Category Archives: Change

Unlocking Trapped Value with AI

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Anyone who has used Chat GPT or any of its cousins will testify to its astonishing ability to provide valuable responses to virtually any query. This is hardly a threat—indeed, it is a boon. So, what are we worrying about?

Well, there is the issue of veracity, of course, and it is true, GPT-enabled assistants can indeed make mistakes. But, come on—humans don’t? We are not looking for gospel truth here. We want highly probable, highly informed answers to questions where we need guidance, and it is clear that GPT-enabled applications are outstanding at meeting this need, for at least three reasons. They are remarkably well-informed. They are available 24/7 on demand with no hold time. And they have infinite patience. So, let’s not kid ourselves. We are massively better off for their emergence on the scene.

What we should be worrying about, on the other hand, is their impact on jobs to be done, employment, and career development. A simple way to think about this is that for any of us to earn money, we have to release some form of trapped value. A bank clerk helps a customer get access to the trapped value in their savings account. A bus driver helps a passenger cope with their trapped value by transporting them to the location where they need to be. A lawyer helps a client get access to trapped value by constructing a contract that meets their needs while protecting against risk. A teacher helps a student access trapped value by helping her solve problems she couldn’t handle before. The principle applies to every job. All systems have points of trapped value, and all jobs are organized around releasing and capturing that value.

Now, let’s introduce generative AI. All of a sudden, a whole lot of trapped value that funded a whole lot of jobs can now be released for free (or virtually for free). Those jobs can be protected in the short term but not forever. In other words, the environment really has changed, and we must assess our new circumstances or fall behind. This is Darwinism at work. Evolution never stops. It can’t. As long as there is change, there will be dislocation, which in turn will stimulate innovation. That’s life.

But here’s the good news. The universe can never eliminate trapped value, it can only move it from place to place. That is, there are always emergent problems to solve, always new opportunities to capitalize on, because every system always traps value somewhere. What Darwinism requires is that we detect the new value traps and redirect our activity to engage with them.

Publicly funded agencies sometimes interpret this as a mandate for training programs, but we have to be careful here. Training works well for disseminating established skills that address known problems. It does not work well, however, where the problems are still being determined and the skills are as yet undeveloped. Novelty, in other words, demands creativity. It is simply not negotiable.

Getting back to the impact of generative AI, we should understand that it is an advisory technology. It is not automation. That is, it is not eliminating the need for human beings to make judgment calls. Rather, it is accelerating the preparation for so doing and framing the options in ways that make decision-making more straightforward. By solving for the old value traps, it is giving us the opportunity to up our game. It’s our job to step up to add net new value to the equation.

The best way to do this is to ferret out the emerging new value traps. Who is the customer now? What is the bottleneck that is holding them back? How could that bottleneck be broken open? What is the reward for so doing? These are the fundamental questions that drive any business model. We know how to do this. It’s just that we have been riding on the inertia of the past set of solutions for so long we may have atrophied in some of the muscles we need now. One thing we need not worry about is the universe running out of trapped value. If you are ever in doubt, just read the day’s headlines and be reassured. The world needs our help. Any tool that helps us do our part better is a blessing.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Motivate Innovation with These Three Frames

Leave a reply

Motivate Innovation with These Three Frames

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

You want to innovate, to drive change in your organization. New products, new processes, new markets, new technologies, new ways of working together.

People in any organization have a tendency to resist change. This is for many reasons including fear of the unknown, fear about how it might impact their role or their empire, or their job security, and the natural tendency that people get comfortable with and attached to the way things are.

More often than not, change requires buy-in from others in your organization, and you will need to be able to communicate a strong reason to change. It’s important to identify the outcome you are seeking, of course. Let’s say you want to improve customer satisfaction. Great! In order for people to really be ready to change, they have to see that outcome as important. Ideally, as essential. If we want people to focus on getting from Point A to Point B, we need to help them understand why that change is so important that it overcomes their natural resistance. Just improving the share price or reducing turnover might not be enough to get someone to be willing to embrace what they may perceive as the personal pain of change.

The question is, “Why is making this change absolutely essential?” Of course, there are an unlimited number of reasons, but in our experience they fall into three primary strategies. The individual details are going to vary situationally, but these are the three basic strategies for igniting that burning platform for change.

If you’ve driven change before or been part of an organization going through change, most likely the change was communicated using one of these three frames. We present them here to make you aware of these three diverse approaches and to give you the opportunity before you communicate your next change to step back and decide deliberately which frame you will choose because each one had its own power and its own drawbacks. Let’s introduce the three frames, and then we’ll explain them. The three frames are number one, we suck. Number two, constant improvement. Number three, environmental change. Let’s review these.

1. The “We Suck” Frame

Let’s start with we suck. That’s a fun one. A company is at the bottom of its industry in sales or share price or both. Customer satisfaction scores are through the floor. The new product which will change the game in the marketplace is three years late. Who am I talking about? Doesn’t matter. When things are bleak, sometimes it seems necessary to just tell the truth and admit that the results you’re getting are bad, unacceptable, and must change. Holding up an honest mirror and pointing out the reality of the situation can create a strong motivation for some kind of change. As I said, everyone wants to get out of a situation where they’re failing. It’s highly motivating to get away from suckiness. It doesn’t have to be the entire company that’s going down the tubes like in my example. It might just be one capability, one product, one process, one geography.

