Category Archives: Change

Five Must Reads for 2025

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

‘Tis the season for “year in review” and “top 10 lists.” As fun (and sometimes frightening) as it is to look back, it is just as fun (and sometimes frightening) to look ahead. After all, as innovators, that is what we naturally do. So, in anticipation of the year ahead, here are 5 Must Reads to make 2025 far more fun than frightening.

(listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name so I can’t be accused of playing favorites)

Pay Up! Unlocking Insider Secrets of Salary Negotiation by Kate Dixon

This book is for everyone, especially… people who want to earn what they deserve
This book solves the problem of…the black box that is compensation and the fear of negotiating for what you’re worth
This book creates value by… Outlining a step-by-step system to:
- Understand key terms and concepts and apply them to your situation
- Research the information you need to confidently and competently negotiate
- Know what to say and do (and NOT say or do) in the moment
Why I love this book: Full disclosure – Kate and I are friends, so I’ve had a front-row seat to her wisdom and humor (how many compensation books invoke Beyonce?) and the jaw-dropping impact she gets for her clients. I’ve even gifted this book to others because I know it works!

Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work by Whitney Johnson

This book is for everyone, especially… people who are rethinking their careers and are ready for change
This book solves the problem of… knowing how to start redefining your career (and yourself)
This book creates value by… Turning Clayton Christensen’s Theory of Disruption into four principles for self-disruption, including:
- Identifying your disruptive strengths
- Stepping backward or sideways to grow
- Patiently waiting for your career (and legacy) to emerge
Why I love this book: Two quotes: (1) “Disruption starts as an inside game” and (2) “Constraints can be the perfect remedy if you are having a difficult time.”

Live Big! A Manifesto for a Creative Life by Rochelle Seltzer

This book is for everyone, especially… people who want to experience daily joy and creativity
This book solves the problem of…feeling stuck in the day-to-day reality of life, uncertain whit how to begin, and afraid to make big, drastic changes
This book creates value by… Offering 20 tips for:
- Becoming a person who Lives Big, including slowing down, aligning to your purpose, and being patient
- Acting big, including listening to your intuition, embracing change, and carrying on
- Savoring the small joys of life, including the gorgeous design of the book
Why I love this book: Rochelle’s Discovery Dozen exercise is a game-changer. I learned this tool when she was my coach, and I have continued to use it for everything from naming my business, to deciding if/when/how to act on an opportunity, and writing articles.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Steiner

This book is for everyone, especially... busy managers who want to be better people leaders
This book solves the problem of…balancing hands-on management with team empowerment and individual development
This book creates value by… Guiding you through seven questions that help you:
- Work less hard while having more impact
- Break cycles of team overdependence and workplace overwhelm
- Turn coaching and feedback from an occasional formal event into a daily habit
Why I love this book: A copy of the 7 questions sits just below my monitor, reminding me to be curious, dig deeper, and that every decision is a choice to do one thing and not another.

Readers Choice!

It’s audience participation time! In the comments below, drop YOUR recommendation for a 2025 Must Read.

Bonus points for telling us:

Who it’s for
Problem it solves
Value it creates
Why you love it

Image credit: MileZero, Misterinnovation.com

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Moments and Movements Are Not the Same Thing

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

On September 17th, 2011, protesters began to flood into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Declaring “We are the 99%” they planned to #Occupy Wall Street for as long as it took to make their voice heard. Similar protests soon spread like wildfire across 951 cities in 82 countries. It seemed to be a massive global movement of historic proportions.

But it wasn’t a movement. It was merely a moment. Within a few months, the streets and parks were cleared. The protesters went home and nothing much changed. #Occupy was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly, no tangible aim was accomplished.

Failure has costs. Thousands of people for hours a day across several months adds up to billions of dollars worth of man-hours that could have been put to some useful purpose. Make no mistake. Creating positive change in the world takes far more than mobilization. You need a vision and a strategy, guided by values, designed to accomplish clear objectives.

Getting Beyond Grievance

Every change effort starts with a grievance. There’s something that people don’t like and they want it to be different. In a social or political movement that may be a corrupt leader or a glaring injustice. In an organizational context, the problem is usually something like falling sales, unhappy customers, low employee morale or technological disruption.

Whatever the case may be, the first step toward bringing change about is to understand that getting mired in grievance won’t get you anywhere. You can’t just complain about things you don’t like. You need to come up with an affirmative vision for how you would want things to be different and better.

