Category Archives: collaboration

How Courage and Trust are Transforming Bayer

Fewer Rules and Better Results

How Courage and Trust are Transforming Bayer

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Consider this question: If workers are hobbled by 1,000 rules, does it make a meaningful difference to reduce them to only 900?”

The answer is No.  In fact, this is precisely why most attempts at fighting bureaucracy fail – and why true transformation requires starting completely fresh.

Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, knows this and isn’t afraid to admit it.  When he took the helm in June 2023, he discovered a company paralyzed by bureaucracy. Instead of trying to optimize the system, he looked at the company’s “1,362 pages” of employee rules and knew the entire structure needed to change.

Breaking the Stranglehold

As Anderson stated in Fortune, “There was a time for hierarchical, command-and-control organizations – the 19th century, to be exact, when many workers were illiterate, information traveled at a snail’s pace, and strict adherence to rules offered the competitive advantage of reliability.”

The modern reality is different. Today’s Bayer employs highly skilled experts, operates at digital speed, and competes in markets where, as Anderson observes, “the most reliable companies are the most dynamic.”

The challenge wasn’t just the encyclopedic rule book. The organization’s “12 levels of hierarchy” created what Anderson called “unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.” In today’s innovation-driven market, this industrial-age structure threatened the company’s future.

Unleashing Innovation

Anderson’s solution? “Dynamic Shared Ownership” – a radical model that puts 95% of decision-making in the hands of the people actually doing the work. Instead of annual budgets and endless approvals, self-directed teams work in 90-day sprints with the autonomy to make real-time decisions.

The results are already showing. Take Vividion, Bayer’s independently operated subsidiary. Operating in small, autonomous teams, they went from FDA approval to first patient dosing in just six weeks. They’re now on track to produce one or two new drug candidates for clinical testing every year.

Speed Becomes Reality

The impact extends across the organization. Bayer’s scientists have transformed their plant breeding process, reducing cycles from “five years down to merely four months.”

In the consumer health division, teams have accelerated their development timelines significantly, reducing product launch schedules “by up to nine months” in Asia. Within their first two months under the new system, these teams generated millions in additional value.

While financial markets remain uncertain about this transformation, one crucial metric suggests it’s working: employee retention has improved. The scientists, researchers, and product developers – the people doing the innovative work – are showing their confidence in this dramatic shift toward autonomous operation.

Why This Matters & What to do Next

For most of us, the question isn’t whether our organization has too much bureaucracy – it almost certainly does. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

Try this – Create a small, autonomous team with a 90-day mission. Give them real decision-making power and see what they can accomplish when freed from bureaucratic constraints.

Remember Anderson’s key insight: reducing rules from 1,000 to 900 won’t create meaningful change. Real transformation requires the courage to fundamentally rethink how work gets done.

For anyone who’s ever felt the soul-crushing weight of bureaucracy, Bayer’s radical reinvention offers hope. Maybe the path to innovation isn’t through better rules and processes, but through the courage to trust in human potential.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Lean is the Enemy of Learning

And Other Counterintuitive Lessons from a Day at MIT

Lean is the Enemy of Learning

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

I firmly believe that there are certain things in life that you automatically say Yes to.  You do not ask questions or pause to consider context. You simply say Yes:

  1. Painkillers after a medical procedure
  2. Warm blankets
  3. The opportunity to listen to brilliant people talk about things that fascinate them.

So, when asked if I would like to attend an Executive Briefing curated by MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, I did not ask questions or pause to check my calendar.  I simply said Yes.

I’m extremely happy that I did because what I heard blew my mind.

Lean is the enemy of learning

When Ben Armstrong, Executive Director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center and Co-Lead of the Work of the Future Initiative, said, “To produce something new, you need to create a lot of waste,” I nearly lept out of my chair, raised my arms, and shouted “Amen brother!”

He went on to tell the story of a meeting between Elon Musk and Toyota executives shortly after Musk became CEO.  Toyota executives marveled at how quickly Tesla could build an EV and asked Musk for his secret.  Musk gestured around the factory floor at all the abandoned hunks of metal and partially built cars and explained that, unlike Toyota, which prided itself on being lean and minimizing waste, Tesla engineers focused on learning – and waste is a required part of the process.

