Category Archives: Change

Navigating Unwelcome Change

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Five Questions with Theresa Ward

Navigating Unwelcome Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Picture this: your boss announces a major reorganization with a big smile, expecting you to be excited about “new opportunities.” Meanwhile, you’re sitting there thinking “What the hell just happened to my job?”

Theresa Ward, founder and Chief Momentum Officer of Fiery Feather, has spent years watching this disconnect play out. Her insight? Leaders are expected to sell change while still personally struggling with it, creating what she calls “that weird middle ground” where authenticity goes to die.

Our conversation revealed why unwelcome change triggers the same response as grief, and why leaders who stop pretending they’ve got it figured out are more successful.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that organizations need to unlearn?

Theresa Ward: That middle managers need to be enthusiastic about a change, or at least appear enthusiastic, to lead their teams through it.

RB: It seems like enthusiasm is important to get people on board and doing what they need to do to make change happen. Why is this wrong?

TW: Because it makes you wonder if this person is being authentic.  Are they genuinely enthusiastic?  Do they really believe this is the right thing?

To be clear, I’m talking about Unwelcome Change. Change that is thrust upon you.  How we experience Unwelcome Change is the same way we experience grief.

When we initially experience Unwelcome Change, our brain goes into shock or denial which can actually trigger an increase in engagement and productivity.

Then we move into anger and blame, which looks different for all of us. We’ve probably experienced somebody yelling in a meeting, but it can also look like turning off the camera, folding your arms, rolling your eyes, and disengaging.

Bargaining. I always think of that clip from Jerry Maguire, where he’s got the goldfish, and he says, “Who’s coming with me?” because he’s going to make lemonades out of this lemon, even if it’s a completely ridiculous condition.

Then depression sets in.  It’s the low point but it’s also where you’re really ready to admit that you’re upset, sad, and grieving the change that has happened. It’s the dark before the dawn.

RB: If everyone goes through this grief process, why do some leaders seem genuinely enthusiastic about the change?”

TW: If they came up with the idea, they’re not going to be angry or depressed about their own idea.

But even if it’s one announcement, people don’t experience just one change.  It’s not, “Our budget is going from X to Y” and everyone can just get used to it. It’s double or triple that!  It’s a budget cut, then a reorg, then a new boss, then a friend being laid off, then a project you loved getting trashed.  You’re dealing with onion layers of change.

We all go through different stages at speeds. You can’t rush it. Sometimes you just have to be like, “Oh, okay, I’m feeling pretty angry this week. I’m just gonna have to sit through my anger phase and realize that it’s a phase.”

RB: I get that you can’t rush the process, but change doesn’t slow down so you can catch up.  What can people do to navigate change while they’re processing it?

TW: BLT, baby.  These are 3 tools, not a formula, that you can use for different experiences.

B stands for Benefit of Change. This is finding the silver lining, something we often underestimate because it’s such a broad cliche. For it to be effective, you need to look for a specific and personal silver lining.  For example, a friend of mine works for a company that was acquired.  He was not a fan of how the culture was changing, but the bigger company offered tuition reimbursement. So he used that to get his master’s of fine arts for free.

L is Locus of Control.  Take inventory of everything that’s upsetting you and place it into one of 3 categories: What can I control? What can I influence? What do I need to just surrender? Sitting up at night and worrying about whether the budget will be cut again is outside of my control.  So, I shouldn’t spend my time and energy on that.  Instead, I need to focus on what I can control, like my attitude and response.

T is Take the Long View. Every day we find ourselves in situations that get us emotional – a traffic jam, getting cut off in traffic, or flubbing a big client presentation. When we get more emotional than what the situation calls for, ask how you’re going to feel about the situation tomorrow, then in a month, then a year Because when our fight or flight brain mode kicks in, we catastrophize things.  But the reality is that most of it won’t matter tomorrow.

RB: What’s the most important mindset shift leaders need to make to help their teams through unwelcome change?

TW: Find what works for you first then, with empathy, help your team. Like the Airline Safety Video, put your mask on first, then help others.  It allows you to be authentic and builds empathy with the team.  Two things required to start the shift from unwelcome to accepted.

