Category Archives: Change

It All Starts with Wanting Things to be Different

It All Starts With Wanting Things to be Different

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Wanting things to be different is a good start, but it’s not enough. To create conditions for things to move in a new direction, you’ve got to change your behavior. But with systems that involve people, this is not a straightforward process.

To create conditions for the system to change, you must understand the system”s disposition – the lines along which it prefers to change.. And to do that, you’ve got to push on the system and watch its response. With people systems, the response is not knowable before the experiment.

If you expect to be able to predict how the system will respond, working with people systems can be frustrating. I offer some guidance here. With this work, you are not responsible for the system’s response, you are only responsible for how you respond to the system’s response.

If the system responds in a way you like, turn that experiment into a project to amplify the change. If the system responds in a way you dislike, unwind the experiment. Here’s a simple mantra – do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. (Thanks to Dave Snowden for this.)

If you don’t like how things are going, you have only one lever to pull. You can only change.your response to what you see and experience. You can respond by pushing on the system and responding to what you see or you can respond by changing what you think and feel about the system.

But keep in mind that you are part of the system. And maybe the system is running an experiment on you. Either way, your only choice is to choose how to respond.

Image credits: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available for download at http://misterinnovation.com

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Building Transformative Teams

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Building Transformative Teams

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

One of the most common questions I get asked by senior managers is “How can we find more innovative people?” I know the type they have in mind. Someone energetic and dynamic, full of ideas and able to present them powerfully. It seems like everybody these days is looking for an early version of Steve Jobs.

Yet the truth is that today’s high value work is not done by individuals, but teams. It wasn’t always this way. The journal Nature noted that until the 1920’s most scientific papers only had a single author, but by the 1950s that co-authorship became the norm and now the average paper has four times as many authors as it did back then.

To solve the kind of complex problems that it takes to drive genuine transformation, you don’t need the best people, you need the best teams. That’s why traditional job descriptions lead us astray. They tend to focus on task-driven skills rather than collaboration skills. We need to change how we evaluate, recruit, manage and train talent. Here’s what to look for:

Passion For A Problem

I once had a unit manager who wasn’t performing the way we wanted her to. She wasn’t totally awful. In fact, she was well liked by her staff, coworkers, and senior management. But she wasn’t showing anywhere near the creativity required to take the business to the next level and we decided to ease her out of her position.

Then a funny thing happened. After she left our company, she became a successful interior decorator. Her clients loved how she could transform a space with creativity and style. She also displayed many of the same qualities that made her so well liked as a manager. She was a good listener, highly collaborative, and focused on results.

So why is it that someone could be so dull and unimaginative in one context and so creative in another? The simplest answer is that she was a lot more interested in interior decorating than she was in our business. Researchers have long established that intrinsic motivation is a major component of what makes people creative.

The biggest misconception about innovation is that it’s about ideas. It’s not. It’s about solving problems. So the first step to building a transformative team is to hire people interested in the problems you are trying to solve. If someone has a true passion for your mission, work to develop the ideas you need to crack the problem.

Collaboration Skills

We often think of high performing teams being driven by a dominant, charismatic leader, but research shows just the opposite. In one wide ranging study, scientists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon found that high performing teams are made up of people who have high social sensitivity, take turns when speaking and include women in the group.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has researched the workplace for decades and has found that psychological safety, or the ability of each team member to be able to give voice to their ideas without fear of reprisal or rebuke, is crucial for high performing, innovative teams. Google found much the same thing when it studied what makes great teams tick.

Stanford professor Robert Sutton also summarized wide ranging research for his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, which showed that even one disruptive member can poison a work environment, decrease productivity and drive valuable employees to leave the company. So even if someone is a great individual performer, it’s better to get rid of nasty people than allow them to sabotage the effectiveness of an entire team.

The most transformative teams are the ones that collaborate well. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to evaluate individual performance than teamwork. So lazy managers tend to reward people who are good at taking credit rather than those who actively listen and provide crucial support to those around them.

High Quality Interaction

There is increasing evidence that how teams interact is crucial for how they perform. A study done for the CIA performed after 9/11 to determine what attributes made for the most effective analyst teams found that what made teams successful was not the attributes of their members, or even the coaching they got from their leaders, but the interactions within the team itself.

