Category Archives: Change

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

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

Why Business Transformations Fail — by Robyn Bolton
Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth — by Robyn Bolton
Overcoming the Fear of Innovation Failure — by Stefan Lindegaard
Making People Matter in AI Era — by Janet Sernack
Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend — by Stefan Lindegaard
Your Digital Transformation Starting Point — by Braden Kelley
Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It — by Mike Shipulski
Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making — by Greg Satell
Innovation or Not – SpinLaunch — by Art Inteligencia
Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard — by David Burkus

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

You Already Have Too Many Ideas — by Mike Shipulski
Portfolio Management and Category Power — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Your Legends Define Your Culture — by Shep Hyken
Should We Stop Asking Employees to Innovate? — by Stefan Lindegaard
Benchmarking Innovation Performance — by Noel Sobelman

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 four years:

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Embracing Convenience as a Strategy

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Embracing Convenience as a Strategy

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I just received an email from the Dollar Shave Club. I’ve been a member (as in customer) of the “club” for more than 10 years. I joined the club after watching their irreverent, R-rated (for language) YouTube video that has more than 28 million views. The concept was simple. Pay a small monthly fee and new razor blades are delivered to your mailbox. The member never has to worry about running out of fresh razor blades ever again.

After giving them a try, I joined the club. For years, I received a package of four blades every month. I never worried about whether they would show up – they always did. It was so convenient, which is the reason for this article.

I’ve written about Dollar Shave Club and convenience before. Nothing new there, but what I want to share is the subject line of the email. It read:

More like Dollar Convenience Club

There’s nothing special about razor blades, but what makes Dollar Shave Club special is its customer experience model, which is built around convenience. When they first started selling razor blades in 2012, the subscription model was not as popular as it is today. The word “subscription” was tied to newspapers and magazines. Today, almost any business can come up with its own version of a subscription model.

So, back to Dollar Shave Club. What I love is how they promote convenience as much as, if not even more, than the actual razor blades and other “bathroom needs” – their words, not mine!

While it is still called Dollar Shave Club, inflation has led to a higher price. Not to worry. Their customers still buy from them. Why?

Convenience: This is the overarching reason they are in existence.
Quality products: If the blades weren’t good, it wouldn’t matter if they were called the “Less than a Dollar Shave Club.” Quality is important to them.
Price: Even though people are willing to pay more for convenience (the proof is in my annual CX research), they have chosen to go the opposite direction and have a low price that’s almost as compelling as the convenient experience.
Consistency and reliability: Customers know exactly what to expect and when to expect it. The predictable schedule and consistent quality create trust and confidence in the brand.
Fun: This is a bonus, but who doesn’t like a little fun? Its brand of fun may not be appropriate for everyone, but it is for some companies. Dollar Shave Club’s commercials are funny, which helps them stand out in a crowded market.

Shep Hyken Convenience Cartoon

The Dollar Shave Club doesn’t sell better blades. They sell a better experience. And that is the lesson for the day. If your product does what it’s supposed to do and you add the experience that customers want – and for the members of Dollar Shave Club, that’s convenience – you have a winning combination. And like Dollar Shave Club, consider promoting the specific experience.

So, in addition to promoting what you sell, what experience do you create and promote that makes your customers love you even more? That answer is what will get your customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credit: Unsplash

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July 4th Flash Sale – 50% Off Charting Change

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Wow! Exciting news!

My publisher is having a summer sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 50% off!

Including FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! *

I created the Human-Centered Change methodology to help organizations get everyone literally all on the same page for change. The 70+ visual, collaborative tools are introduced in my book Charting Change, including the powerful Change Planning Canvas™. The toolkit has been created to help organizations:

Beat the 70% failure rate for change programs
Quickly visualize, plan and execute change efforts
Deliver projects and change efforts on time
Accelerate implementation and adoption
Get valuable tools for a low investment

You must go to SpringerLink for this Cyber Sale:

The offer is valid until 11:59PM EDT on July 4, 2025 only using code FLSH50

Click here to get this deal using code FLSH50 and save 50%!