Theresa’s BLT framework won’t make change painless, but it gives you permission to admit that transformation is hard, even for leaders. The moment you stop pretending you’ve got it all figured out is the moment your team starts trusting you to guide them through the mess.

Image credit: Pexels

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Science Says You Shouldn’t Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

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Science Says You Shouldn't Waste Too Much Time Trying to Convince People

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof, to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition.

These are, for the most part, constructive ideas. Yet they are more a taxonomy than a toolbox. Human nature can be baffling and our behavior is rarely consistent. Sometimes we’ll dig in our heels on a relatively minor point and others we’ll give in on a major issue relatively easily, often without any constable rhyme or reason.

Yet consider this one simple science-based principle that explains a lot: The best indicator of what we think and what we do is what the people around us think and do. Once you internalize that, you can begin to understand a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior and work to spread the ideas you care about. Often it’s not opinions we need to shape, but networks.

Majorities Don’t Just Rule, They Also Influence

Consider a famous set of conformity studies performed by the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The design was simple, but ingenuous. He merely showed people pairs of cards, asking them to match the length of a single line on one card with one of three on an adjacent card. The correct answer was meant to be obvious.

However, as the experimenter went around the room, one person after another gave the same wrong answer. When it reached the final person in the group (in truth, the only real subject, the rest were confederates), the vast majority of the time that person conformed to the majority opinion, even if it was obviously wrong!

The idea that people have a tendency toward conformity is nothing new, but that they would give obviously wrong answers to simple and unambiguous questions was indeed shocking. Now think about how hard it is for a more complex idea to take hold across a broad spectrum of people, each with their own biases and opinions.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence, even local majorities. So if you want people to adopt an idea or partake in an action, you need to take into account the communities they are already a part of—at home, at work, in their neighborhood and in other aspects of their social circles. That’s where their greatest influences lie.

The 3 Degrees of Influence Rule

In 1948, Congress authorized funding for the Framingham Heart Study, which would track the lifestyle and health habits, such as diet, exercise, tobacco use and alcohol intake, of 5209 healthy men and women. It was originally intended to last 20 years, but the results were so incredibly useful, it lasted for decades and even included the children of early cohorts.

More than a half century after the study began two researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, began to suspect that the Framingham Heart Study could be used for a very different, but important purpose. What they noticed was that the data included not only information about people’s habits, but their social networks as well.

So they set out to see if they could identify causal links between people’s health and their social connections. Using 32 years of data, they were able to establish a strong effect in areas as diverse as happiness, smoking and even obesity. As it turns out, the people around us not only help to shape our opinions, but our health as well.

The really astounding discovery, however, was that the effect extended to three degrees of influence. So not only our friends’ friends, influence us deeply, but their friends too—people that we don’t even know. Wherever we go, we bring that long, complex web of influence with us and we, in turn, help to shape others’ webs of influence too.

So when set out to shape someone else’s opinion, we need to account for social networks. We may, for example, be able to play on a target’s emotions, give them all the facts and evidence and demonstrate strong social proof, but their communities — extending out to three degrees of influence — will always factor in. While we’re working to persuade, those invisible webs of influence may be working against us.

Thanksgiving Dinners And Earnings Guidance

There is no greater American tradition than the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. No matter what your political persuasion, you are bound to have some relative who holds very different opinions than the rest of the family and who feels no compunction about making clear to everyone at the table exactly where they stand.

As should be clear by now, the reason our crazy uncles are so impervious to persuasion is that we aren’t actually arguing with them at all, but the totality of their social networks. Their friends at work, buddies at the bar, people in their neighborhood and everybody else who they interact with on a regular basis, all get a say at our holiday table.

In much the same way, there isn’t any real reason for CEOs to provide earnings guidance for investors. Steve Jobs refused do it and Apple’s stock during his tenure. Same thing with Unilever under Paul Polman. In 2018, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and uber-investor Warren Buffett wrote a strong Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal urging CEOs to end the practice.