The best place to start is by asking yourself, “if I had the power to change anything, what would it look like?” Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for the civil rights movement was for a Beloved Community. Bill Gates’s vision for Microsoft was for a “computer on every desk and in every home.” A good vision should be aspirational. It should inspire.

One of the things I found in my research is that successful change leaders don’t try to move from grievance to vision in one step, but rather identify a Keystone Change, which focuses on a clear and tangible goal, includes multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change, to bridge the gap.

For King, the Keystone Change was voting rights. For Gates it was an easy-to-use operating system. For your vision, it will undoubtedly be something different. The salient point here is that every successful transformation I have come across started out with a Keystone Change, so that’s where you will want to start as well.

Building In Constraints Through A Genome Of Values

Creating a clear vision for change is absolutely essential, but it’s only a first step. You also need to be clear and explicit about your values. While a vision for the future represents possibility, values represent constraints. Values make clear that we not only want things, but we’re also willing to incur certain costs to attain them.

For example, throughout his life, Nelson Mandela was accused of being a Communist, an anarchist, an extremist and worse. Yet when confronted with these accusations, he would always say that no one had to guess what he believed or what he was fighting for, because it was all written down in 1955 in a document called the Freedom Charter.

Importantly, the Freedom Charter imposed constraints on Mandela and his movement. When he rose to power, he couldn’t oppress white Afrikaners, because that would betray all that he’d been fighting for. That gave the movement credibility and power. Occupy, of course, was never clear or explicit about its values and never sought to constrain itself in any way. It’s activists were often seen as undisciplined and vulgar

In a similar vein, when Lou Gerstner set out to transform IBM in the 90s, he vowed that he would shift the company’s values from the “stack of its own proprietary technologies” to its “customers’ stack of business processes.” Yet it was his willingness to forego revenue on every sale to make good on this value is what made people believe in it. If not for that, it’s doubtful IBM would still be in business today.

Make no mistake. Values always cost something. If you are unwilling to bear costs and constraints, it isn’t a value. It’s a platitude. Change is always built on a foundation of shared values and common purpose. If you aren’t able to communicate clearly about what you believe and what you value, you can’t expect others to join you.

Mobilizing People To Influence Institutions

In October 2011, at the height of the #Occupy protests, the civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis showed up at an #Occupy rally in Atlanta and asked to speak. He was refused. Some attributed the snub to racism among the privileged white protestors. Others faulted Lewis himself, who didn’t understand the complex rules of the rally.

The protester who led the charge to block Lewis, however, described a different motivation. For him, Lewis’s great crime was that he was part of the “two-party system” and therefore unworthy of trust. “Any organization that upholds the legitimacy of the two-party system simply buttresses interests opposed to those of everyday people,” the man said.

This is, of course, total nonsense. Every regime or status quo depends on institutions to support them. That’s why a key part of any transformation strategy is to mobilize people to influence the institutions that can bring change about. One major reason that #Occupy failed was that it mobilized people to do no more than sleep in parks and snarl out epithets.

Now consider Martin Luther King Jr., who was able to bring considerable influence to bear on the US political system, just as Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston did with the US legal system and Nelson Mandela did with international institutions. These men had at least as much reason to be skeptical as any #Occupy protester, but understood that it is institutions that have the power to make change real.

In our corporate work, we find the same principle applies. Would-be changemakers tend to construe institutions too narrowly. If it is an internal initiative, they overlook customers, industry associations, community leaders and other external stakeholders. If it is an externally facing initiative, they often overlook important internal stakeholders that can help.

Preparing For Your Moment

It’s easy to confuse a moment with a movement. A movement involves linking together small, but often disparate groups in the context of shared purpose and shared values. A moment occurs when an event triggers a temporary decrease in resistance to an action or idea that opens up a window of opportunity. Movements require preparation. Moments require little more than luck.

That’s why we see protesters suddenly fill the streets and then, almost as suddenly, dissipate with little or no impact. It’s why some startups catch investors’ imagination and race to billion-dollar unicorn status, only to crash and burn just as fast. Politicians’ fortunes rise and fall, social media stars have their moment in the sun before disappearing into obscurity.

Building a movement requires work. You need to get beyond mere grievances and articulate an affirmative vision. You need to identify and speak to shared values and build on common ground. You need to invite people to join your cause for their own reasons, which may be different from your own. And then you need to focus your efforts on influencing the institutions that can actually make a difference.

