Category Archives: Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation and Navigating Change in the Digital Age

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In an era where the digital landscape is perpetually evolving, organizations face the necessity of transformation to remain competitive and relevant. Digital transformation isn’t merely about adopting new technologies—it’s a holistic journey that involves shifts in culture, operations, and customer interactions. As a thought leader in human-centered change and innovation, I believe the key to successful digital transformation lies in balancing technology with the human elements of change. Let’s explore how organizations are navigating this complex journey through strategic case studies and actionable insights.

The Essence of Digital Transformation

To truly grasp digital transformation, one must understand that it encompasses much more than digitizing existing processes. It’s about re-imagining how your organization functions and interacts with both employees and customers, leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing. At its core, digital transformation seeks to enhance efficiency, improve customer experience, and foster innovation to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Case Study 1: LEGO’s Strategic Resilience

Background

LEGO, the beloved brick maker, is an exemplar of how a traditional company can thrive amidst digital transformation. In the early 2000s, LEGO faced decreasing sales and was nearing the brink of financial collapse. The company needed a thorough digital overhaul to adapt to changing market dynamics and consumer expectations.

Transformation Journey

LEGO embraced digital transformation by integrating digital tools with its physical products. Recognizing the growing influence of digital play, they launched LEGO Mindstorms, a programmable robotics kit that merged software with their iconic bricks. Furthermore, LEGO ventured into the digital gaming space, creating mobile apps and video games that extended their brand universe into digital domains.

The Human Element

LEGO prioritized customer engagement throughout its transformation. By inviting fans to co-create new designs through the LEGO Ideas platform, they effectively tapped into their community’s creative potential. Internally, LEGO fostered a culture of innovation, encouraging employees to experiment and embrace new ideas. This balance of human-centric strategies with digital initiatives has helped LEGO sustain its iconic status while evolving with the times.

Case Study 2: GE’s Digital Industrial Revolution

Background

General Electric (GE), a giant in the industrial sector, embarked on a bold digital transformation strategy aiming to become the world’s leading digital industrial company. Facing the pressures of a rapidly digitizing world, GE sought to revitalize its operations and product offerings through data-driven solutions.

Transformation Journey

GE initiated the development of its Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform called Predix. By equipping industrial equipment with sensors and connecting them to the cloud, GE extracted valuable insights to optimize performance, predict failures, and enhance customer value. This strategic pivot toward digital services represented a significant departure from their traditional manufacturing focus.

The Human Element

GE recognized the crucial role that organizational culture played in supporting this transformation. Leadership prioritized up-skilling employees, ensuring they were equipped with the necessary data analytics and digital skills. By fostering an agile work environment, GE empowered teams to collaborate effectively and innovate continuously. This human-centric approach enabled GE to navigate the challenges of digital transformation while capitalizing on the opportunities it presented.

Guiding Principles for Navigating Digital Transformation

Align Strategy with Purpose: Clearly define the purpose behind your digital transformation efforts and ensure they align with your organization’s vision and goals.
Engage Stakeholders: Foster open communication and engage employees, customers, and partners early in the transformation process.
Iterate and Adapt: Adopt an agile mindset, allowing for iterative improvements and adjustments as new insights emerge.
Invest in Learning: Prioritize workforce development to build the digital skills needed to embrace new technologies.
Focus on Customer Experience: Leverage digital capabilities to enhance customer interactions and deliver personalized experiences.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is an ongoing journey rather than a one-time project. Organizations must navigate complexities by integrating technology with human-centered strategies. By learning from successful case studies like LEGO and GE, businesses can model effective approaches to transformation that center around innovation, resilience, and sustainable growth. Embrace the digital age with clarity, purpose, and a people-first approach, and your organization will be well-positioned to thrive now and in the future.

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.

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600 Free Innovation, Transformation and Design Quote Slides

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600 Innovation, Transformation and Design Quote Slides on Innovation, Change and Design

Free Downloads for Keynote Speeches, Presentations and Workshops

Looking for a compelling quote for a keynote speech, workshop or presentation on any of these topics?

Innovation
Digital Transformation
Design
Change
Creativity
Leadership
Design Thinking

I’m flattered that people have been quoting my keynote speeches and my first two books Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and Charting Change.

So, I’m making some of my favorite quotes available from myself and other thought leaders in a fun, visual, easily shareable format.

I’ve been publishing them on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Print them, share them on social media, or use them in your presentations, keynote speeches or workshops.

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Put the PDF into FULL SCREEN MODE
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Contact me with your favorite innovation, design thinking, change, transformation, or design quotes and I’ll consider adding them to my library of future downloads.

