Category Archives: Digital Transformation

The Changemaker Mindset

The Changemaker Mindset

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

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

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

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

A Problem They Couldn’t Look Away From

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

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

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

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

Identifying A Keystone Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empowering A Movement

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

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

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

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

Building Empathy, Even For Your Enemies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harnessing Human-Centered Change for Lasting Impact

Harnessing Human-Centered Change for Lasting Impact

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

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

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

The Essence of Human-Centered Change

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

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

Insights from Braden’s Journey

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

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

Empowering Change Agents

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

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

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

Celebrating Progress and Looking Forward

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

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

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

Image credit: ACMP, Braden Kelley

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

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

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of January 2025Drum roll please…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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

99% of Companies Failed to Do This Last Year

99% of Companies Failed to Do This Last Year

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, one essential activity that 99% of companies failed to prioritize last year is conducting regular independent customer and employee experience audits. These audits are critical for understanding the current state and potential improvements needed to enhance engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction among customers and employees.

For most companies, customer and employee experiences are the backbone of their success. A business can’t thrive without satisfied customers buying their products or services, and employees are the driving force behind delivering these experiences. Despite this understanding, many businesses neglect the proactive steps necessary to evaluate and enrich these experiences systematically utilizing unbiased external third parties to walk the experiences and document friction points and opportunities.

Is your company part of the 99% that failed to conduct both an independent customer experience audit and an independent employee experience audit last year?

If you are part of the 1%, please be sure and leave some thoughts about the experience (no pun intended) in the comments!

Why Independent Experience Audits Matter

Independent experience audits are comprehensive reviews of interactions customers and employees have with a company performed by an unbiased external resource. They help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. These audits should be performed regularly as they can reveal insights into:

  • The alignment between company offerings and customer needs.
  • The effectiveness of internal processes in promoting a positive work environment.
  • The coherence of brand values with actual customer and employee experiences.
  • Emerging trends and preferences that might impact future strategies.

“73% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.” – Temkin Group

Despite the apparent value proposition of these independent audits, why are so many companies still overlooking them? The constraints are often a mix of perceived complexity, lack of in-house expertise, or prioritization of immediate financial metrics over strategic insights. However, history has shown that organizations that adapt ahead of changes in expectations are better positioned to succeed over those that react out of necessity.

Case Study 1: An Overlooked Opportunity – Company X

Company X, a well-established retail brand, faced declining sales figures and employee turnover. Their product line remained strong, and pay scales were competitive. However, deeper insights revealed that customer experiences were inconsistent, and employees often felt disengaged due to a lack of communication and growth opportunities.

Recognizing the signs, Company X engaged in a comprehensive independent experience audit. The audit discovered two key issues:

  • Customer Experience: Customers reported a lack of personalization in their shopping journey, expressing frustration over disconnected in-store and online experiences.
  • Employee Experience: Employees felt unappreciated, with inadequate feedback channels and professional development options.

Armed with these insights, Company X implemented a strategy that enhanced personalized shopping experiences using AI-driven recommendations and integrated both digital and physical stores for seamless customer journeys. Simultaneously, they developed a robust internal communication framework that empowered employees through regular feedback and offered career progression pathways.

Within six months post-intervention, Company X witnessed a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 20% decrease in employee turnover—solidifying the importance of independent experience audits.

Case Study 2: A Success Story – Company Y

Company Y, on the other hand, already valued independent customer and employee experience audits as a vital component of their corporate strategy. As a result, they experienced steady growth and minimal churn rates despite operating in the highly competitive tech industry.

Company Y conducts bi-annual audits using a company like HCLTech, reviewing user interactions with their software products and collecting feedback through employee surveys intertwined with one-on-one interviews. They discovered that:

  • Customer Experience: The need for improved user interface intuitiveness was prevalent, prompting a user-centered design overhaul that optimized performance and usability.
  • Employee Experience: Although engagement levels were high, team collaboration across departments showed potential for enhancement.

By proactively addressing these issues, Company Y not only improved its software product, which increased customer retention by 25%, but also invested in team-building exercises and diversified project teams, leading to more innovative solutions and a dynamic organizational culture.

