Category Archives: collaboration

Using Leading and Lagging Indicators to Drive Your Business Forward

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You get what you measure, so make sure you’re tracking the right things.

Using Leading and Lagging Indicators to Drive Your Business Forward

GUEST POST from Soren Kaplan

I’ve seen a lot of organizations create strategies, programs, and projects focused on optimizing operations, streamlining processes, and driving innovation. Leadership teams put lots of energy coming up with the next big thing. But amazingly few teams think about how they’ll measure results. They may say they want revenue growth or cost savings, but that’s about the extent of it. Digging into the details by defining the specific metrics that will help track progress and forecast whether they’re going to achieve their goals in the future often gets neglected.

I’ve used this Key Performance Indicators template to address this challenge. Here’s the basis of why it’s important to use KPIs for your strategy and innovation initiatives, and how to use the template.

Strategy Without Successful Execution Is Just Brainstorming

Between developing strategy and executing it, there’s a step that requires creativity coupled with analytical thinking. It’s defining leading and lagging indicators. Many manufacturing companies and organizations that embrace Six Sigma know the importance of the metrics. Metrics help you quantify success, so you know when you’re achieving it and when you’re not.

Most companies focus on lagging indicators, like how much revenue they made in the last quarter, how many products they sold, or how many new customers they acquired. That’s important information, but those measures are obtained by looking in the rear-view mirror of what’s already happened. In addition to these things, you also need leading indicators to help you predict what will happen in the future. Here’s how to use both of these indicators to translate strategy into tangible implementation plans.

Leading Indicators Help You Predict the Future

Leading Indicators predict how you will perform in the future. They are more easily managed than lagging indicators but are harder to define. For example, if you’re looking to increase sales, you might measure the number of emails you send or sales calls you make. If you know that one in 10 calls results in a sale, the more contacts you make, the higher your sale forecast. Same goes for if you’re running a manufacturing organization. Leading Indicators for a manufacturing plant might include number of incidents that cause production slowdowns or the availability of specific materials in the supply chain.

Lagging Indicators Tell You How You Did

Lagging Indicators are easier to measure because they quantify what happened in the past. For example, a lagging indicator for sales would be measuring the number of products sold last month or number of new customers that signed up for a service. This information is usually easy to obtain and measure. Lagging Indicators are essential for charting progress but are not necessarily that helpful when looking at the inputs needed for achieving your overall desired results.

Create Your Dashboard

If you want innovation, reduced costs, and greater performance, you need to figure out how to do it, and what it looks like when you get it. Creating a set of lagging indicators gives you targets to achieve. But lagging indicators without leading indicators won’t provide focus around what to do–or early warning signals that things might be off track. If you’re manufacturing products, for example, if you’re not measuring whether your suppliers are delivering your materials on time, you might get surprised one day when you realize you don’t have the raw materials you need to achieve your manufacturing targets.

Here’s how to create a simple dashboard that contains both leading and lagging indicators:

  1. Convene your team and identify the specific quantifiable targets that you need to achieve (your lagging indicators). Ask: What does success look like and how do we measure it?
  2. Once you have your lagging indicators, define the inputs needed to achieve them. Ask: What specific things need to happen for us to achieve these targets and how do we measure those things? (your leading indicators)
  3. With your lagging and leading indicators defined, use specific tools to gather and report on your data, whether a spreadsheet or online dashboard.

Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “What’s measured, improves.” If you want to improve your processes and business, figure out what you’re measuring. If you measure only the outputs (lagging indicators), your success will be far less predictable than if you’re also measuring the things that will get you where you want to go.

Image Credit: Praxie.com

This article was originally published on Inc.com and has been syndicated for this blog.

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Lobsters and the Wisdom of Ignoring Your Customers

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Lobsters and the Wisdom of Ignoring Your Customers

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Being the smart innovator (and businessperson) you are, you know it’s important to talk to customers. You also know it’s important to listen to them.

It’s also important to ignore your customers.

(Sometimes)

Customers will tell you what the problem is. If you stay curious and ask follow-up questions (Why? and Tell me more), they’ll tell you why it’s a problem and the root cause. You should definitely listen to this information.

Customers will also tell you how to fix the problem. You should definitely ignore this information.

To understand why, let me tell you a story.

Eye Contact is a Problem

Years ago, two friends and I took a day trip to Maine. It was late in Fall, and many lobster shacks dotting the coast were closed for the season. We found one still open and settled in for lunch.

Now, I’m a reasonably adventurous eater. I’ll try almost anything once (but not try fried tarantulas). However, I have one rule – I do not want to make eye contact with my food.

Knowing that lobsters are traditionally served with their heads still attached, I braced for the inevitable. As the waitress turned to me, I placed the same order as my friends but with a tiny special request. “I’ll have the lobster, but please remove its head.”

You know that scene in movies when the record scratches, the room falls silent, and everyone stops everything they’re doing to stare at the person who made an offending comment? Yeah, that’s precisely what happened when I asked for the head to be removed.

The waitress was horrified, “Why? That’s where all the best stuff is!”

“I don’t like making eye contact with my food,” I replied.

She pursed her lips, jotted down my request, and walked away.

A short time later, our lunch was served. My friends received their lobsters as God (or the chef) intended, head still attached. Then, with great fanfare, my lobster arrived.

Its head was still attached.

But we did not make eye contact.

Placed over the lobster’s eyes were two olives, connected by a broken toothpick and attached to the lobster’s “ears” by two more toothpicks.

The chef was offended by my request to remove the lobster’s head. But, because he understood why I wanted the head removed, he created a solution that would work for both of us – lobster-sized olive sunglasses.

Are you removing the head or making sunglasses?

Customers, like me, are experts in problems. We know what the problems are, why they’re problems, and what solutions work and what don’t. So, if you ask us what we want, we’ll give you the solution we know – remove the head.

Innovators, like you and the chef, are experts in solutions. You know what’s possible, see the trade-offs, and anticipate the consequences of various choices. You also take great pride in your work and expertise, so you’re not going to give someone a sub-par solution simply because they asked for it. You’re going to provide them with olive sunglasses.