During the pandemic many companies stopped giving earnings guidance to investors but, as soon as things began to stabilize, they started up again. It seems incredible, because all of the experts, even McKinsey, have advised against it. Still the vast majority of CEOs are unconvinced, despite all the contrary evidence. Could their networks be playing a role?

Don’t Try To Shape Opinions, Shape Networks

We like to think we can shape the ideas of others. It can sometimes seem like a puzzle. How can we conjure up the right combination of value proposition, analysis, emotive argument and social proof, to persuade our target?. There is, in fact, an enormous communication industry dedicated to exactly that proposition.

Decades of scientific research suggests that it’s not so easy. Our thoughts aren’t just the product of neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters reacting to different stimuli, but also our social networks. The best indicator of what people think and do is what the people around them think and do. While we’re trying to score debate points, those complex webs of influence are pushing back in often subtle, but extremely powerful ways.

We need to be far more humble about our persuasive powers. Anybody who has ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it is to convince even a single person of something. If you expect to shift the opinions of dozens or hundreds—much less thousands or millions—with pure sophistry, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Instead of trying to shape opinions, we’re often better off shaping networks. That’s why we advise our clients pursuing transformational change efforts to start with a majority, even if that majority is only three people in a room of five. You can always expand a majority out, but once you’re in the minority you’re going to get immediate pushback.

Rather than wordsmithing slogans, our time and efforts will be much better spent working to craft cultures, weaving the complex webs of influence that lead to genuinely shared values and shared purpose.

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2025Drum roll please…

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

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

  1. Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure — by Robyn Bolton
  2. 3 Secret Saboteurs of Strategic Foresight — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Five Unsung Scientific Discoveries Driving Future Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
  4. Unblocking Change — by Mike Shipulski
  5. Why Elastocalorics Will Redefine Our World — by Art Inteligencia
  6. People Will Be Competent and Hardworking – If We Let Them — by Greg Satell
  7. The Unsung Heroes of Culture — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
  8. Making it Safe to Innovate — by Janet Sernack
  9. Strategic Foresight Won’t Save Your Company — by Robyn Bolton
  10. Your Work Isn’t Transformative — by Mike Shipulski

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

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

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Why Aren’t You?

Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

As a fashion and lifestyle conceptualist and analyst for a major Australian department store group during the pre-Internet era, I co-created, with the GM of Marketing and GM of Women’s, Men’s, Children’s Apparel and Accessories, a completely new role. I took on the responsibility of forecasting and predicting customer, lifestyle, and fashion trends two to three years ahead of the present. While forecasting involves estimating future events or trends based on historical and statistical data, making predictions involves forming educated guesses or projections that do not necessarily rely on such data. Both forecasting and predictive skills are vital for developing strategic foresight—an organized and systematic approach to exploring plausible futures and anticipating, better preparing for, and staying ahead of change.

In this exciting new role, I had to ensure that my forecasts and predictions did not cause people to become anxious and tense, leading to poor or conflicting decisions involving millions of dollars. Instead, I needed to make sure that my forecasts convinced people that the well-researched information had been collected, captured, analyzed, and synthesized effectively. To ensure that the discovery of new marketing concepts is prompted by the development of strategic foresight, which enables people to make informed, million-dollar investment decisions by staying ahead of change.

This was before the revolutions in Design Thinking and Strategic Foresight. It taught me the fundamentals of agile and adaptive thinking processes, as well as the importance of creating and capturing value by viewing it from the customer’s perspective. It was initiated through rigorous research that involved framing the domain and scanning for trends by mentally moving back and forth among many scenarios, making links, connections, and unlikely associations. The information could then be actualized, analyzed, and synthesized to focus on evaluating a range of plausible futures as forecast scenarios. To envision the future by identifying the most promising or commercially viable trends in Australian marketing and merchandising, thereby supporting better policy-making across the organization, which consisted of forty-two department stores.

At the time, Australian fashion and lifestyle trends were considered six months behind those in Europe and the USA. This allowed me to utilize current and historical sales data, along with statistical methods, to create a solid foundation for the sales and marketing situation across various merchandise segments. Having completed a marketing degree as an adult learner, I applied and integrated marketing concepts and principles from product and fashion lifecycle management. Through being inventive, I built a fashion and lifestyle information system that had not previously existed, enabling the whole organization to stay ahead of change.  