So we should never mistake a moment for a movement. However, we can build a movement in anticipation for a moment that we expect will come. Gandhi trained his disciples for ten years before the opportunity for the Salt March came along. King’s efforts failed in Albany, but triumphed in Birmingham under better circumstances. Polish protesters were ill-prepared in 1970, but learned from the mistakes and later brought down an empire.

The crucial point to remember is that moments of opportunity are rare. We need to prepare for them. So that when they happen and fortune smiles on us we are ready. We have everything in place. That’s how radical, transformational change comes about.

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

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Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

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After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024:

Greg Satell
Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Janet Sernack
Janet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ which provides innovation consulting services to help organizations adapt, innovate and grow through disruption by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to co-create a world where people matter & innovation is the norm.

Mike Shipulski
Mike Shipulski brings together people, culture, and tools to change engineering behavior. He writes daily on Twitter as @MikeShipulski and weekly on his blog Shipulski On Design.

Robyn Bolton
Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.
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Pete Foley
A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com

Geoffrey A. Moore
Geoffrey A. Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo! Best known for Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win with the latest book being The Infinite Staircase. Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs, go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

David Burkus
Dr. David Burkus is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. Recognized as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, his forward-thinking ideas and books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David is the author of five books about business and leadership and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and more. A former business school professor turned sought-after international speaker, he’s worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

John Bessant
John Bessant has been active in research, teaching, and consulting in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. Today, he is Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Research Director, at Exeter University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. He has acted as advisor to various national governments and international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank, and the OECD. John has authored many books including Managing innovation and High Involvement Innovation (Wiley). Follow @johnbessant

Braden Kelley
Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Howard Tiersky
Howard Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”

Stefan Lindegaard
Stefan Lindegaard is an author, speaker and strategic advisor. His work focuses on corporate transformation based on disruption, digitalization and innovation in large corporations, government organizations and smaller companies. Stefan believes that business today requires an open and global perspective, and his work takes him to Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.

Dainora Jociute
Dainora (a.k.a. Dee) creates customer-centric content at Viima. Viima is the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world. Passionate about environmental issues, Dee writes about sustainable innovation hoping to save the world – one article at the time.

Teresa Spangler
Teresa Spangler is the CEO of PlazaBridge Group has been a driving force behind innovation and growth for more than 30 years. Today, she wears multiple hats as a social entrepreneur, innovation expert, growth strategist, author and speaker (not to mention mother, wife, band-leader and so much more). She is especially passionate about helping CEOs understand and value the role human capital plays in innovation, and the impact that innovation has on humanity; in our ever-increasing artificial/cyber world.

Soren Kaplan
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top keynote speakers and thought leaders in business strategy and innovation.

Diana Porumboiu
Diana heads marketing at Viima, the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world, and has a passion for innovation, and for genuine, valuable content that creates long-lasting impact. Her combination of creativity, strategic thinking and curiosity has helped organisations grow their online presence through strategic campaigns, community management and engaging content.

Steve Blank
Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia University. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship, credited with launching the Lean Startup movement that changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Jesse Nieminen
Jesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima, the best way to collect and develop ideas. Viima’s innovation management software is already loved by thousands of organizations all the way to the Global Fortune 500. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and frequently writes on the topic, usually in Viima’s blog.

Robert B Tucker
Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

Dennis Stauffer
Dennis Stauffer is an author, independent researcher, and expert on personal innovativeness. He is the founder of Innovator Mindset LLC which helps individuals, teams, and organizations enhance and accelerate innovation success. by shifting mindset. Follow @DennisStauffer

Arlen Meyers
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/

Ayelet Baron
Ayelet Baron is a pioneering futurist reminding us we are powerful creators through award winning books, daily blog and thinking of what is possible. Former global tech executive who sees trust, relationships and community as our building blocks to a healthy world.

Leo Chan
Leo is the founder of Abound Innovation Inc. He’s a people and heart-first entrepreneur who believes everyone can be an innovator. An innovator himself, with 55 US patents and over 20 years of experience, Leo has come alongside organizations like Chick-fil-A and guided them to unleash the innovative potential of their employees by transforming them into confident innovators.

Rachel Audige
Rachel Audige is an Innovation Architect who helps organisations embed inventive thinking as well as a certified Systematic Inventive Thinking Facilitator, based in Melbourne.

Art Inteligencia
Art Inteligencia is the lead futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. He is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Art travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. His favorite numbers are one and zero.