How to Implement Experience Audits in Your Organization

To avoid the common pitfalls highlighted, businesses need to incorporate independent experience audits into their regular strategic evaluations. Here’s a simplified approach to getting started:

  1. Define Objectives: Clearly identify what you aim to discover with the audit. Are you focusing on loyalty, satisfaction, efficiency, or a combination?
  2. Select a Partner: Choose an independent resource that is experienced, trustworthy and thorough in their activities to assess and document their findings as they walk the critical components of your customer and employee experiences.
  3. Gather Data: Utilize surveys, interviews, focus groups, and data analytics to collect comprehensive insights.
  4. Analyze Findings: Categorize feedback to identify consistent patterns, pain points, and potential areas for improvement.
  5. Develop an Action Plan: Prioritize issues by impact and feasibility, then devise a strategy that aligns with your company’s goals.
  6. Implement Changes: Address the identified opportunities with targeted interventions, ensuring stakeholders are engaged and informed.
  7. Measure Impact: Continuously track the effectiveness of changes and refine strategies as necessary.

Conclusion

Independent experience audits are not just a ‘nice to have’ but a strategic necessity. Companies can no longer afford to be complacent; they must take actionable insights from these audits to craft memorable and meaningful experiences for their customers and employees. Companies like Y that put independent experience audits at the heart of their strategy invariably found themselves robust against industry challenges, offering lessons that the broader business community should heed.

“Companies that excel at customer experience are 60% more profitable than their peers.” – Gartner

If you would like to engage an unbiased external person like Braden Kelley to conduct a customer experience and/or employee audit for you this year to join the 1% leapfrogging their competition, contact us!

Bottom line: 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: Pixabay

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 — by Jesse Nieminen
  2. Best Team Building Exercise Around — by David Burkus
  3. You Are Doing Strategic Planning Wrong (According to Seth Godin) — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Why Annual Employee Experience Audits Are Important — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
  5. Don’t ‘Follow the Science’, Follow the Scientific Method — by Pete Foley
  6. Artificial Innovation — by Braden Kelley
  7. Dynamic Thinking — by Mike Shipulski
  8. The State of Customer Experience and the Contact Center — by Shep Hyken
  9. The Duality of High-Performing Teams — by David Burkus
  10. Uber Economy is Killing Innovation, Prosperity and Entrepreneurship — by Greg Satell

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

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

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

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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

Why CIOs Should Co-Lead Customer Experience

https://www.forrester.com/report/The-ROI-Of-CX-Transformation/RES136233

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Forrester recently gathered top Customer Experience (CX) professionals from around the world for the Forrester CX Forum in New York. For the uninitiated, CX is the discipline of defining the step-by-step customer journey from marketing through sales and service. It defines the key capabilities, content, and interfaces that need to be present at each customer touchpoint and how those touchpoints work together to form a cohesive experience.

At the conference, extensive data was presented to support the argument that delivering a seamless customer experience is more important than ever. In fact, it’s the primary way digital disruptors, like Uber and Amazon, are taking share from more traditional brands.

Forrester found that from 2011 to 2015, revenues for companies that scored near the top of the Forrester CX Index™ outgrew that from a group of companies who scored poorly (CX laggards in Forrester’s terminology) by more than five to one.

But who is actually in charge of CX, and who should be? Many CIOs classically would respond that these types of matters―the design of the website, its features, and generally how we interact with the customer―is the responsibility of marketing or other areas of “the business.” Once “business” decides what they want, IT will build and support it – that’s the breakdown of responsibilities. For the CIO, this may seem to be the most efficient arrangement, as they have plenty to worry about and sometimes it’s nice to be able to identify something they don’t have to focus on.

But in testing this classic mindset through conversations with many of the CX experts at the Forrester Summit, I heard a strong, unanimous dissent with this traditional view. The view of the CX community is that to deliver great results in customer experience, senior IT leadership must be intensively involved in the full CX lifecycle, not merely a recipient of requirements when it’s time to write some code, and not merely kept apprised in an “FYI” type fashion. For example, Ori Soen, General Manager of Medallia Digital, a leading provider of CX software, offered, “We clearly see that when CIOs and their IT teams are customer-centric and focused on CX, the organization is able to generate much better business outcomes from its CX investment.”

These experts point to successful CX companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Airbnb, where the development teams and business teams are working as one unit, making decisions about the experience, and implementing it together.

As Daniel Davenport, Managing Director of Liquid Hub, an agency that focuses on customer engagement, articulated, “I think it is important for the CIO to have a voice at the table and co-create the ultimate solution.”

But as busy as enterprise CIOs and their key lieutenants are, I pressed the CX experts at the Forrester Forum as to exactly why it’s truly essential that the CIO be so aggressively involved in CX and what the specific areas of value are. After speaking with some CX professionals, I derived five key areas of significant value that are derived from CIO involvement in the CX process.