We decide with our hearts and justify with our heads – even when leasing office space

John E. Fernández, Director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, shared an unexpected insight about selling sustainable buildings effectively.  Instead of hard numbers around water and energy cost savings, what convinces companies to pay the premium for Net Zero environments is prestige.  The bragging rights of being a tenant in Winthrop Center, Boston’s first-ever Passive House office building, gave developers a meaningful point of differentiation and justified higher-than-market-rate rents to future tenants like McKinsey and M&T Bank.

49% of companies are Silos and Spaghetti

I did a hard eye roll when I saw Digital Transformation on the agenda.  But Stephanie Woerner, Principal Research Scientists and Executive Director for MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, proved me wrong by explaining that Digital Transformation requires operational excellence and customer-focused innovation.

Her research reveals that while 26% of companies have evolved to manage both innovation and operations, operate with agility, and deliver great customer experiences, nearly half of companies are stuck operating in silos and throwing spaghetti against the wall.  These “silo and spaghetti companies” are often product companies rife with complex systems and processes that require and reward individual heroics to make progress. 

What seems like the safest option is the riskiest

How did 26% of companies transform while the rest stayed stuck or made little progress?  The path forward isn’t what you’d expect. Companies that go all-in on operational excellence or customer innovation struggle to shift focus and work in the other half of the equation.  But doing a little bit of each is even more risky because the companies often wait for results from one step before taking the next.  The result is a never-ending transformation slog that is eventually abandoned.

Academia is full of random factoids

They’re not random to the academics, but for us civilians, they’re mainly helpful for trivia night:

  • 50% of US robots are used in the automotive industry
  • <20% of manufacturing job descriptions require digital skills (yes, that includes MS Office)
  • Data centers will account for 8-21% of global energy demand by 2030
  • Energy is 10% of the cost but 90% of the cost of mining bitcoin
  • Cities take up 3% of the earth’s surface, contain 33% of the population, account for 70% of global electricity consumption, and are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions

Why say Yes

When brilliant people talk about things they find fascinating, it’s often because those things challenge conventional wisdom. The tension between lean efficiency and innovative learning, the role of emotion in business decisions, and the risks of playing it too safe all point to a fascinating truth: sometimes the most counterintuitive path forward is the most successful. 

How have you seen this play out in your work?

Image credit: Unsplash

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When Scaling Innovation Backfires

How One Company Became the Theranos of Marshmallows

When Scaling Innovation Backfires

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Here’s a head-scratcher when it comes to scaling innovation: What happens when your innovative product is a hit with customers, but you still fail spectacularly? Just ask the folks behind Smashmallow, the gourmet marshmallow company that went from sweet success to sticky situation faster than you can say “s’mores.”

The Recipe for Initial Success

Jon Sebastiani sold his premium jerky company Krave to Hershey for $240 million and thought he’d found his next billion-dollar idea in fancy French marshmallows. And initially, it looked like he had. 

Smashmallow’s artisanal, flavor-packed treats weren’t just another fluffy, tasteless sugar puff – they created an entirely new snack category. Customers couldn’t get enough of their handcrafted, churro-dusted, chocolate-chip-studded clouds of happiness. The company hit $5 million in sales in its first year, doubled that the next, and was available in 15,000 stores nationwide in only its third year.

Sounds like a startup fairy tale, right? Right!  If we’re talking about the original Brothers Grimm versions.  Corporate innovators start taking notes.

The Candy-coated Vision

Sebastiani and his investors weren’t content with building a successful premium regional brand. They wanted to become the Kraft of craft marshmallows, scaling from artisanal to industrial without losing what made the product special. It’s a story that plays out in corporations every day: the pressure to turn every successful pilot into a billion-dollar business.

So, they invested.  Big time.

They signed a contract with “an internationally respected builder of candy-making machines” to design and build a $3 million custom-built machine and another with a copacker to build an entirely new facility to accommodate the custom machine.

Bold visions require bold moves, and Sebastiani was a bold guy.

The Scale-up Meltdown

But boldness can’t overcome reality, and the custom machine couldn’t replicate the magic of handmade marshmallows. It couldn’t even make the marshmallows.

Starch dust created explosion hazards. Cinnamon wouldn’t stick. Workers couldn’t breathe through spice clouds. The handmade ethos of imperfect squares gave way to industrialized perfection. Each attempt to solve one problem created three more, like a game of confectionery whack-a-mole.