Paul Sloane
Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.

Phil McKinney
Phil McKinney is the Author of “Beyond The Obvious”, Host of the Killer Innovations Podcast and Syndicated Radio Show, a Keynote Speaker, President & CEO CableLabs and an Innovation Mentor and Coach.

Ralph Christian Ohr
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.

Jeffrey Phillips
Jeffrey Phillips has over 15 years of experience leading innovation in Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies and non-profits. He is experienced in innovation strategy, defining and implementing front end processes, tools and teams and leading innovation projects. He is the author of Relentless Innovation and OutManeuver. Jeffrey writes the popular Innovate on Purpose blog. Follow him @ovoinnovation

Dean and Linda Anderson
Dr. Dean Anderson and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson lead BeingFirst, a consultancy focused on educating the marketplace about what’s possible in personal, organizational and community transformation and how to achieve them. Each has been advising clients and training professionals for more than 40 years.

Shilpi Kumar
Shilpi Kumar an inquisitive researcher, designer, strategist and an educator with over 15 years of experience, who truly believes that we can design a better world by understanding human behavior. I work with organizations to identify strategic opportunities and offer user-centric solutions.

Scott Anthony
Scott Anthony is a strategic advisor, writer and speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has been based in Singapore since 2010, and currently serves at the Managing Director of Innosight’s Asia-Pacific operations.

Anthony Mills
Anthony Mills is the Founder & CEO of Legacy Innovation Group (www.legacyinnova.com), a world-leading strategic innovation consulting firm working with organizations all over the world. Anthony is also the Executive Director of GInI – Global Innovation Institute (www.gini.org), the world’s foremost certification, accreditation, and membership organization in the field of innovation. Anthony has advised leaders from around the world on how to successfully drive long-term growth and resilience through new innovation. Learn more at www.anthonymills.com. Anthony can be reached directly at anthony@anthonymills.com.

Paul Hobcraft
Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities. Follow @paul4innovating

Jorge Barba
Jorge Barba is a strategist and entrepreneur, who helps companies build new puzzles using human skills. He is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog www.Game-Changer.net

Chateau G Pato
Chateau G Pato is a senior futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. She is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Chateau travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. Her favorite numbers are one and zero.

Douglas Ferguson
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques.

Alain Thys
As an experience architect, Alain helps leaders craft customer, employee and shareholder experiences for profit, reinvention and transformation. He does this through his personal consultancy Alain Thys & Co as well as the transformative venture studio Agents of A.W.E. Together with his teams, Alain has influenced the experience of over 500 million customers and 350,000 employees. Follow his blog or connect on Linkedin.

Bruce Fairley
Bruce Fairley is the CEO and Founder of The Narrative Group, a firm dedicated to helping C-Suite executives build enterprise value. Through smart, human-powered digital transformation, Bruce optimizes the business-technology relationship. His innovative profit over pitfalls approach and customized programs are part of Bruce’s mission to build sustainable ‘best-future’ outcomes for visionary leaders. Having spearheaded large scale change initiatives across four continents, he and his skilled, diverse team elevate process, culture, and the bottom line for medium to large firms worldwide.

Tom Stafford
Tom Stafford studies learning and decision making. His main focus is the movement system – the idea being that if we can understand the intelligence of simple actions we will have an excellent handle on intelligence more generally. His research looks at simple decision making, and simple skill learning, using measures of behaviour informed by the computational, robotics and neuroscience work done in the wider group.

If your favorite didn’t make the list, then next year try to rally more votes for them or convince them to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions.

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 lists here:

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. . .

Happy New Year everyone!

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The Tool for Planning Your 2025 Changes – Flash Sale

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Wow! Exciting news for the new year!

My publisher is having a holiday flash sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 50% off to arm yourself with the very best tools for 2025 change planning!

When you buy the hardcover version of my book directly from the publisher you get 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 until January 4, 2025 only using code FLSH50

Click here to get this deal using code FLSH50

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.

SPECIAL BONUS: For a limited time you can also get a hardcover copy of my first best-selling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on Amazon at a nice discount off the cover price – currently 44% OFF while supplies last!

*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.

3 Strategies All Changemakers Should Know

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3 Strategies All Changemakers Should Know

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

All too often, we see change as a communication exercise. We think that if people really understood our idea, they would embrace it. In this view, bringing about change is really just a matter of messaging. Find the right slogan and deliver it in the right way, and you will ignite the passions required to drive transformation.