1. Art of the Possible

CX innovation sits at the intersection of customer need and the ever-changing landscape of what is technically possible. It’s too abstract for CX professionals to define requirements and ask IT to figure out how to make them work if the CX teams don’t have a good sense of what they have to work with. New technologies from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Virtual Reality to In-memory computing make it possible to do things today that were impractical just a year or two ago. But IT can’t be expected to “brief” CX professionals on every technology in the world. Instead, the process needs to be a collaboration of those studying what customers need and those studying what technology is newly enabling so that they can pool their knowledge and find new intersections where value can be created for the customer and the company. That only happens when IT is intimately involved in the ongoing process of considering the next generation CX.

2. Understanding Level of Effort and Dependencies for Prioritization and Planning

In an enterprise, there are typically many systems and many simultaneous programs going on that impact what can be implemented, when it can be implemented and with what level of effort. CX teams need to be constantly considering how their visions intersect with the technical reality of enterprise IT to develop CX roadmaps that aggressively bring new capabilities to market, but don’t crash headlong into other initiatives, system upgrades, or compliance issues.

Furthermore, CX design requires the continuous balancing of the customer’s optimal experience and various business considerations, including the cost of implementing new capabilities and the cost of supporting them. A significant component of these cost factors is IT. Therefore, there is a constant and ongoing need to both understand from IT what the level of effort might be for any given enhancement, and perhaps even more importantly, IT should be a creative collaborator in thinking about how to optimize technical approaches so that great CX ideas can be implemented with a sensible value equation. To do this effectively, IT can’t just “cost out” requirements provided by the business, but needs to be “on the inside” to understand what is really trying to be accomplished. Sometimes the answer that works economically relies on a different set of requirements than that which was initially envisioned, and an engaged senior IT partner can get creative with their colleagues to search for the best value equation.

3. Measuring CX

Measurement is a huge component of CX. The goal of CX is to move the customer through a journey from awareness to consideration to purchase to advocacy and loyalty. Many discreet components make up this journey across various touchpoints: the emails sent to customers, individual features of an app, the information available to call center representatives, and the way returns are handled. The constant obsession of CX professionals is, “How do we make this process better so the customer is more delighted and the business outcome is even more robust?” But to do so, it is essential to constantly measure the impact of each individual component of the customer’s mindset and behavior. Measuring these many interactions is often complex because it requires collecting data across many different touchpoints and then being able to correlate it so as to figure out the puzzle of causality. That requires understanding enterprise data and how to connect it across very diverse systems ― an expertise that IT needs to bring to the table.

In addition to the enterprise systems themselves, there are many excellent and deeply technical tools that support the CX measurement process. CIOs need to be deeply involved in these systems just as they would in finance or HR systems. I spoke with David McBride, a CX expert and Director of Product Management at IBM who argued, “CIOs have long been focused on creating technology to help businesses operate; when they participate in the CX process, they get to see data or even videos of customers and how they may be struggling to move through the current customer journey.” IBM’s Behavioral Analytics tool (formerly known as Tealeaf), for example, offers tools that record user sessions for analytical purposes. McBride notes, “There is nothing like seeing a session replayed to illustrate the extent of a particular struggle.”

4. True End-to-End Perspective

Lastly, in enterprises very often there isn’t just one CX initiative, but many, focused on different products, channels, touchpoints, or customer segments. The office of the CIO can often make sure that the ultimate customer experience is achieved by making sure that there is cohesion to both the technology and also the management of data across these different initiatives.

I spoke with Angela Wells, Senior Director, CX at Oracle about this, “At Oracle, what we have seen is that the CIO can and should be essential to CX decisions. What has happened at a lot of bigger companies is that they have made many ‘one-off’ decisions about what they thought were best-in-breed solutions in separate [areas of the business], and then the data didn’t talk to each other. It all got pretty sporadic and expensive, and it didn’t really deliver the customer experience [desired]. So, what we have found is that CIOs have become a centralized source for thinking about what’s going to happen to that data. They are thinking more of an umbrella; what’s best for the whole company, not just what’s best for my little niche?”

As small steps in customer experience grow into a larger program, you run the risk of chaos if there isn’t someone with the broader perspective. Dimitry Grenader, VP Product Marketing at Luminoso, a leading player in the AI arena, expressed this passionately, “In this day and age, CX should not just be left to marketers. Software is eating the world, and being able to put together the right platform will ultimately determine the success or failure of the efforts. Everything in today’s world starts as a feature, then becomes a product, which in turn becomes a platform, and finally becomes the operating system. If you don’t have the right operating system, you are building a castle on the sand.”

