Category Archives: Change

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2026

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2026Drum 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 July’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. What Happens When AI Becomes Your Customer? — by Shep Hyken
  2. The Experience Economy 2.0 — by Braden Kelley
  3. How to Calculate the ROI of Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley
  4. Strategic Foresight: A Practitioner’s Guide to Thinking About the Future — by Braden Kelley
  5. Innovation or Not — InTruth — by Braden Kelley
  6. Innovation Framework Examples: 7 Real-World Cases That Show How They Work — by Braden Kelley
  7. The Personal AI Renaissance — by Braden Kelley
  8. Your 3 Phase AI Journey — by Geoffrey Moore
  9. Why So Much Bullshit? — by Greg Satell
  10. Creating an Innovation Edge — by John Bessant

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in June 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!

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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 five years:

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Three Facts That Business Leaders Refuse to Accept

Three Facts That Business Leaders Refuse to Accept

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the late 90s Fortune magazine named Enron the most innovative company for six consecutive years, right up until the company collapsed in scandal. GE’s strategy of stack ranking was seen as a model to be emulated by other firms, even though there was no evidence it worked. McKinsey advised companies to fight a war for talent.

Today, we know better. It’s obvious that Enron was incredibly dysfunctional, that stack ranking undermines a high-performance culture and that talent is something that you build through upskilling, not something you “win” in a metaphorical war. It’s mind boggling to think of all the damage that was done before those ideas were exposed.

Yet if we accept all that we need to ask ourselves which ideas are widely accepted today that don’t hold water. Every era has its own fictions, things that are accepted because they are repeated, but lack any serious foundation. They become memes replicating themselves throughout the zeitgeist, rarely being questioned. Here are three truths that will surprise you.

1. Bigger Organizations Are More Innovative

We tend to think of innovation as something startups do. Big organizations, with their bloated bureaucracies and cumbersome decision making, are less nimble. Yet a recent book, Corporate Explorer, by Stanford professor Charles O’Reilly, Harvard Professor ​​Paul Lawrence and consultant Andrew Binns finds that larger firms have more resources, talent and ideas.

This may seem surprising, but there is ample evidence supporting the principle that larger enterprises innovate more effectively. A 1969 study of local health departments found that the larger ones serving larger communities were more innovative. A 1986 analysis of footwear manufacturers found that the bigger ones had more technical specialists and adopted more radical innovation. Same thing when researchers looked at German banks’ adoption of telecommunication services.

Clearly startups have advantages. They tend to be less bureaucratic and can make decisions faster. They are also less invested in incumbent systems and technologies, which makes change easier. Yet innovation isn’t just about speed, it’s also about commitment to solving important problems and larger enterprises have more resources and scope to do that.

That’s why when you look at the most cutting edge technologies, like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, materials science, synthetic biology and others, you tend to find large organizations at the core. Don’t get me wrong, not every big company can innovate, but the ones that can come up with new ideas and execute them consistently, year after year and decade after decade, are enterprises with scale.

2. Levels Of Bureaucracy And Hierarchy Are Increasing, Not Decreasing

About a decade ago, the management guru Gary Hamel wrote a highly cited article in Harvard Business Review entitled First, Let’s Fire All the Managers. He analyzed the success of Morningstar, a leading manufacturer of tomato products that operates with a flat management structure and called for other corporations to follow its lead.

“A hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organization,” he wrote. “This levy comes in several forms. First, managers add overhead, and as an organization grows, the costs of management rise in both absolute and relative terms.” The article was very influential and helped bolster other flat models, such as Holacracy.

For a while now, management gurus have been advocating for flatter organizations, yet there is little evidence that eliminating managers is a viable model. In fact, when Wharton Professor Ronnie Lee took a close look at game software developers, he found that the number of levels of bureaucracy increased significantly, not decreased, over the last 50 years.

Certainly, the “flat organization” idea hasn’t caught on. “Since 1983, the size of the bureaucratic class—the number of managers and administrators in the US workforce—has more than doubled, while employment in other categories has grown by only 40%,” Hamil recently wrote.

The inescapable conclusion is that we’ve failed to do away with bureaucracies and hierarchies because they serve a useful purpose. While flatter structures can inspire creativity, we need hierarchies to execute complex operations well. That might not play well when your trying to sell consulting projects or on the keynote stage, but it’s the truth.

3. Markets Are Becoming Less Competitive, not More (At least in the US)

Today it’s become an article of faith that everything moves faster. Business pundits tell us that we’re living in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Yet are things actually moving any faster than in earlier eras? The evidence is surprisingly scarce.