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Innovative Tools for Enhancing User Research

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Innovative Tools for Enhancing User Research

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the fast-paced world of innovation, understanding the needs and behaviors of users has never been more crucial. As organizations strive to create products and services that truly resonate, effective user research becomes indispensable. Fortunately, a suite of innovative tools is now available to enhance the way we conduct user research. This article explores some of these tools and illustrates their impact through real-world case studies.

Innovative Tools for User Research

In the digital age, a plethora of user research tools has emerged, offering user researchers unprecedented insights into consumer behavior. Among these tools, augmented reality (AR) user testing, AI-driven sentiment analysis, and real-time collaboration platforms have gained prominence. These tools facilitate deeper understanding and engagement with users, often leading to breakthroughs in product and service design.

Case Studies

Case Study 1: XYZ Inc. Leverages Augmented Reality for User Testing

XYZ Inc., a tech company focused on smart home solutions, incorporated augmented reality (AR) into their user research strategy. By utilizing AR for user testing, they allowed participants to interact with virtual prototypes of their new home-automation system in a realistic environment. This approach not only reduced the costs associated with physical prototyping but also provided users with a more intuitive experience.

Through AR, XYZ Inc. gathered valuable feedback on user interactions with interfaces, uncovering usability issues that traditional methods would have overlooked. As a result, the company was able to refine its user experience design significantly before launching the product, leading to higher customer satisfaction and adoption rates.

Case Study 2: ABC Corp. Utilizes AI-driven Sentiment Analysis

ABC Corp., a financial services firm, implemented AI-driven sentiment analysis to interpret user feedback on their mobile banking app. By integrating AI algorithms that processed thousands of feedback entries, they were able to detect not only the content but also the emotional tone of user comments.

This tool provided insights that went beyond what conventional surveys and interviews could capture. ABC Corp. discovered specific pain points related to security and navigation and identified that sentiments were particularly negative among users aged 50 and above. Armed with this knowledge, they prioritized user-friendly designs and security enhancements tailored to meet the needs of this demographic, resulting in a significant uptick in positive user feedback and app engagement.

Conclusion

The integration of innovative tools in user research is transforming the landscape of user-centered design. As illustrated by the case studies of XYZ Inc. and ABC Corp., adopting new technologies such as AR user testing and AI-driven sentiment analysis can lead to profound insights and significantly enhance product design and user satisfaction. Embracing these tools not only strengthens the research process but also places organizations at the forefront of innovation, ultimately fostering a deeper connection with the end-users.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Developing 21st-Century Leader and Team Superpowers

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Developing 21st-Century Leader and Team Superpowers

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

According to McKinsey & Co, in a recent article The new roles of leaders in 21st-century organizations they say that the focus of leaders, in traditional organisations, is to maximize value for shareholders. To do this effectively, they say that traditional leaders typically play four different roles – the planner (developing strategy and translating it into a plan); the director (assigning responsibility); and the controller (making sure everyone does what they should minimize variance against the plan). Whilst these represent the core and foundational business management and leadership roles essential to successful organisational performance, the world has changed significantly, and traditional organisations are being severely disrupted. Requiring the development of new, adaptive, and supplementary, and new leadership and team roles, which embrace the set of 21st-century superpowers for leaders and teams – strategically supported by digital technologies, and an ecosystem focus to thrive in the face of exponential change and a VUCA world.

Maximizing the dormant space

This creates a space of unparalleled opportunity towards reshaping the world anew by activating what might be considered the dormant space, between traditional leadership roles and the possibility of a set of 21st-century superpowers for leaders and teams.

To be embraced, enacted, and embodied by conscious leaders and collaborative teams in more purposeful, meaningful, and innovative ways that serve people, customers, and the common good.

The new roles of leaders and teams in the 21st century

The leadership paradigm has shifted, in the past 20 years, to focus more on “co-creating meaningful value with and for all stakeholders, expanding beyond shareholders to include customers, employees, partners, and our broader society”.

Taking the stance that in an open system, everyone must win through co-creation, collaboration, experimentation, and innovation that results in delivering great customer experiences. To retain and sustain current customers, and to attract and attain new ones in an increasingly competitive global marketplace!

Making the key “leadership challenge of our times” as one which cultivates transformative eco-system-led learning and change, nurturing connections, exploration, discovery, creativity, collaboration, experimentation, and innovation at all levels of the system.