“I believe that a CIO must at the very least be a strong stakeholder, if not the driver of the CX process.”

Oracle’s Wells summed up this shift in terms of the evolving role of the CIO in our new digitally transformed world, “If you are thinking of the CIO as that straight tech-minded person, you are going to miss out on that more modern CIO that is a Chief Innovation Officer who takes responsibility to figure out how we make the most of what we are spending on technology to deliver the best customer experience.”

5. Changing the Way IT Operates

Finally, the level of transformation required to enable enterprises to deliver on their customer’s digital expectations may require a significant transformation in many facets of how IT operates, so it’s important for the CIO to deeply understand this difference.

As Forrester Vice President and Research Group Director Sharyn Leaver summed it up, “Compelling experiences, delivered digitally, separate CX winners from laggards. Firms that lead their industries to customer experience aggressively embrace business technologies to help win, serve, and retain customers — and they do so at rapid pace. This requires intense involvement from CIOs and their teams. Not at an arm’s length. But through ongoing collaboration and innovation.

“CX brings new prominence to technology’s role, but also new pressures on CIOs. The pervasive need for digital experiences exposes old systems, static organizations, and especially outmoded cultures that cannot deliver at the speed of the customer. For the CIO, this is much more daunting than merely spinning up a digital or mobile team. For many, success will require an overhaul of their organization – the people, processes, governance, and technology itself.”

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

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

Four Deadly Business Myths

Four Deadly Business Myths

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The unicorn is perhaps unique among myths in that the creature doesn’t appear in the mythology of any culture. The ancient Greeks, for all of their centaurs, hydras and medusae, never had any stories of unicorns, they simply thought that some existed somewhere. Of course, nobody had ever seen one, but they believed others had.

Beliefs are amazing things. We don’t need any evidence or rational basis to believe something to be true. In fact, research has shown that, when confronted with scientific evidence which conflicts with preexisting views, people tend to question the objectivity of the research rather than revisit their beliefs. Also, as Sam Arbesman has explained, our notions of the facts themselves change over time.

George Soros and others have noted that information has a reflexive quality. We can’t possibly verify every proposition, so we tend to take cues from those around us, especially when they are reinforced by authority figures, like consultants and media personalities. Over time, the zeitgeist diverges further from reality and myths evolve into established doctrine.

Myth #1: We Live In A VUCA Business Environment

Today it seems that every business pundit is talking about how we operate in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. It’s not hard to see the attraction. Conjuring almost apocalyptic images of continuous industrial disruption creates demand for consulting and advisory services. It’s easier to sell aspirin than vitamins.

The data, however, tell a different story. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

Today, in part because of lax antitrust enforcement over the past few decades, businesses have become less disruptive, less competitive and less dynamic, while our economy has become less innovative and less productive. The fact that the reality is in such stark contrast to the rhetoric, is more than worrying, it should be a flashing red light.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt industries anymore. We disrupt people. Economic data shows that for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Income and wealth inequality remain at historic highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The recent great resignation, when people began leaving their jobs in droves, helps tell this story. Should anyone be surprised? We’ve been working longer hours, constantly tethered to the office even as we work remotely, under increasing levels of stress. Yes, things change. They always have and always will. We need to adapt, but all of the VUCA talk is killing us.

Myth #2: Empathy Is Absolution

Another favorite buzzword today is empathy. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective. As noted above, there’s far too much talk about disruption and uncertainty and not nearly enough about stability and well-being.

Still, the one-dimensional use of empathy is misleading. When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, it seems like a “nice to have,” rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned living overseas for 15 years is that it is incredibly important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

Learning that not everyone thinks alike is one of life’s most valuable lessons. Yes, coercion is often a viable strategy in the short-term. But to build something that lasts, it’s much better if people do things for their own reasons, even if those reasons are different than yours. To achieve that, you have to understand their motivations.

Myth #3: Diversity Equity And Inclusion Is About Enforcing Rules

In recent years corporate America has pushed to implement policies for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Society for Human Resource Management even offers a diversity toolkit on its website firms can adopt, complete with guidelines, best practices and even form letters.

Many organizations have incorporated diversity awareness training for employees to learn about things like unconscious bias, microaggressions and cultural awareness. There are often strict codes of conduct with serious repercussions for violations. Those who step out of line can be terminated and see their careers derailed.