If the facts are on your side, using the frame that, “We have to improve customer satisfaction because right now our customers hate us,” will probably get people’s attention. Often, the pain of failure is enough to overcome resistance to change. The problem with the we suck approach, however, is not hard to guess. It can be highly demotivating, even depressing. It can drive people away from your company. It can be hard to get excited about change when building on a belief that we suck. If we suck so much, how will we be able to improve? How will we make this change successful?

In order for the we suck frame not to backfire, you have to combine it with a strong hope of victory. The team needs to have faith that they can correct the situation. A few tactics. First, highlight the problem in a measurable way and set clear goals. “Our satisfaction scores are at a 6 and they should be at least an 8.” That gives people a clear sense of where the line of victory is. Second, if things used to be better and then they got worse, be sure to highlight that. It creates hope that the organization is capable of better.

A third tactic, highlight the areas the organization is doing well as part of the message. If we’re doing great in four out of five areas, but we suck in the fifth area, be sure to make that point. Not just to be positive, to give sugar with the medicine, but to put the problem in context. “We’re a high-quality organization. We excel in many areas, but in this one respect, we aren’t operating at our own standard.” The key is to show the gap, but also to create confidence that it can be solved.

A fourth tactic, highlight recent changes in circumstance that can also increase confidence. Especially if the problem has existed for a long time. It’s easy for people to feel it’s unsolvable, so make sure part of the message conveys what is change that makes it solvable now? Whether it’s new leadership, a new technology, increased budget, or something else.

2. The “Constant Improvement” Frame

The second frame is constant improvement, an alternative to the we suck frame. This frame emphasizes the need to constantly strive to be better as a value in and of itself. It says, “We’re already at X level, but we can do more. We can drive even more value for our customers. We can lower our costs even more.” This is, of course, a much more positive message than the we suck frame. It doesn’t really on any admission that the current state is any form of failure. However, in order to be motivating, it relies on a certain alignment with the values of your audience.

In some corporate cultures, the value of constant improvement is embodied into the psyche. Places like Apple and Amazon hire people who love to constantly improve, but if your organization does not have this value in its DNA, it’s tough to create it overnight. The downside of the constant improvement frame, therefore, is that it might not be sufficiently powerful in many cultures. People might think, “Yeah, it’s nice to improve, but I kind of like my organization the way it is now.” If the change is not seen as a must, just a nice to have, and if it requires some pain or a scary change, people might not be sufficiently motivated. They’ll tend to embrace small-scale change that doesn’t upset the apple cart, but may still have significant resistance to significant change.

3. The “Environmental Change” Frame

The third and last frame is environmental change. This is my personal favorite frame. The environmental frame says, “Something major in our business environment has changed and we must respond and change in order to survive or thrive. Our customers have all gone mobile. Competitive pricing has dropped our price in half. The population is aging. The Asian market is opening up.” What’s great about this frame is that it excuses the past. We can say, “Hey, what we did in the past was great for the circumstances that existed then, but now we need to change to what will work now and in the future.” In this frame, we don’t suck, we’re just becoming a bit out-of-date and need to adjust to the external change, but the changes are truly a must. Not just to meet the standard of constant improvement as in frame two, but in order to survive. This sort of example is, of course, where the phrase “burning platform” comes from. Your house is all of a sudden on fire. The environment has changed. You have to move.

As I mentioned, I like this third one the best since it can be a positive message and still have urgency, but it may at first appear that this really only relevant in certain circumstances. Those where there really has obviously been a significant environmental change, but you can really leverage this frame or, in fact, any of these frames in almost any situation. The key to using this frame is to do one or both of two things. Either find an environmental change that you can focus on to justify the change, and usually there is almost always some form of environmental change or forecasted change that you can use to create change based on an environmental frame, or create an environmental change.

For example, a new boss coming in can be an environmental change. The new boss has new expectations. We as a department need to deliver in a different way than we have before. There are many other ways to create environmental change. A new brand promise, a new performance management protocol, even a new goal or initiative that the company has that must be met.

Here at FROM, we work with clients all the time to make change successful and part of the work we do is about developing the frame for and communication about the change. I can assure you that there are lots of ways to apply creativity, to utilize the best frame in just about any circumstance with all your digital innovation, for change, for innovation.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pexels

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

Change Marketing versus Change Communications

1 Reply

Change Marketing versus Change Communications

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the ever-evolving landscapes of business and organizational growth, the paradigms of change management play a crucial role in steering the ship towards success. Within this realm, two concepts frequently emerge as tools to navigate turbulent waters: Change Marketing and Change Communications. At first glance, they may appear synonymous, but understanding their distinct roles and synergies is essential for orchestrating impactful transformations. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I aim to dissect these terms and provide clarity on how they can be leveraged to drive meaningful change.

Understanding the Concepts

Change Communications

Change Communications is the strategic dissemination of information related to a specific change initiative within an organization. It aims to inform, educate, and engage the stakeholders by providing them with accurate, consistent, and timely information. The primary objective of Change Communications is to reduce uncertainty, clarify doubts, and streamline the transition process. A well-executed communication plan addresses the who, what, where, when, and why of the change initiative. It takes into account the different perspectives of stakeholders and ensures that messages resonate with their specific concerns and expectations.

