Category Archives: Change

What is the Role of Management in Managing Change?

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Change is an inevitable part of life. Organizations must learn to manage change to remain competitive. Management plays a key role in managing change by creating a culture that supports change, developing a plan to implement the change, and communicating the change to employees.

ROLE #1: Creating a Culture That Supports Change

Establishing a culture that supports change can be a challenge, but it is essential for successful change management. Management should create a work environment that encourages collaboration and open communication. Management should also set expectations that employees should be open to change and willing to experiment. Additionally, management should provide support and resources to make sure employees have the tools they need to succeed in the new environment.

ROLE #2: Developing a Plan to Implement Change

The next step in managing change is to develop a plan for implementing the change. A successful change management plan should include an analysis of the current situation and the desired change, a timeline for implementation, and action steps for achieving the goals. Additionally, management should consider the impact of the change on employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

ROLE #3: Communicating the Change

Once the change has been planned, management should communicate it to all stakeholders. Communication should include an explanation of the reasons for the change and how it will benefit the organization. It should also explain what employees need to do to ensure a successful transition. Additionally, management should provide training and resources to help employees learn the new processes.

Conclusion

Managing change is an important part of any organization’s success. Management plays a key role in managing change by creating a culture that supports change, developing a plan to implement the change, and communicating the change to employees. By taking these steps, management can ensure that the transition to the new environment is smooth and successful.

Image credit: Pexels

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

Engaging Consciousness in the Emotional Work of Organizational Transformation

Leave a reply

Engaging Consciousness in the Emotional Work of Organizational Transformation

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

Organizational transformation is a uniquely human endeavor. Navigating the journey to change starts with understanding the employee experience and creating space for emotional safety in the workplace.

According to organizational behavior expert Sigal Barsade, emotions are the key to encouraging higher performance and achievement. Her research shows that emotions influence employees’ wellness in addition to driving productivity. Thus, to influence organizational transformation, leaders need to take a closer look at how emotions factor into the employee experience.

In this article, we’ll discuss emotions and their role to change management in the following topics:

The Employee Experience
The Transformation Timeline
Emotions at Work
An Engagement of Consciousness

The Employee Experience

Without a keen understanding of the employee experience and your team’s emotional state, sustainable change is more fantasy than reality. In your efforts to initiate organizational transformation, consider first transforming employees’ work experience to promote a sense of emotional well-being.

In shaping the employee experience, it’s critical to understand employees’ expectations for emotional safety in the workplace. As most employees value their mental health above all else, they expect their working environment to promote trust, purpose, and social cohesion. Moreover, they want to know that leadership recognizes their contributions and that there is room and opportunity for sustainable growth and development. Similarly, team members want their personal sense of purpose to be in alignment with the organization.

With increased emotional wellness comes higher employee engagement and a more motivated workforce. With a stronger sense of emotional safety in the employee experience, leaders will find that their team is prepared to engage in organizational transformation.

The Transformation Timeline

“You have to attract people… you can’t bribe or coerce transformation.”
Greg Satell

Once you prioritize the employee experience in your change strategy, you can begin the organizational transformation timeline. Organizational transformation is a process that happens through gradual change, resulting in sustainable behavioral transformation. This type of comprehensive change can only occur through a series of repeatable actions and innovative systems, not one-time initiatives.

Take steps towards sustainable change with the following phases of organizational transformation:

Phase One: Fight Resistance

To sustain organizational transformation, leaders and team members need a solid strategy for managing resistance. Resistance often stems from the discomfort that change brings.

To move beyond this fear, leaders should explain that while transformation involves many unknown factors, the forthcoming change will bring overall positive results. By showing team members how they will benefit from a change, leaders can overcome resistance and encourage their employees to support the initiative.

Freezing of Behaviors
In Lewis’ Change management model, change is broken into three steps: freezing, changing, and refreezing.

In the first phase of organizational transformation, the “unfreezing” process will occur. This involves recognizing one’s need for change and defining new behaviors that replace the former methods and practices. During this very fluid phase, team members and leaders identify and share data that supports a need for change.