Unfortunately, these efforts can backfire, especially if diversity efforts rely to heavily on a disciplinary regime. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out long ago, strict rules-based approaches are problematic because they inevitably lead to logical contradictions. What starts out as a well-meaning effort can quickly become a capricious workplace dominated by fear.

Cultural competency is much better understood as a set of skills than a set of rules. While the prospect of getting fired for saying the wrong thing can be chilling, who wouldn’t want to be a more effective communicator, able to collaborate more effectively with colleagues who have different viewpoints, skills and perspectives?

To bring about real transformation, you need to attract. You can’t bully or overpower. Promoting inclusion should be about understanding, not intimidation.

Myth #4: People Are Best Motivated Through Carrots And Sticks

One of the things we’ve noticed when we advise organizations on transformation initiatives is that executives tend to default towards incentive structures. They quickly conjure up a Rube Goldberg-like system of bonuses and penalties designed to incentivize people to exhibit the desired behaviors. This is almost always a mistake.

If you feel the need to bribe and bully people to get what you want, you are signaling from the outset that there is something undesirable about what you’re asking for. In fact, we’ve known for decades that financial incentives often prove to be problematic.

Instead of trying to get people to do what you want, you’re much better off identifying people who want what you want and empowering them to succeed. As they prosper, they can bring others in who can attract others still. That’s how you build a movement that people feel a sense of ownership of, rather than mandate that they feel subjugated by.

The trick is that you always want to start with a majority, even if it’s three people in a room of five. The biggest influence on what we do and think is what the people around us do and think. That’s why it’s always easy to expand a majority out, but as soon as you are in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback.

We need to stop trying to engineer behavior, as if humans are assemblages of buttons and levers that we push and pull to get the results we want. Effective leaders are more like gardeners, nurturing, growing and shaping the ecosystems in which they operate, uniting others with a sense of shared identity and shared purpose.

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

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

The Two Main Opponents of Digital Success

The Two Main Opponents of Digital Success

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

I have written before about the importance of the role that emotion plays in driving your customer’s or audience’s behavior in digital channels.

When creating digital touch points, it is natural to focus on the capabilities and content that we believe customers will want, need, and hopefully love. This is essential as your digital touchpoint must have a strong core value proposition to the visitor in order to be viable.

However, it’s important to be aware of a psychological factor called Negativity Bias. What Negativity Bias says is basically that our negative emotions are more powerful in our psyche than our positive emotions. We might be excited about going on vacation, but if we are worried it might rain, those negative feelings can outweigh the positive ones.

At FROM we spend a lot of time testing websites, mobile apps and other digital experiences with real end-users and we get to observe their emotional reactions first-hand. After watching hundreds of these tests, I would have to say that our research confirms this idea of negativity bias. Simply put, no matter how promising or worthwhile a site is when it starts to trigger negative reactions in users, they usually abandon it quickly, no matter how initially interested they may have been. Note there is an exception to this rule which we call the Bruce Springsteen Rule – perhaps showing our age. For many years the TicketMaster site was quite terrible and yet when the moment came that a new Bruce Springsteen concert opened up for sale, tens of thousands of people would flock to the site and frankly just suffer through the purchase experience in order to get those tickets. So if your site experience is the digital equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen ticket (Millennials, please substitute Justin Bieber), then you may have found a way to neutralize negativity bias. Otherwise, read on.

So what are these negative reactions we get from users? There are a variety of possibilities, but there are two primary emotional villains that lead the pack: confusion and frustration.

Confusion is usually the first emotion we see. A user begins perhaps looking for a product or researching a topic, but he/she doesn’t fully understand the interface, the results they are getting or the labeling or language used. They start to feel confused. Confusion is a harmful emotion because it tends to make people feel that they are at fault. They are perhaps too stupid to figure out how to use the site or app. You might think,” Well that’s better than them blaming us!” but in fact, it’s not. They say the best thing you can do to have a great first date with someone is to leave them feeling great about themselves, and so it goes with digital experiences. If a user feels they aren’t smart enough to figure out your site or app, they may not blame you, but they leave nevertheless, so the outcome is basically the same.

And by the way they may in fact subconsciously blame you for making them feel dumb.