More specifically, they found that teams that work interdependently tend to perform much better than when tasks are doled out individually and carried out in parallel. Another study found that teams that interacted more on a face-to-face basis, rather than remotely, tended to build higher levels of trust and produced more creative work.

While the quality of remote working tools, including teleconferencing apps like Zoom and collaboration tools like Mural and Miro, have greatly improved in recent years, we still need to take the time to build authentic relationships with those we work with. That can include regular in-person team meetups for remote teams or even intermittent relationship building calls unrelated to current projects.

What’s crucial to understand and internalize is that the value of a team is not just the sum of each individual contribution, but what happens when ideas bounce against each other. That’s what allows concepts to evolve and grow into something completely new and different. Innovation, more than anything else, is combination.

Talent Isn’t Something You Hire, It’s Something You Build

The truth is that there is no effective answer for the question, “how do we find innovative people?” Talent isn’t something you hire or win in a war, it’s something you empower. It depends less on the innate skills of individuals than how people are supported and led. As workplace expert David Burkus puts it, “talent doesn’t make the team. The team makes the talent.”

All too often, leaders take a transactional view and try to manage by incentives. They believe that if they contrive the right combination of carrots and sticks, they can engineer creativity and performance. Yet the world doesn’t work that way. We can’t simply treat people as means to an end and expect them to achieve at a high level. We have to treat them as ends in themselves.

Effective leaders provide their teams with a sense of shared purpose and common mission. They provide an environment of psychological safety not because of some misplaced sense of altruism, but to enable honest and candid collaboration. They cultivate a culture of connection that leads to genuine relationships among colleagues.

What’s crucial for leaders to understand is that the problems we need to solve now are far too complex for us to rely on individual accomplishments. The high value work today is done by teams and that is what we need to focus on. It’s no longer enough for leaders to simply plan and direct action. We need to inspire and empower belief.

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

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We Need to Stop Rooting for Change

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We Need To Stop Rooting For Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Today, everyone seems to want to associate themselves with change. Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s former CEO, loved to call his firm a 124 year-old startup. Its value fell by 30% under his tenure and would later collapse. Bill Gates pointed out that the culprit wasn’t innovation or disruption, but basic mismanagement.

It seems that, these days, Immelt’s leadership is closer to the rule than the exception. Everybody wants to be an innovator. Nobody wants to be associated with the status quo. Even political conservatives describe themselves as a “movement,” a seeming contradiction in terms. Change has become gospel, an end in itself rather than a mere means to an end.

The truth is that innovation is less about new ideas than it is about identifying meaningful problems. Too much happy talk about change can actually undermine meaningful transformation. If your focus on the fabulous yonder obscures your view into the day-to-day, you’re most likely headed for trouble. We need to start taking change more seriously.

Change Is Hard. People Are Struggling

Humans struggle to adapt. Our brains are not wired for change, but build synaptic pathways based on past experiences. These can change over time, but with some difficulty. We are also greatly influenced by those around us, whose brains have been shaped by similar experiences. Finally, there are often genuine switching costs that need to be overcome.

The notion that transformation can be challenging is nothing new. What managers often fail to account for, however, is that change never happens in a vacuum. It must be seen in context of everything else that’s going on in people’s lives, including pressures related to family, economic and health concerns.

Consider that research points to a dramatic increase of anxiety and depression since the start of the pandemic. Another study reported in Harvard Business Review found that 76% of employees in 2021 reported at least one mental health symptom, up from 59% in 2019 and 50% have reported leaving a job due to mental health concerns, compared to 34% two years earlier. Those are dramatic increases on already high levels.

Yet even before the pandemic there were signs of trouble. A 2014 report by PwC revealed that 65% of respondents in corporations cited change fatigue, 44% of employees complained they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. Should we be surprised that so many change initiatives fail?

Too Much Early Talk Ignites Resistance

Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.

Yet this approach can often backfire. Any time you ask people to change what they think or how they act, there will be some who won’t like it and they will work to undermine you in ways that are often dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Starting a transformation initiative with a big kickoff just gives them an early warning that they’d better get started sabotaging you or change might actually take place.