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

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

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

You Must Learn the Change Lifecycle

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You Must Learn the Change Lifecycle

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When a transformational initiative fails, it’s often said that it was because people don’t like change. That’s not really true. Everywhere I go in the world, no matter what type of group I’m speaking to, people are enthusiastic about some kind of change. It’s other people’s ideas for change that they aren’t so crazy about.

Senior leaders love to tell me about their inspired visions for their enterprise, but complain that they can’t get the rank-and-file to go along. Middle managers complain that they are bursting with ideas, but can’t get the bosses to go along. As failed initiatives pile up, people talk past each other and change fatigue sets in.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are natural laws that govern change and these laws can be learned and applied by anyone. The problem is that managers don’t study change the same way they study finance, or marketing, or strategy. Business schools don’t teach it as a discipline. But change has a lifecycle that we can learn to manage and exploit.

Identifying A Problem That Needs Solving

As a young man, Mohandas Gandhi wasn’t the type of person anyone would notice. Impulsive and undisciplined, he was also so shy as a young lawyer that he could hardly bring himself to speak in open court. With his law career failing, he accepted an offer to represent the cousin of a wealthy Muslim merchant in South Africa.

Upon his arrival, Gandhi was subjected to humiliation on a train and it changed him. His sense of dignity offended, he decided to fight back. He found his voice, built the almost superhuman discipline he became famous for and successfully campaigned for the rights of Indians in South Africa. He returned to India 21 years later as the “Mahatma,” or “holy man.”

Revolutions don’t begin with a slogan, they begin with a cause. Martin Luther King Jr., as eloquent as he was, didn’t start with words. It was his personal experiences with racism that helped him find his words. His devotion to the cause that gave those words meaning, not the other way around.

Steve Jobs didn’t look for ideas, but for products that sucked. Computers sucked. Music players sucked. Mobile phones sucked. His passion was to make them “insanely great.” Every breakthrough product or invention, a laser printer, a quantum computer or even a life-saving cure like cancer immunotherapy, always starts out with a problem that needs to be solved.

Painful Failure

In 1998, five friends met in a cafe in Belgrade. Although still in their 20s, they were already experienced activists. In 1992, they had taken part in student protests to protest the war in Bosnia. In 1996, they took to the streets to support Zajedno, a coalition of opposition parties aligned against Slobodan Milošević. Both efforts, for very different reasons, failed.

This isn’t unusual. Gandhi had his Himalayan miscalculation. The first march on Washington, for women’s suffrage in 1913, was a disaster. Martin Luther King’s Albany campaign proved to be a big waste of time. Many modern movements, such as #Occupy, Turkey’s Gezi Park protests and the Arab Spring, achieved little, if anything at all.

It’s not just political movements either. Good ideas fail all the time. Even important, revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, such as cancer immunotherapy and sanitary practices in hospitals were rejected outright at first. Legendary entrepreneurs, such as IBM’s Thomas Watson at IBM and Apple’s Steve Jobs had miserable, heart wrenching failures.

The problem is that every idea has flaws. No plan survives first contact with the enemy because every plan, no matter how carefully considered or how righteous the cause, is wrong. Sometimes it’s off by just a little and sometimes it’s off by a lot, but it’s always wrong. You need to be prepared to take a few hits along the way, pick yourself up and apply what you’ve learned from the experience to do better next time.

Finding Focus

Successful change efforts are not, as many assume, all-out efforts. Rather, they learn to focus their own relative strengths against an opponent’s relative weaknesses. They focus resources at a particular opportunity at a time and place of their choosing. Military strategists call this principle Schwerpunkt, the delivery of overwhelming force at a specific point of attack.

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

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

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

Surviving Victory

One of the most surprising things that I’ve learned about change is that the victory phase is often the most dangerous. When you think you’ve won, that’s when you take your eye off the ball. But the people who oppose your idea don’t just melt away and go home because you won an early battle. In fact, now that they see change is possible, they’ll likely redouble their efforts to undermine what you’re trying to achieve.

The Otpor activists knew this from experience. When the Zajedno coalition won an electoral victory in 1996, it was pulled apart from the inside as a result of some deft political maneuvers by the regime. After the overthrow of Milošević, they quickly moved to head off any such efforts. The day the new government took power, billboards went up all over Belgrade that read, “Now We’re Watching You!”