Next time you talk to customers, stay curious, ask open-ended questions, ask follow-up questions, and build a deep understanding of their problems. Then ignore their ideas and suggestions. They’ll only stand in the way of your olive sunglasses.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Corporate Venturing as a Catalyst for Innovation

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Venture Beyond

Corporate Venturing as a Catalyst for Innovation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the pursuit of innovation is no longer optional; it’s existential. Yet, many large, established corporations struggle to innovate at the pace of the market. Internal bureaucracy, risk aversion, and a focus on incremental improvements can stifle the disruptive thinking required for true transformation. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that one of the most powerful and underutilized strategies for overcoming this inertia is corporate venturing. This isn’t just about investing money; it’s about strategically engaging with the startup ecosystem to ignite new growth, access frontier technologies, and inject a vital dose of entrepreneurial DNA into the heart of your organization. Corporate venturing is a deliberate act of looking beyond your walls to find the future.

Corporate venturing encompasses a range of activities, from direct venture capital investments (Corporate Venture Capital or CVC) to incubation programs, accelerators, and strategic partnerships with startups. Its core purpose is to bridge the innovation gap between the agile, disruptive startup world and the established, resource-rich corporate entity. This symbiotic relationship offers startups access to capital, market reach, and mentorship, while providing corporations with a window into emerging technologies, new business models, and fresh talent. More importantly, it acts as an external nervous system for innovation, allowing the corporation to sense, adapt, and respond to market shifts with a speed that internal R&D often cannot match. It’s a human-centered approach to expanding your innovation capacity, leveraging the entrepreneurial spirit that often flourishes outside traditional corporate structures.

The Strategic Imperatives of Corporate Venturing

To truly leverage corporate venturing as a catalyst for innovation, it must be approached with strategic intent, not just as a financial play. Here are four key imperatives:

  • 1. Strategic Alignment, Not Just Financial Return: While financial returns are welcome, the primary driver for corporate venturing should be strategic. How does this investment or partnership align with your long-term vision? Does it open up new markets, provide access to critical technologies, or deepen your understanding of future customer needs?
  • 2. Active Engagement, Beyond Capital: Successful corporate venturing is not passive. It requires active mentorship, resource sharing, and a genuine effort to integrate lessons learned from startups back into the core business. It’s a two-way street of learning and collaboration.
  • 3. Build Bridges, Not Walls: The biggest challenge is often integrating the fast-paced startup mentality with the established corporate culture. Dedicated venturing units should act as translators, bridging the gap between the two worlds and fostering mutual understanding and respect.
  • 4. Portfolio Thinking and Experimentation: Treat your venture portfolio like an experimental lab. Not every investment will succeed, but each provides valuable learning. Diversify your bets across different technologies, markets, and business models to hedge against uncertainty and maximize discovery.

“Don’t just acquire the future; invest in building it. Corporate venturing is your strategic lens into tomorrow’s disruption and market expansion.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Google Ventures (GV) – Investing in the Adjacent Future

The Challenge:

Google, despite its massive internal R&D capabilities, recognized that innovation often happens at the edges of an industry, driven by small, agile teams. The challenge was to systematically identify and invest in groundbreaking startups that could either complement Google’s core business or open up entirely new growth areas, without stifling their entrepreneurial spirit with corporate bureaucracy.

The Corporate Venturing Solution:

Google established Google Ventures (GV) as its venture capital arm. Unlike traditional corporate VCs, GV operates with a high degree of autonomy, investing in a broad range of technology companies, many of which are not directly related to Google’s immediate product lines. However, the strategic alignment is clear: GV invests in areas that represent the adjacent future of technology—AI, life sciences, consumer tech, enterprise software—giving Google an early window into the next wave of disruption. GV provides more than just capital; it offers startups access to Google’s unparalleled expertise in engineering, design, and marketing through its “GV Experts” program.

  • Strategic Alignment: GV’s investments provide Google with intelligence on emerging technologies and market shifts that could impact its long-term strategy.
  • Active Engagement: The “GV Experts” program offers invaluable operational support, helping startups scale and overcome technical challenges.
  • Autonomy and Agility: By operating somewhat independently, GV avoids many of the bureaucratic pitfalls that can slow down corporate innovation efforts.

The Result:

GV has been incredibly successful, with a portfolio that includes major companies like Uber, Slack, and Nest (which Google later acquired). These investments provide significant financial returns, but more importantly, they offer Google a strategic vantage point. It allows them to understand and even influence future technological trajectories, keeping the parent company at the forefront of innovation. GV demonstrates how a well-structured CVC can act as a crucial early warning system and growth engine for a tech giant.

Case Study 2: BMW i Ventures – Driving Future Mobility

The Challenge:

The automotive industry is facing unprecedented disruption, driven by trends like electrification, autonomous driving, shared mobility, and connected vehicles. BMW, a legacy automaker, needed to rapidly adapt and innovate beyond its traditional car manufacturing core to secure its position in the future of mobility. Relying solely on internal R&D would be too slow and limited in scope.

The Corporate Venturing Solution:

BMW established BMW i Ventures, a corporate venture capital fund dedicated to investing in early- to mid-stage startups in the mobility, digital, and sustainability sectors. The fund strategically targets companies developing cutting-edge technologies and services that could shape the future of transportation and enhance the overall customer experience. This includes areas like advanced materials, AI for autonomous systems, smart charging solutions, and innovative digital services for car ownership or sharing. BMW i Ventures provides capital, but also offers strategic partnerships, pilot opportunities within BMW’s ecosystem, and valuable market insights.

  • Strategic Alignment: Every investment is directly tied to BMW’s long-term vision for sustainable, intelligent, and human-centered mobility.
  • Access to Frontier Tech: The fund provides early access to technologies that might take years or decades to develop internally, accelerating BMW’s innovation timeline.
  • New Business Models: Investments in areas like shared mobility or digital services help BMW explore and validate entirely new revenue streams beyond traditional car sales.

The Result:

BMW i Ventures has allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing industry. It has fostered collaborations with innovative startups, informed BMW’s internal product roadmaps, and positioned the brand as a leader in future mobility solutions. By strategically venturing beyond its core business, BMW has gained agility, expanded its innovation ecosystem, and proactively secured its relevance in the coming decades.