Unfortunately, there are perverse incentives involved in many initiatives. When change involves new capability, there are inevitably vendors involved and consultants are brought in to manage the process. Often, in addition to helping to design and procure systems, these consultants are given the assignment for organizational change management as well.

At first, it may seem intuitive and sensible that the same vendor that designs the system helps implement the program. However, what is often missed is that these consultants are much more heavily financially incentivized to close the deal, which can often be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, than to drive genuine long-term transformation.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that what passes for “organizational change management” is often little more than an internal communication strategy and a training program implementation. That clearly doesn’t suffice.

Change Is Nonlinear. There Are Advantages To Starting Slow

People who are passionate about change naturally want it to happen as soon as possible. This is especially true of action-oriented managers, who pride themselves on executing a plan quickly and efficiently. There are often informal organizational incentives as well. Executives who are seen to be hard-charging and who “get things done” can be more likely to move up the corporate ladder.

Yet consider the case of Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence. Soon after returning to India from South Africa, he called for nationwide strikes in response to the repressive Rowlatt Act. The people immediately rose up, but things quickly spun out of control and ended in tragedy. A decade later, he learned from his mistake and set out on his Salt March with just a small, disciplined cadre, which would inspire the world and help lead to Indian Independence.

Similar strategies have proven highly effective in organizational transformations. When Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began its shift to lean manufacturing, it started with a single team in a single plant, but success there led to a transformation involving 17,000 employees. When Experian sought to shift to a cloud-based enterprise, it started with internal API’s that had limited effect on its business, but helped lead to genuine and complete change.

What each of these had in common is that they started with a keystone change, which had a concrete and tangible goal, involved multiple stakeholders and paved the way for future change. While the initial wins were small, they showed what was possible and, because they were successful, they were able to build momentum and grow exponentially.

Change isn’t linear. Success grows exponentially on success. That’s why you often need to start slow to move fast.

Making Change Meaningful

My friend Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet many leaders approach change initiatives as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie.

The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without a track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Most often, they’ll pay lip service, take a “wait and see” approach and then turn away at the first sign of trouble.

The problem with cheerleading change is that it puts the cart before the horse. People don’t embrace change because you came up with a fancy slogan, they adopt what they find meaningful, that creates genuine value to their lives and their work. Without that, all the happy talk just seems like a con.

We need to have more reverence for the mundane and ordinary. For better or worse, it works and it’s what people know. To create genuine transformation we need to get out of the business of selling ideas and into the business of selling success. If we can help allies to make change successful, even on a small scale, they can bring in others who bring in others still.

That can’t be done through persuasion, we have to start by identifying people who are already enthusiastic about change. Change isn’t about communication, but empowerment.

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

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Seeing Things as They Cannot Be

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Seeing Things as They Cannot Be

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When there’s a big problem, the first step is to define what’s causing it. To do that, based on an understanding of the physics, a sequence of events is proposed and then tested to see if it replicates the problem. In that way, the team must understand the system as it is before the problem can be solved.

Seeing Things as They Are

The same logic applies when it’s time to improve an existing product or service. The first thing to do is to see the system as it is. But seeing things as they are is difficult. We have a tendency to see things as we want them or to see them in ways that make us look good (or smart). Or, we see them in a way that justifies the improvements we already know we want to make.

To battle our biases and see things as they are, we use tools such as block diagrams to define the system as it is. The most important element of the block diagram is clarity. The first revision will be incorrect, but it must be clear and explicit. It must describe things in a way that creates a singular understanding of the system. The best block diagrams can be interpreted only one way. More strongly, if there’s ambiguity or lack of clarity, the thing has not yet risen to the level of a block diagram.

The block diagram evolves as the team converges on a single understanding of things as they are. And with a diagram of things as they are, a solution is readily defined and validated. If when tested the proposed solution makes the problem go away, it’s inferred that the team sees things as they are and the solution takes advantage of that understanding to make the problem go away.

Seeing Things as They May Be

Even whey the solution fixes the problem, the team really doesn’t know if they see things as they are. Really, all they know is they see things as they may be. Sure, the solution makes the problem go away, but it’s impossible to really know if the solution captures the physics of failure. When the system is large and has a lot of moving parts, the team cannot see things as they are, rather, they can only see the system as it may be. This is especially true if the system involves people, as people behave differently based on how they feel and what happened to them yesterday.