I conducted backcasting research and built relationships with top Australian manufacturers that supplied our customers, gathering evidence and feedback that supported or challenged my approach to developing trend-tracking processes over a three-year period. I traveled widely four times a year to Europe and the USA to research the fashion and lifestyle value chain, visiting yarn, textile, couture, and ready-to-wear shows to explore, discover, identify, and validate emerging and diverging trends, providing context and evidence of their evolution and convergence. This was further tested and validated by analyzing and synthesizing the most critical and commercially successful fashion and lifestyle ranges marketed and merchandised at that time in major global department stores and leading retail outlets.

Formal research was also carried out through various channels, including desktop research, fashion and lifestyle forecasting services, as well as USA and European media, to gather customer insights that could then be identified, analyzed, synthesized, and developed and implemented into key fashion marketing and merchandising trends across the entire group of forty-two department stores. This enabled them to present a coordinated marketing and merchandising approach across all apparel to customers and stay ahead of change.

This was my journey into what is now known as strategic foresight, laying the vital foundations for developing my brain’s neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity, and becoming an agility shifter, with a prospective mind and adaptive thinking strategy that enables me to stay ahead of change.

Staying ahead of change

It took me many years to realize that I was chosen for this enviable role, not because of my deep knowledge and extensive experience, but for my intuitive and unconventional way of thinking. In Tomorrowmind, Dr Martin Seligman calls this ‘prospection’, an ability to metabolize the past with the present to envisage the future. He states that a prospective mind extracts the nutrients from the past and the present, then excretes the toxins and ballast to prepare for tomorrow. He defines prospection as “the mental process of projecting and evaluating future possibilities and then using these projections to guide thought and action.”

This develops the ability to stay ahead of change by anticipating and adapting to it, and includes many elements, such as:

  • Being able to adopt both a systemic and tactical approach, as well as a structured and detailed perspective alongside an agile and flexible view of the current reality or present state, simultaneously.
  • Sensing, connecting, perceiving, and linking operational patterns, and analyzing and synthesizing them within their context.
  • Generating, exploring, and unifying possibilities and options for selecting the most valuable commercial applications that match customers’ lifestyle needs and wants.
  • Unlearning and viewing the world with fresh eyes through sensing and perceiving it through a paradoxical lens, and cultivating a ‘both/and’ bird’s-eye perspective.
  • Opening your heart, mind, and will to relearning and learning, letting go of what may have worked in the past, focusing your emotional energy, towards learning new mindsets and mental models and relearning how to perceive the world differently.
  • Wondering and wandering into fresh and multiple perspectives underlie the development of a strategic foresight capability.

This approach helps shift your focus across the polarities of thought, from a fixed, binary, or linear and competitive approach to one that is neuro-scientifically grounded. It aims to foster your neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity within your brain, enabling the development of new and diverse perspectives that support prospective, strategic, critical, conceptual, complementary, and creative thinking processes necessary for staying ahead of change.

  • Improves strategic thinking

Strategic foresight aims to anticipate, analyze, synthesize, adapt to, and shape the factors relevant to a person, team, or company’s business, enabling it to perform and grow better than its competitors and stay ahead of change. It requires confidence, capacity, and competence to partner effectively and to think and act differently, using cutting-edge analytics, proven creative tools, and artificial intelligence (AI). This approach empowers, enables, and equips individuals with better, more risk-informed strategic thinking. It also provides a foundation for creative thinking by helping people better understand the options and alternatives available to them. Additionally, it identifies potential developments that could lead to building a competitive advantage at the individual, team, or organizational level, enabling them to stay ahead of change, innovate, and succeed in an uncertain business environment.  

  • Increases adaptability

In a recent article, ‘Navigating the Future with Strategic Foresight, the Boston Consulting Group stated:

“It’s not about gathering more data than everyone else but about being able to detect forward-looking signals, stretch perspectives, and interpret the data with fresh eyes. Uncertainty does not dissipate; rather, strategic foresight offers the clarity of direction that comes from greater confidence in data, assumptions, and analysis”.

