Category Archives: Change

99% of Companies Failed to Do This Last Year

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, one essential activity that 99% of companies failed to prioritize last year is conducting regular independent customer and employee experience audits. These audits are critical for understanding the current state and potential improvements needed to enhance engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction among customers and employees.

For most companies, customer and employee experiences are the backbone of their success. A business can’t thrive without satisfied customers buying their products or services, and employees are the driving force behind delivering these experiences. Despite this understanding, many businesses neglect the proactive steps necessary to evaluate and enrich these experiences systematically utilizing unbiased external third parties to walk the experiences and document friction points and opportunities.

Is your company part of the 99% that failed to conduct both an independent customer experience audit and an independent employee experience audit last year?

If you are part of the 1%, please be sure and leave some thoughts about the experience (no pun intended) in the comments!

Why Independent Experience Audits Matter

Independent experience audits are comprehensive reviews of interactions customers and employees have with a company performed by an unbiased external resource. They help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. These audits should be performed regularly as they can reveal insights into:

The alignment between company offerings and customer needs.
The effectiveness of internal processes in promoting a positive work environment.
The coherence of brand values with actual customer and employee experiences.
Emerging trends and preferences that might impact future strategies.

“73% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.” – Temkin Group

Despite the apparent value proposition of these independent audits, why are so many companies still overlooking them? The constraints are often a mix of perceived complexity, lack of in-house expertise, or prioritization of immediate financial metrics over strategic insights. However, history has shown that organizations that adapt ahead of changes in expectations are better positioned to succeed over those that react out of necessity.

Case Study 1: An Overlooked Opportunity – Company X

Company X, a well-established retail brand, faced declining sales figures and employee turnover. Their product line remained strong, and pay scales were competitive. However, deeper insights revealed that customer experiences were inconsistent, and employees often felt disengaged due to a lack of communication and growth opportunities.

Recognizing the signs, Company X engaged in a comprehensive independent experience audit. The audit discovered two key issues:

Customer Experience: Customers reported a lack of personalization in their shopping journey, expressing frustration over disconnected in-store and online experiences.
Employee Experience: Employees felt unappreciated, with inadequate feedback channels and professional development options.

Armed with these insights, Company X implemented a strategy that enhanced personalized shopping experiences using AI-driven recommendations and integrated both digital and physical stores for seamless customer journeys. Simultaneously, they developed a robust internal communication framework that empowered employees through regular feedback and offered career progression pathways.

Within six months post-intervention, Company X witnessed a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 20% decrease in employee turnover—solidifying the importance of independent experience audits.

Case Study 2: A Success Story – Company Y

Company Y, on the other hand, already valued independent customer and employee experience audits as a vital component of their corporate strategy. As a result, they experienced steady growth and minimal churn rates despite operating in the highly competitive tech industry.

Company Y conducts bi-annual audits using a company like HCLTech, reviewing user interactions with their software products and collecting feedback through employee surveys intertwined with one-on-one interviews. They discovered that:

Customer Experience: The need for improved user interface intuitiveness was prevalent, prompting a user-centered design overhaul that optimized performance and usability.
Employee Experience: Although engagement levels were high, team collaboration across departments showed potential for enhancement.

By proactively addressing these issues, Company Y not only improved its software product, which increased customer retention by 25%, but also invested in team-building exercises and diversified project teams, leading to more innovative solutions and a dynamic organizational culture.

How to Implement Experience Audits in Your Organization

To avoid the common pitfalls highlighted, businesses need to incorporate independent experience audits into their regular strategic evaluations. Here’s a simplified approach to getting started:

Define Objectives: Clearly identify what you aim to discover with the audit. Are you focusing on loyalty, satisfaction, efficiency, or a combination?
Select a Partner: Choose an independent resource that is experienced, trustworthy and thorough in their activities to assess and document their findings as they walk the critical components of your customer and employee experiences.
Gather Data: Utilize surveys, interviews, focus groups, and data analytics to collect comprehensive insights.
Analyze Findings: Categorize feedback to identify consistent patterns, pain points, and potential areas for improvement.
Develop an Action Plan: Prioritize issues by impact and feasibility, then devise a strategy that aligns with your company’s goals.
Implement Changes: Address the identified opportunities with targeted interventions, ensuring stakeholders are engaged and informed.
Measure Impact: Continuously track the effectiveness of changes and refine strategies as necessary.

Conclusion

Independent experience audits are not just a ‘nice to have’ but a strategic necessity. Companies can no longer afford to be complacent; they must take actionable insights from these audits to craft memorable and meaningful experiences for their customers and employees. Companies like Y that put independent experience audits at the heart of their strategy invariably found themselves robust against industry challenges, offering lessons that the broader business community should heed.