There’s inherent uncertainty when working with larger systems and systems that involve people. It’s not insurmountable, but you’ve got to acknowledge that your understanding of the system is less than perfect. If your company is used to solving small problems within small systems, there will be little tolerance for the inherent uncertainty and associated unpredictability (in time) of a solution. To help your company make the transition, replace the language of “seeing things as they are” with “seeing things as they may be.” The same diagnostic process applies, but since the understanding of the system is incomplete or wrong, the proposed solutions cannot not be pre-judged as “this will work” and “that won’t work.” You’ve got to be open to all potential solutions that don’t contradict the system as it may be. And you’ve got to be tolerant of the inherent unpredictability of the effort as a whole.

Seeing Things as They Could Be

To create something that doesn’t yet exist, something does things like never before, something altogether new, you’ve got to stand on top of your understanding of the system and jump off. Whether you see things as they are or as they may be, the new system will be different. It’s not about diagnosing the existing system; it’s about imagining the system as it could be. And there’s a paradox here. The better you understand the existing system, the more difficulty you’ll have imagining the new one. And, the more success the company has had with the system as it is, the more resistance you’ll feel when you try to make the system something it could be.

Seeing things as they could be takes courage – courage to obsolete your best work and courage to divest from success. The first one must be overcome first. Your body creates stress around the notion of making yourself look bad. If you can create something altogether better, why didn’t you do it last time? There’s a hit to the ego around making your best work look like it’s not all that good. But once you get over all that, you’ve earned the right to go to battle with your organization who is afraid to move away from the recipe responsible for all the profits generated over the last decade.

But don’t look at those fears as bad. Rather, look at them as indicators you’re working on something that could make a real difference. Your ego recognizes you’re working on something better and it sends fear into your veins. The organization recognizes you’re working on something that threatens the status quo and it does what it can to make you stop. You’re onto something. Keep going.

Seeing Things as They Can’t Be

This is rarified air. In this domain you must violate first principles. In this domain you’ve got to run experiments that everyone thinks are unreasonable, if not ill-informed. You must do the opposite. If your product is fast, your prototype must be the slowest. If the existing one is the heaviest, you must make the lightest. If your reputation is based on the highest functioning products, the new offering must do far less. If your offering requires trained operators, the new one must prevent operator involvement.

If your most seasoned Principal Engineer thinks it’s a good idea, you’re doing it wrong. You’ve got to propose an idea that makes the most experienced people throw something at you. You’ve got to suggest something so crazy they start foaming at the mouth. Your concepts must rip out their fillings. Where “seeing things as they could be” creates some organizational stress, “seeing things as they can’t be” creates earthquakes. If you’re not prepared to be fired, this is not the domain for you.

All four of these domains are valuable and have merit. And we need them all. If there’s one message it’s be clear which domain you’re working in. And if there’s a second message it’s explain to company leadership which domain you’re working in and set expectations on the level of uncertainty and unpredictability of that domain.

Image credits: Pexels

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ChatGPT Blew My Mind with its Strategy Development

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ChatGPT Blew My Mind with its Strategy Development

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s easy to get complacent about your strategy skills. After all, our yearly “strategic planning” processes result in quarterly “strategic priorities” that require daily “strategic decisions.” So, it’s reasonable to assume that we know what we’re doing when it comes to strategy development.

I’ll admit I did. After all, I’ve written strategic plans for major brands, developed strategies for billion-dollar businesses, and teach strategy in a Masters program.

I thought I knew what I was doing.

Then ChatGPT proved me wrong.

How it Began

My student’s Midterm assignment for this semester is to develop, recommend, and support a strategy for the companies they’ve studied for the past seven weeks. Each week, we apply a different framework – Strategy Kernel, SWOT, Business Model Canvas, Porter’s 5 Forces, PESTLE, Value Chain – to a case study. Then, for homework, they apply the framework to the company they are analyzing.

Now, it’s time to roll up all that analysis and turn it into strategic insights and a recommended strategy.

Naturally, they asked me for examples.

I don’t have a whole lot of examples, and I have precisely none that I can share with them.

I quickly fed The LEGO Group’s Annual Report, Sustainability Report, and Modern Slavery and Transparency Statements into ChatGPT and went to work.