Change Marketing

On the other hand, Change Marketing borrows principles from traditional marketing but adapts them to promulgate change initiatives within an organization. It applies marketing techniques such as segmenting, targeting, positioning, and promotion to make the change appeal to the organization’s internal audience. At its core, Change Marketing is about building buy-in, excitement, and advocacy for change among employees. It focuses on raising awareness about the benefits of the change, cultivating a positive perception, and driving behavioral commitment. By framing the change as a product or service, Change Marketing positions the change initiative into a more relatable and consumable format.

Exploring the Differences

While both Change Marketing and Change Communications aim to facilitate change, their methodologies and focus areas differ in several key ways:

1. Objective

Change Communications is largely informative. Its purpose is to keep stakeholders informed and aligned throughout the change process. Change Marketing, meanwhile, takes a sales-oriented approach, persuading stakeholders to not only understand but also actively embrace and champion the change initiative.

2. Approach

Change Communications focuses on transparency and clarity, ensuring that the message is communicated consistently and accurately. Change Marketing employs creative and emotional appeals. It seeks to create a narrative or brand around the change, appealing to the emotional and psychological drivers of the stakeholders.

3. Tools and Channels

The tools and channels used in Change Communications typically include newsletters, emails, intranet updates, and formal meetings. These are factual and structured to ensure clarity. In contrast, Change Marketing may employ more dynamic and engaging tools such as storytelling, testimonials, videos, events, and interactive workshops, often leveraged through multiple platforms to create touchpoints.

4. Stakeholder Engagement

Change Communications tends to be more authoritative, with information flowing top-down from leadership to the employees. Change Marketing, however, is more collaborative. It encourages two-way communication and feedback loops, empowering stakeholders to be co-creators of the change narrative.

Synergizing Both Approaches

Leveraging Change Marketing and Change Communications together can create a more cohesive and comprehensive change strategy, enhancing the likelihood of successful transformation. Here’s how they can be integrated:

Create a Strong Narrative

Weave a compelling narrative that not only communicates the facts but also makes the change relatable and engaging. Use Change Communications to set the foundation and establish baseline understanding, and then layer on Change Marketing to breathe life into the story, making it resonate on a personal level.

Segment and Personalize

Different stakeholders have varying needs, concerns, and levels of influence. Change Marketing enables you to segment your audience and customize messages, while Change Communications ensures that these tailored messages are coherent and aligned with overall objectives.

Foster Participation and Ownership

Encourage a participatory culture where stakeholders feel they have a voice in the change process. Use Change Communications to set up structured feedback mechanisms, and leverage Change Marketing to create invitations and spaces for dialogue and co-creation.

Measure and Adapt

Both approaches require measurement to understand effectiveness and areas for improvement. Use analytics from communications channels to evaluate engagement levels and adjust strategies; similarly, use marketing metrics to assess buy-in and adapt campaigns to enhance impact.

Conclusion

Change Marketing and Change Communications are both pivotal elements of successful change management, each offering unique contributions towards achieving a transformative vision. By understanding the distinct roles they play and harnessing their complementary strengths, organizations can navigate change with agility and finesse. This dual-approach not only smooths the transition process but also builds a resilient and engaged workforce ready to face the future.

In embracing both pathways, leaders can foster a culture of empathy, insight, and innovation, where change is not merely communicated but sold as an exciting journey toward a better tomorrow.

In closing, I encourage all change leaders and enthusiasts to continuously pursue learning and adaptation. Engage with new methodologies, share your stories, and remain open to experimentation. The future of change management rests in our ability to be both innovative and empathetic facilitators of transformation. One great place to start is to get a copy of Braden’s best-selling book Charting Change, which is now in its Second Edition with several new chapters!

And, if you need help marketing your change, please let me know.

Image credit: Pixabay

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

We Need a New Language for Change

1 Reply

We Need a New Language for Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

If innovation (the term) is dead and we will continue to engage in innovation (the activity), how do we talk about creating meaningful change without falling back on meaningless buzzwords? The answer isn’t finding a single replacement word – it’s building a new innovation language that actually describes what we’re trying to achieve. Think of it as upgrading from a crayon to a full set of oil paints – suddenly you can create much more nuanced pictures of progress.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All

We’ve spent decades trying to cram every type of progress, change, and improvement into the word “innovation.” It’s like trying to describe all forms of movement with just the word “moving.” Sure, you’re moving but without the specificity of words like walking, running, jumping, bounding, and dancing, you don’t know what or how you’re moving or why.

That’s why using “innovation” to describe everything different from today doesn’t work.

Use More Precise Language for What and How

Before we throw everything out, let’s keep what actually works: Innovation means “something new that creates value.” That last bit is crucial – it’s what separates meaningful change from just doing new stuff for novelty’s sake. (Looking at you, QR code on toothpaste tutorials.)

But, just like “dancing” is a specific form of movement, we need more precise language to describe what the new value-creating thing is that we’re doing:

Core IMPROVEMENTS: Making existing things better. It’s the unglamorous but essential work of continuous refinement. Think better batteries, faster processors, smoother processes.
Adjacent EXPANSIONS: Venturing into new territory – new customers, new offerings, new revenue models, OR new processes. It’s like a restaurant adding delivery service: same food, new way of reaching customers.
Radical REINVENTION: Going all in, changing multiple dimensions at once. Think Netflix killing its own DVD business to stream content they now produce themselves. (And yes, that sound you hear is Blockbuster crying in the corner.)