Conclusion: The Future of Innovation is Open

Corporate venturing is more than just a financial vehicle; it is a mindset—an acknowledgment that the most profound innovations often emerge from outside your established walls. It’s a strategic embrace of openness, agility, and the entrepreneurial spirit. For large corporations, it represents a vital pathway to overcome internal inertia, access game-changing technologies, and build a more resilient and future-ready organization.

As leaders, our challenge is to move beyond short-term thinking and embrace a portfolio approach to innovation. By strategically venturing into the unknown, by actively engaging with the disruptors, and by fostering a culture that learns from both successes and failures, we can unlock unprecedented growth and ensure our organizations are not just prepared for the future, but actively shaping it.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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Engaging Users in the Design Process

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Co-Creation for Experience

Engaging Users in the Design Process - Co-Creation for Experience

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the world of design and innovation, we have long operated under a traditional model. We observe users from a distance, conduct market research, and then retreat to our labs and conference rooms to design a solution that we believe they will love. We call this “customer-centric” design, but it’s a one-way street. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that this model is no longer enough. The future of innovation belongs to those who move beyond designing **for** their users to designing **with** them. This is the power of **co-creation**, a strategic shift that transforms customers from passive recipients of a product into active, invaluable partners in its creation.

Co-creation is the ultimate form of empathy. It’s an open invitation for your most passionate users to contribute their insights, skills, and creativity directly to the design process. This isn’t just about collecting feedback; it’s about treating your customers as equal partners in the journey of innovation. The benefits are profound. By involving the people you serve, you bypass the risk of building something they don’t genuinely need. You uncover unarticulated pain points and desires that a traditional survey could never reveal. And perhaps most importantly, you build a powerful sense of ownership and community. When customers have a hand in creating a product, they don’t just use it; they become an army of loyal advocates, invested in its success and eager to spread the word.

The Co-Creation Framework: A Human-Centered Approach

Successful co-creation is not a random act of crowdsourcing; it is a structured, human-centered process. It requires a clear framework to ensure that the collaboration is meaningful, productive, and respectful. Here are four essential steps:

  • 1. Define the Challenge, Not the Solution: The starting point is crucial. Don’t ask users to validate a product you’ve already built. Instead, present them with a clear, compelling problem to solve. For example, instead of “How do you like our new app?”, ask, “How might we make your daily commute more enjoyable?” This opens the door to a wider range of creative solutions.
  • 2. Build the Right Platform: Co-creation can happen in many forms. It could be a series of in-person workshops, a dedicated online community, a digital platform for ideation and voting, or a private beta program. Choose a platform that is accessible, easy to use, and facilitates collaboration among all participants.
  • 3. Empower the Co-Creator: Treat your users as equal partners. Give them the information they need, and make their role in the process explicit. Whether they are ideating, prototyping, or providing feedback, ensure they understand how their contributions will be used and how they fit into the bigger picture.
  • 4. Close the Loop: This is arguably the most important step. A co-creation initiative is not a one-off event. It requires transparency and a continuous feedback loop. Be sure to show participants what happened to their ideas. Even if an idea wasn’t chosen, explain why and thank them for their contribution. This builds trust and encourages continued participation, turning a single project into a long-term community.

“The best innovations are not born in a lab; they are born in the conversations between creators and the people they are creating for.” — Braden Kelley

Case Study 1: Threadless – Building a Business on Collective Creativity

The Challenge:

In the highly competitive world of apparel, fashion trends are traditionally dictated from the top-down by designers and major retailers. This process is inherently risky and often disconnected from what consumers actually want to wear. A small t-shirt company needed a new model that could consistently produce fresh, relevant designs with minimal risk while building an authentic brand.

The Co-Creation Solution:

Threadless launched a revolutionary business model based entirely on co-creation. The company’s platform is a digital community where artists from around the world submit t-shirt designs. The community then votes on their favorite submissions. Each week, the designs with the highest votes are put into production. The winning artists receive prize money and royalties on their designs. This model is a masterclass in crowdsourced innovation.

  • Empowered Co-Creators: Threadless gives artists a clear incentive and platform to contribute their creativity. They are not just submitting work; they are participating in a creative community.
  • Reduced Risk: The voting process acts as powerful market validation. Threadless knows a design is likely to be a commercial success before it ever spends a dollar on production, significantly reducing inventory and design risk.
  • Built-in Community: The platform fostered a vibrant, global community of artists and fans who felt a deep sense of ownership. This turned a transactional relationship into a collaborative partnership, leading to immense brand loyalty.

The Result:

Threadless became a major success story, proving that a company’s most valuable design team might be its own customers. By co-creating with its community, Threadless not only built a profitable business but also created an authentic, beloved brand known for its originality and its dedication to the collective voice of its creators. The company’s model demonstrates that the best way to predict what consumers want is to simply ask them to create it.

Case Study 2: L’Oréal’s Open Innovation Platform – Co-Creating Science and Beauty

The Challenge:

As a global beauty giant, L’Oréal’s R&D model was powerful but also traditional and at times, slow. The company needed to accelerate its innovation pipeline, especially in cutting-edge fields like green chemistry, artificial intelligence, and new biotech ingredients. The challenge was how to access and integrate external expertise from the world’s most brilliant scientists, researchers, and startups in a way that was agile and efficient.

The Co-Creation Solution:

L’Oréal adopted a strategic open innovation approach, which is a sophisticated form of co-creation. Instead of relying solely on internal labs, the company actively seeks partnerships with independent scientists, researchers, and startups through dedicated platforms and venture capital initiatives. L’Oréal presents specific scientific or technological challenges and invites external experts to co-develop solutions. For example, they might partner with a startup to develop a new sustainable ingredient or collaborate with a university lab to create a new method for personalized skincare.

  • Defined Challenges: L’Oréal clearly articulates its technological and scientific needs, empowering a global network of experts to contribute.
  • Empowered Partners: The company treats these external collaborators as true partners, not just vendors. This approach fosters a culture of shared purpose and mutual trust.
  • Continuous Innovation: This model is not a one-time project; it is a permanent innovation channel that allows the company to continuously learn from and adapt to the rapid advancements in science and technology.