The information gathered through strategic foresight enhances people’s ability and willingness to adapt their responses to uncertainty and unexpected situations and embrace change. It provides concrete evidence, in the form of data, assumptions, and analysis, to support people in being adaptive. This requires being open to unlearning, relearning, and learning, protecting you against anxiety, stress, and burnout, and helping you stay ahead of change and become resilient to create, invent, and innovate through chaos, uncertainty and disruption.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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3 Reasons Why Bad Business Thinking Exists

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3 Reasons Why Bad Business Thinking Exists

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

“The single most important message in this book is very simple,” reads the first line in John Kotter’s highly regarded The Heart of Change. “People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.

Really? That’s the important message? That emotive arguments are more powerful than factual arguments? What about other reasons why people change their behavior, such as social proof, conformity, incentives or coercion? By setting up a binary and artificial choice between two communication alternatives, he eliminates important strategic and tactical options.

It’s not just Kotter either, who is a well respected professor at Harvard Business School. The truth is that a lot of management thinking is surprisingly shoddy, with arbitrary notions and cognitive biases dressed up as scholarly work. We need to be more skeptical about “research” that comes out of business schools and consultancies. Here are three things to look for:

1. WYSIATI And Confirmation Bias

Kotter’s point about emotive vs. analytic arguments is, of course, completely valid. The fundamental error he makes is that he focuses on that particular aspect to the exclusion of everything else. Daniel Kahneman calls this WYSIATI, or “what you see is all there is.” Once you get tunnel vision on a particular fact or idea, it’s hard to see anything else.

Consider this thought experiment: You go to a conference featuring a powerful, emotive presentation on the need to combat climate change. You see glaciers melting, polar bears losing their habitat and young children starving from drought. Then you go back to the office, fired up and ready to do something about it, but everyone else has a strong argument against acting on climate change.

What is likely to happen next? You convince you co-workers—including your bosses— about the urgency of the crisis? Or, surrounded by skeptics, your conviction begins to wane? When all we see is the poor polar bears and starving in an echo chamber of likeminded people, we forget about other considerations, but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is.

An issue related to WYSIATI is confirmation bias. Kotter proudly points out that he worked with Deloitte to conduct extensive research for his book. Amazingly, after analyzing over 200 interviews, he ended up with the same 8-step process he cited in his earlier work. So what was the purpose of the research, to gain actual insights or to confirm what he thought he already knew?

Perhaps not surprisingly, after decades of organizations applying Kotter’s ideas about change McKinsey still finds that more than two-thirds of transformational efforts fail. Maybe there is actually more to change than communication strategy.

2. Halo Effects And Confounding Variables

One of the most popular modes of analysis that business thinkers use is to examine successful companies and see what they do differently. A number of bestselling management books, such as In Search of Excellence, have used this method. Unfortunately, when doing so they often fall prey to a cognitive bias known as the halo effect.

For example, in 2000, before the dotcom crash, Cisco was flying high. A profile in Fortune reported it to have an unparalleled culture with highly motivated employees. But just one year later, when the market tanked, the very same publication described it as “cocksure” and “naive.” Did the “culture,” under the very same leadership, really change that much in a year? Or did the perceptions of its performance change?

Cisco had a highly motivated and, some would say, aggressive sales force. When the company was doing well, analysts assumed it was their aggressiveness that produced good results and when its fortunes changed, that same aggressive behavior was blamed for its failures. This is what’s known as a confounding error, the fact that an aggressive sales force correlated with specific results doesn’t mean that the aggressive sales force caused the results.

Every organization has things which it does differently, that are idiosyncratic to its management and culture. In some market contexts those traits will be advantageous, in other environments they may not be. It takes work—and some humility—to separate what’s truly a success factor, what’s merely fit for a narrow purpose and what’s not really relevant.

3. Survivorship Bias

Business school professors and consultants gain fame—not to mention large fees—when they are able to define a novel concept or success factor. If you are able to isolate one thing that organizations should do differently, you have a powerful product to sell. A single powerful insight can make an entire career, which is probably why so many cut corners.