By 2022, Smashmallow was gone, leaving behind a cautionary tale about the gap between what customers value and what executives and investors want. The irony? They succeeded in their mission to disrupt the market – by 2028, the North American marshmallow market is projected to more than double its 2019 size, largely thanks to the premium category Smashmallow created. They just won’t be around to enjoy it.

A Bittersweet Paradox

For so many corporate innovators, this story hits close to home. How many promising projects died not because customers didn’t love them but because they couldn’t scale to “move the needle” for a multi-billion dollar corporation? A $15 million business might be a champagne-popping moment for an entrepreneur, but it barely registers as a rounding error on a Fortune 500 income statement.

This is the innovation paradox facing corporate innovators: The very pressure to go big or go home often destroys what makes an innovation special in the first place. It’s not enough to create something customers love – you must create something that can scale to satisfy the corporate appetite for growth.

Finding the Sweet Spot

The lesson isn’t that we should abandon ambitious scaling plans. Instead, we must be brutally honest about whether our drive for scale aligns with what makes our innovation valuable to customers. If it doesn’t, we must choose whether to scale back our ambitions (unlikely) or let go of our successful-but-small idea.   

After all, not every marshmallow needs to be a mountain, but every mountain climber (that’s you) needs a mountain.

Image credit: Unsplash

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A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams

Building, Leading and Scaling

A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Together with a client, we are developing a toolbox for building, leading, and scaling high-performance teams. We are about to begin the implementation phase and will share case stories in a few months, as there are valuable learnings in this process.

For now, you are welcome to use this toolbox. See the introduction and images below, and if you see a match, get in touch with your feedback and questions about utilization and implementation within your teams and organization.

Here’s a short overview of the toolbox. The attached images also provide a glimpse (let me know if I should send you an image deck with all of this combined):

Capability Gap Map

The Capability Gap Map tool helps identify and understand the current status, future desired position, and gaps that need to be filled across different focus areas. The key elements are 7-12 indicators that are prioritized, assessed today, and considered for the future position.

Steps for Using the Capability Gap Map:

  1. Identify Indicators: Select 7-12 key indicators relevant to the focus area.
  2. Prioritize Indicators: Rank the indicators based on their importance and impact.
  3. Rate Current State: Assess the current state for each indicator.
  4. Assess Future State: Define the desired future state for each indicator.
  5. Develop Action Plans: Create a one-pager outlining short, mid, and long-term actions to bridge the gaps.

SEBL (Stop, Enhance, Borrow, Learn)

SEBL is a tool to help leaders and their teams understand what to Stop, Enhance, Borrow, and Learn based on the Capability Gap Map. This tool can spur reflections and help drive specific actions.

Steps for Using SEBL:

  1. Stop: Identify and eliminate ineffective practices to free up resources and provide clarity.
  2. Enhance: Improve what’s already working well, capitalizing on strengths.
  3. Borrow: Look outward for inspiration and adapt successful practices from other sources.
  4. Learn: Push boundaries, innovate, and introduce entirely new concepts or skills.

Action Overviews

The Action Overview is a short document for leaders and their teams to create an overview of their upcoming actions. It can be used for individuals as well as teams and is useful for sharing the current focus with team members and stakeholders to get feedback and leverage networks.

Steps for Action Overviews:

  1. Focus & Description: Define your key action and relate it to your team’s objectives.
  2. Expected Outcomes & Metrics/KPIs: Detail what you aim to achieve and the metrics to measure these outcomes.
  3. Resources & Team Collaboration: Identify needed resources and potential for cross-functional collaboration.
  4. Stakeholders: Identify relevant internal and external stakeholders and their attitudes toward the action.
  5. Milestones/Deadline: Break down the action into manageable milestones, each with its own deadline.

Additional Tools

This toolbox is still in the early phases, and we are starting to implement it while developing other tools. If you are curious, we can also develop tailored Team Dynamics Cards, exercises, assessments, and other insights to support the above actions. You can access my library with over 250 images, 50+ cards on Team Dynamics and Leadership Growth, and more than 30 exercises. Custom materials can also be created for your teams or organization.

Feel free to use and share these tools. I look forward to your feedback and questions on implementing them within your teams and organization. If you’d like a complete image deck or more details, just let me know!