The Result:

By implementing a co-creation strategy on a massive scale, L’Oréal has been able to significantly accelerate its innovation cycle and develop groundbreaking products that would have been impossible to create internally alone. The approach has led to new patents, new product categories, and a more agile business model. This case study demonstrates that co-creation is not limited to consumer-facing products; it is a powerful strategic tool for even the largest and most complex organizations to stay at the forefront of their industries.

Conclusion: The Future of Innovation is Collaborative

The era of closed-door design is over. In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever, the most successful organizations will be those that open their doors and invite their users to the innovation table. Co-creation is not a marketing gimmick; it is a fundamental strategic shift from “customer-centric” to “customer-led.” It is an acknowledgment that your users are not just consumers; they are a wellspring of insight, creativity, and passion.

As leaders, our role is to create the platforms and the culture that enable this collaboration. By treating your users as partners, you will not only build better products and services but also forge a deeper, more resilient connection to the people you serve. The future of innovation is not solitary; it is collaborative, and it is waiting for you to invite the first person in.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pexels

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3 Mind-Blowing Things I Learned in Nebraska

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3 Mind-Blowing Things I Learned in Nebraska

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the Before Times, we attended conferences to learn, make connections, and promote ourselves and our businesses. Then COVID hit, and conferences became virtual.   Although that made them easier to attend, it also made them easier to skip. Because, if we’re honest, most conferences were more about connecting and promoting than learning.

Last week, I went to one of those rare, almost mythical, conferences more focused on learning and connecting than promoting. It was fantastic! It was also in Nebraska (which is a pretty interesting place, btw).

Here are my three biggest mind-blowing takeaways from Inside Outside’s IO2022 Summit:

“Strategy is the direction you take to win in the future”

Kareen Proudian, Managing Partner at Faculty of Change

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but if you asked me to define “Strategy,” I’d respond with a long and rambling answer. Which means I can’t define “strategy.”  This admission is especially embarrassing because I have a resume littered with places where I developed, drafted, and implemented strategies, so I should have learned what the word means. But nope, I didn’t.

I suspect I’m not alone.

Asking for the definition of strategy is like asking if you must wear clothes to the office. You should know the answer. But unlike whether or not clothing is mandatory, most of us don’t know the answer, AND it’s easy to get away with never knowing the answer.

The elegant simplicity of Kareen’s definition of strategy blew my mind. It’s short, memorable, and something that most people can understand. Maybe I should share the definition with my alma maters and past employers.

“When we feel threatened, our IQ drops 50 to 70 points”

Alla Weinberg, CEO at Spoke & Wheel

When I first heard talk about Psychological Safety and Safe Spaces in today’s business world, I rolled my eyes. Hard. As a Gen X-er, I grumbled about how we didn’t need “safe spaces” when I grew up because we were tough and self-reliant, and I lamented the inevitable downfall of society caused by weak and coddled Millennials.

I was wrong.

Psychological Safety is absolutely and unquestionably essential for individuals to grow, teams to work, companies to operate and innovate, and societies to function and evolve. I’ve seen teams and businesses transform and achieve unbelievable success by discussing and living the elements they require for Psychological Safety. I’ve also seen teams and businesses fail in its absence.

These results aren’t surprising when you realize that you feel threatened when you are in a complex situation in which you cannot accurately predict the outcomes. And when you feel threatened, you are half as intelligent, effective, and creative as you are when you’re calm.

So, if you’re a manager and you’re upset that your people aren’t as intelligent, effective, or creative as they should be, it may not be their fault. It may be yours.

“Stage expertise, not industry expertise, is key to innovation success”

Sean Sheppard, Managing Partner at U+

There is deep comfort in the known. It’s why we gravitate to people like us. It’s also why companies ask job candidates and consultants about their experience in the industry and choose those with deep experience and impressive expertise. Often, there’s nothing with this question or the resulting decision.

Sometimes, it’s precisely the wrong question.

Sometimes, functional expertise is significantly more important than industry experience. After all, if you’re the hiring manager at a healthcare company looking for a Director of Finance, who would you hire – a Marketing Director from a competitor or a Finance Director from a CPG company?

That’s the case with innovation.

Decades of real-world experience (not to mention the successful launch of 100+ startups) show that successful corporate startup teams had expertise (mindsets, skillsets, executional drive) in the startup’s phase and a working knowledge of the industry rather extensive industry expertise and little to no innovation experience.

Questions are good. The right questions are better. So, the next time you’re staffing up an innovation team (or hiring a consultant), choose based on their innovation experience and willingness to learn about your industry.

Innovation happens everywhere

That’s why people from San Francisco, Austin, Washington DC, NYC, Toronto, Boston, and dozens of other places converged on Lincoln, Nebraska.

We went to see innovation in action and learn about the thriving startup community in the middle of the country. We also went to learn and connect with others committed to creating new things that create value.

Getting our minds blown was a bonus.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Three HOW MIGHT WE Alternatives That Actually Spark Creative Ideas

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Three How Might We Alternatives That Actually Spark Creative Ideas

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Q: How might we brainstorm new ideas to serve our customers better?

A: Have a brainstorming session that starts with “How Might We help customers [Job to be Done/problem]?”

If only it were that simple.

How Might We (HMW) is an incredible tool (not BS, as some would assert), but we misuse it. We focus too much on the “we” and not enough on the “might.”

Might > We

HMW was first used to prompt people to be “wildly creative while simultaneously leveraging [company’s] innate strengths.”

IDEO popularized the prompt as a way to solve “wicked problems” – problems so complex that there is no right or wrong answer.

In both of these cases, the assumption was that the word “might” would free people from the shackles of today’s thinking and constraints and give people permission to dream without fear of judgment and reality.

“We” kept ideas tethered to the reality of the company’s “innate strengths,” providing a modicum of comfort to executives worried that the session wouldn’t result in anything useful and would, therefore, be a waste of time.

We > Might

Alas, as time went on and HMW became more popular, we lost sight of its intent (prompt wildly creative thinking about wicked problems) and twisted it to our purposes.