Phase Two: Facilitate Adjustment

After strategically managing resistance to change, the next phase in achieving organizational transformation is facilitating the adjustment period. During this phase, team members are no longer actively resisting transformation but still need time to adjust to the changes the new initiative brings.

In the adjustment period, changes are discussed in detail, and team members are invited to provide criticism and feedback. This phase allows team members to personalize the change as they recognize their individual roles in achieving organizational transformation. In a successful adjustment phase, every team member is aligned with the necessary actions for the next phase: acceptance.

Changing

Within the adjustment phase of organizational transformation, team leaders will actively change their old habits. At this time, all stakeholders work to replace undesired behaviors with desired ones.

Phase Three: Foster Acceptance

In phase three of the organizational transformation timeline, you’ll lead your team into the acceptance phase with a solid vision and strategy for sustaining the changes over time.

Refreezing

In the foster acceptance phase, refreezing occurs when changes are stabilized and become the new normal. As the organizational transformation nears completion, team members are in the best position to cement these changes by ensuring a legacy of growth.

Phase Four: Ensure Consistency

The fourth phase of organizational transformation establishes consistent and sustainable growth. Consistency is a direct result of repeatable actions from strategic processes, intentional routines, and innovative practices that allow each team member to enact changes that carry into the future continuously.

Emotions at Work

A clear strategy for long-term change is only a roadmap to organizational transformation. After setting the stage for change to take place, leaders must engage in the emotional work of transformation.

Change takes emotional labor, requiring an environment that is uniquely attuned to address employees’ emotional needs. In the workplace, emotions can be an accelerator for transformation. To engage emotions in the most effective way, leaders can create conditions that ensure psychological safety.

Research shows that to solidify organizational transformation, we must mitigate emotional harm and, in doing so, foster emotional commitment from team members. While emotional harm isn’t tangible, it presents itself in certain ways that can create anxiety, fear, and similar negative responses in employees. Essentially, working to facilitate positive experiences alongside potentially negative emotions is the key to harnessing a safe space for transformation. Leaders that are able to manage the effects of stress successfully can transform a high-pressure environment into a space for high performance.

Sonja Kresojevic, the founder of Spinnaker Co. and a proponent of using agile principles for organizational change, firmly believes that true transformation is a product of an empowered organization. According to Kresojevic, the more we humanize change through emotional labor and healing initiatives, the more we are able to influence others and start shifting organizations in the direction of transformation.

Leaders can promote healing and psychological safety by allowing employees to share their thoughts and criticisms freely and without retribution. With an increase in support and emotional safety, your team will be ripe for organizational transformation.

An Engagement of Consciousness

An organization’s penchant for the unknown is essential in driving organizational transformation. In your efforts to humanize change management, it’s crucial to understand and accept human nature’s role in experiencing change. In understanding our natural inclinations toward risk aversion in the face of change, we can work to replace this avoidance of uncertainty with curiosity, vulnerability, and authenticity in the workplace. This approach to change management will transform the way we work, the risks we take, and our willingness to accept change.

Much of organizational transformation is dependent on accepting uncertainty: that the future is unclear and we don’t have all the answers. The real secret to driving organizational transformation is empowering people to develop and accept new ideas on their own. Managing the uncertainty of organizational transformation takes time, allowing for the unfreezing, changing, and refreezing process to take place as stakeholders consider their options.

Rob Evans, Master Coach of Collaboration and Transformation Designer, shares that giving people a chance to court the unknown, is essential for change acceptance as it allows new ideas to seep in and take hold.

Practicing patience during the change management process allows for “engagement in the full consciousness,” in which leaders can kickstart the organizational transformation timeline and encourage employees to buy into the change. By pairing deliberate strategy with time for authentic employee engagement, radical transformation is an inevitability.

Ready to start the journey to organizational transformation? Consider a new approach to the employee experience. Voltage Control can help you and your team define the best path for your organization’s transformation.