Nothing can be further from the truth. If a change is important and has real potential for impact, there will always be some people who won’t like it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded, and deceptive. Change rarely fails because people don’t understand it. Most often it is actively sabotaged.

A more elegant slogan won’t save you. What you need is a sound strategy to overcome resistance to change. Fortunately, we know from social and political movements that radical, transformational change is possible and, as I explained in Cascades, their principles can be highly effective in organizations. Here are three strategies that you should know.

1. Start With A Majority

Change starts with a belief. If people believe that a change is good, they will be likely to adopt it. If they believe it’s bad, it’s going to be tough to convince them otherwise especially, as is often the case, their beliefs are rooted in their identity and sense of self. In fact, research has shown when we are presented with facts contrary to our beliefs, we tend to question the evidence rather than our own preconceived notions.

This raises an important question: How do we come by our beliefs? As it turns out, the best indicator of not only our beliefs, but our actions, habits and even some aspects of our health, is the people around us and studies suggest that the effect extends out to even third degree relationships. So not only our friends, but the friends of our friend’s friends influence us.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence. That’s why when we seek to bring about change, it’s important to start with a majority. The secret is that you get to choose where you start. It might be a small, local majority of, say, three people in a room of five. As long as supporters outnumber detractors, change can move forward.

You can always expand a majority out, but as soon as you are in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback. When that happens, you can lose momentum and send the entire initiative off the rails. In many cases, you will never get the momentum back and your hopes for change will end before they really start.

There’s an unfortunate aspect of human nature that drives us to want to convince skeptics. Resist it and focus on empowering your supporters.

2. Prepare For A Trigger

It’s easy to confuse a moment with a movement. A movement links together small, but often disparate, groups in the context of shared purpose and shared values. A moment occurs when an event triggers a temporary decrease in resistance and opens up a window of opportunity. Movements require preparation. Moments often emerge on their own.

What’s crucial for changemakers to grasp is that a trigger eventually emerges that creates a moment. It’s rare that we can predict exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s not too hard to see that one will come eventually and prepare for it. Political revolutions have leveraged this for decades, focusing on particular stress points in which a trigger is likely to emerge.

For example, the color revolutions in Eastern Europe targeted elections that they knew were likely to be falsified. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s failed Albany campaign, he moved on to Birmingham, because he knew that Bull Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety, was a hothead and likely to employ the type of brutal tactics that would trigger a moment.

In much the same way, the Covid pandemic triggered digital transformation in many organizations. Economic downturns trigger efficiency measures. When a competitor comes out with a hit product, it tends to trigger enthusiasm for innovation. We don’t know when these things are going to happen, but we know that they are likely to happen eventually.

One reason why so many change efforts have failed in recent years is that the movements were built in response to a moment. Once the moment comes, it’s too late. You build your movement to prepare for a trigger, so that once it comes you can make the most of it.

3. Leverage Your Opposition

Change thrives on passion. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. That’s why so many would-be changemakers start out by attacking their opposition, seeking to meet them head on, expose their misconceptions and show the value of doing things differently.

This is almost always a mistake. Directly engaging with staunch opposition is unlikely to achieve anything other than exhausting and frustrating you. However, while you shouldn’t directly engage your fiercest critics, you obviously can’t act like they don’t exist. On the contrary, you need to learn to love your haters.

In fact by listening to people who hate your idea you can identify early flaws, which gives you the opportunity to fix them before they can be used against you in any serious way. They can also help you to identify shared values. For example, the LGBTQ movement prevailed by emphasizing their commitment to stable marriages and happy families, exactly the ideas that were used against them for decades.

Perhaps most importantly, you can leverage your opposition to your advantage. If left to their own devices, they will often overreach and send people your way. Bull Connor’s brutality, which he was all too eager to display for the TV cameras, furthered the cause of civil rights. In the color revolutions, the activist group Otpor found a way to even use arrests to weaken the regime and empower the revolution..

The truth is that to bring about real change you need to attract, rather than overpower. Being seen fighting the opposition may fire up your most active supporters, but it won’t bring anyone to your side. However, if the enemies of change see you gaining traction, invariably they will lash out, overreach and send people your way.

Applying Strength To Weakness

In the final analysis, the reason that most would-be revolutionaries fail is that they assume the righteousness of their cause will save them. It will not. Injustice, inequity and ineffectiveness can thrive for decades and even centuries, far surpassing a human lifespan. If you think that your idea will prevail simply because you believe in it you will be sorely disappointed.