Image Credits: Unsplash, Stefan Lindegaard

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The Twelve Killers of Innovation

A Corporate Carol About Why You’re Not Getting Results

The Twelve Killers of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Last week, InnoLead published a collection of eleven articles describing the root causes and remedies for killers of innovation in large organizations.  Every single article is worth a read as they’re all written by experts and practitioners whose work I admire.

I was also inspired.

In the spirit of the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, I gave into temptation, added my own failure mode, and decided to have a bit of fun.

The Twelve Killers of Innovation

(Inspired by the Twelve Days of Christmas yet relevant year-round)

On the twelfth day of innovating, management gave to me:

Twelve leaders short-term planning

Eleven long projects dragging

Ten cultures resisting

Nine decisions made too quickly

Eight competing visions

Seven goals left unclear

Six startups mistrusted

Five poorly defined risks

Four rigid structures

Three funding black holes

Two teams under-staffed

And a bureaucracy too entrenched to change

Want to write a happier song?

Each of the innovation killers can be fended off with enough planning, collaboration, and commitment.  To learn how, check out the articles:

Twelve leaders short-term planning – 3 Examples of Why Innovation is a Leadership Problem by Robyn Bolton, MileZero

Eleven long projects dragging – Failing Slow by Clay Maxwell, Peer Insight

Ten cultures resisting – How to Innovate When Resistance is Everywhere by Trevor Anulewicz, NTT DATA

Nine decisions made too quickly – Red Light, Green Light by Doug Williams, SmartOrg Inc.

Eight competing visions – The Five Most Common Innovation Failure Modes by Parker Lee, Territory Global

Seven goals left unclear – Mitigating Common Failure Modes by Jim Bodio, BRI Associates

Six startups mistrusted – Developing a New Corporate Innovation Model by Satish Rao, Newlab

Five poorly defined risks – Strategic Innovation is too Scary by Gina O’Connor, Babson College

Four rigid structures – Corporate Innovation is Dead by Ryan Larcom, High Alpha Innovation

Three funding black holes – Failure Modes by Jake Miller, The Engineered Innovation Group

Two teams under-staffed – Why Innovation Teams Fail by Jacob Dutton, Future Foundry

And a bureaucracy too entrenched to change – Building Resilient Teams by Frank Henningsen, HYPE Innovation

How are you going to make sure that you receive gifts and not coal this year for all your innovation work?

Image credit: Pexels

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The Fears of Your Colleagues

The Fears of Your Colleagues

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“We identified four opportunities for market expansion, all adjacent to our current business, and entry into any one of them is almost guaranteed to materially grow our business.   But no one is doing anything.”

I wanted to be surprised.  Instead, I sighed and asked the question I knew he couldn’t answer.

“What are your colleagues afraid of?”

The Four Horsemen of the Innovation Apocalypse

Most of the time, when opportunities are clear, but action is absent, it’s because one of the first three horsemen of the innovation apocalypse appeared:

  • Short-termism: “The CFO is worried we may miss the quarter, so we’re starting to make cuts.”
  • Size:  “We have a new President coming in who wants to put his stamp on things, so he’s cutting anything that won’t double our business in three years.”
  • Scarcity: “We’re implementing a new process, and this would just be one thing too many for people to handle.”

The business my client described has doubled in the past five years. After fifty years of steady, reliable, and predictable revenue, its top line suddenly became the mythical “hockey stick of growth.”  The technological driver of this change is more likely to be the “new normal” than a fad, so the business is expected to double again in the next five years.

Leadership isn’t worried about delivering the next quarter, year, or five years. They know that they have the resources they need and can access more when the time is right.  They’re confident that the opportunities identified are feasible and meaningful.

Yet, they will not act.

I’m not afraid.  I’m biased!

Behavioral economists, psychologists, and sociologists explain situations like the above by pointing out our “cognitive biases”—the “irrational errors that are programmed into our brains.”  For example, the first three horsemen could be known as Present Biasthe hard-easy effect, and Loss Aversion

As of 2024, over 150 cognitive biases have been identified.

While it’s comforting to blame programming bugs beyond our awareness and control for our “irrational errors,” this approach lets us off the hook a bit too easily.

I’m not biased.  I’m afraid!

Fear is at the root of most, if not all, of these biases because emotions, not programming bugs in our brains, drive our decisions. 