So how to avoid confusion? Study users’ paths through the site via task analysis, as we do here at FROM. Anytime we test a site, even a very successful one, we always find many points of confusion. It’s a matter of basic hygiene: sites are constantly changing, and it’s hard to make sure that every tweak is totally clear to everyone. Doing quarterly or at least annual user tests to make sure you are aware of any confusion “bombs” that may have been planted on your site is just good business. Furthermore, confusion-related problems are often inexpensive to fix. Sometimes it’s simply about rewording a button or moving a call to action. Sometimes it’s about just removing a feature that’s causing more confusion than benefit.

The second emotional villain is frustration. When you are frustrated you aren’t feeling at all confused — generally, you know exactly what the site is supposed to do; it just isn’t doing it! Frustration can be triggered by site defects, slow performance, check out process that are more steps than the user feels they “should be,” policies that don’t give the user the outcome they want, or missing features that the user perceives “everybody else has” which may actually just mean that Uber and Amazon have them. It’s quite easy to frustrate users today as their expectations are so incredibly high. Creating frustration in digital users is super-damaging to your brand because many users create a meaning around the frustration which is that the brand just doesn’t care. Users believe that brands should know what they expect and that if they aren’t providing it, there can be only reason: they just aren’t bothering. This, of course, may be a completely erroneous conclusion… in our experience very often clients don’t realize the points in their customer experience that are creating frustration until we conduct the user tests that reveal these problems.

Frustration problems are often easy to fix, but sometimes they can be very challenging because they may stem from underlying technology issues that are expensive to remediate. Nevertheless, it’s essential to understand where these problems exist and gauge the impact they are having on your business results, so that you can make an informed decision about whether or when to invest in addressing them.

In our experience, sites that offer something of value and manage to avoid creating confusion or frustration for their visitors are winners. The first step to getting there is a user-research focused assessment so that you can face the reality of the emotional reactions you are creating. Once that is understood, a roadmap to improvement can be developed and results measured along the way.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pixabay

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

Don’t Slow Roll Your Transformation

Don't Slow Roll Your Transformation

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Business pundits love to talk about transformation, and consultants drool at the opportunity to tap into a limitless budget, but the truth is, transformations suck.

At minimum, transformation consists of re-engineering your operating model while continuing to operate, with even greater disruption involved if you are revamping your business model at the same time. Now, if you are a privately held enterprise, you might be able to sell this to your board as a “pivot,” and indeed, in the venture world, there is some accommodation built in for such moves. Not so, however, for companies whose shares are publicly held. If this describes you, fasten your seatbelt and read on.

Transformations come with “J curves”—financial projections that have you swimming underwater for some considerable period before you emerge reborn on the other side. Public investors hate J curves. They also worry prospective customers, as well as ecosystem partners, not to mention your own employees. Only a VC loves a J curve, but their attention is on a younger generation.

Nonetheless, everyone understands there are situations where transformation is warranted. For public companies, the most common cause is when the entire franchise is under existential threat. A new technology paradigm is going to categorically obsolete the core franchise, as digital photography did to Kodak, as digital media did to BusinessWeek, as wireless telephony is doing to wireline. It was an existential threat that caused Microsoft to displace its back office software business with Azure’s cloud services, even though the gross margins of the latter were negative while the net margins of the former were stupendous. It was an existential threat that drove Lou Gerstner to reengineer IBM’s hardware-centric business model to focus on services and software. Failure to transform means dissolution of the enterprise. If you are to survive, there are times when you simply have to bite the bullet.

That said, you still have to confront the issue of time. Everyone understands that a transformation will take more than one year, but no one is willing to tolerate it taking three. That is, by the end of the second year you have to be verifiably emerging from the J curve, head out of water, able to breathe positive cash flow, or else you are likely to be written off. That means transformational initiatives should be planned to complete in seven quarters, plus or minus one. That’s the amount of time you can be in the ICU before you risk getting transferred to hospice care.

So, if a transformation is in your future, and you really cannot work around it, then start your planning with the end in mind and calendar that end for seven quarters out. Now, work backward to determine where you will have to be by each of the intervening quarters in order to meet your completion date. When you get back to the current quarter, expect to see you are already two or three quarters behind schedule (not fair, I know, but I already told you that transformations suck). Suppress panic, conduct triage, and start both your engines and the clock.

Final point: given the lack of time and the amount of risk involved, there is only one sensible way to approach a transformation. Prioritize it above everything else, and keep everyone focused on making the intermediate milestones until you are well and truly out of danger. Transformations are no joking matter. Most companies lose their way. Don’t let that be true of you and yours.