Adopt More Sophisticated Words to Describe Why

Innovation collapsed because innovation became an end in and of itself. Companies invested in it to get good PR, check a shareholder box, or entertain employees with events.

We forgot that innovation is a means to an end and, as a result, got lazy about specifying what the expected end is. We need to get back to setting these expectations with words that are both clear and inspiring

Growth means ongoing evolution
Transformation means fundamental system change (not just putting QR codes on things)
Invention means creating something new without regard to its immediate usefulness
Problem Solving means finding, creating, and implementing practical solutions
Value Creation means demonstrating measurable and meaningful impact

Why This Matters

This isn’t just semantic nitpicking. Using more precise language sets better expectations, helps people choose the most appropriate tools, and enables you to measure success accurately. It’s the difference between saying “I want to move more during the day” and “I want to build enough endurance to run a 5K by June.”

What’s Next?

As we emerge from innovation’s chrysalis, maybe what we’re becoming isn’t simpler – it’s more sophisticated. And maybe that’s exactly what we need to move forward.

Drop a comment: What words do you use to describe different types of change and innovation in your organization? How do you differentiate between what you’re doing and why you’re doing it?

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

The Changemaker Mindset

Leave a reply

The Changemaker Mindset

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Every time I speak to a group of executives, they complain that their organizations desperately need to change, but that the bosses are hostile to it. And every time I speak to a group of leaders, they say that change is their highest priority, but can’t seem to align the rank-and-file behind transformational initiatives.

The truth is that everybody loves their own brand of change, it’s other people’s ideas and initiatives that they don’t like. We all have things that we want to be different. But the status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. To want change is one thing, but to change ourselves, well… that’s another story.

What I’ve found in both my research and my practice is that people who bring about transformational, even historic, change start out no differently than anyone else. In fact, early versions of them are often decidedly unimpressive. The difference between them and everyone else is that somewhere along the way they learn to adopt a changemaker mindset.

A Problem They Couldn’t Look Away From

As a young man, Mohandis 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.”

The truth is that 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. It was his devotion to the cause that gave those words meaning, not the other way around.

Steve Jobs didn’t look for ideas, he looked 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 someone couldn’t look away from.

Identifying A Keystone Change

Every change effort, if it is to be successful, needs to identify a Keystone Change to bridge the gap between the initial grievance about the world as it is and the vision for how the world could be. You can’t get there in a single step. This is a lesson that even a legendary changemaker like Gandhi had to learn the hard way.

In 1919, five years after his return to India, Gandhi called for a nationwide series of strikes and boycotts in response to the Rowlatt Acts, which restricted Indian rights. These protests were successful at first, but soon spun wildly out of control and eventually led to the massacre at Amritsar, in which British soldiers left hundreds dead and more than a thousand wounded.

A decade later, when the Indian National Congress asked Gandhi to design a campaign of civil disobedience in support of independence, he proceeded more cautiously. Rather than rashly calling for national action, he set out with 70 or 80 of his closest disciples to protest unjust salt laws. Their nonviolent discipline inspired the nation and the world.

Today, the Salt March is known as Gandhi’s greatest triumph. It was the first time that the British was forced to negotiate with the Indians and, because it demonstrated that the Raj could be defied, helped lead to Indian independence in 1947. Yet without that earlier failure, which Gandhi would call his Himalayan miscalculation, it would not have been possible.

Gandhi is, of course, a legendary historical figure. But other, more pedestrian, changemakers learned the same thing. A lean manufacturing transformation at Wyeth Pharmaceutical started with a single change with a single team, but quickly spread to 17,000 employees. A healthcare revolution began with just six quality practices. When the CIO of Experian set out to move his organization to the cloud, he began with internal API’s and just a few teams.

To make change real, you need to get out of the business of selling an idea and into the business of selling a success. You do that with a Keystone Change.

Empowering A Movement

We revere legendary change leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and others not just for their ideas, but because of how they empowered others to take ownership of their cause. Those who followed them did so not in their names, but for themselves. The struggle was collective, not one of subservience.

That’s what makes building a movement different from traditional change models they often teach in business schools. A snazzy internal communication program and a training regimen may help an organization adopt new software or gear up to support a new product line, but it won’t change how people fundamentally think or act.

Movement leaders focus on empowerment, not persuasion. Gandhi didn’t need to convince his countrymen about the daily humiliations and injustices suffered under the British Raj. King did not have to explain to black Americans that racism was wrong. Mandela did not have to persuade black South Africans about the evils of Apartheid. They empowered them to make a difference. That’s what makes movements so compelling and effective.

Changemakers of all kinds can do the same. At Experian, the CIO set up an “API Center of Excellence” to help product managers who wanted to build out cloud-based features. To power the quality movement in healthcare, activists created “change kits” to guide hospital staff who were on board and wanted to bring their colleagues along. Change can only succeed if you equip those who believe in it to drive it forward.

Building Empathy, Even For Your Enemies

People who believe in change want to believe that if everyone understood it, they’d want it to happen. That’s why “change management” gurus focus on communication and persuasion. They think that if you explain your idea for change in just the right way, others will see the light. For many change consultants, transformation is primarily a messaging problem.