For example, in their study of 108 companies, distinguished INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne found that “blue ocean” products, those in new categories without competition, far outperform those in the more competitive “red ocean” markets. Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, was an immediate hit, selling over 3.5 million copies.

Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen’ book, Profit from the Core, boasted even more extensive research encompassing 200 case studies, a database of 1,854 companies, 100 interviews of senior executives and an “extensive review” of existing literature. They found that firms that focused on their ”core” far outperformed those who strayed.

It doesn’t take too much thinking to start seeing problems. How can you both “focus on your core” and seek out “blue oceans”? It betrays logic that both strategies could outperform one another. Also, how do you define “core?” Core markets? Core capabilities? Core customers? While it’s true that “blue ocean” markets lack competitors, they don’t have any customers either. Who do you sell to?

Yet there is an even bigger, more insidious problem called survivorship bias. Notice how “research” doesn’t include firms that went out of business because there were no customers in those “blue oceans” or because they failed to diversify outside of their “core.” The data only pertains to those that survived.

It’s hard to think of any other field where researchers could get away with such obviously careless work. Can you imagine medical research that didn’t include patients that died, or airplane research that didn’t include the flights that crashed? Suffice it to say that since the two books were published two decades ago, they’ve shown no capacity to predict whether a business will succeed or fail.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

When I’m finishing up a book, I send out sections to be fact-checked by experts and those who have first-person knowledge of events. I’m always amazed at how much I get wrong. In some cases, I make truly egregious errors about facts I should have known (or did know, but failed to take into account). It can be an incredibly humbling process.

That’s why it’s so important to not to believe everything you think, there are simply too many ways to get things wrong. As Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” I would also add a second principle that just because you’ve managed to fool others, doesn’t mean you’ve gotten it right.

Unfortunately, so many of the popular management ideas today come from people who never actually operated a business, such as business school professors and consultants. These are often people who’ve never failed. They’ve been told that they’re smart all their lives and expect others to be impressed by their ideas, not to examine them thoroughly.

The problem with so much business thinking today is that there is an appalling lack of rigor. That’s the only way that obviously flawed ideas such as “blue oceans,” “profiting from the core” and John Kotter’s ideas about change management are able to gain traction. It’s hard to imagine any other field with such a complete lack of quality control.

That’s why I send out fact checks, because I know how likely I am to think foolish and inaccurate things. I’ve also noticed that I tend to be most wrong when I think I’ve come up with something brilliant. Much as Tolstoy wrote about families, there are infinitely more ways to get things wrong than to get things right.

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

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Change is More About Power Than Persuasion

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Change is More About Power Than Persuasion

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The greatest misconception about change is that it’s about persuasion. All too often, we think that once people understand our idea, they will embrace it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Anybody who’s ever been married or had kids knows how difficult it can be to convince even a single person of something.

Clearly, if you intend to influence an entire organization — much less an entire society—of something, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. Still, organizations routinely pay armies of change management consultants to spend endless billable hours wordsmithing internal marketing campaigns. No wonder change so often fails.

The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. If you want change and can access the power to implement it, it will happen. If not, it won’t. That’s why effective change agents learn to leverage multiple sources of power. They mobilize people to influence institutions that can further their cause. That’s how you bring genuine transformation about.

The Paradox Of Hard Power

In early March, 2022 the prominent political scientist John Mearsheimer gave an interview to The New Yorker in which he argued that the United States had blundered greatly in its support of Ukraine. According to his theory we failed to recognize Russia’s role as a great power and its right to dictate certain things to its smaller and weaker neighbor.

That conclusion had a shelf like of about a week. Very quickly, the idea that America should have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia became not only morally questionable, but patently absurd. How could such a respected expert of foreign affairs get things so wrong? Part of the reason has to do with his misinterpretation of key facts, but perhaps an even greater problem is his misunderstanding of power.

Mearsheimer’s error is that he focused on hard power—the power to coerce—to the exclusion of everything else. The problem with hard power is that the more you use it, the weaker it gets. After brutalizing its neighbors and meddling in the affairs of western nations for over a decade, Vladimir Putin had unleashed forces whose power greatly exceeded Russia’s.

