interviews, analyzed each stage of the customer journey, looked at pricing models and renewal protocols, and performed usability studies. When they audited support ticket data for the top five common customer issues, they realized that if Autodesk didn’t change their model, the cost of running software for every customer would increase by 40%, and profit margins would decrease by 15% to 20%.

Autodesk made the change, revenue increased significantly, and their stock price doubled. Service design allows for this kind of analysis and consideration of operational costs.

How to Learn More

RB: Wow, not many things can deliver better service, happier customers, and doubling a stock price. Solid proof that companies, and innovation teams in particular, need to get smart on service design. We’ve talked a lot about the What and Why of Service Design. How can people learn more about the How?

LA: Lou Downe’s book is a great place to start Good Services: How to Design Services That Work. So is Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight by Thomas A Stewart and Patricia O’Connell.  I also recommend people check out The Service Design Network for tools and case studies and TheyDo, which helps companies visualize and manage their service design.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2023Drum 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 August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. The Paradox of Innovation Leadership — by Janet Sernack
  2. Why Most Corporate Innovation Programs Fail — by Greg Satell
  3. A Top-Down Open Innovation Approach — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  4. Innovation Management ISO 56000 Series Explained — by Diana Porumboiu
  5. Scale Your Innovation by Mapping Your Value Network — by John Bessant
  6. The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Future Employment — by Chateau G Pato
  7. Leaders Avoid Doing This One Thing — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Navigating the Unpredictable Terrain of Modern Business — by Teresa Spangler
  9. Imagination versus Knowledge — by Janet Sernack
  10. Productive Disagreement Requires Trust — by Mike Shipulski

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

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 three years:

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Aligning Your Culture for Digital Transformation

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Aligning Your Culture for Digital Transformation

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

A quote you often hear is, “Culture eats strategy for lunch,” typically attributed to Peter Drucker (whether correctly or not). Regardless, it puts a spotlight on the power of culture to resist even the most compelling strategic narratives. These days it’s hard to come up with a more compelling narrative than digital transformation. But it can definitely find itself at odds with culture, so what chance could it possibly have?

In my work with successful companies, two cultures show up over and over again. One is a competition culture, where teams get up every morning driven to be the best. The other is a collaboration culture, where teams strive to be the best for others. Both cultures can create great companies, and, if you play your cards right, each can be enlisted as an ally of change. You just have to get it aligned properly.

To do so, you need to use your culture to focus people on a driving force of change that is outside of your company:

  • In the case of a competition culture, this would be a competitor using disruptive technology to steal your market share. Think Google for Microsoft, Lyft for Uber, Nvidia for Intel, or Arista for Cisco. Transform or they win! That’s the sort of thing that galvanizes change in a competition culture.
  • In the case of a collaboration culture, the driving force is fear of letting your customer down as the world shifts to a new platform. Think of Salesforce championing machine learning, Docusign championing systems of agreement, or Proofpoint championing people-centric security. These are changes that could put your customers’ franchises at risk. No customer left behind! That’s the battle cry that brings a collaboration culture to attention.

The key point here is that, regardless of whether you have a competition or a collaboration culture, the force for change must be external, not internal. Either culture, internally focused, simply will not transform. Instead, everyone will spend all their time listening to radio station WIIFM—What’s in it for me? And what they will learn is that there are not a lot of good songs playing. Transformation requires sacrifice. We are going to have to step back before we step forward.

People are willing to sacrifice for the right cause outside the company, but not inside. So, when you are leading a transformation, be sure to keep people’s attention focused on a North Star that transcends their individual issues, not on the career compass they are holding in their hand.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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