Yet anyone who has ever been married or had kids knows how hard it can be to convince even a single person of something. Persuading hundreds, if not thousands—or even an entire society—that they should drop what they’re thinking and doing to adopt your idea and help drive it forward is a tall order. The simple truth is that no one is really that charming.

Make no mistake. If your idea is important, if it has real potential to affect how people think and how they act, there will always be those who will hate it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. That’s just a simple fact of life that every potential changemaker needs to learn to internalize and accept.

Yet adopting a changemaker mindset means that you understand that change is always built on common ground and that you need to build empathy, even for your most ardent adversaries, because that is how you identify shared values and move things forward. It is by listening to your opposition and internalizing its logic that you can learn how to discredit it, or even better, inspire those hostile to change to discredit themselves.

That is the changemaker mindset: To understand that change is hard, even unlikely, but to remain clear-eyed, hard-nosed and opportunity focused. To know that through shared values and shared purpose, radical, transformational change is not only possible, but ultimately inevitable.

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

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Rise of the Change Marketing Agency

Leave a reply

Rise of the Change Marketing Agency

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, where technological innovation and rapidly evolving consumer expectations are the norm, organizations need to manage change more adeptly than ever before. Introducing unique products or transforming internal processes is not just about logistics anymore; it’s also about aligning emotional, perceptual, and experiential shifts among stakeholders. This is where the nascent concept of a “Change Marketing Agency” comes into play — a specialized entity that bridges the gap between traditional change management and strategic marketing.

Understanding Change Marketing

Traditionally, change management has focused on the frameworks and toolsets that help an organization steer through the tumultuous waters of transformation. However, the human-centered aspect of change often takes a back seat. Enter change marketing — a philosophy and practice that utilizes marketing principles to enable effective change by addressing the emotional and behavioral aspects of the transformation journey.

Change marketing is not about selling a product, but about securing buy-in and engagement for transformative initiatives from stakeholders. It’s about narrating a compelling story that aligns vision, communicates benefits, and inspires action. As such, a Change Marketing Agency can play a decisive role in ensuring that change resonates with the inherent values and expectations of both internal and external stakeholders.

Difference Between Change Marketing and Change Communications

While change marketing and change communications are related, they serve different purposes and utilize different strategies. Here’s a breakdown of the key differences:

Objective:
- Change Communications focuses on the dissemination of information necessary for awareness and understanding.
- Change Marketing aims to build desire, alignment, and engagement, often by tapping into emotional and psychological triggers.
Approach:
- Change Communications typically involves one-way communication to inform and instruct stakeholders.
- Change Marketing uses a multi-channel, interactive strategy designed to engage stakeholders through storytelling and experiential campaigns.
Key Tools:
- Change Communications may employ memos, emails, FAQs, and newsletters to share updates.
- Change Marketing leverages branding, narrative development, workshops, multimedia content, and feedback loops.
End Goal:
- Change Communications strives for clarity and understanding among stakeholders.
- Change Marketing is focused on creating advocates and fostering a shared sense of purpose around the change initiative.

The Emerging Role of Change Marketing Agencies

The necessity for such agencies is increasingly clear as organizations recognize the limits of traditional change management methodologies. With new demands to personalize and humanize change, companies need partners adept in storytelling, audience segmentation, and behavioral psychology.

Change Marketing Agencies deliver services that range from crafting narrative-driven communication plans, creating engaging content that aligns with company culture, to analyzing stakeholder response and refining strategies dynamically. By integrating these services, they help organizations facilitate smoother transitions during times of change.

Case Study 1: The Digital Shift of a Legacy Publishing House

Imagine a traditional publishing house, steeped in decades of heritage, transitioning to a digital-first model. The challenge was not only technological but also cultural. Employees accustomed to paper-based processes were resistant, stakeholders questioned the shift’s efficacy, and long-time readers were apprehensive about abandoning the tactile experience of a physical book.

Enter the Change Marketing Agency. They embarked on a campaign that highlighted the richness of digital storytelling. Through a series of engaging multimedia experiences showcasing enhanced storytelling possible with digital tools, they shifted the narrative from a departure from tradition to an evolution of it. Internally, workshops and storytelling sessions were organized to visualize the new possibilities for employees, turning apprehension into curiosity and eventually enthusiasm.

Externally, the agency crafted a series of customer stories showcasing individuals enjoying enriched reading experiences in the digital ecosystem—aligning the change with customer lifestyles. This multi-layered narrative approach not only facilitated the transition but redefined the brand’s image, leading to a spike in digital subscriptions and an embrace of digital-first culture by resistant employees.

Case Study 2: Retail Giant’s Sustainability Transformation

Another compelling example is a major retail company, whose goal was to rebrand its image around sustainability and eco-friendliness. Despite comprehensive internal policies and sustainability initiatives, both employees and consumers were skeptical about the company’s genuine commitment to these values.

The Change Marketing Agency did not simply broadcast the changes; they nurtured a movement. They launched a transparent campaign sharing stories from every level of the company, emphasizing transparency and genuine impact. By spotlighting employee-led green initiatives and community collaborations, they personalized the brand’s sustainability narrative.