This article originally appeared at VoltageControl.com

Image credit: Pixabay

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

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2022

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of December 2022 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:

Forbidden Truth About Innovation — by Robyn Bolton

A Letter to Innovation Santa — by John Bessant

Preserving Ecosystems as an Innovation Superpower — by Pete Foley

What is a Chief Innovation Officer? — by Art Inteligencia

If You Can Be One Thing – Be Effective — by Mike Shipulski

How to Drive Fear Out of Innovation — by Teresa Spangler

3 Steps to Find the Horse’s A** In Your Company (and Create Space for Innovation) — by Robyn Bolton

Six Ways to Stop Gen-Z from Quiet Quitting — by Shep Hyken

Overcoming the Top 3 Barriers to Customer-Centricity — by Alain Thys

Designing Innovation – Accelerating Creativity via Innovation Strategy — by Douglas Ferguson

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

What Are Strategic and Market Foresight? — by Braden Kelley

Innovate for Good – Breaking Paradoxes — by Teresa Spangler

Leading Your Way Through Crisis — by Greg Satell

Innovating in a Downturn — by Geoffrey A. Moore

Brewing a Better Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

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

Creating Change That Lasts

Leave a reply

Creating Change That Lasts

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Lou Gerstner took over at IBM in 1993, the century-old tech giant was in dire straits. Overtaken by nimbler upstarts, like Microsoft in software, Compaq in hardware and Intel in microprocessors, it was hemorrhaging money. Many believed that it needed to be broken up into smaller, more focused units in order to compete.

Yet Gerstner saw it differently and kept the company intact, which led to one of the most dramatic turnarounds in corporate history. Today, more than a quarter century later, while many of its formal rivals have long since disappeared IBM is still profitable and on the cutting edge of many of the most exciting technologies.

That success was no accident. In researching my book, Cascades, I studied not only business transformations, but many social and political movements as well. What I found is that while most change efforts fail, the relatively few that succeed follow a pattern that is amazingly consistent. If you want to create change that lasts, here’s what you need to do.

Build Trust Through Shared Values

When Mahatma Gandhi returned to India, he began to implement a strategy of civil disobedience similar to what he had so successful in his campaigns in South Africa. He would later call this his Himalayan miscalculation. “Before a people could be fit for offering civil disobedience,” he later wrote, “they should thoroughly understand its deeper implications.”

One of the key tenets of transformation is that you can’t change fundamental behaviors without changing fundamental beliefs. So Gerstner, like Gandhi, first set out to change the culture within his organization. He saw that IBM had lost sight of its values. For example, the company had always valued competitiveness, but by the time he arrived much of that competitive energy was directed at fighting internal battles rather than in the marketplace.

“We needed to integrate as a team inside the company so that we could integrate for the customers on their premises,” Gerster would later say. “It flew in the face of what everybody did in their careers before I arrived there. It meant that we would share technical plans, we would move toward common technical standards and plans, we would not have individual transfer pricing between every product so that everybody could get their little piece of the customers’ money.”

He pushed these values constantly, through personal conversations, company emails, in the press and at company meetings. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstner’s chief lieutenants, told me, “Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted and he did it by example. We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers.”

Create a Clear Vision for the Future

At his very first press conference, Gerstner declared: “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” So it was ironic that he developed a vision for the company within months into his tenure. What he noticed was that the culture within IBM had degraded to such an extent that it was hard to align its business units around a coherent strategy

Every change effort begins with a list of grievances. Sales are down, your industry is being disrupted or technology is passing you by. But until you are able to articulate a clear vision for how you want things to look in the future, any change is bound to be fleeting. For Gerstner at IBM, that vision was to put customers, rather than technology, at the center.

He started with a single keystone change, shifting IBM’s focus from its own “proprietary stack of technologies” to its customers’ “stack of business processes.” That focus on the customer was much more clear and tangible than simply “changing the culture.” It also would require multiple stakeholders to work together and pave the way for future change.

In my research, I found that every successful transformation, whether it was a political movement, a social movement or a business transformation, was able to identify a keystone change that paved the way for a larger vision. So if you want to bring about lasting transformation, that’s a great place to start.