The study of how our emotions impact decision-making didn’t take off until the early 2000s. It really accelerated in 2015 when professors from Harvard, UC Riverside, Claremont McKenna College, and Carnegie Mellon published a meta-study on the topic and declared:

The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices.

Bottom line – we decide with our hearts and justify with our heads.

Our hearts are afraid that we’ll lose the respect of our peers and loved ones, the reputations we’ve worked decades to build, the physical goods and intangible experiences that project our societal status, or the financial safety of a regular paycheck.

And, as my brilliant and kind sister told me, “These feelings we feel, these feelings are real.”

I’m afraid and biased and brave!

Next time you see someone (maybe you?) do something “irrational,”  get curious and ask:

  • What cognitive bias are they falling prey to? 
  • What is the fear that’s driving that bias? 
  • How can you help them to be brave, live with the fear, and move forward?

I’m curious…when was the last time you were afraid, biased, and brave?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Your Blueprint for Building High-Performance Teams

Your Blueprint for Building High-Performance Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

What can leaders do to enhance their skills, mindset, and toolbox to build and lead high-performance teams? This is the driving question behind this series of discussions and articles, which together create a blueprint designed to help you and other leaders excel in the competitive arena of team leadership.

The High-Performance Team Blueprint

This blueprint begins with a focus on personal leadership development – assessing your current skills, adopting new mindsets, and acquiring the necessary tools before moving on to actionable strategies for team building.

This phased approach ensures that you first strengthen your own leadership foundations, which is crucial for effectively applying these skills to influence team dynamics and organizational strategies.

Here, I will outline the key components of the blueprint. I encourage you to reflect on these concepts, apply them to your context, and share your feedback, ideas, and perspectives. This collaborative effort will enrich the discussion and enhance the utility of the strategies presented.

The Blueprint Overview

1. Understanding High-Performance Leadership: What Makes It Different?

Explore the unique characteristics of high-performance leadership that set it apart from traditional leadership approaches. This element focuses on the transformative abilities leaders must have to drive exceptional team outcomes, such as fostering a culture where trust, empowerment, and collaboration are the norm. Understand the impact these traits have on organizational success and learn how to cultivate them in your leadership style.

2. Self-Assessment for Leaders: Are You Ready for High-Performance?

Assess your readiness to lead a high-performance team by critically evaluating your current leadership style and capabilities. This section provides tools and frameworks that help you measure your effectiveness in essential areas such as building trust, empowering others, and facilitating collaboration. It also guides you through identifying gaps in your leadership approach and setting goals for improvement.

3. Developing the High-Performance Leader: Mindset and Key Skills

Enhance key leadership skills that are essential for managing high-performance teams. Focus on developing transparency to build trust, fostering autonomy to empower your team, and promoting inclusivity to enhance collaboration. This section offers practical strategies and exercises to strengthen these skills and encourages you to integrate them into your daily leadership practice.

4. Training and Resources for High-Performance Leadership

Discover and engage with training programs and resources that are specifically designed to enhance your leadership in the realms of psychological safety, team empowerment, and effective collaboration. This element helps you navigate the wide array of educational materials and professional development opportunities available, selecting those that align best with your personal and organizational needs.

5. Building Your High-Performance Team: Make It Happen

Put your enhanced leadership skills to the test by forming your high-performance team. This practical guide provides detailed steps for selecting team members who align with high-performance values, defining clear and impactful roles, and setting strategic goals that motivate and challenge the team. Learn how to lay the foundation for effective team dynamics from the outset.

6. Sustaining Team Performance: Cultivating Culture and Engagement

Delve into strategies to maintain and boost team performance over the long term. This section emphasizes the importance of nurturing a culture that values continuous improvement, open communication, and mutual support. Explore ways to keep your team engaged and motivated, ensuring that the high-performance mindset becomes embedded in everyday operations.

7. Scaling High-Performance Practices: Leadership in Action

Explore effective strategies for broadening the implementation of high-performance practices throughout the organization. Learn how to adapt the core principles of trust, empowerment, and collaboration to various team structures and organizational contexts. This element focuses on overcoming challenges associated with scaling these practices, ensuring they enhance productivity and engagement across all levels.

8. Evaluating and Enhancing Team Performance: Tools for Leaders

Master the use of sophisticated tools to monitor and refine your team’s performance. This section teaches you how to implement data-driven approaches for tracking key performance indicators related to trust, empowerment, and collaboration. Gain insights on interpreting these metrics and using them to make informed decisions that drive continuous team improvement and organizational success.