Two hours later, I had everything needed to make a solid case that LEGO needs to change its strategy due to risks with consumers, partners, and retailers. Not only that, the strategy was concise and memorable, with only 34 carefully chosen words waiting to be brought to life through the execution of seven initiatives.

Two hours after that, all of my genius strategic analysis had been poured into a beautifully designed and perfectly LEGO-branded presentation that, in a mere six slides, laid out the entire case for change (which was, of course, supported by a 10-page appendix).

The Moment

As I gazed lovingly at my work, I felt pretty proud of myself. I even toyed with the idea of dropping a copy off at LEGO’s Back Bay headquarters in case they needed some help.

I chuckled at my little daydream, knowing no one would look at it because no one asked for it, and no implementers were involved in creating it.

That’s when it hit me.

All the reasons my daydream would never become a reality also applied to every strategy effort I’ve ever been part of.

No one looks at your strategy because it’s just a box to check to get next year’s budget.
No one asks for it because they’re already working hard to maintain the status quo. They don’t have the time or energy to imagine a better future when they’re just trying to get through today.
No one responsible for implementing it was involved in creating it because strategy is created at high levels of the organization or outsourced to consultants.

What the strategy is doesn’t matter.*

What matters is how the strategy was created.

Conversation is the only way to create a successful, actionable, and impactful strategy.

Conversation with the people responsible for implementing it, they people on the ground and the front lines, the people dealing with the ripple effects of all those “strategic” decisions.

How It’s Going

Today, I’m challenging myself—and you—to make strategy a dialogue, not a monologue. To value participation over presentation. Because strategy without conversation isn’t strategy at all—it’s just a beautiful document waiting to be forgotten.

Who are you inviting into your next strategy conversation that isn’t usually there but should be? Share in the comments below.

Image credit: Pexels

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of March 2025 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 March’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results — by Robyn Bolton
Leading Through Complexity and Uncertainty — by Greg Satell
Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
The Role Platforms Play in Business Networks — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Inspiring Innovation — by John Bessant
Six Keys to Effective Teamwork — by David Burkus
Product-Lifecycle Management 2.0 — by Dr. Matthew Heim
5 Business Myths You Cannot Afford to Believe — by Shep Hyken
What Great Ideas Feel Like — by Mike Shipulski
Better Decision Making at Speed — by Mike Shipulski

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

The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024 — by Braden Kelley
Your Innovation Team Doesn’t Have to be Dead — by Robyn Bolton
Unlocking Trapped Value with AI — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Be Better or Be Different? — by Shep Hyken
Ten Reasons Every B2B Company Needs an Evangelist — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

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

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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What Playing the Flute Taught Me About Business Growth

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What Playing the Flute Taught Me About Business Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Ideas and insights can emerge from the most unexpected places. My mom was a preschool teacher, and I often say that I learned everything I needed to know about managing people by watching her wrangle four-year-olds. But it only recently occurred to me that the most valuable business growth lessons came from my thoroughly unremarkable years playing the flute in middle school.

6th Grade: Following the Manual and Falling Flat

Sixth grade was momentous for many reasons, one being that that was when students could choose an instrument and join the school band. I chose the flute because my friends did, and there was a rumor that clarinets gave you buck teeth—I had enough orthodontic issues already.

Each week, our “jill of all trades” teacher gathered the flutists together and guided us through the instructional book until we could play a passable version of Yankee Doodle. I practiced daily, following the book and playing the notes, but the music was lifeless, and I was bored.

7th Grade: Finding Context and Direction

In seventh grade, we moved to full band rehearsals with a new teacher trained to lead an entire band (he was also deaf in one ear, which was, I think, a better qualification for the job than his degree). Hearing all the instruments together made the music more interesting and I was more motivated to practice because I understood how my part played in the whole. But I was still a very average flutist.

To help me improve, my parents got me a private flute teacher. Once a week, Mom drove me to my flute teacher’s house for one-on-one tutoring. She corrected mistakes when I made them, showed me tips and tricks to play faster and breathe deeper, and selected music I enjoyed playing. With her help, I became an above-average flutist.

Post-Grad: Five Business Truths from Band Class

I stopped playing in the 12th grade. Despite everyone’s efforts, I was never exceptional—I didn’t care enough to do the work required.