Wise leaders, whether in a political or a business context, must learn to wield coercive power wisely. Use it too little and you undermine your authority and effectiveness, but use it too much and you undermine trust, which eventually will undercut and dilute your capacity. Hard power works best when combined with other sources.

The Attraction Of Soft Power

One factor that Mearsheimer failed to consider is soft power, which Joseph Nye, who coined the term, defined as the ability to influence others without coercion. To do that requires that you build up confidence and stature, which is no easy task. You can’t simply bully or bribe people into admiring and trusting you.

For years, Putin had wielded hard power, including Russia’s military, energy assets and intelligence services, with considerable skill and alacrity. Yet by doing so, he undermined his ability to attract others to his cause. In fact, many found Russia’s actions to be so repugnant and objectionable that they became determined to work against its interests.

Businesses, especially large corporations, are increasingly attentive to soft power. Consider Apple, which is no stranger to wielding hard power. It is known as a ruthless competitor, especially with regard to its supply chain. Yet it also works hard to position itself as a consumer advocate for privacy (while taking a shot at its competitors, of course).

One reason why protestors target corporations is that they are especially vulnerable to attacks on their soft power. When activists wanted to campaign against restrictive new voting laws in Georgia, they didn’t target the politicians who wrote the legislation, but companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines. The firms quickly took a public stance against the laws.

Networked Power

As Anne-Marie Slaughter explained in The Chessboard and the Web, “Power in networks flows from connectedness: the number, type, and location of connections a node has… the most central nodes have the most connections and the highest likelihood of gaining more.” It is this power that Russia may have feared most in Ukraine.

It’s a salient fact that Russia sparked Euromaidan protests in 2013 not in response to any military moves, but because of an economic agreement between Ukraine and the EU. At the same time, Russia was trying to create its own network through a Eurasian Customs Union. Deeper connection between Ukraine and the EU would have undermined the centrality of that project, which had deep significance to Putin’s plans.

One of the biggest misperceptions about power in networks is that it depends on the number of connections. It doesn’t. What’s often far more important is your position in the network. Just like Ukraine’s position in between Russia and Europe increases its importance—and hence, its power—a person’s position in an organizational network or a company’s position in a market network can give them influence that far exceeds their hard or soft power.

In a now famous essay, Lina Kahn, who currently heads the Federal Trade Commission, pointed out that Amazon has attained massive network power by making itself the central node in then American retail industry. It’s not just Amazon either. The Federal Reserve has found that corporations have been increasing their power over the US economy in recent decades, leading to excessive market concentration in most industries, with lower competition and dynamism.

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what we expected from the digital era, which was supposed to be a democratizing force. Nevertheless, here we are …

The Revenge Of Power

In 2013, the political scientist Moisés Naím published The End of Power, in which he argued that because of the increase in mobility and technology and decrease in poverty, the power of institutions was diminishing. Power hadn’t ended exactly but, as he put it, power was becoming “easier to gain but harder to use or keep.”

However, in his more recent book, The Revenge of Power, Naim points out that autocrats, governments, corporations and other institutions have been able to combine hard power, soft power and networked power to wring back control. It is the coordination and combination of the three, rather than a particular strength in any one, that yields results.

Unfortunately, few seem to learn this basic principle of change. The Occupy Movement focused exclusively on mobilizing people in the streets and, predictably, had no effect on institutions. Common Core activists, on the other hand, focused on institutions, left themselves open to mobilizations from grass-root activists and ran into serious problems.

To make a significant impact, you need to mobilize people to influence institutions and the best way to do that is through leveraging networks. In the final analysis, it is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drives transformational change. As leaders, it’s our job to help those groups connect and to inspire them with purpose.

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

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Your Work Isn’t Transformative

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Your Work Isn't Transformative

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Continuous improvement is not transformation. With continuous improvement, products, processes and services are improved three percent year-on-year. With transformation, products are a mechanism to generate data, processes are eliminated altogether and services move from fixing what’s broken to proactive updates that deliver the surprising customer value.