Approach and Progression

This blueprint is structured as a progressive journey designed to enhance your leadership capabilities and equip you to effectively manage high-performance teams.

Here’s how each phase builds upon the previous, guiding you from foundational development to broader organizational impact:

Foundation Phase (Elements 1-4): This initial stage focuses on building the core skills and insights necessary to foster a high-performance culture. It centers on personal leadership development, laying the groundwork for effective team leadership. You’ll explore high-performance leadership traits, assess your current capabilities, develop key skills, and identify valuable training resources.

Implementation Phase (Elements 5-6): During this middle stage, you’ll apply the skills you’ve developed to real-world team settings. This phase is about putting theory into practice by forming and sustaining teams that demonstrate high performance through established trust, clear empowerment, and effective collaboration. You’ll learn to build your first high-performance team and cultivate a culture that supports ongoing success.

Scaling Phase (Elements 7-8): The final stage is about expanding the reach of your successful practices across the organization. You’ll apply proven strategies from your initial team to other parts of the company and employ advanced analytical tools to assess and enhance their effectiveness. This phase ensures that the high-performance practices are sustainable and can lead to lasting improvements across the company.

A structured pathway as this one ensures that your development as a leader is comprehensive and continuous, enabling you to not only learn and grow personally but also apply these advancements effectively to achieve lasting organizational success.

Image Credits: Pixabay

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‘Twas the Night Before Launch Day

Twas the Night Before Launch Day

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

‘Twas the night before launch day, when throughout HQ,
Not a worker had left, there was too much to do;
The plans were laid out by the whiteboard with care,
While our Innovation Chief Sarah planned with great flair;

The team was all nestled all snug at their posts,
While visions of success inspired them the most;
And Sarah in her blazer, so sharp and so bright,
Had just settled in for a long working night,

When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,
She sprang from her desk to see what was the matter.
When what to her wondering eyes should appear,
But the CEO and board, spreading holiday cheer!

“Now, ARCHITECTURE!” they cried, “We need strategy and rules!
Now BEHAVIORS and CULTURE!” – these ABC tools.
“Tell us Sarah,” they said, “how you’ll lead us to glory,
Through bringing new value – tell us your story!”

She smiled as she stood, confidence in her stance,
“The ABCs of Innovation aren’t left up to chance.
Architecture’s our framework, our process and measure,
Our governance model not built at our leisure;

“The Behaviors we foster? Curiosity leads,
With courage and commitment to meet future needs.
And Culture,” she said, with a twinkle of pride,
“Is how innovation becomes our natural stride.”

Her cross-functional team gathered ’round with delight,
Each bringing their skills to help win this big fight:
“From concept to testing, from planning to more,
We’re ready to launch what we’ve worked toward before!”

The CEO beamed and the board gave a cheer,
“This is exactly the progress we’d hoped for this year!
With Architecture to guide us, and Behaviors so strong,
Plus Culture to fuel us – well, nothing could go wrong!”

Then Sarah exclaimed, as they turned out the light,
“Happy launching to all, and to all a good night!
For tomorrow we share what’s been worth all the wait,
Guided by ABCs, we’ll make something great!”

Image credit: Microsoft CoPilot

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Ignoring Your Customers is the Key to Happiness

Ignoring Your Customers is the Key to Happiness

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Now I know why our researchers are so sad.”

Teaching at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) offers a unique perspective. By day, I engage with seasoned business professionals. By night, I interact with budding designers and artists, each group bringing vastly different experiences to the table.

Customer-centricity is the hill I will die on…
In my Product Innovation Lab course, students learn the innovation process and work in small teams to apply those lessons to the products they create.

We spend the first quarter of the course to problem-finding. It’s excruciating for everyone. Like their counterparts in business and engineering, they’re bursting with ideas, and they hate being slowed down. Despite data proving that poor product-market fit a leading cause of start-up failure and that 54% of innovations launched by big companies fail to reach $1M in sales (a paltry number given the scale of surveyed companies), they’re convinced their ideas are flawless.

We spend two weeks exploring Jobs to be Done and practicing interviewing techniques. But their first conversations sound more like interrogations than anything we did in class.

They return from their interviews and share what they learned. After each insight, I ask, “Why is that?” or “Why is that important?