Looking back, I realized that my mediocrity taught me five crucial lessons that had nothing to do with music:

Don’t do something just because everyone else is. I chose the flute because my friends did. I didn’t choose my path but followed others—that’s why the music was lifeless.
Following the instruction manual is worse than doing nothing. You can’t learn an instrument from a book. Are you sharp or flat? Too fast or slow? You don’t know, but others do (but don’t say anything).
Part of a person is better than all of a book. Though spread thin, the time my teachers spent with each instrumental section was the difference between technically correct noise and tolerable music.
A dedicated teacher beats a distracted one. Having someone beside me meant no mistake went uncorrected and no triumph unrecognized. She knew my abilities and found music that stretched me without causing frustration.
If you don’t want to do what’s required, be honest about it. I stopped wanting to play the flute in 10th grade but kept going because it was easier to maintain the status quo. In hindsight, a lot of time, money, and effort would have been saved if I stopped playing when I stopped caring.

The Executive Orchestra: What Grade Are You In?

How many executives remain in sixth grade—following management fads because of FOMO, buying books, handing them out, and expecting magic? And, when that fails, hiring someone to do the work for them and wondering why the music stops when the contract ends?

How many progress to seventh grade, finding someone who can teach, correct, and celebrate their teams as they build new capabilities?

How do what I should have done in 10th grade and be honest about what they are and aren’t willing to do, spending time and resources on priorities rather than maintaining an image?

More importantly, what grade are you in?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Probably the greatest misconception about change is that it fails because people don’t understand it. The truth is that change usually fails because it is actively sabotaged. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. Anytime you ask people to change what they think or how they act, you can expect resistance.

Yet not all resistance is the same. Some people are merely skeptical about change, they are looking for evidence based, rational arguments that the proposed action will achieve positive results. Often, however, resistance is irrational and no amount of evidence will be persuasive. People are actively working to subvert change efforts.

We can’t let our transformation efforts be defined by those who want it to fail. Not everyone will embrace change. Instead of wasting time and effort to convince the opposition, we should focus our efforts on empowering those who want it to succeed. However, we need to learn to recognize different kinds of resistance so that we can address genuine issues.

1. Change Fatigue

In recent years, business pundits have embraced the change gospel. We are told that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Therefore, we must “innovate or die.” This creates an environment in which leaders have strong incentives to be seen as dynamic change agents who drive multiple initiatives.

Yet the truth is that, for most industries, we live in a decidedly un-VUCA world. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

With so much talk about change, but so little of it actually happening, it shouldn’t be surprising that a study by PwC found that 65% of workers experienced “change fatigue” and that only half felt that their organization had the capabilities to deliver change. In other words, the change gospel is undermining our ability to produce real change!

That’s why in our transformation workshops the very first thing we ask participants to define is the need for change. We simply can’t expect people to get on board with a change initiative if they don’t see a genuine, meaningful problem being solved. Change, for change’s sake, is simply a waste of everybody’s time.

So before you embark on any transformation initiative ask yourself: “Why do we need this change? What problem are we solving? What value would we derive from solving it? Is that value worth disrupting people’s lives and work?

2. Perverse Incentives

Earlier in my career my work focused on turning around media companies in Eastern Europe and I noticed an interesting trend. Managers of sales departments in struggling companies often accounted for the majority of sales (and commissions) in their companies. Because these leaders were seen as major drivers of revenue, they had an enormous amount of power.

The secret to their success had less to do with any actual sales ability and vastly more to do with the fact that, for a variety of reasons, they had managed to get the prime accounts for themselves and, even if they were managing those accounts poorly, had no incentive to spread them around. They were, in effect, being incentivized to mismanage.

The truth is that we’ve known for decades that financial incentives usually backfire. Nevertheless, when we sit down with leaders to define a change strategy they invariably want to start by devising a complex system of “carrots and sticks” to engineer the behavior they want to see and are often disappointed when they are told that it’s a bad idea.

You never want to have to incentivize people to drive change. If an initiative has real value, you should be able to find people who are enthusiastic about it and want to make it work. Even a small initial cadre should be enough to deliver a successful keystone change and get the ball rolling. After that, the issue has more to do with scaling change than anything else.