For the consumer base, they designed interactive experiences that allowed customers to see the environmental impact of their purchase decisions, fostering a sense of participation in the larger sustainability mission. As a result, the company observed not just an enhancement in public perception but tangible employee engagement, manifesting in innovative, ground-up sustainability projects internally.

Conclusion

The rise of Change Marketing Agencies highlights an evolving recognition of the power of integrated human-centered narratives in managing change. By marrying the art of marketing with the science of change management, they do not just manage transitions—they animate them. For organizations, this means deeper engagement, less friction, and transformative change that resonates on a personal level.

As we forge into an era marked by continuous change, the role of such agencies will likely expand. Their ability to humanize, narrate, and communicate complex transformations stands poised to redefine how organizations and individuals embrace the evolving future.

And, if you need help marketing your change, please let me know.

Image credit: Pixabay

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

Innovating for Social Good

Leave a reply

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The Coach for Innovators Amplifiers, a small group of global business game changers, started engaging in monthly dialogue sessions in 2022. As alumni of the Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program™, we intended to apply our knowledge, skills, and experience to discover and explore how we might collaborate to support countries, organizations, and education institutions in achieving the World Economic Forum’s Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals by innovating for good.

We are a small, cohesive, committed group of corporate executives, consultants, educators, coaches, and trainers who connected and maximized the differences and diversity of our group by debating how to apply innovation as the glue to achieve sustainable change everywhere. Our mission is to amplify and catalyze innovators, organizations, and communities to stimulate and achieve sustainable development everywhere. It is based on the values of ethical practice, systems thinking, social entrepreneurship, civic change, alignment, deep learning, humanity, collective action, openness, curiosity, courage, experimentation, and well-being by innovating for good.

We set about adding value to the quality of people’s lives by engaging and influencing people to lead the transition towards co-creating societal shifts ethically, equitably and sustainably.

Our target market consists of passionate and energetic young people engaged in learning to teach the core elements of the Being side of social entrepreneurship to enable them to be ecologically resilient by innovating for good.

A different approach to innovation

Our approach was based on three core principles that emerged during our research and testing process:

Innovation is like drinking water; it is essential for life and belongs to all life to sustain it in all contexts.
Innovation is a duty; people have no right to pollute and destroy all life and the planet.
Innovation allows us to consciously manifest different ways of being and doing to co-create a future we want to have and sustain.

This requires people to unlearn old mental models and irrelevant perspectives in a 21st-century disrupted world and relearn and learn to adopt an innovative mindset. Which focuses on supporting sustainable and positive economic growth and de-growth and on developing circular economies to do better with less by:

Challenging people’s illusions and inertia regarding the future, confronting harsh realities, and addressing problems to enhance people’s quality of life.
Transitioning from competition to co-petition within ecosystems, fostering genuine collaboration across boundaries to co-create solutions on a global scale.
Moving away from competition towards co-petition in ecosystems, embracing collaboration across boundaries to co-create global solutions.

Meta-learning model – Innovating for good

This became the basis for developing a meta-learning model constructed on what we had encountered as the key systemic problems that largely inhibited innovation. We tested and validated it using a small, diverse target market sample of global students studying here in Australia.

We incorporated our findings into pivoting The Start-Up Game™ Boardroom Version and into the book Janet Sernack is currently writing – “Conscious Innovation – Activating the Heart, Mind and Spirit of Innovation.” Both are due for release in June 2025,

Concept/Stage	Problem/Explanation	Question
Awakening process Igniting the light of consciousness	People can shift their values, beliefs, and mindsets by applying various approaches and methodologies to develop the new perspectives required to innovate.	How might we alert people to the importance of innovation?
Letting it go Exposing the landmines	Actions speak louder than words. What activities, exercises, and challenges will mobilize people to participate in the innovation challenge?	What do you think people might need to let go of to make the space and time to innovate?
Initiating the shift Embracing new perspectives	Actions speak louder than words. What types of activities, exercises, and challenges will mobilize people to participate in the innovation challenge?	How might we best introduce and engage people with embracing new perspectives on innovation?
Communicating Shifting gears	Communication is key. People need clarity and coherent messages to understand and appreciate the importance and benefits of innovation.	What are the key messages that might resonate with you?
Sharing the story Setting the torch alight	Stories inspire us and provide evidence of success; what stories do you consider important to share to ignite people’s motivation to innovate?	What kinds of stories might inspire you to take up the innovation challenge?
Stories inspire us and provide evidence of success; what stories do you consider essential to share to ignite people’s motivation to innovate?	Actions speak louder than words. What activities, exercises, and challenges will mobilise people to participate in the innovation challenge?	Many people don’t know how to make sense of innovation and are unaware that all change and growth require innovation of some type to be effective and sustainable.

Inner development supports outer development – Innovating for good.

The Inner Development Goal Framework was initiated in 2023 by the 29k Foundation, Ekskaret Foundation, IMD Business School for Management, LUCSUS Center for Sustainability Studies | Lund University, Stockholm Resilience Center | Stockholm University, The New Division, Flourishing Network at Harvard University, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). It has been set up as a not-for-profit initiative to address the pressing need to increase our collective abilities to face and effectively work with complex challenges. Based on the pre-supposition, “without a foundational shift in human values and leadership capacities, external solutions to our global challenges may be limited, too slow, or short-lived”.