Amazingly, they have answers.

While their first conversations were interrogations, once the nervousness fades, they remember their training, engage in conversations, and discover surprising and wonderful answers.

Yet the still prioritize the answers to “What” over answers to “Why?”

…Because it’s the hill that will kill me.
Every year, this cycle repeats. This year, I finally asked why, after weeks of learning that the answers to What questions are almost always wrong and Why questions are the only path to the right answers (and differentiated solutions with a sustainable competitive advantage), why do they still prioritize the What answers?

The answer was a dagger to my heart.

“That’s what the boss wants to know,” a student explained. “Bosses just want to know what we need to build so they can tell engineering what to make. They don’t care why we should make it or whether it’s different. In fact, it’s better if it’s not different.”

I tried to stay professional, but there was definitely a sarcastic tone when I asked how that was working.

“We haven’t launched anything in 18 months because no one likes what we build. We spend months on prototypes, show them to users, and they hate it. Then, when we ask the researchers to do more research because their last insights were wrong, they get all cra….OOOOHHHHHHHH…..”

(insert clouds parting, beams of sunlight shining down, and a choir of angels here)

“That’s why the researchers are so sad all the time! They always try to tell us the “Whys” behind the “Whats” but no one wants to hear it. We just want to know what to build to get to work. But we could create something people love if we understood why today’s things don’t work!”

Honestly, I didn’t know whether to drop the mic in triumph or flip the table in rage.

Ignorance may be bliss but obsolescence is not
It’s easy to ignore customers.

To send them surveys with pre-approved answers choices that can be quickly analyzed and neatly presented to management. To build exactly what customers tell you to build, even though you’re the expert on what’s possible and they only know what’s needed.

It’s easy to point to the surveys and prototypes and claim you are customer-centric. If only the customers would cooperate.

It’s much harder to listen to customers. To ask questions, listen to answers you don’t want to hear, and repeat those answers to more powerful people who want to hear them even less. To have the courage to share rough prototypes and to take the time to be curious when customers call them ugly.

So, if you want to be happy, keep pretending to care about your customers.

Pretty soon, you won’t have any left to bother you.

Image credit: Pexels

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Six Reasons Norway is a Leader in High-Performance Teamwork

Six Reasons Norway is a Leader in High-Performance Teamwork

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

If you research why certain countries are leaders and others are laggards in high performance teamwork, you quickly see that Norway and thus the Norwegian society has several notable characteristics that contribute to the success of high-performance teams in business and organizations.

Note: Thank you to those who joined me in Oslo to discuss high-performance teams and explore my new and developing concept of High Performance Zones for Teams: Trust, Empowerment, and Collaboration.

Here are a few key factors for Norway in the context of high-performance:

  1. High Levels of Trust: Norwegian society is characterized by high trust both in institutions and among individuals. This trust extends into the workplace, where there is a strong belief in the reliability and integrity of colleagues. High trust environments can enhance collaboration and the sharing of ideas, which are crucial for high-performance teams.
  2. Flat Organizational Structures: Norwegian companies often favor flat organizational structures over hierarchical ones. This promotes open communication and a sense of equality among team members, enabling quicker decision-making and greater flexibility – important attributes for high-performance teams.
  3. Work-Life Balance: Norway places a strong emphasis on work-life balance, which helps maintain high levels of job satisfaction and motivation among employees. Well-rested and well-rounded employees are more likely to contribute positively to their teams.
  4. Focus on Consensus-Building: In Norwegian business culture, there is a tendency towards consensus-building rather than top-down decision-making. This approach ensures that various perspectives are considered and that team members are committed to the agreed-upon course of action, leading to more sustainable and effective team performance.
  5. Investment in Employee Development: There is a significant investment in training and development within Norwegian organizations. A well-trained workforce with opportunities for continuous learning and improvement can adapt and perform better in dynamic business environments.
  6. Innovation and Technological Adaptation: Norway is well-known for its adaptation of new technologies and innovation. High-performance teams often leverage cutting-edge technologies and new practices to maintain competitive advantages.

These aspects of Norwegian society and organizational culture provide a supportive environment for cultivating high-performance teams, which are essential for achieving exceptional outcomes in business and other fields.

How does your country compare on these six factors? Please share, and let’s discuss.

Image Credits: Pixabay

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