  • We end the HMW sentence with our problems (e.g., HMW cut costs by getting more customers to use self-service tools?).
  • We use it to brainstorm solutions to things that aren’t even problems (e.g., HMW eliminate all customer service options that aren’t self-serve?)
  • We mentally replace “might” with “will” so we can emerge from brainstorming sessions with a tactical implementation plan.

How Might Can YOU Fix HMW?

If you’re not getting creative, radical, or unexpected ideas from your brainstorming sessions, you have an HMW problem.< As a result, continuing to use HMW as a tool to prompt creative, radical, or unexpected ideas is the definition of insanity. And you are not insane. Instead, mix it up. Use different words to articulate the original intent of HMW.

How would we solve this problem if the answer to every request is YES?

Innovation thrives within constraints. Brainstorming doesn’t.

Even when you tell people not to constrain themselves, even implore them to value “quantity over quality,” you still get more “safe” ideas rather than more “crazy” ideas.

Do more than tell. Make a world without constraints real. Explicitly remove all the constraints people throw at ideas by creating a world of infinite money, people, capabilities, willingness, appetite for risk, and executive support. Doing this removes the dreaded “but” because there is no “but we don’t have the money/people/capabilities” or “but management will never go for it” and creates space for “and.”

What would we ask for if we were guaranteed a YES to only ONE request?

This question is often asked at the end of a brainstorm to prioritize ideas. But it’s equally helpful to ask it at the beginning.

This question shifts our mindset from “the bosses will never say yes, so I won’t even mention it” to “the bosses will say yes to only one thing, so it better be great!”  It pulls people off the sidelines and reveals what people believe to be the most critical element of a solution.   It drives passionate engagement amongst the whole team and acts as a springboard to the next brainstorm – How Might We use (what they said yes to) to solve (customers’ Jobs to be Done/problem)?

How would we solve the problem if the answer to every request is NO?

This one is a bit risky.

Some people will throw their hands in the air, declare the exercise a waste of time and effort, and collapse into a demotivated blob of resignation.

Some people will feel free. As Seth Godin wrote about a journal that promises to reject every single person who submits an article, “The absurdity of it is the point. Submitting to them feels effortless and without a lot of drama, because you know you’re going to get rejected. So instead of becoming attached to the outcome, you can simply focus on the work.”

For others, this will summon their inner rebel, the part of themselves that wants to stick it to the man, prove the doubters wrong, and unleash a great “I told you so” upon the world. To them, “No” is the start of the conversation, not the end. It fires them up to do their best work.

Don’t invite the first group of people to the brainstorm.

Definitely invite the other two groups.

How Might Will/Do YOU Fix HMW?

If you want something different, you need to do something different.

Start your next brainstorm with a new variation on the old HMW prompt.

How do people react? Does it lead to more creative or more “safe” ideas?

How might we adjust to do even better next time?

Image credit: Pexels

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Innovating with Competitors for Mutual Benefit

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The Art of Co-opetition

Innovating with Competitors for Mutual Benefit

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

For centuries, the business world has been largely defined by a zero-sum game mentality: my gain is your loss, and vice versa. Competition, in its purest form, often paints rivals as adversaries to be defeated. However, in an increasingly complex, interconnected, and rapidly evolving global economy, this outdated mindset is not only limiting; it’s detrimental. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I advocate for a more nuanced and powerful strategy: **co-opetition**. This isn’t just a clever portmanteau; it’s a strategic imperative that combines competition and cooperation, enabling organizations to innovate faster, enter new markets, and tackle grand challenges that no single entity could solve alone. It’s about recognizing that sometimes, the fastest way forward is to build bridges, not just walls, with those who might traditionally be seen as your fiercest rivals.

Co-opetition acknowledges that while companies may compete fiercely for market share on one front, they can also collaborate to expand the entire market, establish industry standards, share costly R&D, or even address systemic societal issues. This requires a significant shift in mindset—from purely adversarial to strategically collaborative—and a deep understanding of shared objectives that transcend individual company interests. It’s about finding those unique, human-centered problems or opportunities that are too big for any single player, and then pooling resources and expertise to collectively unlock new value.

Why Co-opetition is the New Innovation Frontier

Embracing co-opetition offers compelling advantages in today’s innovation landscape:

  • Accelerated Innovation: By sharing research, development costs, or technological expertise, companies can bring new products, services, or industry standards to market much faster than they could individually. This is particularly crucial in rapidly evolving tech sectors.
  • Market Expansion & Creation: Collaborating with competitors can help create entirely new markets or significantly expand existing ones by developing universally accepted standards, educating consumers, or pooling resources for infrastructure development.
  • Shared Risk & Cost Reduction: Tackling complex, high-risk innovation projects (e.g., developing sustainable technologies, exploring new scientific frontiers) becomes more feasible when costs and risks are shared across multiple organizations.
  • Access to Complementary Expertise: No single company has all the answers. Co-opetition allows rivals to leverage each other’s unique strengths, technologies, or market access, creating synergistic solutions.
  • Industry-Wide Problem Solving: Many of today’s grand challenges—climate change, global health, digital ethics—require industry-wide solutions. Competitors often have a shared interest in solving these systemic issues that impact their entire ecosystem.

“In the age of exponential change, the enemy isn’t always your competitor. Sometimes, the real adversary is stagnation, and co-opetition is the antidote.”

The Art of Navigating Co-opetitive Relationships

Successfully engaging in co-opetition requires strategic clarity and careful management:

  1. Clearly Define Collaboration Boundaries: Establish strict rules of engagement, clearly delineating what areas are open for cooperation and what remains fiercely competitive. This prevents valuable intellectual property or sensitive strategies from being compromised.
  2. Identify Mutual Benefits: Both parties must clearly see the tangible advantages of collaboration. The “what’s in it for us” must be explicit and balanced.
  3. Build Trust & Transparency (Within Limits): While sharing proprietary secrets is generally off-limits, a foundational level of trust and transparency is essential for effective collaboration. Clear communication channels are vital.
  4. Focus on Expanding the Pie: The goal of co-opetition is often to grow the overall market or solve a common industry challenge, rather than just fighting over existing slices.
  5. Formalize Agreements: Legal frameworks and clear contracts are crucial to define roles, responsibilities, IP ownership, and dispute resolution mechanisms.