Inner Development Goal Framework

The framework consists of five dimensions across twenty-three skills:

Being; relationship to self,
Thinking, cognitive skills,
Relating, caring for others and the world,
Collaborating, social kills,
Acting, enabling change.

This great initiative inspired our group, as it was closely aligned with ImagineNation’s™ approach that the group members had learned in The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program when innovating for good.

Our goal was to enhance the quality of people’s lives, specifically focusing on “being the change” you wished to see in the world. We aimed to develop people’s confidence, capacity, and competence in being change-ready and responsive, accepting responsibility, and becoming emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptive.

These six elements are foundational and learnable in developing an innovation mindset to help people make mandatory, impactful, ethical changes aligned with the seventeen sustainable and five inner development goals dimensions when innovating for good.

We co-created a toolkit to enable us to mentor, teach and coach a tribe of doers/young people to create a movement that:

It encapsulates their dreams and inspires their hopes and optimism about the future.
It fosters a safe space for healing and for their voices to be heard.
It cultivates their potential through innovative uncertainty tolerance to co-create new forms.
It instills a sense of urgency to collectively advocate for the changes essential to shape and own the future they desire for their children and grandchildren.

Power of Agency, Development and Hope

In a recent article, “Five Global Trends in Business and Society in 2025,” Insead identified the top five global trends for 2025: climate change, geopolitical crises, income and wealth inequality and social instability, and inflation or recession. How we react to and manage these five trends by innovating for goodwill tests the resilience of our global society, economy, governments, academic institutions, corporations, and civil societies in an increasingly uncertain, unstable world.

To have any sense of agency in the face of these emerging challenges, our Coach for Innovators Amplifiers group and the Inner Development Goal group have boiled it down to a fundamental principle: “To be the change you wish to see in the world,” develop your skills and be hopeful, believing and even trusting that by innovating for good, things might eventually turn out well for everyone, everywhere.

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

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Harnessing Human-Centered Change for Lasting Impact

Leave a reply

Harnessing Human-Centered Change for Lasting Impact

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Greetings on this Global Change Management Day! Today I would like to highlight the work of Braden Kelley, an internationally-recognized thought leader and best-selling author passionately committed to advancing human-centered change and innovation. Today, I want to share insights that emphasize the importance of placing people at the heart of transformation efforts and how this approach fosters sustainable change.

Change management, at its core, is about guiding human behavior and perception. While organizational strategies, structures, and systems are critical, they mean little without addressing the human side of change. This is where human-centered change comes into play, an approach Braden Kelley has dedicated much of his career to developing and promoting.

The Essence of Human-Centered Change

Human-centered change is more than a methodology; it is a philosophy that reclaims the importance of empathy, communication, and collaboration in organizational transformation. It’s about understanding the human experience and designing change initiatives that align with the intrinsic motivations and needs of individuals.

When people feel heard and understood, they become genuine advocates of change. This approach leads to not just short-term success but long-lasting impact, turning change-resistant cultures into adaptable ecosystems thriving on innovation.

Insights from Braden’s Journey

Throughout his career, Braden has created frameworks and tools that encapsulate the essence of human-centered change. One such resource is the Change Planning Toolkit. It provides a unique visual framework to help change managers plan, implement, and sustain change initiatives with meticulous precision and empathy for those involved.

The toolkit is grounded in the principle that every change journey is unique, yet structured guidance can illuminate paths to common goals. This is reviewed in various workshops and talks where he emphasizes iteration and engagement over top-down mandates. This toolkit — and many others he has developed — aims to demystify change management by involving stakeholders from the ground up and serves to get everyone literally all on the same page for change.

Empowering Change Agents

One of Braden’s objectives with creating tools and resources is to empower change agents—those individuals within an organization who understand the importance of human-centric transformation. By equipping them with comprehensive tools, such as canvases and diagnostics, these change leaders can effectively convey and execute change efforts.

For those interested in exploring these resources, be sure and get the 10 free human-centered change tools that Braden makes available here on this web site – including a visualization of the ACMP Standard for Change Management®.

These tools serve as a starting point for embedding human-centered practices in change management projects. They are crafted to encourage dialogue, understanding, and alignment among all stakeholders.

Celebrating Progress and Looking Forward

Global Change Management Day provides an opportunity to reflect on our progress and set aspirations for the future. As we acknowledge the evolving challenges facing businesses and societies, it becomes imperative that change management professionals continue to evolve, embracing approaches that prioritize humanity.

Moving forward, the objective is to foster communities of practice where change professionals can share insights, challenges, and successes. Through collaboration and shared learning, we can enhance our understanding and implementation of change practices that honor the human spirit while achieving our organizational objectives.

Image credit: ACMP, Braden Kelley

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

A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife

Leave a reply

A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The physicist Max Planck made many historic breakthroughs, including a discovery that led to quantum theory. Still, he lamented that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Clearly, that’s not only true for scientific truths. Every generation rejects some notions of their elders, explores things on their own and adopts new ideas. Some of those ideas will survive, but others will ultimately be rejected, which always causes some acrimony. Even Aristotle complained about the “exalted notions” of the youth.