3. Switching Costs

Every change encounters switching costs. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.

There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a significant roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we all have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the mysterious promise of transformation.

Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.

You never want to get bogged down in selling an idea. The switching costs will always be more real to skeptics than any image you can conjure. Rather, you want to identify people who are already enthusiastic about the change and willing to bear any costs associated with switching. If you can empower them to succeed with a keystone change, you can sell that tangible success, which is always a stronger value proposition.

A key thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t have to convince early adopters. If you feel the need to persuade, you either have the wrong change or the wrong people. Find people who are as passionate as you are and show change can work. Then you can start thinking about bringing others in.

4. Identity And Dignity

Gary Starkweather had a big idea, but his boss at Xerox’s Research Center in Webster, NY hated it so much that he threatened to fire anyone who worked on it. To him, Xerox was a copier company and the idea didn’t have anything to do with copiers. Luckily, for Gary and for Xerox, the idea meshed perfectly with the new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)’s mission and the laser printed he developed there helped save the company.

Xerox PARC has since become almost synonymous with innovation, but even the researchers there could be hostile to ideas that were different. Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith, were working on a new graphics technology called SuperPaint. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in with PARC’s vision of personal computing and the two became outcasts. Smith would later team up with Ed Catmull and the technology would form the core of what became Pixar.

One of the biggest mistakes change leaders make is assuming that resistance to change has a rational basis. Very often people oppose change because it offends their identity and sense of self. We all take pride in the way we go about things, whether that involves our actions or our way of thinking about things.

This is the most visceral kind of resistance. We can motivate people to push through fatigue or bear the burden of inevitable switching costs, but we can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are. When people see themselves in a particular way, they rarely change and, in fact, will pay almost any price to stay true to their inner core.

What can be hardest about change, especially when we feel passionately about it, is that at some point, we need to accept that others will not embrace it and we will have to leave some behind. Not every change is for everybody. Some will have to pursue a different journey, one to which they can devote their passions and seek out their own truths.

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

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Focus your Emotional Energy Purposefully

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Focus your Emotional Energy Purposefully

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When I exited my corporate career more than thirty-five years ago, I was privileged to be regarded and respected as the Fashion Direction Manager for the Grace Bros Department Store group, one of Australia’s most senior women in retail management. This launched my global reputation as a fashion and lifestyle marketing innovator. In this exciting role, I was responsible for designing and implementing a company-wide fashion information system for apparel, accessories, homeware, merchandising, and advertising. This required me to focus my emotional energy on researching, analyzing, and conceptualizing global fashion and lifestyle trends and adapting them to suit the Australian consumer lifestyle.

It was a dream role before the invention of the Internet, the implosion of the mass media, and the dominance of fast fashion. It required our team to focus their emotional energy on intensively researching different global and diverse media sources, including yarn, textile, couture, designer, ready-to-wear shows, trade journals, magazines, and seasonal sales data.

Generating creative thinking

Creativity is about connecting things, and in the fashion world, the best designers make the most unlikely connections to produce novel and wondrous creations. As my professional background included graphic and fashion design and marketing, I could further hone my associative (lateral and connective) thinking skills to think creatively and critically in this role. To focus my emotional energy and attention on guiding my intuition, values, and decisions on the needs and wants of buyers, merchandisers, marketers, and customers. To emerge, diverge and converge the key connections and patterns occurring globally in the fashion world and external complex fashion systems. I also learned the importance of being customer-focused and the value and role of being empathic with customers, manufacturers’ value chains and fashion information system users.

It was an incredibly emotional, physical, and stressful role, which required me to travel overseas four times a year to stay current on the different global fashion streams.

This caused my life to melt into being at work, the gym, or the airport.

Stress-induced exhaustion and burnout

This resulted in my first profound encounter with stress-induced exhaustion and burnout, which hit me right in the face one morning when my body refused to move, and I was unable to get out of bed.

I have also noticed that many of my global coaching clients have faced a similar challenge: stress-induced exhaustion and burnout. Fortunately, they can use the coaching partnership to unearth their particular pattern and unresourceful ways of being and learn how to focus their emotional energy to disrupt, dispute, and deviate from it into a more resourceful way of being and acting. However, it has shifted the coach’s role as a healer, making it even more critical in our current environment.