Case Study 1: Payment Networks – Visa, Mastercard, and the Expansion of Digital Commerce

The Challenge:

Before the widespread adoption of credit and debit cards, cash and checks dominated transactions. The challenge for individual banks was to create a universally accepted, reliable, and secure electronic payment system that would build consumer trust and enable widespread merchant adoption. No single bank had the reach or resources to do this alone.

Co-opetition in Action:

Visa and Mastercard emerged from groups of competing banks that understood the need for a shared infrastructure. While banks competed fiercely for customers, they collectively owned and operated these payment networks. These networks, in turn, competed fiercely with each other to sign up banks and merchants. This is a classic example of co-opetition:

  • Shared Infrastructure: Competing banks collaborated to create a vast, reliable network for processing transactions, establishing universal standards that benefited all participants.
  • Market Expansion: By providing a secure and convenient alternative to cash, they jointly expanded the entire market for electronic payments, creating billions in new revenue for the entire banking industry.
  • Innovation in Security & Technology: Both Visa and Mastercard continually innovate in areas like fraud prevention, contactless payments, and digital wallets, often setting industry-wide standards that benefit all banks and consumers using their networks, even as they compete for transaction volume.

The Result:

The co-opetitive model of payment networks led to an explosion in digital commerce, fundamentally transforming how people buy and sell. Competing banks leveraged a shared infrastructure to grow a massive new market. Visa and Mastercard continue to be fierce rivals, yet their foundational co-opetition allows them to jointly build and expand the digital economy, proving that collaboration at a foundational level can drive immense, mutual profit.

Case Study 2: Autonomous Driving Development – The Race to a Shared Future

The Challenge:

Developing fully autonomous driving (Level 5) technology is one of the most complex and capital-intensive engineering challenges of our time. It requires trillions of miles of testing, massive R&D investments in AI, sensors, mapping, and regulatory navigation. No single automaker or tech company possesses all the necessary resources, data, or expertise to bring this to fruition independently, safely, and quickly.

Co-opetition in Action:

In response, we’ve seen an unprecedented wave of co-opetition across the automotive and tech industries. Companies that are fierce competitors in vehicle sales or software platforms are collaborating on specific aspects of autonomous driving:

  • Joint Ventures for Tech Platforms: BMW and Mercedes-Benz (Daimler), for example, have collaborated on developing scalable platforms for automated driving, pooling resources for sensor fusion, perception, and decision-making software. They still compete on car design and brand, but share the foundational, high-cost R&D.
  • Data Sharing & Mapping Consortia: Companies are exploring ways to share vast amounts of road data to improve mapping and perception systems, recognizing that a better shared “map” benefits everyone in the industry.
  • Standardization Efforts: Competitors work together on industry standards for safety, testing protocols, and communication between autonomous vehicles, ensuring public trust and regulatory acceptance for the entire sector.

The Result:

This co-opetitive approach is accelerating the development of autonomous driving technology, making it safer and more viable for wider adoption. While each company still aims to differentiate its final product, the shared investment in foundational technology and standards reduces individual risk, speeds up learning, and helps build public confidence in a nascent industry. It’s a pragmatic recognition that some challenges are simply too big to tackle alone, and mutual benefit can be achieved even among the fiercest competitors.

Conclusion: Redefining Competition for a Collaborative Future

The outdated paradigm of pure, unadulterated competition is no longer sufficient for the complexities of the 21st century. The most forward-thinking, human-centered organizations understand that strategic co-opetition—the art of collaborating with rivals for mutual benefit—is a powerful engine for innovation, market expansion, and systemic problem-solving.

As leaders, our challenge is to identify those critical junctures where collaboration with competitors can expand the overall pie, mitigate shared risks, or accelerate progress on grand challenges. It requires courage, a strategic mindset, and a willingness to see beyond immediate rivalries to shared long-term prosperity. Embrace co-opetition, and you will unlock new frontiers of innovation, build more resilient industries, and collectively shape a more prosperous and sustainable future.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Making Innovation the Way We Do Business (easy as ABC)

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Making Innovation the Way We Do Business (easy as ABC)

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“We need to be more innovative.”

How many times have you said or heard that? It’s how most innovation efforts start. It’s a statement that reflects leaders’ genuine desire to return to the “good ol’ days” when the company routinely created and launched new products and enjoyed the publicity and growth that followed.

But what does it mean to be more innovative?

Innovation’s ABCs

A is for Architecture

Architecture includes most of the elements people think of when they start the work to become more innovative – strategy, structure, processes, metrics, governance, and incentives.

Each of these elements answers fundamental questions:

  • Strategy: Why is innovation important? How does it contribute to our overall strategy?
  • Structure: Who does the work of innovation?
  • Process: How is the work done?
  • Metrics: How will we know when we’re successful? How will we measure progress?
  • Governance: Who makes decisions? How and when are decisions made?
  • Incentives: Why should people invest their time, money, and political capital? How will they be rewarded?

When it comes to your business, you can answer all these questions. The same is true if you’re serious about innovation. If you can’t answer the questions, you have work to do. If you don’t want to do the work, then you don’t want to be innovative. You want to look innovative*.

B is for Behavior

Innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem.

Leaders that talk about innovation, delegate it to subordinates and routinely pull resources from innovation to “shore up” current operations don’t want to be innovative. They want to look innovative.

Leaders who roll up their sleeves and work alongside innovation teams, ask questions and listen with open minds, and invest and protect innovation resources want to be innovative.

To be fair, it’s incredibly challenging to be a great leader of both innovation and operations. It’s the equivalent of writing equally well with your right and left hands. But it is possible. More importantly, it’s essential.

C is for Culture

Culture is invisible, pervasive, and personal. It is also the make-or-break factor for innovation because it surrounds innovation architecture, teams, and leaders.

Culture can expand to encourage and support exploration, creativity, and risk-taking. Or it can constrict, unleashing antibodies that swarm, suffocate, and kill anything that threatens the status quo.