The billboards, however, were merely a tactic. The real work started months before. The activists had learned from the earlier failures and anticipated officials straying from the cause. So they made a plan to survive victory and forced each opposition politician to sign a “contract with the people,” so they couldn’t backtrack after victory was won.

We do a similar exercise with our transformation clients. We ask questions like, “How would someone possessed by an an evil demon undermine the change you seek? Where are you most vulnerable to an attack? How can you leverage shared values to mitigate those efforts? You can’t prevent bad things from happening, but a little preparation goes a long way.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to remind ourselves that transformation is a journey, not a destination. Change has a lifecycle. Whatever impact you seek to make is far more likely to be a marathon than a sprint. No defeat or victory is final. The road is long and, to travel it effectively, you need to learn to recognize and anticipate the various twists and turns.

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

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Summer Sale on Charting Change

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Wow! Exciting news!

My publisher is having a summer sale that will allow you to get the hardcover or the digital version (eBook) of my latest best-selling book Charting Change for 25% off!

Including FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! *

Beat the 70% failure rate for change programs
Quickly visualize, plan and execute change efforts
Deliver projects and change efforts on time
Accelerate implementation and adoption
Get valuable tools for a low investment

You must go to SpringerLink for this Cyber Sale:

The offer is valid until June 27, 2025 only using code SNSUM25

Click here to get this deal using code SNSUM25 and save 25%!

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

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Five Questions to Liz Wiseman

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?

Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.

I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.

What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.

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

Lize Wiseman

Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization. I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks. When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.) If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.

RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”

LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.

Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.

RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?

LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.

RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?

LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for. Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody. It’s human to slip up. But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up. Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well. They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers. These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate. It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.

RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?

LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.

I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.

The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Create Dilemmas Not Conflicts for Successful Change

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Create Dilemmas Not Conflicts for Successful Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the summer of 1982, Poland was under strict martial law. The leaders of the revolutionary Solidarity movement were either in jail or in hiding. As the regime tightened its grip, any kind of protest risked arrest. People were demoralized, forced to sit in their homes with nothing to do but watch propaganda-laden “news” and old movies.

Yet the resident’s of Świdnik, a small city in central Poland, refused to take it sitting down. Instead, they walked. Every night at 7:30, when the evening news program began to spew the regime’s lies, they went for a walk and, just to put a fine point on the matter, some took their TV sets with them, in wheelbarrows and baby carriages.

It was fun—and funny. Similar “walking protests” soon spread virally to cities across Poland, which put the regime in a bind, they either had to shut the protests down or let people thumb their nose at the regime. This is what’s known as a dilemma action, a brilliant strategy that allows you to avoid conflict while at the same time putting your opposition into a bad spot.

Starting With A Shared Value Or Widely Held Belief

When we first start working with a team on a change initiative, they want to focus on what they’re passionate about, what differentiates their effort from the status quo. It’s something we all do. When we feel fervently about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance.

Yet to bring others in, we need to switch from differentiating values—what we love about an idea—to more widely shared values. For example, when we work with teams looking to move their organizations toward agile development, they often want to focus on the agile manifesto, because that’s what they’re passionate about. It rarely resonates with people outside the agile community, however.

Once they begin to focus on shared values, like better quality projects done faster and cheaper, it’s much easier to get people to come along. After all, who could argue with better results? That doesn’t mean that agile teams are abandoning the manifesto or hiding it in any way, they’re just not leading with it.

Shared values are also part of what made the Świdnik walking protests so powerful. As one of the protesters put it, “If the resistance is done by underground activists, it’s not you or me. But if you see your neighbors taking their TV for a walk, it makes you feel part of something. An aim of the dictatorship is to make you feel isolated.”

Designing A Constructive Act

Some years ago, I was brought in to rebuild a sales and marketing operation. It immediately became clear that the sales director was a big part of the problem. Not only was she still calling on clients herself and competing with her own salespeople, she was accounting for 90% of the revenues! Clearly, this wasn’t because of superhuman ability, but because she was assigning the best clients to herself.