Tough, important battles can only be won with good strategy and tactics, which is why successful change agents learn how to adopt the principle of Schwerpunkt. The idea is that instead of trying to defeat your enemy with overwhelming force generally, you want to deliver overwhelming force and win a decisive victory at a particular point of attack.

Yet Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static concept. You have to constantly innovate your approach as your opposition adapts to whatever success you may achieve. For example, the civil rights movement had its first successes with boycotts, but moved on to sit-ins, “Freedom Rides,” community actions and eventually, mass marches.

Starting with a majority, preparing for a trigger and leveraging your opposition are only three ways you can apply strength to weakness. The key to success isn’t any particular tactic, leader or slogan but strategic flexibility. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what most change efforts lack. All too often they get caught up in a strategy and double down, because it feels good to believe in something, even if it’s failure.

Change, like many things, largely boils down to strategy and execution. It’s not a simple matter of belief or passion. You need to learn how to operate effectively, by studying those who succeeded and those who failed, building on your successes, dusting yourself off after the inevitable setbacks, correcting mistakes and returning to fight with renewed vigor.

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

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Voting Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

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Happy Holidays!

For more than a decade I’ve devoted myself to making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because I truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

As a result, we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos with Braden Kelley and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation team. As a small thank you to those of you who follow along, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year!

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Do you just have someone that you like to read that writes about innovation, or some of the important adjacencies – trends, consumer psychology, change, leadership, strategy, behavioral economics, collaboration, or design thinking?

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking to recognize the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024.

It is time to vote and help us narrow things down.

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2024 at midnight GMT.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions to this web site by an author will be a BIG contributing factor (through the end of the voting period).

You can vote in any of these three ways (and each earns points for them, so please feel free to vote all three ways):

Sending us the name of the blogger by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on Facebook
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on our Linkedin Page (Be sure and follow us)

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024 will then be announced here in early January 2025.

Here are the people who received nominations this year along with some carryover recommendations (in alphabetical order):

Adi Gaskell – @adigaskell
Alain Thys
Alex Goryachev
Andy Heikkila – @AndyO_TheHammer
Annette Franz
Arlen Meyers – @sopeofficial
Art Inteligencia
Ayelet Baron
Braden Kelley – @innovate
Brian Miller
Bruce Fairley
Chad McAllister – @ChadMcAllister
Chateau G Pato
Chris Beswick
Chris Rollins
Dr. Detlef Reis
Dainora Jociute
Dan Blacharski – @Dan_Blacharski
Daniel Burrus – @DanielBurrus
Daniel Lock
David Burkus
Dean and Linda Anderson
Dennis Stauffer
Diana Porumboiu
Douglas Ferguson
Drew Boyd – @DrewBoyd
Frank Mattes – @FrankMattes
Geoffrey A Moore
Gregg Fraley – @greggfraley
Greg Satell – @Digitaltonto
Helen Yu
Howard Tiersky
Janet Sernack – @JanetSernack
Jeffrey Baumgartner – @creativejeffrey
Jeff Freedman – @SmallArmyAgency
Jeffrey Phillips – @ovoinnovation
Jesse Nieminen – @nieminenjesse
John Bessant
Jorge Barba – @JorgeBarba
Julian Birkinshaw – @JBirkinshaw
Julie Anixter – @julieanixter
Kate Hammer – @Kate_Hammer
Kevin McFarthing – @InnovationFixer
Leo Chan
Lou Killeffer – @LKilleffer
Manuel Berdoy

Mari Anixter- @MariAnixter
Maria Paula Oliveira – @mpaulaoliveira
Matthew E May – @MatthewEMay
Michael Graber – @SouthernGrowth
Mike Brown – @Brainzooming
Mike Shipulski – @MikeShipulski
Mukesh Gupta
Nick Jain
Nick Partridge – @KnewNewNeu
Nicolas Bry – @NicoBry
Nicholas Longrich
Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Pamela Soin
Patricia Salamone
Paul Hobcraft – @Paul4innovating
Paul Sloane – @paulsloane
Pete Foley – @foley_pete
Rachel Audige
Ralph Christian Ohr – @ralph_ohr
Randy Pennington
Richard Haasnoot – @Innovate2Grow
Robert B Tucker – @RobertBTucker
Robyn Bolton – @rm_bolton
Saul Kaplan – @skap5
Shep Hyken – @hyken
Shilpi Kumar
Scott Anthony – @ScottDAnthony
Scott Bowden – @scottbowden51
Shelly Greenway – @ChiefDistiller
Soren Kaplan – @SorenKaplan
Stefan Lindegaard – @Lindegaard
Stephen Shapiro – @stephenshapiro
Steve Blank
Steven Forth – @StevenForth
Tamara Kleinberg – @LaunchStreet
Teresa Spangler – @composerspang
Tom Koulopoulos – @TKspeaks
Tullio Siragusa
Yoram Solomon – @yoram

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We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!