“Companies that excel at customer experience are 60% more profitable than their peers.” – Gartner

If you would like to engage an unbiased external person like Braden Kelley to conduct a customer experience and/or employee audit for you this year to join the 1% leapfrogging their competition, contact us!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2024

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2024 Drum roll please…

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

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

Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 — by Jesse Nieminen
Best Team Building Exercise Around — by David Burkus
You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong (According to Seth Godin) — by Robyn Bolton
Why Annual Employee Experience Audits Are Important — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Don’t ‘Follow the Science’, Follow the Scientific Method — by Pete Foley
Artificial Innovation — by Braden Kelley
Dynamic Thinking — by Mike Shipulski
The State of Customer Experience and the Contact Center — by Shep Hyken
The Duality of High-Performing Teams — by David Burkus
Uber Economy is Killing Innovation, Prosperity and Entrepreneurship — by Greg Satell

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

Leadership Best Quacktices from Oregon’s Dan Lanning — by Braden Kelley
Top Ten Uses for a Customer Journey Map — by Art Inteligencia
The Power of Cultural Competence in Leadership — by Greg Satell
Components of a Good Digital Strategy — by Howard Tiersky
Customer Experience Audit 101 — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

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!

SPECIAL BONUS: While supplies last, you can get the hardcover version of my first bestselling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for 44% OFF until Amazon runs out of stock or changes the price. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while it lasts!

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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What Separates Truly Revolutionary Leaders from Everyone Else

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What Separates Truly Revolutionary Leaders From Everyone Else

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1919, Mahatma Gandhi, who had long established himself as a revolutionary leader of uncommon strategic acumen, called for a general strike throughout India to protest unjust laws levied on his people by the British. It was, at least at first, an enormous success. In Mumbai, for example, 80% of shops closed their doors.

Yet things soon got out of hand. What began as peaceful protests against oppression turned violent. Riots broke out. The moral high ground that Gandhi so coveted—and relied on to accomplish his objectives—would crumble under his feat. Things ended with a horrible massacre at Amritsar. Gandhi would later call it his Himalayan miscalculation.

Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. Not by a long shot. He not only admitted his mistake, he vowed to learn from it. Ten years later, when the opportunity presented itself, he took a very different tack, which led to the Salt March and became his greatest triumph. It is often the ability to learn from mistakes that makes the difference between success and failure.

A Flash Of Insight That Would Overthrow A Dictator

One day in 1998, a group of five friends met in a cafe in Belgrade. Although still in their 20s, they were already experienced activists and most of what they experienced was failure. In 1992, they had taken part in student protests to protest the war in Bosnia. Yet much like the #Occupy protests that would later spread across the world, they never amounted to much.

In 1996, they took to the streets to support Zajedno, a coalition of opposition parties aligned against Slobodan Milošević. Although the ruling party clearly lost at the polls, the Serbian dictator annulled the election. Massive protests broke out, but unfortunately, the opposition coalition was unable to maintain unity and it was all for basically naught.

It was these defeats that they began to examine in 1998. They took a hard look at what had worked and what didn’t. They knew that they could get people to the polls and they knew that if people went to the polls they could win the Presidential election coming up in 2000. They also knew, from bitter experience, that if Milošević lost the election he would try to steal it.

So that’s what they planned for. They created a movement called Otpor that was steeped in patriotic imagery from the World War II resistance. It grew slowly at first, amounting to only a few hundred members after a year. But by the time the elections came around in 2000, Otpor’s ranks swelled to 70,000 and had grown into a potent political force.

When the Serbian strongman tried to falsify the election results massive protests, now known as the Bulldozer Revolution broke out. This time Otpor was able to enforce unity among the opposition parties, having lost the confidence of the military and police forces, Milošević was forced to give in. He would later be extradited to The Hague and die in his prison cell.

The Epiphany That Would Lead To The Lean Startup

In 1999, the day before his eighth startup went public, Steve Blank decided to retire at the age of 45. With time to reflect, he sat in a ski lodge and began to write a memoir with a “lessons learned” section at the end of each chapter. “In hindsight, it was a catharsis of moving from one part of my life to another,” he told me.

What he realized was that the idea a business started with was always wrong. Sometimes it was off by a little, sometimes it was off by a lot, but it was always wrong. The key to success was not a better idea, necessarily, but identifying and fixing its flaws before you ran out of money. To do that you needed to go and talk to customers.

“I was 80 pages in when I realized there was a pattern. When I sat inside the building things didn’t go very well, but when I got outside the building things turned around and got much better,” he remembers. Pursuing customer development even before product development was the essential insight behind the Lean Startup movement.

Today, lean startup methods have gone beyond startups been proven useful for large corporations, scientific institutions and even government agencies. The essential epiphany that made it possible came not from divine enlightenment, but rather through hard examination of two decades of mistakes and the will to change tack.