The data, however, tell a very different story. A report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

A comprehensive 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found two correlated, but countervailing trends: the rise of “superstar” firms and the fall of labor’s share of GDP. Essentially, the typical industry has fewer, but larger players. Their increased bargaining power leads to more profits, but lower wages.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt industries anymore. We disrupt people. Economic data shows that for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Income and wealth inequality remain at historic highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

What You See Is How You’ll Act

When ideas are repeated often enough, we begin to take them as self-evident and don’t even question them. People take it for granted that small organizations are more innovative than larger ones, that flatter organizations outperform those with high levels of bureaucracy and that business is more competitive today than in earlier eras.

If you believe all that, then you would avoid getting involved with a large organization if you want to innovate, you would try to eliminate levels of hierarchy and create a high sense of urgency about everything you do. Yet when you examine the evidence it becomes clear that none of these things are factual.

The truth is that size has little to do with innovation. As we saw during Covid, the most pathbreaking advances came from collaborations between organizations, public and private, large and small. The levels of hierarchy in an organization aren’t nearly as important as its networks. Pushing too many initiatives is more likely to result in a high level of change fatigue and diminished mental health than lead to genuine results.

When we look back at earlier eras, it’s easy to see the errors in the zeitgeist. It seems obvious that the robber barons undermined society, that excessive tariffs during the depression would impoverished society and that Enron was a fraud. Yet we need to look with the same skeptical eye at prevalent beliefs today.

As Richard Dawkins has explained, memes are selfish. They propagate themselves for their own benefit, not necessarily for ours. We need to learn to be fiercer advocates for our fates.

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

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You Need a Strategy Not a Slogan to Overcome Resistance to Change

You Need a Strategy Not a Slogan to Overcome Resistance to Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When we’re passionate about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. We want to believe that if others can just understand it, they will embrace it. That’s why most change management practices focus on persuasion, explaining the need for change and creating a sense of urgency.

But consider recent research that finds that we can’t even agree on simple concepts such as what a penguin is and it becomes clear that for any given initiative, people are bound to see it differently. The simple truth is that change doesn’t fail on its own, it fails because people resist it. If we are to bring about genuine change, our first job is to overcome that resistance.

We need to internalize that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened, we act in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. Every change strategy has to begin with that. Clever gimmicks or snappy slogans won’t bring about true transformation. We have to build a strategy to overcome resistance from the start.

First, Follow The Energy

There’s something about human nature that, when we’re really excited about an idea, makes us want to go convince the skeptics. That’s almost always a bad idea. A much better strategy is to start with people who are enthusiastic about your change, who want it to succeed. They can help you strengthen it and spread it to others, who can spread it further still.

For example, in his efforts to reform the Pentagon, Colonel John Boyd began every initiative by briefing a group of collaborators he called the “Acolytes,” who would help hone and sharpen the ideas. He then moved on to congressional staffers, elected officials and the media. By the time general officers were aware of what he was doing, he had built up too much support to ignore.

In a similar vein, a massive effort to implement lean manufacturing methods at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began with a single team at one factory, but grew to encompass 17,000 employees across 25 sites worldwide and cut manufacturing costs by 25%. The campaign that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević started with just 5 kids in a coffee shop.

One advantage to starting small is that you can identify your apostles informally, even through casual conversations. In skills-based transformations, effective change leaders often start with workshops and see who seems enthusiastic or comes up after the session. Your apostles don’t need to have senior positions or special skills, they just have to be passionate.

“You have to go where the energy is,” John Gadsby, who built a movement for process improvement inside Procter & Gamble that has grown to encompass 60,000 employees, told me. “We’ll choose energy and excitement and enthusiasm over the right position, or the person at the right leadership level, or the person whose job it is supposed to be to do that.”

Identify Shared Values

Humans naturally form tribes. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection, which explains how groups favor those who share their attributes in the hopes that those attributes will be propagated.

So it’s natural that when we feel passionately about an idea, we want to focus on how it’s different, to create our own tribe. For example, the Agile Manifesto has inspired fierce devotion and helped build a vibrant community around Agile product development. So it shouldn’t be surprising that when evangelists try to attract others to the movement, it’s the Agile Manifesto that they want to emphasize.

Yet for those outside the Agile development community, its principles can seem strange and impractical. It emphasizes adaptability over planning which can appear to be chaotic for those who are used to a more traditional approach. If you want to bring in new people, it’s better to focus on shared values, such as the ability to produce better quality projects faster and cheaper.

One of the biggest challenges in driving transformation is that while differentiating values make people excited about an idea, it is shared values that help build genuine and widespread support. That doesn’t mean you abandon or water down your beliefs. It just means that you need to meet people where they are, not where you wish them to be.

Design A Dilemma Action

Unfortunately, building a shared purpose isn’t always possible. Whenever we set out to make a significant impact you are bound to get pushback, not for any rational logic, necessarily but because, for whatever reason, but because for whatever reason, it offends some people’s dignity, their identity, their sense of self. A simple truth is that we all form irrational attachments and when those are threatened, we tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves.