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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

Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024

Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024

2021 marked the re-birth of my original Blogging Innovation blog as a new blog called Human-Centered Change and Innovation.

Many of you may know that Blogging Innovation grew into the world’s most popular global innovation community before being re-branded as Innovation Excellence and being ultimately sold to DisruptorLeague.com.

Thanks to an outpouring of support I’ve ignited the fuse of this new multiple author blog around the topics of human-centered change, innovation, transformation and design.

I feel blessed that the global innovation and change professional communities have responded with a growing roster of contributing authors and more than 17,000 newsletter subscribers.

To celebrate we’ve pulled together the Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2024 from our archive of over 2,500 articles on these topics.

We do some other rankings too.

We just published the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2024 and as the volume of this blog has grown we have brought back our monthly article ranking to complement this annual one.

But enough delay, here are the 100 most popular innovation and transformation posts of 2024.

Did your favorite make the cut?

1. Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a Threat – by Stefan Lindegaard

2. FREE Innovation Maturity Assessment – by Braden Kelley

3. The Education Business Model Canvas – by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

4. The Role of Stakeholder Analysis in Change Management – by Art Inteligencia

5. Act Like an Owner – Revisited! – by Shep Hyken

6. Iterate Your Thinking – by Dennis Stauffer

7. SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification – by Pete Foley

8. What is Human-Centered Change? – by Braden Kelley

9. A 90% Project Failure Rate Means You’re Doing it Wrong – by Mike Shipulski

10. Should a Bad Grade in Organic Chemistry be a Doctor Killer? – by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

11. How Netflix Built a Culture of Innovation – by Art Inteligencia

12. Fear is a Leading Indicator of Personal Growth – by Mike Shipulski

13. Sustaining Imagination is Hard – by Braden Kelley

14. No Regret Decisions: The First Steps of Leading through Hyper-Change – by Phil Buckley

15. The Art of Adaptability: How to Respond to Changing Market Conditions – by Art Inteligencia

16. Sprint Toward the Innovation Action – by Mike Shipulski

17. Marriott’s Approach to Customer Service – by Shep Hyken

18. Top 5 Future Studies Programs – by Art Inteligencia

19. Reversible versus Irreversible Decisions – by Farnham Street

20. 50 Cognitive Biases Reference – Free Download – Courtesy of TitleMax

21. Free Human-Centered Change Tools – by Braden Kelley

22. Designing an Innovation Lab: A Step-by-Step Guide – by Art Inteligencia

23. Why More Women Are Needed in Innovation – by Greg Satell

24. How to Defeat Corporate Antibodies – by Stefan Lindegaard

25. The Nine Innovation Roles – by Braden Kelley

26. Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023 – Curated by Braden Kelley

27. Human-Centered Change – by Braden Kelley

28. Visual Project Charter™ – 35″ x 56″ (Poster Size) and JPG for Online Whiteboarding – by Braden Kelley

29. FutureHacking – Be Your Own Futurist – by Braden Kelley

30. ACMP Standard for Change Management® Visualization – 35″ x 56″ (Poster Size) – Association of Change Management Professionals – by Braden Kelley