A strategic initiative is not transformation. A strategic initiative improves a function or process that is – a move to consultative selling or a better new product development process. Transformation dismantles. The selling process is displaced by automatic with month-to-month renewals. And while product development is still a thing, it’s relegated to a process that creates the platform for the real money-maker – the novel customer value made possible by the data generated by the product.

Cultural change is not transformation.Cultural change uses the gaps in survey data to tweak a successful formula and adjust messaging. Transformation creates new organizations that violate existing company culture.

If there the corporate structure is unchanged, there can be no transformation.

If the power brokers are unchanged, there can be no transformation.

If the company culture isn’t violated, there can be no transformation.

If it’s not digital, there can be no transformation.

In short, if the same rules apply, there can be no transformation.

Transformation doesn’t generate discomfort, it generates disarray.

Transformation doesn’t tweak the successful, it creates the unrecognizable.

Transformation doesn’t change the what, it creates a new how.

Transformation doesn’t make better caterpillars, it creates butterflies.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Special eBook Offer – $13.99 for the Charting Change

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Special Charting Change eBook offer

Wow! Exciting news!

My publisher is having a summer sale that will allow you to get the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for only $13.99!

You can also get the softcover or hardcover version of the book for 10% off (which is useful for anyone living outside an Amazon stronghold because it includes 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 11:59PM EDT on July 23, 2025 only

Click here to get this deal!

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

*This offer is valid for English-language Springer, Palgrave & Apress books & eBooks. The discount is redeemable on link.springer.com only. Titles affected by fixed book price laws, forthcoming titles and titles temporarily not available on link.springer.com are excluded from this promotion, as are reference works, handbooks, encyclopedias, subscriptions, or bulk purchases. The currency in which your order will be invoiced depends on the billing address associated with the payment method used, not necessarily your home currency. Regional VAT/tax may apply. Promotional prices may change due to exchange rates.

This offer is valid for individual customers only. Booksellers, book distributors, and institutions such as libraries and corporations please visit springernature.com/contact-us. This promotion does not work in combination with other discounts or gift cards.






Unblocking Change

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Unblocking Change

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want things to change, you have two options. You can incentivize change or you can move things out of the way that block change. The first way doesn’t work and the second one does. For more details, click this link at it will take you to a post that describes the late Danny Kahneman’s thoughts on the subject.

And, also from Kahneman, to move things out of the way and unblock change, change the environment.

Change Blocker 1 – Metrics

When you measure someone on efficiency, you get efficiency. And if people think a potential change could reduce efficiency, that change is blocked. And the same goes for all metrics associated with cost, quality and speed. When a change threatens the metric, the change will be blocked. To change the environment to eliminate the blocking, help people understand who the change will actually IMPROVE the metric. Do the analysis and educate those who would be negatively impacted if the change reduced the metric. Change their environment to one that believes the change will improve the metric.

Change Blocker 2 – Incentives

When someone’s bonus could be negatively impacted by a potential change, that change will be blocked. Figure out whose incentive compensation are jeopardized by the potential change and help them understand how the potential change will actually increase their incentives. You may have to explain that their incentives will increase in the long term, but that’s an argument that holds water. Until they believe their incentives will not suffer, they’ll block the change.

Change Blocker 3 – Fear

This is the big one – fear of negative consequences. Here’s a short list: fear of being judged, fear of being blamed, fear of losing status, fear of losing control, fear of losing a job, fear of losing a promotion, fear of looking stupid and fear of failing. One of the best ways to help people get over their fear is to run a small experiment that demonstrates that they have nothing to fear. Show them that the change will actually work. Show them how they’ll benefit.

Eliminating the things that block change is fundamentally different than pushing people in the direction of change. It’s different in effectiveness and approach. Start with the questions: “What’s in the way of change?” or “Who is in the way of change?” and then “Why are they in the way of change?” From there, you’ll have an idea what must be moved out of the way. And then ask: “How can their environment be changed so the change-blocker can be moved out of the way?”

What’s in the way of giving it a try?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

  • Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all. 

  • Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

  • Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure. 

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions.  According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

  • Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

  • Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
  • Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm. 
  • Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
  • Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

  • Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose. 
  • Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views: 
  • Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

  • Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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