When that happens — and it always does eventually — we can get sucked into a conflict, which will likely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Yet, here too, developing empathy skills to identify shared values can be extremely helpful. They can help us to design a dilemma action, which puts the opponents into an impossible position.

Dilemma actions have only recently become an active area of research, but have been used by practitioners for at least a century — famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies — by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. Your opponent then has a choice: they can disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and let change progress.

For example, I was once leading a transformation project that was being impeded by a sales director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it, so I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established, was dismissed from her position and everything fell into place after that.

Planning To Survive Victory

Many change leaders assume that once they win an initial victory that everything will get easier after that. They work for months — and sometimes years — to get a project off the ground. Yet just when they think they’re turning the corner, when they’ve won executive sponsorship, signed up key partners and procured enough financing to have a realistic budget, all the sudden things seem to get mired down.

That’s no accident. Just because you’ve won a few early battles doesn’t mean opposition to your idea melts away. On the contrary, faced with the fact that change may actually succeed, those who oppose it have probably just begun to redouble their efforts to undermine it. These efforts are often not overt, but they are there and can easily derail an initiative.

As Saul Alinsky once put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That’s why every change effort must plan from the beginning to survive victory. You need to anticipate resistance, think about where you’re vulnerable and how you’ll mitigate those attacks by leveraging shared values.

The truth is that change is always a journey, never a particular destination, which is why lasting change is always built on the common ground of shared values. The answer doesn’t lie in any specific strategy or initiative, but in how people are able to internalize the need for change and transfer ideas through social bonds. A leader’s role is not necessarily to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

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

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Why Are What We Know and What We Do Often So Different?

Why Are What We Know and What We Do Often So Different?

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1988, a young management student named John Krafcik published an article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review entitled, Triumph of the Lean Production System. Based on his study of 90 manufacturing plants in 20 countries, it argued that manufacturing could be made vastly more productive, while improving quality at the same time.

These methods would grow into the lean manufacturing movement and their effectiveness has been well documented. Krafcik himself went on to have a successful career in the auto industry, taking over Google’s self-driving division, Waymo, in 2016. There is an amazingly strong case for manufacturers to adopt lean methods.

Yet surprisingly few do. In fact, a recent survey found that less than 15% of manufacturers have adopted lean methods. This dilemma is much more common than you’d think. We’ve been conditioned to believe that a good idea, once proven out, will prevail in the marketplace, but that’s not really true. There is often a large gap between what we know and what we do.

A New World Of Work

Clearly the world of work has changed. When I began professional life in the mid-90s, laptops were still new and few people had access to the Internet. Work was something you did in your office. We largely communicated by phone and memos typed up by secretaries. Data analysis was something you did with a pencil, paper and a desk calculator.

Today, on the other hand, work is largely something we do with each other. We are increasingly collaborating in teams and our work has become more social and less cognitive. For example, the journal Nature noted that the average scientific paper today has four times as many authors as one did in 1950 and the work they are doing is far more interdisciplinary.

The truth is that we spend most of our time in meetings, collaborating with colleagues to solve problems, rather than working alone in our offices to execute tasks. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been no shortage of concepts developed, such as psychological safety, agile development and diversity & inclusion policies, designed to help us succeed and prosper in this new world of work.

Yet much like with lean manufacturing, the reality of most workplaces rarely reflects the pundits’ rhetoric. The reason for this is simple. The status quo has inertia on its side and that is an incredibly powerful force. Change takes effort and is often disruptive. The costs are clear and present while the benefits can seem distant and remote.

The New, New Economy

In 1982, when Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple, he asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” The ploy worked and Sculley became the first CEO of a major conventional company to join a Silicon Valley startup.

Yet since then, besides for a relatively short period between 1996 and 2004, labor productivity has remained depressed, except during recessions when businesses cut workers. At the same time, income inequality has increased and business has become less dynamic, with fewer startups and less churn among market leaders. I don’t think those are the changes Jobs was talking about.

It seems amazing that given all of the technological progress, including mobile and cloud computing, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 manufacturing technologies, that so little has been accomplished, but in their recent book, Power and Progress, economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that market and technological forces, if left to their own devices, tend to favor elites rather than society as a whole.

We can’t simply leave our fates to the impersonal whims of market and technological forces. The historical record shows that innovations that displace workers do not necessarily make us better off. In fact, we have strong reasons to suspect that many of these technologies impoverish our society and corrode our culture.

Technology and markets were created by humans to serve people. That is their purpose and should be, by any reasonable analysis, the measure of their value. We need to take a hard look at the last 30 years and ask how we’re better off, how we’re worse off, what we need to do differently and how we can forge a better path.

The End Of History?

In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest titled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society.

He was misunderstood. His actual argument was far more nuanced and insightful. After explaining the arguments of philosophers like Hegel and Kojeve, Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity.