It was obvious that if I was ever going to get things going in the right direction, I was going to have to get rid of the sales director, but that would be difficult. She was politically savvy, well liked and, because she accounted for so much revenue, was seen as critical to the viability of the company.

She had agreed to distribute her clients among the team and focus on managing instead of selling, but never seemed to get around to it. Put simply, she was sandbagging me. So I set up a sales call for one of the staff and a key client, which put the sales director in a position. She couldn’t object—it was what she agreed to—but if she acceded it would break her hold on the business.

It was similar to the action in Świdnik. Who could object to taking an evening stroll? When an action is seen to be constructive, it takes on the power of legitimacy. One of the mistakes changemakers often make is that in their anger they do something that is seen as destructive and lose credibility. That’s always a mistake.

Forcing A Decision

What makes a dilemma action so powerful is that it forces your opposition to make a choice. In Poland, the walking protests quickly spread beyond Świdnik to cities throughout the country. The communist regime had to decide whether to let them continue or to put a stop to them. If the protests continued, the the apparatchiks would look impotent, but if they took action against people going out for a simple evening stroll, they would look ridiculous.

My situation with the sales director was difficult because the onus was on me. I had to decide whether to continue to let her sandbag or to fire her without a clear cause. Designing a dilemma action got me out of that bind because it shifted the decision to her. She either had to give up the client (and then others) or to take a deliberately insubordinate action.

We often oppose change not because of any rational logic but because, for whatever reason, it offends our dignity, our identity and our sense of self. The response to a dilemma action is far more likely to be governed by emotion than a deliberate thought process. People are prone to lash out and overreach.

That’s what make a dilemma actions so effective. It calls a bluff. The opposition can no longer wait it out, but are forced to act and, because of how the action is designed, any action they take will hurt their cause and push change forward.

How Transformational Change Really Happens

One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it comes about when those who oppose it are somehow persuaded. That almost never happens. Look back at any major transformation throughout history and the tide turned when those who opposed it discredited themselves by taking action that was widely judged to be objectionable.

In Gandhi’s Salt March, the British discredited themselves when they violently attacked peaceful protestors. In Birmingham, Bull Connor discredited himself (and Jim Crow laws) when he confronted children with snarling dogs and fire hoses. California’s Proposition 8 was seen as so discriminatory that it aided the cause of same-sex marriage.

We see the same type of thing in our work with organizations. Everybody has been in a meeting in which, after an hour or so of moving slowly to a consensus, someone who hadn’t said a word the whole time suddenly throws a hissy fit in the conference room. This type of behavior doesn’t come from any rational place, but is triggered by an offense to identity.

Dilemma actions give us clear design principles to induce opponents of change to discredit themselves, which they will not only do willingly, but with enthusiasm. The British in India, Bull Connor in Birmingham and anti-gay activists in California wanted to show the world who they were, they merely had to be given the opportunity.

When confronted with fervent, irrational resistance to change the optimal strategy is never to create conflict, but rather a dilemma for your opposition.

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

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Making People Matter in AI Era

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Making People Matter in AI Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 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 nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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

Image Credit: Unsplash

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

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

What Innovation is Really About — by Stefan Lindegaard
‘Stealing’ from Artists to Make Innovations Both Novel and Familiar — by Pete Foley
Benchmarking Innovation Performance — by Noel Sobelman
Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word — by Robyn Bolton
Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle — Five Questions for Tendayi Viki
Change Behavior to Change Culture — by Mike Shipulski
The Real Reason Your Team Isn’t Speaking to You — by David Burkus
The Enemy of Customer Service is … — by Shep Hyken
Three Real Business Threats (and How to Solve Them) — by Robyn Bolton
Better Customer Experiences Without Customer Feedback — by Shep Hyken

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

Transforming Leadership to Reshape the Future of Innovation — Exclusive Interview with Brian Solis
Re-Framing Your Strategy for the Chaos of 2025 — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Innovation or Not – Kawasaki Corleo — by Art Inteligencia
Three Practical Keys to Managing Uncertainty — by Robyn Bolton
Managing Team Conflict — by David Burkus

Have something to contribute?

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

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Your Digital Transformation Starting Point

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by Braden Kelley

Welcome, innovators and change-makers! In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the concept of digital transformation isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a strategic imperative for survival and growth. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I’ve dedicated my work to helping organizations navigate these complex shifts successfully. This article offers a preview of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology, a visual and collaborative approach designed to get everyone literally all on the same page for change. It’s introduced in my latest book Charting Change – now in its second edition!

The world is moving faster than ever, and the pace of technological advancement demands that companies adapt or risk becoming obsolete. Consider the fate of Blockbuster, a titan in its industry that ultimately succumbed to the digital revolution. This serves as a stark reminder: to defend your company’s very existence, you must start thinking like a technology company or go out of business. This isn’t just about adopting new tools; it’s about fundamentally re-imagining how you structure and operate your business.

The Essence of Human-Centered Change™

Charting Change introduces a unique Human-Centered Change™ methodology. This approach isn’t about imposing change from the top down; it’s about empowering people within your organization to understand, embrace, and drive the transformation process. It’s about fostering a shared understanding and a collaborative spirit, ensuring that everyone is aligned on the vision and the path forward. This flipbook provides a flavor of what you’ll find in the comprehensive Charting Change book and the more than 70 tools and frameworks that constitute the Human-Centered Change™ methodology.

To succeed in this digital age, you must critically examine your business and your industry through the eyes of a digital native startup – one that seeks to disrupt and capture market share. This perspective is crucial for identifying opportunities and threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Five Foundational Questions for Digital Transformation

To make this challenging yet vital self-assessment easier, I propose five foundational questions that can guide your digital transformation journey. These questions are designed to provoke deep thought and reveal areas where innovation and change are most needed.

1. Redesigning Your Business from Scratch:

“If I were to build this business today, given everything that I know about the industry and its customers and the advances in people, process, technology, and tools, how would I design it?” This question encourages you to shed preconceived notions and imagine a greenfield approach. What would a truly optimized and digitally-native version of your business look like? This thought experiment can unlock radical new ideas and solutions.

2. Uncovering Customer Value:

“From the customers’ perspective, where does the value come from?” Understanding value through the customer’s lens is paramount. Often, what we perceive as valuable internally may not align with what truly matters to our customers. By focusing on their perspective, you can identify areas for significant improvement and innovation that directly impact satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Maximizing Value, Minimizing Waste:

“What structure and systems would deliver the maximum value with the minimum waste?” This question pushes you to consider efficiency and effectiveness. Digital transformation isn’t just about adding new technology; it’s about optimizing processes and systems to deliver greater value with less overhead. Think lean, agile, and customer-centric in your structural design.

4. Overcoming Barriers and Obstacles:

“What are the barriers to adoption and the obstacles to delight for my product(s) and/or service(s) and how will my design help potential customers overcome them?” Even the most innovative products and services can fail if they face significant friction in adoption or if they don’t truly delight the user. Identifying these hurdles early allows you to design solutions that proactively address them, ensuring a smoother and more positive customer experience.

5. Eliminating Friction:

“Where is the friction in my business that the latest usage methods of people, process, technology, and tools can help eliminate?” Friction can exist anywhere – in internal workflows, customer interactions, or supply chains. The power of digital transformation lies in its ability to smooth out these rough edges, creating seamless experiences for both employees and customers. Pinpointing these areas of friction is the first step towards a more efficient and effective operation.

Embark on Your Transformation Journey

These five questions are your starting point, a catalyst for deeper investigation and strategic planning. They are designed to ignite the conversations and insights necessary for successful digital and business transformations. The Human-Centered Change™ methodology, with its rich collection of tools and frameworks, provides the structured approach and practical guidance you need to answer these questions comprehensively and to make change stick within your organization.

I invite you to delve deeper into the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. Charting Change is more than just a book; it’s a visual toolkit that empowers you and your team to collaboratively map out your change journey, overcome obstacles, and ultimately, succeed in the digital age.

For more information about the book and to explore the extensive collection of tools and frameworks:

Visit: http://charting-change.com
Download the flipbook

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, shaped into an article introducing the flipbook with a little help from Google Gemini.

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