Trying to control or change culture is like trying to hold water in your fist. But if you let go just a bit, create the right conditions, and wait patiently, change is possible.

Easy as 123

The most common mistake executives make in the pursuit of being “more innovative” is that they focus on only A or only B or only C.  But, as I always tell my clients, the answer is “and, not or.”

  1. Start with Architecture because it’s logical, rational, and produces tangible outputs like org charts, process flows, and instruction manuals filled with templates and tools. Architecture is comforting because it helps us know what to do and how.
  2. Use Architecture to encourage Behavior because the best way to learn something is to do it. With Architecture in place (but well before it’s finished), bring leaders into the work – talking to customers, sharing their ideas, and creating prototypes. When leaders do the work of innovation, they quickly realize what’s possible (and what’s not) and are open to learning how to engage (behave) in a way that supports innovation.
  3. Leverage Architecture and Behavior to engage Culture by creating the artifacts, rituals, and evidence that innovation can happen in your company, is happening and will continue to happen. As people see “innovation” evolve from a buzzword to a small investment to “the way we do business,” their skepticism will fade, and their support will grow.

Just like the Jackson 5 said

ABC, It’s easy a 123

Architecture, behavior, culture – they’re all essential to enabling an innovation capability that repeatedly creates new revenue.

And while starting with architecture, building new leadership behaviors, and investing until the culture changes isn’t easy, it’s the 123 steps required to “be more innovative.”

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Building Seamless Human-AI Workflows

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Designing for Collaboration

Building Seamless Human-AI Workflows

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The rise of artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic fantasy; it’s a present-day reality reshaping our workplaces. However, the narrative often focuses on AI replacing human jobs. As a human-centered innovation thought leader, I believe the true power of AI lies not in substitution, but in synergy. The future of work is not human versus AI, but human with AI, collaborating in seamless workflows that leverage the unique strengths of both. Designing for this collaboration is the next great frontier of innovation.

The fear of automation is understandable, but it overlooks a critical point: AI excels at tasks that are often repetitive, data-intensive, and rule-based. Humans, on the other hand, bring creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and the ability to handle ambiguity and novel situations. The sweet spot lies in designing workflows where AI augments human capabilities, freeing us from mundane tasks and empowering us to focus on higher-level strategic thinking, innovation, and human connection. This requires a fundamental shift in how we design work, moving away from a purely task-oriented approach to one that emphasizes collaboration and shared intelligence.

Building seamless human-AI workflows is a human-centered design challenge. It demands that we deeply understand the needs, skills, and workflows of human workers and then thoughtfully integrate AI tools in a way that enhances their capabilities and improves their experience. This involves:

  • Identifying the Right Problems: Focusing AI on tasks that are truly draining human energy and preventing them from higher-value work. This means conducting thorough journey mapping and observational studies to pinpoint the most repetitive and tedious parts of a person’s workday. The goal is to eliminate friction, not just automate for automation’s sake.
  • Designing Intuitive Interfaces: Ensuring that AI tools are user-friendly and seamlessly integrated into existing workflows, minimizing the learning curve and maximizing adoption. The user should feel like the AI is a helpful partner, not a clunky, foreign piece of technology. The interaction should be conversational and natural.
  • Fostering Trust and Transparency: Making it clear how AI is making decisions and providing explanations when appropriate, building confidence in the technology. We must move away from “black box” algorithms and towards a model where humans understand the reasoning behind an AI’s suggestion, which is crucial for building trust and ensuring the human remains in control.
  • Defining Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Establishing a clear understanding of what tasks are best suited for humans and what tasks AI will handle, creating a harmonious division of labor. This requires ongoing communication and training to help people understand their new roles in a hybrid human-AI team. The human’s role should be elevated, not diminished.
  • Iterative Learning and Adaptation: Continuously monitoring the performance of human-AI workflows and making adjustments based on feedback and evolving needs. A human-AI workflow is not a static solution; it’s a dynamic system that requires continuous optimization based on both quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback from the people using it.

Case Study 1: Augmenting Customer Service with AI

The Challenge: Overwhelmed Human Agents and Long Wait Times

A large e-commerce company was struggling with an overwhelmed customer service department. Human agents were spending a significant amount of time answering repetitive questions and sifting through basic inquiries, leading to long wait times and frustrated customers. This was impacting customer satisfaction and agent morale, creating a vicious cycle of burnout and poor service.

The Human-AI Collaborative Solution:

Instead of simply replacing human agents with chatbots, the company implemented an AI-powered support system designed to augment human capabilities. An AI chatbot was deployed to handle frequently asked questions and provide instant answers to common issues, such as order status updates and password resets. However, when the AI encountered a complex or emotionally charged query, it seamlessly escalated the conversation to a human agent, providing the agent with a complete transcript of the interaction and relevant customer data, like past purchases and support history. The AI also assisted human agents by automatically summarizing past interactions and suggesting relevant knowledge base articles, allowing them to resolve issues more quickly and efficiently. The human agent’s role shifted from being a frontline information desk to a skilled problem-solver and relationship builder.

The Results:

The implementation of this human-AI collaborative workflow led to a significant reduction in average wait times (by over 30%) and a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Human agents were freed from the burden of repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex and nuanced customer issues, leading to higher job satisfaction and lower burnout rates. The AI provided efficiency and speed, while the human agents provided empathy and creative problem-solving skills that the AI couldn’t replicate. The result was a superior customer service experience that leveraged the strengths of both humans and AI, creating a powerful synergy that improved the entire customer journey.

Key Insight: AI can significantly improve customer service by handling routine inquiries, freeing up human agents to focus on complex issues and build stronger customer relationships.

Case Study 2: Empowering Medical Professionals with AI-Driven Diagnostics

The Challenge: Improving Diagnostic Accuracy and Efficiency

Radiologists in a major hospital were facing an increasing workload, struggling to analyze a high volume of medical images (X-rays, MRIs, CT scans) while maintaining accuracy and minimizing diagnostic errors. This was a demanding and pressure-filled environment where human fatigue could lead to oversights with potentially serious consequences for patients. The backlog of images was growing, and the time a radiologist could spend on each case was shrinking.