Humans tend to build stories that support our notions of who we think we are. If you work hard at your job, new ideas about lean manufacturing or agile development can seem like an affront. In much the same way, entrepreneurs like to think that their businesses have social value and the denizens of the tech universe like to think that their code changes the world.

If you believe that the forces of history are on your side, pursuing your path seems like a calling and an obligation. The benefits you receive are just more proof that you are headed in the right direction and whatever costs that are incurred by others may seem like mere table stakes to be paid for the price of progress.

That’s why tech billionaires write silly manifestos and politicians are able to fleece them for outrageous amounts of money. It is not enough to earn a good living and live in comfort. People have a need to be recognized and they will cling to the the identity they have built for themselves. Asking them to change can often seem more than a simple shift in behavior, but an affront to who they are.

Dismantling the Cult of Inevitability

We’d like to think that if something is a good idea, can be proven to work, improve performance and make people’s lives better, that market and technological forces will somehow make it inevitable. Unfortunately, the history of the last half century makes it clear that’s not true. Most people in developed countries are worse off than a generation ago.

Yes it’s true that our TV’s have gotten better and we have infinitely more channels. We carry supercomputers around in our pockets that give us unprecedented access to information and emerging services like ChatGPT give us almost superhuman powers to process it. Yet the cost of basics, such as housing, healthcare and education have impoverished us.

This wasn’t inevitable. Consider that in the US per capita GDP has nearly doubled since 1985 but median household income has risen only 27% and you begin to see the problem. In my work with organizational transformation it is clear that similar forces are at work in the corporate world. For all the talk about disruption and change, the status quo usually prevails.

We need to be more cognizant of the stories we tell ourselves. We have a primal need to be the heroes in our own narratives, to tell ourselves that we are on the right path while others are just fooling themselves, to look for information that confirms our choices and neglect evidence to the contrary. It is not a character flaw, but a reality of human nature.

Ironically, it is through awareness of our failings that can help us overcome them. Decades of research show that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in behavior. Once we know that we can be more vigilant and hold ourselves to a higher standard. What we know and what we do are two different things, but with effort we can narrow the gap.

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

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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

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

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

If you’re curious whether or not your change initiative is likely to succeed or fail, take the FREE two minute diagnostic.

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

Top 10 Innovation Articles of June 2026

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 2026Drum roll please…

To all of my American compadres — Happy 4th of July!

As we celebrated the 250th anniversary of American independence, it’s a great time to remember that freedom plays an important role in human flourishing and innovation success.

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 June’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Illuminate to Innovate — by Janet Sernack
  2. Take an Evidence-Based Approach for Transformation and Change — by Greg Satell
  3. Innovation or Not – Midjourney Medical and the Illusion of Frictionless Health — by Braden Kelley
  4. CX Leadership Insights from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and MasterCard — by Shep Hyken
  5. The Future of Touchless Precision – Holographic Acoustic Manipulation — by Art Inteligencia
  6. Markets Don’t Build Themselves, You Must Engineer Them — Exclusive Interview with Bruce Cleveland
  7. Why VUCA is a Myth — by Greg Satell
  8. The Circular Harvest — How Systems Engineering and Design Thinking Are Rewriting the Future of Farming — by Braden Kelley
  9. The Anatomy of Agentic Trust – A Mechanistic Interpretability Framework for Change Leaders — by Art Inteligencia
  10. Crossing the Chasm of Fear – An AI Soft Landing scenario — by Braden Kelley

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in May 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!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

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 five years:

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

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.


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

The Human-Centered Change Guidebook - Charting Change

To help you master these frameworks and power your latest initiatives to success, the publisher of my second book — Charting Change (Second Edition) — is running an exclusive 48-hour flash sale.

You can get the hardcover, softcover, or the eBook for 50% off the list price using CODE: FLSH50 until July 4, 2026, at 11:59 PM EDT.

The newly expanded second edition is specifically updated to address modern transformation challenges, featuring loads of new content, additional guest expert sections, and dedicated chapters on:

  • Business Architecture: Aligning strategy with operational execution.
  • Project and Portfolio Management (PPM): Prioritizing the right initiatives.
  • Digital & Business Transformations: Overcoming cultural resistance to tech adoption.

I stumbled across this price drop and wanted to share it immediately. If you haven’t already secured your copy to power your organization’s strategy, now you have no excuse!

Click here to get your copy of Charting Change for 50% off using CODE: FLSH50


💡 Exclusive July 4th Bonus Offer:
You can always get 10 free tools here from the book. However, if you buy the book during this flash sale and contact me with your receipt, I will personally send you 26 premium tools from the 70+ tools inside the full Change Planning Toolkit™ — including the Change Planning Canvas™!


*If discount is not applied automatically, please use this code: FLSH50. The discount is available through July 4, 2026 until 23:59 EST. 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.

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

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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