Build a common language of innovation on your team


31. Overcoming Resistance to Change – by Chateau G Pato

32. Are We Abandoning Science? – by Greg Satell

33. How Networks Power Transformation – by Greg Satell

34. What Differentiates High Performing Teams – by David Burkus

35. The 6 Building Blocks of Great Teams – by David Burkus

36. Unintended Consequences. The Hidden Risk of Fast-Paced Innovation – by Pete Foley

37. The Role of Employee Training and Development in Enhancing Customer Experience – by Art Inteligencia

38. The Pyramid of Results, Motivation and Ability – by Braden Kelley

39. Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems – by Greg Satell

40. What is the difference between signals and trends? – by Art Inteligencia

41. Next Generation Leadership Traits and Characteristics – by Stefan Lindegaard

42. Latest Interview with the What’s Next? Podcast – Featuring Braden Kelley

43. A Tipping Point for Organizational Culture – by Janet Sernack

44. Accountability and Empowerment in Team Dynamics – by Stefan Lindegaard

45. Design Thinking for Non-Designers – by Chateau G Pato

46. The Innovation Enthusiasm Gap – by Howard Tiersky

47. The One Movie All Electric Car Designers Should Watch – by Braden Kelley

48. The Ultimate Guide to the Phase-Gate Process – by Dainora Jociute

49. Innovation Management ISO 56000 Series Explained – by Diana Porumboiu

50. How to Create an Effective Innovation Hub – by Chateau G Pato


Accelerate your change and transformation success


51. Imagination versus Knowledge – Is imagination really more important? – by Janet Sernack

52. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – by Braden Kelley

53. A Shortcut to Making Strategic Trade-Offs – by Geoffrey A. Moore

54. How to Make Navigating Ambiguity a Super Power – by Robyn Bolton

55. Three HOW MIGHT WE Alternatives That Actually Spark Creative Ideas – by Robyn Bolton

56. Problems vs. Solutions vs. Complaints – by Mike Shipulski

57. Innovation or Not – Liquid Trees – by Art Inteligencia

58. Everyone Clear Now on What ChatGPT is Doing? – by Geoffrey A. Moore

59. Leadership Best Quacktices from Oregon’s Dan Lanning – by Braden Kelley

60. Will Innovation Management Leverage AI in the Future? – by Jesse Nieminen

61. The Power of Position Innovation – by John Bessant

62. Creating Organizational Agility – by Howard Tiersky

63. A Case Study on High Performance Teams – by Stefan Lindegaard

64. Secrets to Overcoming Resistance to Change – by David Burkus

65. How to Write a Failure Resume – by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

66. 9 of 10 Companies Requiring Employees to Return to the Office in 2024 – by Shep Hyken

67. The Five Keys to Successful Change – by Braden Kelley

68. What is Social Analysis? – by Art Inteligencia

69. Dare to Think Differently – by Janet Sernack

70. Parallels Between the 1920’s and Today Are Frightening – by Greg Satell

71. What is Trend Spotting? – by Art Inteligencia

72. Driving Change is Not Enough – You Also Have To Survive Victory – by Greg Satell

73. 5 Simple Steps to Team Alignment – by David Burkus

74. Building a Better Change Communication Plan – by Braden Kelley

75. The Role of Leadership in Fostering a Culture of Innovation – by Art Inteligencia

76. 4 Simple Steps to Becoming Your Own Futurist – An Introduction to the FutureHacking™ methodology – by Braden Kelley

77. Four Hidden Secrets of Innovation – by Greg Satell

78. Why Organizations Struggle with Innovation – by Howard Tiersky

79. An Introduction to Strategic Foresight – by Stefan Lindegaard

80. Learning About Innovation – From a Skateboard? – by John Bessant


Get the Change Planning Toolkit


81. 800+ FREE Quote Posters – by Braden Kelley

82. Do you have a fixed or growth mindset? – by Stefan Lindegaard

83. Generation AI Replacing Generation Z – by Braden Kelley

84. The End of the Digital Revolution – by Greg Satell

85. Is AI Saving Corporate Innovation or Killing It? – by Robyn Bolton

86. The Experiment Canvas™ – 35″ x 56″ (Poster Size) – by Braden Kelley

87. America Drops Out of the Ten Most Innovative Countries – by Braden Kelley

88. 5 Essential Customer Experience Tools to Master – by Braden Kelley

89. AI as an Innovation Tool – How to Work with a Deeply Flawed Genius! – by Pete Foley

90. Four Ways To Empower Change In Your Organization – by Greg Satell

91. Agile Innovation Management – by Diana Porumboiu

92. Do Nothing More Often – by Robyn Bolton

93. Five Things Most Managers Don’t Know About Innovation – by Greg Satell

94. The Fail Fast Fallacy – by Rachel Audige

95. Top Six Trends for Innovation Management in 2025 – by Jesse Nieminen

96. How to Re-engineer the Incubation Zone – by Geoffrey A. Moore

97. Flaws in the Crawl Walk Run Methodology – by Braden Kelley

98. Master the Customer Hierarchy of Needs – by Shep Hyken

99. Rise of the Atomic Consultant – Or the Making of a Superhero – by Braden Kelley

100. A Shared Language for Radical Change – by Greg Satell

Curious which article just missed the cut? Well, here it is just for fun:

101. Is Disruption About to Claim a New Victim? – by Robyn Bolton

These are the Top 100 innovation and transformation articles of 2024 based on the number of page views. If your favorite Human-Centered Change & Innovation article didn’t make the cut, then send a tweet to @innovate and maybe we’ll consider doing a People’s Choice List for 2024.

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 1-6 new articles every week focused on human-centered change, innovation, transformation and design insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook feed or on Twitter or LinkedIn too!

Editor’s Note: Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all the innovation & transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have a valuable insight to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, contact us.

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