Identify Support — And Opposition

Once Gerstner decided to focus his transformation strategy on IBM’s customers, he found that they were terrified at the prospect of the company failing or being broken up. They depended on IBM’s products to manage mission critical processes. They also needed a partner who could help them transition legacy technology to the Internet.

He also found that he could create new allies to support his mission. For example, IBM had a history of competing with application developers, but wasn’t making much money in the application business. So he started treating the application developers as true partners and gained their support.

Yet every significant change effort is bound to attract opposition as well. There will always be a certain faction that is so tied to the old ways of doing things that they will do whatever they can to undermine the transformation and IBM was no different. Some executives, for example, enjoyed the infighting and turf battles that had become the norm. Gerstner took a zero tolerance policy and even fired some senior executives who didn’t get with the program.

Compare that to Blockbuster Video. As I’ve noted before, the company actually devised a viable strategy to meet the Netflix threat but was unable to align internal stakeholders around that strategy.

Treat Transformation as a Journey, Not A Destination

Probably the most impressive thing about IBM’s turnaround in the 90s is how it has endured. Gerstner left the firm in 2002, and it has its share of ups and downs since then, but still rakes in billions in profit every year and continues to innovate in cutting edge areas such as blockchain and quantum computing.

“The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Wladawsky-Berger told me. “Because the transformation was about values first and technology second, we were able to continue to embrace those values as the technology and marketplace continued to evolve.”

That’s what sets those that succeed from those who fail. You can’t bet your future on a particular strategy, program or tactic, because the future will always surprise us. It is how you align people behind a strategy, through forging shared values and building trust, that will determine whether change endures.

Perhaps most of all, you need to understand that transformation is always a journey, never a destination. Success is never a straight line. There will be ups and downs. But if you keep fighting for a better tomorrow, you will not only be able to bring about the change you seek, but the next ones after that as well.

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

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

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

29 Replies

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 2022:

Robyn Bolton
Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Patricia Salamone
Patricia Salamone is a career strategist having worked across the financial services, CPG, media and telecom sectors – seeking resonance with every problem she is hired to solve. Patricia sees innovation through the lens of human need, framing what is to be solved not through the problem at hand, but rather the mystery to be unraveled. Patricia is currently an Account Strategist at Gongos, Inc.

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.

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.

Brian Miller
Brian Miller is the senior VP, strategic development, at BMNT Inc., an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage enterprise accelerator that is changing the future of public service innovation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Norbert Majerus is a popular keynote speaker and consultant. His latest book, Winning Innovation – How Innovation Excellence Propels an Industry Icon Toward Sustained Prosperity, is available now. Follow him on LinkedIn or visit leandriveninnovation.com. For more than 20 years, George, as president of George Taninecz Inc., has helped executives publish award-winning books that illustrate applications of lean thinking. He also supports companies and associations with white papers, articles, and case studies on the deployment of lean in manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries.

Farnham Street
Farnham Street focuses on helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out.

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

Nicholas Longrich
Nicholas Longrich is a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology and paleontology at the University of Bath. He is interested in how and why the world is the way it is and studies dinosaurs, among other things—pterosaurs, fossil birds, lizards and snakes.

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.

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

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

. . .

Happy New Year everyone!

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

The Innovation Talent Stack

Leave a reply

Skills for the Next Decade of Change

The Innovation Talent Stack

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, companies searched for the elusive “Chief Innovation Officer” — the singular genius tasked with pulling the organization into the future. That era is dead. Today’s pace of change is too rapid, and the challenges too complex, for innovation to reside in a single silo or department. The modern competitive advantage belongs to organizations that have successfully distributed innovation capabilities across their workforce, creating an Innovation Talent Stack.

The Talent Stack is not a list of job requirements; it is a layered framework of meta-skills — mindsets, methodologies, and technological fluencies — that collectively enable continuous change and disruption. When these three layers are strong and interconnected, the organization transforms from being merely adaptive to becoming inherently resilient and generative. We must shift our focus from finding the singular “T-shaped employee” to building an organization where T-shaped skills are the standard.