The Human-AI Collaborative Solution:

The hospital integrated AI-powered diagnostic tools into the radiologists’ workflow. These AI algorithms were trained on vast datasets of medical images to identify subtle anomalies and patterns that might be difficult for the human eye to detect, acting as a highly efficient “second pair of eyes.” For example, the AI would highlight a small nodule on a lung scan, prompting the radiologist to take a closer look. However, the AI did not replace the radiologist’s expertise. The AI provided suggestions and highlighted areas of concern, but the final diagnosis and treatment plan remained firmly in the hands of the human medical professional. The radiologist’s role evolved to one of critical judgment, combining their deep clinical knowledge with the AI’s data-processing power. The AI’s insights were presented in a clear, easy-to-understand interface, ensuring the radiologist could quickly integrate the information into their workflow without feeling overwhelmed.

The Results:

The implementation of AI-driven diagnostics led to a significant improvement in diagnostic accuracy (reducing false negatives by 15%) and a reduction in the time it took to analyze medical images. Radiologists reported feeling more confident in their diagnoses and experienced reduced levels of cognitive fatigue. The AI’s ability to process large amounts of data quickly and identify subtle patterns complemented the human radiologist’s clinical judgment and contextual understanding. This collaborative workflow enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of the diagnostic process, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes and a more sustainable workload for medical professionals. The innovation wasn’t in the AI alone, but in the thoughtful design of the human-AI partnership.

Key Insight: AI can be a powerful tool for augmenting the capabilities of medical professionals, improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency while preserving the crucial role of human expertise and judgment.

The Human-Centered Future of Work

The examples above highlight the immense potential of designing for seamless human-AI collaboration. The key is to approach AI not as a replacement for human workers, but as a powerful partner that can amplify our abilities and allow us to focus on what truly makes us human: our creativity, our empathy, and our capacity for complex problem-solving. As we continue to integrate AI into our workflows, it is crucial that we maintain a human-centered perspective, ensuring that these technologies are designed to empower and enhance the human experience, leading to more productive, fulfilling, and innovative ways of working. The future of work is collaborative, and it’s up to us to design it thoughtfully and ethically.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: 1 of 900+ FREE quote slides available at <a href=”http://misterinnovation.com” target= “_blank”>http://misterinnovation.com</a>

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Four Things You Need to Succeed in The Good Place

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Four Things You Need to Succeed in The Good Place

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You have, no doubt, seen the design squiggle. The ubiquitous scribble is all loopy and knotty in the beginning until it finally sorts itself into a straight line by the end.

It illustrates the design process – “the journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution” – and its elegant simplicity has led it to be adopted by all sorts of other disciplines, including innovation.

But when I showed it to a client, her immediate response was, “It’s Jeremy Bearimy!”*

Wha????

And that is how I discovered The Good Place, a sitcom about four humans who die, go to The Good Place, and struggle to learn what it means to be good.

The show, created by Michael Schur of The Office and Parks and Recreation fame, is a brilliant treatise on ethics and moral philosophy. It also contains valuable wisdom about what innovators need to succeed.

Questions

With all due respect, “It’s the way it’s always been done” is an excuse that’s been used for hundreds of years to justify racism, misogyny…

Tahani Al-Jamil

This quote was a gut punch from the show’s fourth and final season. As innovators, we often hear people ask why change is needed. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” they proclaim.

But sometimes it is broke, and we don’t know it. At the very least, it can always be better.

So, while “it’s the way it’s always been done” at your company probably (hopefully) doesn’t include racism, misogyny, sexism, and other genuinely horrible things, framing the status quo as an enabler of those horrors is a harsh wake-up call to the dangers of an unquestioning commitment to continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.

Decisions (not just Ideas)

If you’re always frozen in fear and taking too long to figure out what to do, you’ll miss your opportunity, and maybe get sucked into the propeller of a swamp boat.

Jason Mendoza

Even though Jason Mendoza is the resident idiot of The Good Place, he occasionally (and very accidentally) has moments of profound insight. This one to a situation that innovators are all too familiar with – analysis paralysis.

How often do requests for more data, more (or more relevant) benchmarks, or input from more people slow down decisions and progress? These requests are rarely rooted in doubt about the data, benchmarks, or information you presented. They are rooted in fear – the fear of making the wrong decision, being blamed or shamed, and losing a reputation or even a job.

But worse than being wrong, blamed, shamed, or unemployed is missing an opportunity to radically improve your business, team, or even the world. It’s the business equivalent of getting sucked into the propeller of a swamp boat.

Actions (not just decisions)

In football, trying to run out the clock and hoping for the best never works. It’s called “prevent defense.” You don’t take any chances and just try and hold on to your lead. But prevent defense just PREVENTS you from winning! It’s always better to try something.

Jason Mendoza

Jason does it again, this time invoking a lesson learned from his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars.

Few companies publicly admit to adopting a prevent defense, even though most companies engage in it. They play prevent defense when they don’t invest in innovation, focus exclusively on maintaining or incrementally improving what they currently do, or confine their innovation efforts to events like hackathons and shark tanks.

Incremental improvements and innovation theater keep you competitive. But they won’t get you ahead of the competition or make you a leader in your industry. In fact, they prevent it by making you feel good and safe when you’re really just running out the clock.

Perseverance

Come on, you know how this works. You fail and then you try something else. And you fail again and again, and you fail a thousand times, and you keep trying because maybe the 1,001st idea might work. Now, I’m gonna and try to find our 1,001st idea.

Michael

It’s hard to explain this quote without sharing massive spoilers, so let’s just say that The Good Place is an experiment that fails. A lot.

But it’s also an experiment that generates profound learning and universe-altering changes, things that would not have been possible without the failures.

Yes, smart innovators know when to kill a project. They also know when to try one more time. Wise innovators know the difference.

One final bit of wisdom

Innovation is hard. You will run into more resistance than expected, and things will rarely work out as planned. As long as you keep trying and learning, you won’t fail.

To paraphrase Jason Mendoza (again), you’re not a failed innovator, you’re pre-successful.

*For those of you who are, like I was, unfamiliar with Jeremy Bearimy, here’s a clip explaining it (WARNING: SPOILERS)

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