The Unmasking Of The Most Deadly Disease

In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case, in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, the young doctor purposely infected a tumor on his patient’s neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished and the patient remained cancer free even five years later.

Looking to repeat his success, he created a special brew of toxins designed to jump-start the immune system. Unfortunately, he was never able to replicate his initial results consistently. His idea was met with skepticism by the medical community and, when radiation therapy was developed in the early 20th century, Coley’s research was largely forgotten.

Yet his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, kept the dream alive. With a $2000 grant from Nelson Rockefeller she founded the Cancer Research Institute in 1953 to study immunological approaches to cancer. While mostly dismissed by the medical community, it did inspire a small cadre of devotees to keep looking, albeit mostly in vain.

A breakthrough came in 1996, when a researcher named Jim Allison published a landmark paper that added a new twist to the mystery. Allison had a hunch that Coley’s initial insight that our immune system can fight cancer was correct. However, he had discovered a “switch” that would shut off the immune response and believed that he could switch it back on.

As it turned out, Allison got it right and would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cancer immunotherapy. Coley’s initial idea wasn’t wrong, exactly, just incomplete. He had a piece of the puzzle, but not all of it. What he failed to see was the diabolical nature of the disease itself, some forms of which, “learned” to outwit our immune system by switching it off.

Unfortunately, we can be proved “right” in the end, and still fail. Every idea is flawed in some way, it’s just that sometimes those flaws are more disabling than others.

To Change The World, You Must First Conquer Yourself

There’s nothing quite like the rapture of an epiphany, that initial flash of insight which is still pure and innocent, before the harsh realities of the world muck it up with a bunch of inconvenient facts, corollaries and exceptions. That’s when we can give ourselves to it wholeheartedly, without equivocation or bearing the burden of creeping doubt.

Yet our ideas never turn out like we think they will. To succeed, they must grow and adapt to the world around them. Gandhi, fresh off stunning victories gaining rights for Indians in South Africa, didn’t realize how his methods could go so horribly awry. The Otpor activists, Steve Blank, William Coley and so many others had similar blind spots.

What I’ve found in my research of revolutionary changemakers is that what makes the difference between success or failure isn’t necessarily the brilliance of the initial idea or even the passion and diligence of those who work to bring it about, but their ability to learn things along the way. They didn’t merely stay the course, they corrected it as many times as they had to until they won.

Unfortunately, most never learn that simple lesson. They would rather make a point than make a difference and wear their failures like a badge of honor. After all, who but the most righteous could inspire such opposition? And who but the most pure could continue to persevere in the face of such constant defeat?

That’s the really tough thing about change. To truly bring it about, we first must change ourselves.

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

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Four Deadly Business Myths

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Four Deadly Business Myths

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The unicorn is perhaps unique among myths in that the creature doesn’t appear in the mythology of any culture. The ancient Greeks, for all of their centaurs, hydras and medusae, never had any stories of unicorns, they simply thought that some existed somewhere. Of course, nobody had ever seen one, but they believed others had.

Beliefs are amazing things. We don’t need any evidence or rational basis to believe something to be true. In fact, research has shown that, when confronted with scientific evidence which conflicts with preexisting views, people tend to question the objectivity of the research rather than revisit their beliefs. Also, as Sam Arbesman has explained, our notions of the facts themselves change over time.

George Soros and others have noted that information has a reflexive quality. We can’t possibly verify every proposition, so we tend to take cues from those around us, especially when they are reinforced by authority figures, like consultants and media personalities. Over time, the zeitgeist diverges further from reality and myths evolve into established doctrine.

Myth #1: We Live In A VUCA Business Environment

Today it seems that every business pundit is talking about how we operate in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. It’s not hard to see the attraction. Conjuring almost apocalyptic images of continuous industrial disruption creates demand for consulting and advisory services. It’s easier to sell aspirin than vitamins.

The data, however, tell a different story. In fact, 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.

Today, in part because of lax antitrust enforcement over the past few decades, businesses have become less disruptive, less competitive and less dynamic, while our economy has become less innovative and less productive. The fact that the reality is in such stark contrast to the rhetoric, is more than worrying, it should be a flashing red light.

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.

The recent great resignation, when people began leaving their jobs in droves, helps tell this story. Should anyone be surprised? We’ve been working longer hours, constantly tethered to the office even as we work remotely, under increasing levels of stress. Yes, things change. They always have and always will. We need to adapt, but all of the VUCA talk is killing us.

Myth #2: Empathy Is Absolution

Another favorite buzzword today is empathy. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective. As noted above, there’s far too much talk about disruption and uncertainty and not nearly enough about stability and well-being.