The Three Layers of the Innovation Talent Stack

To prepare your workforce for the next decade, training must move beyond basic technical skills and build these three integrated layers:

1. The Foundation: Mindset and Attitude

This is the cultural operating system. Without it, methodologies and tools become fragile or threatening. This layer focuses on the individual’s approach to complexity and failure.

Adaptability Quotient (AQ): The capacity to recognize and thrive in an environment of constant change. This means teaching employees to unlearn old rules and embrace ambiguity.
Cognitive Empathy: The ability to step into a user’s world and understand their pain points and motivations — not just emotionally, but analytically — to accurately frame the problem that needs solving.
Tolerance for Ambiguity: The mental fortitude to operate without a defined outcome, focusing on the quality of the process and the learning derived from failure, not just success.

2. The Mid-Layer: Methodology and Process

These are the structured tools that translate the innovative mindset into repeatable, de-risked action. They enforce human-centered principles and drive efficiency in exploration.

Human-Centered Design (HCD): Deep proficiency in observing, ideating, prototyping, and testing solutions with the user at the center. This is the antidote to internal bias and the primary tool for generating market value.
Lean Experimentation: The skill of designing minimal-cost tests (MVPs, prototypes) to prove or disprove core assumptions. This includes mastery of metrics that measure learning speed and validated assumptions, not just immediate revenue.
Systems Thinking: The ability to trace the downstream effects of any single change. Innovation leaders must see their product or service as one node in a vast, interconnected ecosystem, anticipating ripple effects on regulation, supply chain, and culture.

3. The Top Layer: Technological Fluency and Acceleration

This is not about coding; it’s about strategic literacy. It’s the ability to speak the language of the machine to accelerate speed and scale across the organization.

AI Co-Pilot Literacy (Prompt Crafting): The skill of giving generative AI tools high-quality strategic direction and constraints, transforming the interaction from a simple query into a genuine co-creation partnership that dramatically compresses time-to-insight.
Data Storytelling and Visualization: The ability to use complex data insights (from predictive analytics, for example) to craft compelling narratives that drive organizational consensus and action, making the unseen risks and opportunities visible.
Ecosystem Mapping: Utilizing digital tools to visualize market structures, competitor moves, and partner potential in real-time, allowing for rapid strategic pivots based on external shifts.

Case Study 1: The Legacy Manufacturer’s Mindset Shift

Challenge: Product Failure due to Internal Bias

A large industrial equipment manufacturer, steeped in a culture of engineering perfection, consistently failed to launch new products successfully. Their design process was entirely internal, based on what their engineers thought the customer needed, demonstrating a critical lack of Cognitive Empathy and a low Tolerance for Ambiguity (they demanded perfect V1 launches).

Talent Stack Intervention:

The firm invested heavily in the Mindset and Methodology layers. They mandated Human-Centered Design (HCD) training for all product and sales teams, forcing them into the field to observe customer workflows. They deliberately celebrated small, cheap product failures within the innovation lab as “Learned Lessons,” directly improving Tolerance for Ambiguity. This cultural shift led to their next generation of heavy machinery being co-designed with operators. The result was a 25% decrease in post-launch support costs and a 40% increase in market adoption for the new line, proving that a methodology-driven mindset change is the necessary prerequisite for market success.

The Cognitive Gap: Where Talent Stacks Collapse

The biggest threat to this model is the Cognitive Gap — the chasm that exists when a technologically fluent team delivers a brilliant solution, but the rest of the organization lacks the mindset (AQ) or the methodology (HCD) to adopt it. When a data scientist uses complex visualization (Top Layer) but the leadership team only measures short-term ROI (Foundation Layer deficiency), the innovation dies on the vine. The Talent Stack demands horizontal fluency to bridge this gap.

Bridging this gap requires the Chief HR Officer to think like the Chief Innovation Officer. They must design training pathways that are non-linear, forcing employees to develop skills across all three layers simultaneously. A successful innovator today must be an empathetic explorer (Mindset), a structured experimenter (Methodology), and a strategically-literate technologist (Fluency).