Yet this time is different. Because the Boomer generation was so large, and Generation X so small, those who came of age in the 1960s essentially ruled for two epochs. The rising Millennial generation, which is now the largest, holds starkly different values than Boomers. Over the next decade, as Millennials come to predominate, we can expect tensions to rise.

Revamping The Workplace

I still remember one incident early in my career. I had taken a job in national radio sales and the first few months were devoted to an intensive training course. One day that featured particularly nice weather, my fellow trainees and I decided that, instead of bringing our lunch back to the office, we would eat it in the park.

Our Boomer bosses were irate and insulted. The problem wasn’t that we took too much time for lunch, but rather that we took too much pleasure in it which, in their eyes at least, violated the social contract. As trainees, we were supposed to “pay our dues,” not to enjoy ourselves and our brief respite from the daily grind was seen as something akin to insubordination.

Millennials won’t stand for that kind of treatment. As this article in Harvard Business Review explains, they require a better work-life balance, more flexible schedules and constructive feedback. They demand to be respected and chafe at hierarchy. The younger generations of today don’t expect to “pay dues,” they seek a greater purpose.

Businesses that do not heed the Millennial’s demands are finding it difficult to compete. Millions of Boomers retired early during the pandemic, which led to severe labor shortage and the Great Resignation. Over the next few decades, as the younger generations take charge, we can expect a very different workplace.

Rethinking Economics

In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a radical idea. He argued that corporate CEOs should not take into account the interests of the communities they serve, but that their only social responsibility was to increase shareholder value. While ridiculed by many at the time, by the 1980s Friedman’s idea became accepted doctrine.

It wasn’t just Friedman, either. As the Boomer counterculture of the 60s and 70s gave way to the Yuppie culture of the 80s a new engineering mindset took hold. Much like the success of business was boiled down to its stock price, the success of a society was boiled down to GDP. “You manage what you measure” became an article of faith.

It has become clear that approach has failed. In fact, since Friedman’s essay the American economy has become markedly less productive. Our economy has become less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric you can think of, our well-being has declined since the 1970s.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the younger generations have rebelled. While the Boomers remember the Reagan years of the 1980s fondly, Millennials and Zoomers only see a record of failure. From the Great Recession to the Great Resignation, they see a dire need to change course and will not be assuaged by rosy economic statistics. They want a better quality of life.

Reshaping Society

When the Boomers came of age in the 60s it was an era of rising prosperity. Perhaps not surprisingly, many prioritized self-actualization and sought to “find themselves.” The scandals of the 1970s made them suspicious of the establishment and the Reagan years, along with the fall of the Soviet Union, reinforced their faith in individual agency.

Millennials have seen this ideology fail. Besides the lack of productivity growth and stagnation in wages, they have seen 9/11 traumatize the nation and pave the path for an ill-considered war on terror that cost trillions and devastated America’s standing in the world. Many carry significant educational debt and had their careers derailed by the Great Recession.

Research from Pew finds other important differences. While the Millennial generation is the most educated in history, with almost 40% holding a 4-year degree, they are worse off financially than their predecessors. Many continued to live with their parents as adults and delayed getting married and starting families. They are also far more multicultural than previous generations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Millennials have rejected the 1980s “greed is good” ethos of the Boomers and tend to focus on experiences rather than materialistic signaling. Also, while the younger generation’s passion for inclusivity is often overstated, they have grown up in a world far more accustomed to seeing marginalized groups in powerful positions.

Brace Yourself for a Tumultuous Decade

The almost seismic shift in values that the transition from Boomer to Millennial dominance represents would be enough to set the stage for conflict. What will make this decade even more difficult is that the demographic impact is hitting at the same time as other important shifts in technology, resources and migration patterns. The last time society has endured this much of a pressure cooker was the 1920s, and that ended badly.

We are already feeling the effects. The mismanaged “War of Terror,” the Great Recession and then the Covid pandemic undermined faith in institutions and paved the way for the rise of popular authoritarianism and the decline of democratic institutions. The battle for the liberal world order is being fought in, of all places, Ukraine, as I write this.

What I think should be most salient about our situation at this point in history is that we are here because of choices that were made. Yes, there were cultural and economic forces at play, but the Boomer generation chose to value the individual over the community, shareholders over other stakeholders and to embrace GDP as a proxy for the overall health of society.

We can, as Ukraine has been doing for the past twenty years, make different choices. We can choose our communities over ourselves, resilience over optimization, and to nurture rather than to dominate. Most of all, we need to invest to increase the productive, environmental and human potentials of our society so that we can better face the challenges ahead.

Make no mistake. This will be a struggle, as all worthy things are.

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

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

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

Leave a reply

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

A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024 — Curated by Braden Kelley
The Twelve Killers of Innovation — by Robyn Bolton
Building Trust for High Performing Teams — by David Burkus
Be Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With — by Shep Hyken
Uncertainty Isn’t Always Bad — by Mike Shipulski
The Real Winners of Mega Events — by Shep Hyken
Five Must Reads for 2025 — by Robyn Bolton
Don’t Slow Roll Your Transformation — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Is it Time to ReLearn to Work? — by Geoffrey A. Moore

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

Why Annual Employee Experience Audits Are Important — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 — by Jesse Nieminen
Best Team Building Exercise Around — by David Burkus
You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong (According to Seth Godin) — by Robyn Bolton
Artificial Innovation — by Braden Kelley

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

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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