Arm Yourself for Successful Change in 2025

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Wow! Exciting news for the holidays!

My publisher is having a holiday flash sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 30% off to slide nicely into the Christmas stocking of someone you love or to arm yourself with the very best tools for 2025 change planning!

When you buy the hardcover version of my book directly from the publisher you get FREE SHIPPING worldwide!

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 until December 31, 2024 only using code HOL30

Click here to get this deal using code HOL30

BONUS OFFER: Until the end of December 31, 2024 you can also save 30% off the regular price of a Change Planning Toolkit™ v13 – Commercial License (Annual), a $369.99 value available for $99.99/year per user, meaning that until the end of the year you can get access to the 70+ tools for all of 2025 for $69.99 using the code HOL30.

ADDITIONAL BONUS: For a limited time you can also get a hardcover copy of my first best-selling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on Amazon at a nice discount off the cover price – currently 50% OFF while supplies last!

Nominations Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

Leave a reply

Human-Centered Change and Innovation loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023.

The deadline for submitting nominations is December 24, 2024 at midnight GMT.

You can submit a nomination either of these two ways:

Sending us the name of the blogger and the url of their blog by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Sending the name of the blogger and the url of their blog and your e-mail address using our contact form

(Note: HUGE bonus points for being a contributing author)

So, think about who you like to read and let us know by midnight GMT on December 24, 2024.

We will then compile a voting list of all the nominations, and publish it on December 25, 2024.

Voting will then be open from December 25, 2024 – January 1, 2025 via comments and twitter @replies to @innovate.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions by an author to this web site will be a contributing factor.

Contact me with writing samples if you’d like to publish your articles on our platform!

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024 will then be announced on here in early January 2025.

We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!

SPECIAL BONUS: From now until December 31, 2024 you can save 30% OFF on my latest best-selling book Charting Change on either the eBook (immediate download) or the hardcover (free shipping worldwide) when using code HOL30.

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Surviving Change

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Surviving Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed that “There is nothing permanent except change” and events over the past few thousand years would seem to prove him right. Yet while change may endure, the rate of change fluctuates over time. Throughout history, forces tend to cascade and converge on particular points.

By all indications, we are in such a period now. We are undergoing four major shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography that will be transformative. Clearly, these shifts will create significant opportunities, but also great peril. The last time we saw this much change afoot was during the 1920s and that didn’t end well.

Yet history is not destiny. We’re entering a new era of innovation in which our ability to solve problems will be unprecedented and can shape our path by making wise choices. Still, as we have seen with the Covid pandemic, the toughest challenges we will face will have had less to do with devising solutions than with changing behaviors and conquering ourselves.

Building A Shared Understanding Of The Problems We Need To Solve

The first step toward solving a problem is acknowledging that there is one. Even before Covid skeptics came into vogue, there was no shortage of pundits who denied climate change. For years, many considered Alan Greenspan to possess sage-like wisdom when he asserted that markets would self-correct. In the end, even he would admit that he was gravely mistaken.

The truth is that we live in a world of the visceral abstract, where strange theories govern much of our existence. People can debate the “big bang,” deny Darwin’s theory of natural selection or even deride these ideas as “lies straight from the pit of hell.” Many agreed when Senator Marco Rubio asserted that these things have nothing to do with our everyday lives.

Still, the reality is that modern existence depends on abstract theories almost every second of the day. Einstein’s theories may seem strange, but if GPS satellites aren’t calibrated to take them into account, we’re going to have a hard time getting where we want to go. In much the same way the coronavirus doesn’t care what we think about Darwin, if it is allowed to replicate it will mutate and new, more deadly variants are likely to arise.

History shows that building a consensus to confront shared challenges is something that is firmly within our capability. The non-proliferation agenda of the 1950s led to concrete achievements such as the Partial Test Ban Treaty. When advances in gene therapy made the potential for danger clear, the Berg Letter called for a moratorium on the riskiest experiments until the dangers were better understood. These norms have been respected for decades.