Case Study 2: The Financial Service Firm and Accelerated Fluency

Challenge: Stagnant Idea Flow and Risk Aversion

A major bank had a strong HCD practice but its experimentation cycle was painfully slow due to regulatory and technical complexity. They could generate great ideas, but struggled with execution and de-risking, creating a backlog of ideas that never reached the market.

Talent Stack Intervention:

The bank focused on strengthening the Technological Fluency layer, particularly AI Co-Pilot Literacy and Data Storytelling. They established a “Regulatory Sandbox” where teams, using generative AI co-pilots, could draft, test, and vet new product disclosures and compliance documentation at 10x speed. This allowed them to simulate regulatory outcomes and quickly de-risk new financial products. By cutting the compliance review cycle from six weeks to three days using AI tools, they accelerated their Lean Experimentation cycle (Methodology) dramatically. This immediate acceleration of speed allowed the bank to launch a new consumer loyalty product eight months ahead of their main competitor, directly proving the return on investment from strategic technological fluency.

Conclusion: Building the Portfolio of Capabilities

The Innovation Talent Stack represents the new strategic map for organizational development. It is a Portfolio of Capabilities that guarantees relevance in the face of continuous disruption. Your company is only as innovative as its least adaptive layer. If your people have the tools but lack the empathy, they will build solutions no one wants. If they have the mindset but lack the methodology, they will remain stuck in perpetual brainstorming.

The time for focusing on single-skill specialists is over. We must cultivate T-shaped innovators — deep in a core function, but broadly fluent across the entire Talent Stack.

“Innovation is not an event, but a culture. And culture is simply the cumulative effect of the skills and mindsets you choose to reward.” — Braden Kelley

Your first step toward building the stack: Identify the top five functional leaders in your organization and assess which of the nine skills listed above they are weakest in. Then, design cross-functional immersion training to plug those specific gaps.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pixabay

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

Voting Closed for the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

Leave a reply

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

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

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

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

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

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

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking to recognize the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.

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

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2022 at midnight GMT.

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

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

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

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

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 will then be announced here in early January 2023.

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO HAS BEEN NOMINATED

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

Measuring and Improving Your Capacity for Change

Leave a reply

The Adaptability Quotient (AQ)

Measuring and Improving Your Capacity for Change

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the 20th century, Intelligence Quotient (IQ) reigned supreme. In the early 21st century, Emotional Quotient (EQ) became the recognized differentiator for effective leadership. Today, in a world defined by exponential technology, global volatility, and non-stop disruption, a new measure has emerged as the most critical predictor of both individual and organizational success: the Adaptability Quotient (AQ).

AQ is the measure of an individual’s or organization’s capacity to recognize, navigate, and thrive in an environment of constant change. It is not simply about coping with change; it is about the willingness and ability to unlearn, pivot, and proactively seek new ways of operating when old competencies lose relevance. The leaders and organizations that master AQ will be the ones who survive and become the disruptors.

Why AQ Trumps IQ and EQ in Volatility

IQ and EQ are necessary, but they are insufficient for sustained success in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. A brilliant strategist (High IQ) may cling to an outdated business model because their knowledge base is too rigid. An emotionally intelligent leader (High EQ) may soothe their team’s anxiety, but fail to push them to take the necessary risk of abandoning a comfortable process.

AQ is the bridge between knowing and doing. It is the ability to integrate intellectual understanding (IQ) with social awareness (EQ) to execute a radical pivot. It moves the human system from a state of resistance to a state of readiness. We must start treating AQ not as a soft skill, but as a core strategic asset that can be measured, trained, and cultivated.