Focusing emotional energy on pursuing mattering, meaning and purposeful work

This ultimately manifests as a crisis and becomes a defining moment. In my case, I made a fundamental choice to focus emotional energy on pursuing meaning, mattering, and purposeful work, which still focuses my full attention and drives me today.

It created a “crack, “or an opening and threshold for making two fundamental choices: to embark on a healing journey to become the kind of person I wanted to be and to find a way to focus my emotional energy on making the difference I wanted to make in the world.

This enabled me to use my knowledge, experience, and skills to establish Australia’s first design management consultancy.

What is emotional energy?

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative and critical thinking strategies, now in partnership with AI.

When a person’s emotional energy has contracted, it results in constrained, negative, pessimistic, and even catastrophic thinking habits, which have a toxic impact on the person’s identity and emotional and physical well-being.

This means there is no space, doorway, or threshold to take on anything new, novel, or different. Nor can they imagine what might be possible to evolve, advance, or transform their personal or professional lives in an uncertain future.

Emotional energy catalyses and directs your intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach your world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When you are true to your calling or purpose, you will make extra efforts to be healthier, positively impact your well-being, and improve your resilience.

How does this apply to leadership in uncertain times?

“I think leaders need to remember that they are in the energy management business,” says Halsey. “Their role is to keep people focused, energized, and positive about themselves and their work. They may be unable to change external circumstances, but they can create a safe, nurturing, and empowering work environment. By setting clear goals, diagnosing individual needs, and providing the right leadership style, leaders can help their teams thrive—even in uncertain times.”

People want work to be less of a job and more of a calling.

According to Martin Seligman and Gabriella Rosen Kellerman in their book Tomorrowmind, a US-based research study that included two thousand employees of all ages, industries, tenures, and incomes, revealed that people craved more meaning at work regardless of sector or position. Everyone wanted work to be less of a job and more of a calling and gave their current jobs a rating of 49, which suggests that their “meaning cups” are only half full.

This search for meaning, mattering, and being of service to humanity in a different and value-adding way enables innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to cultivate the emotional energy and develop the agility required to drive their creativity, invention and innovation endeavors.

It is the most critical ingredient that motivates, empowers, enables, fuels and sustains innovators, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs to adapt, survive and thrive on the innovation roller coaster.

Channeling emotional energy meaningfully and purposefully

From my leadership training and coaching experience, I have learned that most people desperately want their lives to make sense and be meaningful and to know that who they are and what they do matters. It is possible to link meaning and mattering to being intentionally motivated and directed by your core values to make a difference and a contribution that provides value and significance to someone, a community, or society.

Being purposeful

Being purposeful focuses your emotional energy, guides your life decisions influences your behaviors, shapes your goals, offers a sense of direction, and creates meaning. Rather than engaging in shallow, empty, or pointless activities, it gives you agency.

In our uncertain, volatile and disruptive world, it is crucial to think about your “purpose in life.” Be like an Entrepreneur and link your purpose as a guidepost to help you deal with uncertainty, navigate it better, mitigate the damaging effects of long-term stress, and become psychologically resilient.

People with a strong sense of purpose direct and focus their emotional energy on what really matters to them. They tend to be more agile and adaptive, hardier and resilient, and more able to refocus and recover quickly from adverse and catastrophic events.

According to McKinsey & Co.’s article “Igniting individual purpose in times of crisis,” purposeful people also live longer and healthier lives and are essential to employee experience. This results in higher levels of employee engagement, more substantial organizational commitment, and increased feelings of well-being. Like many entrepreneurs, people who find their purpose congruent with their jobs tend to get more meaning from their roles, making them more productive and more likely to outperform their peers.

How can you add more meaning, mattering and purpose?

Meaning is an outcome of purpose, and many people, due to their experience of the pandemic and hybrid workplace in a chaotic and uncertain world, are seeking to re-engage with their work and workplaces by focusing their emotional energy on improving their well-being and creating more purposeful, balanced, and meaningful lives.

This is a short section from our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Activating the Heart, Mind and Soul of Innovation”, which will be published in 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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 9-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 up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of February 2025 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 February’s ten most popular innovation posts: