Category Archives: Change

Surviving Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed that “There is nothing permanent except change” and events over the past few thousand years would seem to prove him right. Yet while change may endure, the rate of change fluctuates over time. Throughout history, forces tend to cascade and converge on particular points.

By all indications, we are in such a period now. We are undergoing four major shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography that will be transformative. Clearly, these shifts will create significant opportunities, but also great peril. The last time we saw this much change afoot was during the 1920s and that didn’t end well.

Yet history is not destiny. We’re entering a new era of innovation in which our ability to solve problems will be unprecedented and can shape our path by making wise choices. Still, as we have seen with the Covid pandemic, the toughest challenges we will face will have had less to do with devising solutions than with changing behaviors and conquering ourselves.

Building A Shared Understanding Of The Problems We Need To Solve

The first step toward solving a problem is acknowledging that there is one. Even before Covid skeptics came into vogue, there was no shortage of pundits who denied climate change. For years, many considered Alan Greenspan to possess sage-like wisdom when he asserted that markets would self-correct. In the end, even he would admit that he was gravely mistaken.

The truth is that we live in a world of the visceral abstract, where strange theories govern much of our existence. People can debate the “big bang,” deny Darwin’s theory of natural selection or even deride these ideas as “lies straight from the pit of hell.” Many agreed when Senator Marco Rubio asserted that these things have nothing to do with our everyday lives.

Still, the reality is that modern existence depends on abstract theories almost every second of the day. Einstein’s theories may seem strange, but if GPS satellites aren’t calibrated to take them into account, we’re going to have a hard time getting where we want to go. In much the same way the coronavirus doesn’t care what we think about Darwin, if it is allowed to replicate it will mutate and new, more deadly variants are likely to arise.

History shows that building a consensus to confront shared challenges is something that is firmly within our capability. The non-proliferation agenda of the 1950s led to concrete achievements such as the Partial Test Ban Treaty. When advances in gene therapy made the potential for danger clear, the Berg Letter called for a moratorium on the riskiest experiments until the dangers were better understood. These norms have been respected for decades.

Discovering Novel Solutions

Identifying and defining our challenges is just a first step. As Bill Gates pointed out, we still don’t know how to solve the climate crisis. Despite all the happy talk about technological advancement, productivity growth remains depressed. We’ve seen a global rise in populist authoritarianism and our inability to solve problems has surely contributed.

Put simply, we do not know how to overcome all of the challenges we face today. We need to innovate. However, innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. We can’t simply hope to adapt and overcome when a crisis hits, we need to innovate for the long-term.

Consider our response to the Covid crisis. Yes, the pandemic caught us off-guard and we should have been better prepared. But our most effective response wasn’t any of the emergency measures, but a three-decade effort that resulted in the development of mRNA vaccines. Even that was nearly killed in its cradle and surely would have been if it had not been for the dedication and perseverance of a young researcher named Katalin Karikó.

An emerging model taking hold is collaboration between government, academia and private industry. For example, JCESR is helping to create next generation technologies in energy storage, the Partnership on AI is helping to map the future for cognitive technologies and the Manufacturing USA Institutes, bring together diverse stakeholders to drive advancement.

Perhaps most of all, we need to start taking a more biological view of technology. We can no longer expect advancement to progress in an organized, linear way. We need to think less like engineers building a machine and more like gardeners who grow ecosystems to nurture new possibilities that we can’t yet imagine, but are lying beneath the surface.

Driving Adoption And Scaling Change

If there’s anything we’ve learned during the Covid pandemic is that developing a viable solution isn’t enough. Early measures, such as masking and social distancing, were met with disdain. The development of effective vaccines in record time was something of a miracle. Still, it was met with derision rather than gratitude in many communities.

This is not a new phenomenon. Good ideas fail all the time. From famous cases like that of Ignaz Semmelweis and William Coley to the great multitudes whose names are lost to history, any time a new idea threatens the status quo there will always be some that will seek to undermine it and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. If change is ever to prevail, we need to learn to anticipate and overcome resistance.

The good news is that it only takes a minority to embrace change in order for it to prevail. Everett Rogers found that it took only 10%-20% of system members to adopt an innovation for rapid adoption to follow. An analysis of over 300 political revolutions estimated that 3.5% active participation was enough. Other research suggests that the tipping point is 25% in an organization.

What we need is not more catchy slogans, divisive rhetoric or even charismatic leaders, but to empower movements made up of small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose. My friend Srdja Popović provides great guides for social and political revolutionaries in both his book and his organization’s website. I have adapted many of these ideas for corporate and organizational contexts in Cascades.

Perhaps most importantly, as I recently pointed out in Harvard Business Review, is that transformation is fundamentally distinct from other stages of innovation. Coming up with a new idea or solution takes very different skills—and often different people—than driving adoption and scale.

Building A Bridge Through Shared Identity

Marshal McLuhan, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, described media as “extensions of man” and predicted that electronic media would eventually lead to a global village. Communities, he predicted, would no longer be tied to a single, isolated physical space but connect and interact with others on a world stage.

What often goes untold is that McLuhan did not see the global village as a peaceful place. In fact, he predicted it would lead to a new form of tribalism and result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history, as long separated —and emotionally charged— cultural norms would constantly intermingle, clash and explode.

Today, what we most need to grapple with is the dystopia that McLuhan foresaw and described so eloquently and accurately. People do not vehemently refute science, trash Darwin, deny climate change or oppose life-saving vaccines because they have undergone some rational deductive process, but because it offends their identity and sense of self. That, more than anything else, is why change fails.

Yet as Francis Fukuyama pointed out in his recent book, our identities are not fixed, but develop and change over time. We can seek to create a larger sense of self through building communities rooted in shared values. What’s missing in our public discourse today isn’t more or better information. What we lack is a shared sense of mission and purpose.

That is the challenge before us. It is not enough to devise solutions to the problems we face, although that in itself will require us to apply the best of our energies and skills. We will also have to learn to survive victory by overcoming the inevitable strife that change leaves in its wake.

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

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

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

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

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

A Shared Language for Radical Change — by Greg Satell
Leadership Best Quacktices from Oregon’s Dan Lanning — by Braden Kelley
Navigating Uncertainty Requires a Map — by John Bessant
The Most Successful Innovation Approach is … — by Howard Tiersky
Don’t Listen to These Three Change Consultant Recommendations — by Greg Satell
What We Can Learn from MrBeast’s Onboarding — by Robyn Bolton
Does Diversity Increase Team Performance? — by David Burkus
Customer Experience Audit 101 — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Daily Practices of Great Managers — by David Burkus
An Innovation Leadership Fable – Wisdom from the Waters — by Robyn Bolton

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

Everyone Clear Now on What ChatGPT is Doing? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
The Keys to Successfully Leading Change — by Stefan Lindegaard
Why Small Innovations Matter Now More Than Ever — by Robyn Bolton
We Must Unlearn These Three Management Myths — by Greg Satell
How Leaders Make Employees Feel Respected — by David Burkus

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 51% 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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You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong

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(According to Seth Godin)

You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s that time of year again – the annual ritual of strategic planning. But as Seth Godin points out in “How to Avoid Strategy Myopia,” we often mistake annual budgets and operational efficiency plans for true strategy. Strategies are not plans or guarantees; they’re informed choices to pursue possibilities that may or may not work.

Godin’s insights, while often associated with innovation, are fundamentally about strategy in its purest form. They challenge us to look beyond next quarter’s earnings and focus on transformative potential just beyond our current vision.

The Myth of “Strategic Planning”

Consider for a moment the last strategic planning session you attended. Was it dominated by discussions of cost-cutting measures, market share percentages, and incremental improvements? If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations focus on optimizing their current operations, behavior that is reinforced by the processes, templates, and forms required to secure next year’s funding.

However, as Godin warns, “When the boss demands a strategy that comes with certainty and proof, we’re likely to settle for a collection of chores, tasks, and tactics, which is not the same as an elegant, resilient strategy. To do strategy right, we need to lean into possibility.”

The Realities We Must Confront

Godin challenges us to confront several uncomfortable truths:

Today’s data doesn’t predict tomorrow: Executives rely heavily on easily measurable metrics based on false proxies when they make decisions. While these metrics provide a sense of control and comfort, they close our eyes to emerging opportunities and threats. When AT&T’s executives considered exiting the cell phone market in the 1980s, they turned to McKinsey to find data to inform their decision. Estimating that the total worldwide market for cell phones was 900,000, AT&T executives were comfortable exiting. It’s unknown if that comfort was worth the $11.5 billion AT&T spent to acquire McCaw Cellular in 1995.

Serving everyone serves no one: “Strategy myopia occurs when we fail to identify who we seek to serve and focus on what we seek to produce instead.” AMEN! True strategy begins with a deep understanding of our customers’ evolving needs, not just their current preferences. This requires empathy, foresight, and a willingness to challenge our assumptions. It also requires us to listen and act on what we hear from customers and not just from our bosses.

“All of the Above” is not an option: Strategy requires that we make choices and is as much about what we choose not to do as what we commit to doing. It requires the courage to say no to good opportunities in service of great ones. It requires facing your FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), loss aversion bias, and finding the courage to keep going.

5 Practical Steps You Can Take

If any of these sound familiar, it’s because they’re also innovation best practices.

Dedicate One Day per Month for Strategic Thinking: Set aside one full day each month for long-term strategic questions, free from the “Tyranny of Now.”
Cultivate Diverse Perspectives: Invite and listen to voices from different backgrounds, disciplines, and levels within the organization.
Embrace Small-Scale Experimentation: Run a series of small, low-cost, low-profile experiments instead of betting everything on a single initiative.
Redefine Success Metrics: Move beyond traditional financial metrics to include indicators of future potential, such as customer lifetime value and adaptability to change.
Foster a Culture of Questioning: Channel your inner two-year-old and ask “why” with genuine curiosity. Encourage your team to challenge assumptions because the most transformative strategies often emerge from questioning the status quo.

As we continue through this season of strategic planning, let’s challenge ourselves to think beyond the annual budget. Let’s envision the future we want to create and chart a course to get there. After all, in the words of Godin himself, “It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.”

Image credit: Pexels

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The Reasons History Converges and Cascades

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The Reasons History Converges and Cascades

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Throughout history there have been certain times and places that have given rise to phenomenal intellectual activity. The Vienna Circle and Cambridge’s Bloomsbury Group in the early 20th century are certainly examples, as is the Golden Age of Russian Literature in the mid-19th century and the post-war existentialist movement in Paris.

In a certain sense, these seem random, but they aren’t really. In each case, we can see undercurrents of politics, economics and other forces that gave rise to tensions people were trying to resolve. Great thinkers would explore, meet and influence each other, creating new directions and possibilities.

Yet it isn’t only intellectual life that converges in this way. History has a way of assembling forces around certain points of time and space, when long-standing trends intersect and give rise to new things. That’s why we study past events and learn about the lives of great personages long gone, so that we can hope to proactively recognize these forces and adapt.

1948: The Birth Of The Post-War Era

1948 was a pivotal year in many ways. Harry Truman was elected in a surprise upset over Thomas Dewey. Gandhi was assassinated in India. In South Africa, the white supremacist Nationalist party took power, making way for a half-century of Apartheid. The communists took power in Czechoslovakia and the Soviets sealed off Berlin. The western allies responded with a massive airlift, the likes of which the world had never seen.

Yet what probably would have more lasting effects than anything else that year didn’t involve great powers, armies or even political parties. In fact, the most consequential events that year hardly made the newspapers and most people probably weren’t even aware of them. It was in 1948 that two breakthrough innovations at Bell Labs ushered in the digital age.

The first was the transistor, invented by John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain. Up until that time, computers used vacuum tubes, which were big, clunky, slow and tended to burn out. Transistors made it possible to make computers exponentially faster and more reliable. They also made way for the integrated circuits we still use today.

The second breakthrough, Claude Shannon’s creation of information theory, was less obvious, but no less important. The basic idea was that information can be broken down into quantifiable entities he called binary digits (or bits for short). It was information theory, along with Shannon’s earlier work that showed how Boolean algebra could be transformed through mechanical means into logic gates, that made the information age possible.

When I spoke to Fred Brooks, who led the development of IBM’s legendary System 360 that would dominate computing for a generation, he explained how both innovations proved pivotal to his work. Of course, it was the transistor that made the IBM 360 possible, but he also told me that it was his decision to switch from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, which enabled the use of lowercase letters, that helped make it transformative.

1968 – A Historically Tumultuous Year

While 1948 is remembered as a year of great events, 1946 is remembered for very different reasons. With armistices firmly in place in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, soldiers coming home from war started settling down and making love. With the inevitable result that came in the years that followed, the Baby Boom generation was born.

As the horrors of war receded and a new era of prosperity emerged, the Boomers began to see things very differently than previous generations. They would question authority, challenging old values and ways of doing things. Many began to advocate for gender and racial equality. Unwilling to take the world as it was, they sought to remake it in their own image.

Tensions simmered throughout the 60s, but in 1968 they would combine and explode. The year started with the Prague Spring, when a number of modest reforms in Czechoslovakia, intended to bring about “Socialism with a human face,” were met by a brutal Soviet crackdown. A few months later, Polish authorities got the message and crushed internal protests advocating for similar reforms.

During the American spring of that year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated. The summer brought, if anything, greater tumult. Bloody clashes between police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention discredited the party amongst many and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon. Tommie Smith and John Carlos would raise their hands in a black power salute on the Olympic Podium.

Perhaps most of all, 1968 represented a handing of the baton. The 20-somethings of the 1960s would become 30-somethings of the 1970s. In the 1980s, they voted for Reagan in droves, and would shift how the the United States saw and governed itself as well as its place in the world.

1989 – Berlin Wall and World Wide Web

In November 1989, there were two watershed events that would fundamentally change how the world worked. The fall of the Berlin Wall would end the Cold War and open up markets across the world. That very same month, Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web and usher in a new technological era of networked computing.

Like in 1948 and 1968, the forces leading up to these events had been building for some time. The Polish Solidarity movement, which had been active since 1980, united activists from labor and the intelligentsia. It showed that the Soviets could be successfully defied. As the price of oil dropped throughout the 1980s, the Eastern Bloc became increasingly untenable.

In a similar way, the development of the World Wide Web had been brewing for decades. The US government had been building out ARPANET and computer scientists had been developing hypertext since the 1960s. All of the technology was in place in 1989 and Berners-Lee was able to create what became the World Wide Web in less than a month.

1989 would mark an inflection point in which the world would shift from hierarchies to networks and the global village which Marshall McLuhan had envisioned came into being. Much like he predicted, however, this village was not a friendly place, but would result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” from which we are still reeling.

The Power Of Cascades

In my book Cascades, I explained how small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose drive transformational change. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, at first. Connections accumulate under the surface, barely noticed, as small groups slowly begin to link together and congeal into a network. Eventually things hit a tipping point.

It’s not just people that are networked though, events are as well. There are always unseen connections between the forces of economics, technology, culture, politics and many other things. Much like social and political movements, the effects are almost impossible to detect at first, but can accelerate in nonlinear ways that defy the prediction of experts.

Yet that doesn’t have to happen. In 1948 we were able to create a new world order that ushered in an era of peace and prosperity unequalled in human history. The events of 1968 and 1989 also helped to bring about enormous progress. The difference between those epochs wasn’t so much due to any underlying forces, but the choices that were made.

Every generation faces great challenges. Some are remembered for their achievements, others for their tragedies. Like earlier generations, we have important choices to make. We should endeavor to choose wisely.

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

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Why Reason Matters

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Why Reason Matters

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

How many times a day do you ask someone to do something? If you total all the requests you make of coworkers, family members, friends, people at restaurants and shops, and even strangers, the total is somewhere between 100 and 1 bazillion. Now, what if I told you that by including just one word in your request, the odds of receiving a positive response increase by 50%?

And no, that word is not “please.”

The real magic word

Harvard 1978. Decades before everyone had access to computer labs, home computers, and personal printers, students had to line up at the copy machine to make copies. You could easily spend hours in line, even if you only had a few copies to make. It was an inefficient and infuriating problem for students.

It was also a perfect research opportunity for Ellen Langer, a professor in Harvard’s Psychology Department.

Prof. Langer and her colleagues asked students to break into the line using one of three phrases:

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine?”
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”

The results were definitive and surprising. Students who used the first phrase were successful 60% of the time, but those who used the phrases with “because” were successful 93% and 94% of the time.

“Because” matters. The reason does not.

Note that in phrases two and three, the reason the student is asking to cut in line isn’t very good. You can practically hear the snarky responses, “Of course, you have to make copies; why else would you be at the copy machine?” or “We’re all in a rush,” and the request is denied.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the research (and hundreds of subsequent studies) showed that when the ask is simple or familiar, people tend to follow instructions or respond positively to requests without paying attention to what’s said, even if the instructions don’t make sense or the request disadvantages them in some way. Essentially, people hear “because,” assume it’s followed by a good reason and comply.

“Because” matters. How you use it matters more.

The power of “because” isn’t about manipulation or coercion. It’s about fostering a culture of transparency, critical thinking, and effective communication.

Taking the time to think about when and how to communicate the Why behind your requests increases your odds of success and establishes you as a strategic and thoughtful leader. But building your “Because’ habit takes time, so consider starting here:

Conduct a “Because” Audit: For one day, track your use of “because.” How many times do you make a request? How many times to you explain your requests with “because?” How many times do you receive a request, and how many of those include “because?” Simply noticing when “because” is used and whether it works provides incredible insights into the impact it can have in your work.

Connect your “Becauses” As leaders, we often focus on the “what” and “how” of directives, but the “why” is equally crucial. Take your top three strategic priorities for the quarter and craft a compelling “because” statement that clearly articulates the reasoning behind it. For instance, “We’re expanding into the Asian market because it represents a $50 billion opportunity that aligns perfectly with our core competencies.” This approach not only provides clarity but also helps in rallying your team around a common purpose.

Cascade the “Because” Habit: Great leaders don’t just adopt best practices; they institutionalize them. Challenge your direct reports to incorporate “because” into their communications. When they bring you requests, ask them for the “because” if they don’t offer it. Make it a friendly competition and celebrate people who use this technique to drive better outcomes.

Tell me how you’ll start because then you’re more likely to succeed.

(see what I did there?)

Image credit: Pexels

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Innovation Mythbusters – Top 5

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Innovation Mythbusters - Top 5

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Amazingly Fabulous Tools is an award-winning, entrepreneurial market leader in the global machine engineering industry. The ambitious and proactive CEO Charlie Chaps invested in dispatching a Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley to research, investigate, and report on how to capture and emulate the critical ingredients of its “secret innovative sauce.” Upon their return, the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers created and shared a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation with the board despite secretly knowing and passively avoiding saying that Amazingly Fabulous Tools could not replicate what they had discovered, primarily due to how the top five innovation myths clandestinely operated in the organization.

The Corporate Antibodies

This is due to their overt experience with the organization’s “innovation antibodies,” which cause an organization to resist change and protect the status quo. These antibodies consist of rigid people and inconsistent processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization. In the Amazingly Fabulous Tool company, most people, especially the founders and the board, unconsciously and powerfully neutralized any forces that threatened to destabilize the company’s current state and stunt its growth by shutting down the fresh ideas and unconventional thinking their company badly needed.

Charlie Chaps built a fantastic, largely incomprehensible strategic plan with a BHAG, strategic goals, and sets of individual KPIs. This plan provided concrete evidence that reassured the board that the company was taking action to sustain its leadership position in the market and would take the business to the next level by growing its ROI. It also aimed to leverage the collective genius of its owners, Bob the Brave Builder and Eric the Energetic Entrepreneur, to ensure a legacy was left no matter who was at the helm.

The Innovation Culture Diagnostic Findings

A quantitative and qualitative cultural diagnostic revealed that people lacked permission, safety, and trust to speak up, rock the boat and challenge the status quo. It also showed that the organization lacked rigor in its process disciplines and a focus on developing its people’s capabilities.

It also revealed that Amazingly Fabulous Tools was secretly driven by its founders’ and sales directors’ self-interest and greed due to the highly competitive profit-share sales model. Not by an obligation and commitment to creating, inventing, designing, and delivering disciplined, innovative process improvements, products, and services that their customers purchased and did not appreciate and cherish.

This was a stark contradiction and barrier to the company’s ability to sustain its enviable global reputation. Finally, people believed that Charlie Chaps’ fantastic strategic plan, BHAG, goals, and KPIs were confusing and disconnected from the organization’s current reality and would not produce a collaborative and innovative organization.

So, they did not accept or apply the plan and kept safe by conducting business as usual.

The Top Five Innovation Myths

Because the corporate antibodies revealed that people unanimously believed each of the key myths, including:

Myth # 1: Innovation is a solo activity; people believe that ” only the owners can innovate.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is impossible without inclusion and collaboration, which are achieved through practical and disciplined teaming and networking.

Myth #2: Innovation is top-down; people believed they were not responsible or accountable for planning and were forced to be reactive. “The planning is difficult, that is for sure, because we are firefighting all the time, and that goes back to the frustration of not having enough time to do what needs to get done…and resources and …tools.”
The Brutal Truth: When people have the permission and safety to challenge the status quo, make mistakes, and are trusted to learn through experimentation, innovation can emerge anywhere in an organization, or team.

Myth #3: Innovation is about the newest thing; people believed that radical innovation was needed when agility was the problem; “The scary thing is our key competitor is getting more flexible (agile); we’re just getting more reliable (stable). It’s the stupid things that are so annoying. It’s the embarrassing things.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is guided by its strategic intent. It can be incremental, continuous, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or differentiated, as there is no one best way of innovating.

Myth # 4: Innovation can’t be taught; people believed that they did not have to learn to improve or innovate when they encountered quality issues continuously; “A lot of times, it’s not because the customer wants the machine tomorrow but because we want to ship it tomorrow because we want to get it off the floor, we want to meet numbers, we want the cash. We usually drive the time frame and rush it out the door, creating many internal problems. It also creates problems externally with the customer when they think they’re getting a machine fully intact, but half its parts are missing….”
The Brutal Truth: Innovators are not born and are made. Anyone can learn to innovate,

Myth #5: You can’t force innovation; people were dis-empowered and did not take responsibility for influencing their environment to provide order and discipline; “It’s a traffic jam. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a traffic jam. Cars sitting bumper to bumper look like they are gridlocked. It represents the log jam of our activities. Where people are trying to push so many activities through two lanes of traffic when we’ve got six lanes worth of traffic.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation can emerge when people have a sense of urgency, understand, and are motivated to engage in necessary, high-impact cultural and organizational change.

People must be prepared for it, change-ready and receptive, and intentionally pulled towards a compelling and desired future within an equalized environment that balances chaos and creativity with rigidity and discipline through rigorous planning.

The real costs to the organization

People believed that “This business makes money despite itself. There is potential to be truly great”. This was the most significant innovation antibody because there was no sense of urgency or even a financial or growth necessity to innovate. The company was quite comfortable with the status quo and had no reason to shift its habitual and unconscious comfort zone in ways that people and organizations must do to innovate because it involves being ready and receptive to mega-changes.

The significant investment in sending the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley sadly remained in the mythical realm of Innovation Dreamland.

So, lacking focus, discipline and rigor, the group of seriously qualified and intelligent engineers knowingly consistently dispatched faulty million-dollar machines to highly valued, global customers.

The cost of rework and brand erosion were considerable.

These machines required considerable analysis, problem-solving, and rework upon their return. Their costs were not recorded as repairs, causing the engineering division to be consistently over budget. Charlie Chaps reacted by restricting its budget and inhibiting its investment in critical research and development, which is needed to create, invent, and innovate to repair and sustain its global reputation as an innovator.

Innovation Dreamland remained a mythical and magical fantasy in Amazingly Fabulous Tools.

Sadly, the organization failed to shift its focus from challenge to opportunity because it could not resolve the corporate antibodies (implicit killers), remove the roadblocks, break down the internal cultural barriers to innovation and develop the agility necessary to become both a people-centric and customer-centric organization.

It lost an opportunity to make innovation a daily habit for everyone by failing to embed it in its organization as a way of life. It needed to empower, enable, and equip its talented, experienced and motivated people with the emotional energy, change, cognitive, and innovation agility to expose, challenge and resolve the underlying corporate antibodies.

It did not prioritize customer satisfaction and keep its promises by creating, inventing, and innovating high-value, quality products and services that improve the quality of their lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Many transformations and change-led innovation initiatives designed as strategic interventions fail due to a lack of alignment between strategy, structure, processes, and human skills, resulting in unproductive actions and poor human behaviors.

This is a short section from Chapter One of our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Empowering People to Be, Think and Act Differently in a Constantly Changing World”, which will be published in 2025.

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, and 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: Wikimedia Commons

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Don’t Listen to These Three Change Consultant Recommendations

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Don't Listen to These Three Change Consultant Recommendations

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The practice of change management is a relatively young discipline. It got its start in 1983, when a McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal, Human Resource Management. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients and set the stage for much that came afterward.

Phillips’ work kicked off a number of similar approaches such as Kotter’s 8-step model and the Prosci ADKAR model and an industry was born. Today, hordes of “change consultants” ply their craft working to communicate transformational ideas to inspire change. The results, unfortunately, have been rather dismal.

The simple truth is that change rarely fails because people don’t understand it, but that it is actively sabotaged by those who, for whatever reason, oppose it. That’s why any change strategy that depends on persuasion is bound to fail. The truth is that if you want to bring change about you need to identify those who believe in it and empower them to succeed.

1. Create A Sense Of Urgency Around Change

One of the basic tenets of change management that dates back to Phillips’ original paper is that you need to create a “sense of urgency” around change. So change leaders work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment, recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast and gain scale.

That may work for a conventional project, but for something that’s truly transformational, it’s a sure path to failure. The problem is that if a change is important and has real potential to impact what people believe and what they do, there will always be those who will hate it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

Starting off with a “big bang” can often unwittingly aid these efforts. Large scale change of any kind, even if the net effect is overwhelmingly positive, always causes some disruption. So appearing to work to overpower, rather than to attract, others can feed into the atmosphere of fear and loathing that opponents of change want to create. It also gives the opponents of change a head start to kill change before it really even starts.

A much better approach is to work to empower small groups, loosely connected, united by a shared purpose. For example, when Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began its shift to lean manufacturing, it started with a single team at a single plant, but led to a 25% reduction of costs across 25 sites encompassing 17,000 employees.

2. Start With A Quick, Easy Win

Another thing that change consultants regularly recommend is going for a “quick and easy win” in order to build momentum and establish credibility. The problem is that if the “win” isn’t meaningful, it will do little to drive change forward. In fact, touting a meaningless and irrelevant pseudo-accomplishment can make change leaders look out-of-touch and impractical.

A much more effective strategy is to start with a keystone change that represents a concrete and tangible goal, involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. That’s how you can begin to build real traction. While the impact of that early keystone change might be limited, a small, but meaningful, success can show what’s possible.

Consider PxG, a process improvement initiative at Procter & Gamble. It started out when three young executives set out to improve a single process. It wasn’t quick or easy. In fact, it took months of hard work. Nevertheless, they were able to transform a bottleneck that held up projects for weeks into a streamlined procedure that is completed in mere hours.

In a similar vein, when the global data giant Experian sought to transform itself into a cloud-based enterprise, it started with internal API’s that were much less risky than those that allowed access to outsiders. These weren’t really that much simpler or easier than public API’s, but showed the potential of cloud technology.

The truth is that sometimes you need to go slow in order to go fast. Transformation is not a linear process, but accelerates as it gains momentum. It pays to build your change effort on solid ground, rather than trying to lurch forward. Nothing slows you down more than a setback.

3. Prepare A Stakeholder Map

In any change process, a variety of stakeholders will have concerns. So consultants often suggest mapping the various stakeholders in terms of their level of enthusiasm, engagement, power to influence and other parameters. The idea is that by categorizing and cataloguing, you can better understand the forces at play.

This type of approach makes for impressive looking PowerPoint decks and intellectually appealing reports, but does little to achieve real change. The truth is that what most influences stakeholders are other stakeholders. Slicing and dicing them eighteen different ways isn’t going to do much more than confuse the situation.

However, for decades social and political movements have used tools such as the Spectrum of Allies and the Pillars of Support to change entire societies and they are just as effective in organizational transformations. Essentially, the idea is to divide stakeholders into two categories: constituencies and institutions (or those who wield institutional power).

So to transform education, you might mobilize support from parents, teachers and students to influence school boards, administrators and teachers unions to make changes. In a corporate context, you might want to mobilize groups of employees, customers and other constituencies to influence internal and external institutions such as senior leaders, the media, professional associations, regulators, labor unions etc.

The point is that you are always mobilizing somebody to influence something. Pure mobilization is nothing more than rabble rousing. Working quietly behind closed doors leaves you vulnerable to an uprising among the rank and file. Building support among constituencies can not only influence those with institutional power to act, it builds change on solid ground.

Focusing On The 25% That Matters

There is an inherent flaw in human nature that has endowed us with a burning desire to convince skeptics. So it shouldn’t be surprising that change consultants focus on persuasion. Nothing validates a high fee like some clever wordsmithing designed to persuade those hostile to the ideas of those paying the bill.

Yet anybody who has ever been married or had children knows how difficult it can be to convince even a single person of something they don’t want to be convinced of. To set out to persuade hundreds—or even thousands—that they should adopt an idea that they are inherently hostile to is not only hubris, but incredibly foolish.

It is also unnecessary. Scientific research suggests that the tipping point for change is only a 25% minority. Once a quarter of the people involved become committed to change, the rest will largely go along. So there is no need to convince skeptics. Your time and effort will be much better spent helping those who are enthusiastic about change to make it succeed.

That’s what the change consultants get wrong. You don’t “manage” change. You empower it by enabling those who believe in it to show it can work and then bringing in others who can bring in others still. The truth is that you don’t need a clever slogan to bring change about, you need a network. That’s how you create a movement that drives transformation.

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

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A Shared Language for Radical Change

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A Shared Language for Radical Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

One of the toughest things about change is simply to have your idea understood. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. People need a reason to believe in change, but they never need much convincing to allow things to go along as they always have. Inaction is the easiest thing in the world.

This can be incredibly frustrating. It doesn’t matter if you’re a political revolutionary, a social visionary or an entrepreneur, if you have an idea you think can impact the world, you want people to be as excited about it as you are. So you try to describe it in vivid language that highlights how wonderfully different it really is.

The pitfall that many would-be revolutionaries fall into is they fail to communicate in terms that others are able to accept and internalize. Make no mistake. Nobody needs to understand your idea. If you think your idea is important and want it to spread, then you need to meet people where they are, not where you’d like them to be. That’s how you make change real.

The Importance Of Finding Your Tribe

There’s no question that Pixar is one of the most successful creative enterprises ever. Yet in his memoir, Creativity, Inc., Pixar founder Ed Catmull wrote that “early on, all of our movies suck.” Catmull calls initial ideas “ugly babies,” because they start out, “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” Few can see what those ugly babies can grow into.

That’s why it’s important to start with a majority. You can always expand a majority out, but once you are in the minority you will either immediately feel pushback or, even worse, you will simply be ignored. If you can find a tribe of people who are as passionate about your idea as you are, you can empower them to succeed and bring in others to join you as well.

There is, however, a danger to this approach. Consider a study that examined networks of the cast and crew of Broadway plays. The researchers found that if no one had ever worked together before, results tended to be poor. However, if the networks among the cast and crew became too dense— becoming a close-knit tribe—performance also suffered.

The problem is that tribes tend to be echo chambers that filter outside voices. Consensus becomes doctrine and, eventually, gospel. Dissension is not only discouraged, but often punished. Eventually, a private language emerges that encodes the gospel into linguistic convention and customs. The outside world loses internal tribal relevance.

The Pitfalls Of A Private Language

Every field of endeavor must navigate the two competing needs: specialization and relevance. For example, a doctor treating a complex disease must master the private, technical language of her field to confer with colleagues, but must also translate those same concepts to a public, common language to communicate with patients in ways they can understand.

Yet as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explained, these types of private languages can be problematic. He made the analogy of a beetle in a box. If everybody had something in a box that they called a beetle, but no one could examine each other’s box, there would be no way of knowing whether everybody was actually talking about the same thing or not.

What Wittgenstein pointed out was that in this situation, the term “beetle” would lose relevance and meaning. It would simply refer to something that everybody had in their box, whatever that was. Everybody could just nod their heads not knowing whether they were talking about an insect, a German automobile or a British rock band. The same also happens with professional jargon and lingo.

I see this problem all the time in my work helping organizations to bring change about. People leading, say, a digital transformation are, not surprisingly, enthusiastic about digital technology and speak to other enthusiasts in the private, technical language native to their tribe. Unfortunately, to everyone else, this language holds little meaning or relevance. For all practical purposes, it might as well be a “beetle in a box.”

Creating A Shared Identity Through Shared Values And Shared Purpose

The easiest way to attack change is to position it as fundamentally at odds with the prevailing culture. In an organizational environment, those who oppose change often speak of undermining business models or corporate “DNA.” In much the same way, social and political movements are often portrayed as “foreign” or “radical.”

That’s why successful change efforts create shared identity through shared values and shared purpose. In the struggle for women’s voting rights in America, groups of Silent Sentinels would picket the White House with slogans taken from President Woodrow Wilson’s own books. To win over nationalistic populations in rural areas, the Serbian revolutionary movement Otpor made the patriotic plea, “Resistance, Because I Love Serbia.”

We find the same strategy effective in our work with organizational transformations. Not everybody loves technology, for example, but everybody can see the value of serving customers better, in operating more efficiently and in creating a better workplace. If you can communicate the need for change in terms of shared values and purpose, it’ll be easier for others to accept.

Even more importantly, people need to see that change can work. That’s why we always recommend starting with a keystone change, which represents a clear and tangible objective, involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. For example, with digital transformations, we advise our clients to automate the most mundane tasks first, even if those aren’t necessarily the highest priority tasks for the project.

Would You Rather Make A Point Or Make A Difference?

One of the most difficult things about leading change is that you need to let people embrace it for their own reasons, which might not necessarily be your own. When you’re passionate about an idea, you want others to see it the same way you do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. You want people to share your devotion and fervor.

Many change efforts end up sabotaging themselves for exactly this reason. People who love technology want others to love it too. Those who feel strongly about racial and gender-based diversity want everyone to see injustice and inequality just as they do. Innovators in any area can often be single-minded in their pursuit of change.

The truth is that we all have a need to be recognized and when others don’t share a view that we feel strongly about, it offends our sense of dignity. The danger, of course, is that in our rapture we descend into solipsism and fail to recognize the dignity of others. We proudly speak in a private language amongst our tribe and expect others to try and find a way in.

Yet the world simply doesn’t work that way. If you care about change, you need to hold yourself accountable to be an effective messenger. You have to make the effort to express yourself in terms that your targets of influence are willing to accept. That doesn’t in any way mean you have to compromise. It simply means that you need to advocate effectively.

In the final analysis, you need to decide whether you’d rather make a point, or make a difference.

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

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

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

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

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

The Runaway Innovation Train — by Pete Foley
How Leaders Make Employees Feel Respected — by David Burkus
Innovation is Combination — by Greg Satell
Why Modifying This One Question Changes Everything — by Robyn Bolton
Acting on Strategy and Tactics — by Mike Shipulski
Push versus Pull in the Productivity Zone — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Next Generation Leadership Traits and Characteristics — by Stefan Lindegaard
Humanizing Agility — by Janet Sernack
Creating More Digital Value for Customers — by Howard Tiersky
False Choice – Founder versus Manager — by Robyn Bolton

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

Four Keys to Mastering Active Listening — by David Burkus
Igniting Innovation with Deep Dialogue — by Janet Sernack
Are You Continuing to Stop and Start the Hard Way? — by Mike Shipulski
Coping with the Chasm — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Don’t Bring a Can of Gasoline to a Fire – Crisis Management — by Shep Hyken

SPECIAL BONUS – THREE DAYS ONLY: From now until 11:59PM ET on November 11, 2024 you can get the hardcover version of the SECOND EDITION of my latest bestselling book Charting Change for 40% OFF using code HARDC50. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while supplies last!

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

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Change Requires Work and Choice

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Change Requires Work and Choice

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

At the end of the CEO’s speech to his employees, he said, “And one other thing, we want to deliver better customer service.” Then he walked off stage.

Delivering better customer service is a good idea, but just saying you want to do so will not make it happen. Most likely, it will remain just a good idea, because, without the right implementation, the idea will never come to anything. Nothing will change.

A big part of my business is serving as a keynote speaker on customer service and CX for all kinds of companies and organizations. I always ask, “Why is this topic important to you and this audience?” Most of the time, clients have a good answer, but occasionally, I hear something like, “We have terrible customer service, and we need someone like you to come in and share what we can do to be better.”

Trying not to sound flippant, I ask, “So you think that having me or someone like me do a one-hour speech is going to fix that?”

This leads to a bigger discussion about the company’s desire to change and the resources – time, talent, and dollars – it requires to make that happen. I then continue with a few more questions:

What makes you think you need help with your customer service or CX?
What would happen if you continued to do what you do and didn’t make a change?
What does success look like, and how quickly do you want to see results?

The answers to these questions are the fuel needed to make the choice to change an easy one.

Then, there is another series of questions to determine the investment they are willing to make to carry out this choice to change. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take training, which is about talent. And then there are the dollars. And one final choice must be made, and it may be the most important of all. Will the leadership get behind the choice to change?

To summarize, the choice to change, especially in customer service and/or CX, is more than a verbal commitment. It requires substantial and sustained effort backed by resources and leadership support. Simply expressing the desire for improvement is not enough. Real change demands actionable plans and the alignment of time, talent, and investment. Companies must determine their current service levels, define success, and commit to the necessary steps and time to achieve it.

One more question: Are you ready to invest in a future where exceptional service is not just an aspiration but a reality? Act now! Your customers and your business can’t afford to wait.

Image Credits: Pexels, Shep Hyken

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