Discovering Novel Solutions

Identifying and defining our challenges is just a first step. As Bill Gates pointed out, we still don’t know how to solve the climate crisis. Despite all the happy talk about technological advancement, productivity growth remains depressed. We’ve seen a global rise in populist authoritarianism and our inability to solve problems has surely contributed.

Put simply, we do not know how to overcome all of the challenges we face today. We need to innovate. However, innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. We can’t simply hope to adapt and overcome when a crisis hits, we need to innovate for the long-term.

Consider our response to the Covid crisis. Yes, the pandemic caught us off-guard and we should have been better prepared. But our most effective response wasn’t any of the emergency measures, but a three-decade effort that resulted in the development of mRNA vaccines. Even that was nearly killed in its cradle and surely would have been if it had not been for the dedication and perseverance of a young researcher named Katalin Karikó.

An emerging model taking hold is collaboration between government, academia and private industry. For example, JCESR is helping to create next generation technologies in energy storage, the Partnership on AI is helping to map the future for cognitive technologies and the Manufacturing USA Institutes, bring together diverse stakeholders to drive advancement.

Perhaps most of all, we need to start taking a more biological view of technology. We can no longer expect advancement to progress in an organized, linear way. We need to think less like engineers building a machine and more like gardeners who grow ecosystems to nurture new possibilities that we can’t yet imagine, but are lying beneath the surface.

Driving Adoption And Scaling Change

If there’s anything we’ve learned during the Covid pandemic is that developing a viable solution isn’t enough. Early measures, such as masking and social distancing, were met with disdain. The development of effective vaccines in record time was something of a miracle. Still, it was met with derision rather than gratitude in many communities.

This is not a new phenomenon. Good ideas fail all the time. From famous cases like that of Ignaz Semmelweis and William Coley to the great multitudes whose names are lost to history, any time a new idea threatens the status quo there will always be some that will seek to undermine it and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. If change is ever to prevail, we need to learn to anticipate and overcome resistance.

The good news is that it only takes a minority to embrace change in order for it to prevail. Everett Rogers found that it took only 10%-20% of system members to adopt an innovation for rapid adoption to follow. An analysis of over 300 political revolutions estimated that 3.5% active participation was enough. Other research suggests that the tipping point is 25% in an organization.

What we need is not more catchy slogans, divisive rhetoric or even charismatic leaders, but to empower movements made up of small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose. My friend Srdja Popović provides great guides for social and political revolutionaries in both his book and his organization’s website. I have adapted many of these ideas for corporate and organizational contexts in Cascades.

Perhaps most importantly, as I recently pointed out in Harvard Business Review, is that transformation is fundamentally distinct from other stages of innovation. Coming up with a new idea or solution takes very different skills—and often different people—than driving adoption and scale.

Building A Bridge Through Shared Identity

Marshal McLuhan, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, described media as “extensions of man” and predicted that electronic media would eventually lead to a global village. Communities, he predicted, would no longer be tied to a single, isolated physical space but connect and interact with others on a world stage.

What often goes untold is that McLuhan did not see the global village as a peaceful place. In fact, he predicted it would lead to a new form of tribalism and result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history, as long separated —and emotionally charged— cultural norms would constantly intermingle, clash and explode.

Today, what we most need to grapple with is the dystopia that McLuhan foresaw and described so eloquently and accurately. People do not vehemently refute science, trash Darwin, deny climate change or oppose life-saving vaccines because they have undergone some rational deductive process, but because it offends their identity and sense of self. That, more than anything else, is why change fails.

Yet as Francis Fukuyama pointed out in his recent book, our identities are not fixed, but develop and change over time. We can seek to create a larger sense of self through building communities rooted in shared values. What’s missing in our public discourse today isn’t more or better information. What we lack is a shared sense of mission and purpose.

That is the challenge before us. It is not enough to devise solutions to the problems we face, although that in itself will require us to apply the best of our energies and skills. We will also have to learn to survive victory by overcoming the inevitable strife that change leaves in its wake.

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

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

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Voting Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

Arm Yourself for Successful Change in 2025

Nominations Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024

Surviving Change

Building A Shared Understanding Of The Problems We Need To Solve

Discovering Novel Solutions

Driving Adoption And Scaling Change

Building A Bridge Through Shared Identity