The Three Pillars of Organizational AQ

For an organization, AQ is an expression of its collective culture and structural design. We can break it down into three core components:

Cognitive Agility (The Mental Pivot):
This is the organizational ability to unlearn rapidly. It involves questioning deeply held assumptions and embracing ambiguity. Does your organization view variance as a problem to be fixed, or as a signal of market change to be investigated? A high AQ organization actively solicits perspectives that contradict the prevailing narrative.
Emotional Resilience (The Cultural Buffer):
This is the organizational capacity to process the anxiety and fear that accompanies change without collapsing into inertia. Leaders with high individual AQ create psychological safety that allows teams to fail, learn, and try again quickly. This resilience transforms resistance into energy for experimentation.
Execution Velocity (The Structural Fluidity):
This is the speed at which the organization can implement a new strategy or product. High AQ requires structural changes: flattened hierarchies, modular organizational units, and decentralized decision-making (empowering teams at the edge). A great idea is useless if it takes eighteen months and five committees to approve.

Case Study 1: The Media Company’s Structural Pivot for Survival

Challenge: The Digital Ad Revenue Cliff

A major publishing house was built on print and traditional digital advertising. When programmatic advertising began to commoditize their core revenue stream, leadership faced massive cognitive dissonance and internal resistance to changing their successful model.

AQ Intervention (Success):

The leadership team implemented a high-AQ pivot. They mandated that 50% of the entire newsroom and sales staff must be cross-trained in data-driven subscription modeling (Cognitive Agility). Crucially, they separated the new ‘Subscription Revenue Unit’ into a fully autonomous internal startup, giving the lead intrapreneurs full control over budget and rapid hiring (Execution Velocity). The public acknowledgment of the financial threat (addressing Emotional Resilience) gave employees permission to abandon the past. This structural separation allowed the new unit to develop a profitable subscription business in 18 months, effectively securing the company’s future by pivoting before the crisis became terminal.

Measuring Your Organization’s AQ

While a precise, standardized number is still emerging, you can measure your organization’s AQ through three critical proxies:

Time-to-Pivot: How long does it take your company to kill a failing project or fully launch a new, major strategic direction after the initial market signal is received? Lower is better.
Unlearning Index: What percentage of the annual training budget is dedicated to acquiring new skills versus reinforcing old skills? How many legacy processes were officially retired last year?
Experimentation Rate: What is the ratio of high-risk, low-budget market experiments to high-budget, safe-bet initiatives? High AQ companies embrace frequent, small bets.

Case Study 2: The Healthcare Provider’s Resilience Test

Challenge: Rapid, Unforeseen Regulatory and Technological Change

A regional healthcare network struggled to integrate mandatory new EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems while simultaneously pivoting to telemedicine during a crisis. Staff resistance was crippling both initiatives due to anxiety and workflow overload.

AQ Intervention (Success):

The leadership recognized the exhaustion and fear. Instead of simply pushing mandates, they invested heavily in Emotional Resilience. They established a system of “Change Huddles” — short, daily, mandatory forums where frontline staff could voice their specific process frustrations with a promise that the administration would address the top three friction points within 48 hours. This structural feedback loop demonstrated genuine care (Emotional Resilience) and immediately tackled bureaucratic bottlenecks (Execution Velocity). By giving staff a sense of agency and responsiveness, the organization maintained high morale and successfully implemented both the EHR and telemedicine system faster than comparable networks, proving that human capacity for change is the limiting factor, not the technology.

Conclusion: The Architect of Adaptability

In the era of continuous transformation, the Adaptability Quotient is not optional; it is the fundamental measure of competitive relevance. Leaders must evolve from managers of stability to Architects of Adaptability. This shift demands that we prioritize fluid structure over rigid hierarchy, psychological safety over command-and-control, and continuous unlearning over the comfort of expertise.

“IQ gets you hired, EQ helps you manage, but AQ determines your survival. The future belongs not to the smartest, but to the most adaptive.” — Braden Kelley

The time to raise your AQ is now. Your first step: Identify the single biggest bureaucratic obstacle that prevents your teams from executing a pivot in less than 90 days, and commit to eliminating it entirely.

Extra Extra: 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: 1 of 950+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

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

Voting Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

1 Reply

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

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking to recognize the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022.

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

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2022 at midnight GMT.

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

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

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022 will then be announced here in early January 2023.

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

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

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

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

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