Still, the one-dimensional use of empathy is misleading. When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, it seems like a “nice to have,” rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned living overseas for 15 years is that it is incredibly important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

Learning that not everyone thinks alike is one of life’s most valuable lessons. Yes, coercion is often a viable strategy in the short-term. But to build something that lasts, it’s much better if people do things for their own reasons, even if those reasons are different than yours. To achieve that, you have to understand their motivations.

Myth #3: Diversity Equity And Inclusion Is About Enforcing Rules

In recent years corporate America has pushed to implement policies for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Society for Human Resource Management even offers a diversity toolkit on its website firms can adopt, complete with guidelines, best practices and even form letters.

Many organizations have incorporated diversity awareness training for employees to learn about things like unconscious bias, microaggressions and cultural awareness. There are often strict codes of conduct with serious repercussions for violations. Those who step out of line can be terminated and see their careers derailed.

Unfortunately, these efforts can backfire, especially if diversity efforts rely to heavily on a disciplinary regime. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out long ago, strict rules-based approaches are problematic because they inevitably lead to logical contradictions. What starts out as a well-meaning effort can quickly become a capricious workplace dominated by fear.

Cultural competency is much better understood as a set of skills than a set of rules. While the prospect of getting fired for saying the wrong thing can be chilling, who wouldn’t want to be a more effective communicator, able to collaborate more effectively with colleagues who have different viewpoints, skills and perspectives?

To bring about real transformation, you need to attract. You can’t bully or overpower. Promoting inclusion should be about understanding, not intimidation.

Myth #4: People Are Best Motivated Through Carrots And Sticks

One of the things we’ve noticed when we advise organizations on transformation initiatives is that executives tend to default towards incentive structures. They quickly conjure up a Rube Goldberg-like system of bonuses and penalties designed to incentivize people to exhibit the desired behaviors. This is almost always a mistake.

If you feel the need to bribe and bully people to get what you want, you are signaling from the outset that there is something undesirable about what you’re asking for. In fact, we’ve known for decades that financial incentives often prove to be problematic.

Instead of trying to get people to do what you want, you’re much better off identifying people who want what you want and empowering them to succeed. As they prosper, they can bring others in who can attract others still. That’s how you build a movement that people feel a sense of ownership of, rather than mandate that they feel subjugated by.

The trick is that you always want to start with a majority, even if it’s three people in a room of five. The biggest influence on what we do and think is what the people around us do and think. That’s why it’s always easy to expand a majority out, but as soon as you are in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback.

We need to stop trying to engineer behavior, as if humans are assemblages of buttons and levers that we push and pull to get the results we want. Effective leaders are more like gardeners, nurturing, growing and shaping the ecosystems in which they operate, uniting others with a sense of shared identity and shared purpose.

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

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Is it Time to ReLearn to Work?

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Is it Time to ReLearn to Work?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

In white-collar industries where remote work is not only viable but often highly productive, we are still struggling to find a post-pandemic formula for integrating office attendance into our weekly routine. Continuing to waffle, however, does no one any good, so we need to get on with things. Part of what has been holding us back is that we have been talking about getting back to the office as an end. It is not. It is a means. The question it begs is, what is the end we have in mind? Why should we get back to the office?

Let’s start by eliminating one reason which gets frequent mention—we can manage better. This is not a good why. Supervision is an artifact of a prior era. Digitally enabled work logs itself, and we can hold each other accountable for all our KPIs, OKRs, and MBOs without having to be collocated. Managers may feel more in control with people in sight, but that is a poor return on the overall commute investment entailed.

A far better reason to return to the office is to reactivate learning. The biggest problem with remote work is that we do not learn. Specifically, we do not:

Learn anything new about ourselves, because we need the input of others to do so.
Learn new soft skills, because online courses don’t cut it.
Learn about our teammates, because video calls lack the needed intimacy.
Learn about our customers, because we need to go to their offices to do so (going to our offices would at least let us share the ride)
Learn about the current state of our company, because that kind of thing never gets published.

In short, just as our children experienced a learning gap at school, so we inherit the same dynamics with remote work. We consume the skills we have, but we do not develop the ones we need next. We are harvesting, but we are not seeding, and there will be a reckoning if we do not alter our course.

So, there is a good why for returning to the office, but that in turn begs the question of how? Here we need to be clear. We do not know how. We do not know what is the right formula. Unfortunately, waiting won’t help either, so now what?

Let me suggest that the best course of action is to implement a clear policy effective immediately with the following provisos.

We publicly acknowledge that we suspect this policy is wrong.
We are putting it in place for 90 days.
We want everyone to abide by it religiously so that we get the right signals.
We will review the policy publicly and transparently after 90 days and implement a new policy at that time.
We will put that policy in place for 90 days, following the same protocols as before.
We will rinse and repeat until no longer necessary.

The point is, we have to get on with getting on, and running the experiment is the fastest way to get there.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Five Must Reads for 2025

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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!

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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!

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