Requiring the traditional organisational leadership roles, to shift towards bravely and boldly “stepping into the uncharted territories of future possibility” and weaving these possibilities into the way people work and commune together.

To co-create new “holding spaces” for igniting, harnessing, and activating people’s collective intelligence to embrace and execute change and deliver the desired commercial outcomes their organisation wants.

Openings for unparalleled opportunities

It seems that we not only survived through the emotional and mental anxiety and overwhelm of living in “a world of disruption, drama, and despair” we also saw the range of disruptive events as a “crack” or opening in our operating systems, for unparalleled opportunities.

By intentionally embracing the “key changes that currently reshape all our innovative learning systems” including the action confidence (courage and capacity to step into something new and bring it into being, creating reality as we step into it) to:

Deepen the learning cycle (from head-centric to the whole person: heart, head, and gut-centric).
Broaden our perspectives and actions (from an individual focus to an eco-system focus).

A moment in time – taking a deep breath

One of the many challenges our collective at ImagineNation™ faced during the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns (we had six long ones here in Melbourne, Australia over 18 months) was the opportunity to slow down, hit our pause buttons, retreat and reflect and take some very deep and slow breaths.

To make time and space to rethink, respond, regroup, experiment, and play with a range of wondrous, imaginative, and playful ideas, to unlearn, learn and relearn new ways of being, thinking, and acting to sense and actualize a future that is wanting to emerge – even though, then and right now, it was and still is unclear how.

Acknowledging that whilst many of us, and the majority of our clients were experiencing the range of significant emotional reactions, mental stalling, and the anxiety and overwhelm of living in “a world of disruption, drama, and despair” as well as sensing and perceiving the world that is emerging as one of unparalleled opportunity”.

Stepping up and into new spaces of possibility and learning

Individually and collectively, we focussed on a range of rethinking, responding, and regrouping strategies including adopting new 21st-century leadership roles.

Initially by taking responsibility for sustaining our own, our partners, and our families, emotional energy, mental toughness, engagement, and overall wellness.

Then consciously enact and embody the new set of emerging 21st-century leadership roles as visionaries, architects, coaches, and catalysts:

Being visionaries: by co-creating a collaborative and global collective of aligned ecosystem partners with clear accountabilities within a virtual, profit share business model.
Being architects: by iterating, pivoting and sharing our IP and learning programs to close peoples’ “knowing-doing gaps” to help them unlearn, learn, relearn, reshape and develop their 21st-century superpowers for leaders and teams.
Being coaches: by exploring working with the range of innovative new coaching platforms, including BetterUp and CoachHub to better democratize, scale, and share our strengths, knowledge, and skills to help a significant number of people deal more effectively with the impact of virtual hybrid workplaces.
Being catalysts: by focussing on partnering with clients to break down their self-induced protective and defensive “silos” to support them to become aware, acknowledge, accept, and resolve their feelings of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection, and overall anxiety.

21st-century superpowers for leaders and teams

It seems that these are just some of the 21st-century superpowers for leaders and teams which act as the foundations necessary to survive and thrive through the emerging decade of both disruption and transformation.

Summing these up into more concrete actions for leaders and teams include cultivating and sustaining these five superpowers:

Transformational Literacy: The ability to increase our capacity to collaborate and co-create across institutional and sector boundaries through “shifting consciousness from ego-system awareness to eco-system awareness.” to pioneer solutions that bridge the ecological, the social, and the spiritual divides existing in the 21^st
Nimbleness and Agility: The ability to shift and re-think and re-learn in changing contexts, to quickly experiment, iterate and pivot to adapt and move forwards collaboratively through mindset flips to emerge creative ideas and innovative solutions that are appreciated, valued, and cherished.
Scalability: The ability to rapidly build desired and most relevant internal capabilities, to shift capacity and service levels through increasing creativity, invention, and innovation in ways that meet changing customer expectations, and satisfy their demands and future requirements.
Stability: The ability to maintain “action confidence” and operational excellence under pressure that frees people from the constraints of “getting it right” and allows them to continuously unlearn, learn, relearn and change through “failing fast” or forward, without being blamed or shamed.
Optionality: The ability to “get out of the box” to build and develop value chains, stakeholder engagements, or an ecosystem focus to acquire new capabilities through external collaboration.

Walking the path forward

According to Otto Scharmer, in a recent article “Action Confidence: Laying Down the Path in Walking” the leadership qualities we also need to nurture in order to lean into the current moment and to source the courage to act are: Humility. Vulnerability. Surrender. Trust.

It might be time to hit your own pause button, retreat and reflect, inhale a deep breath in this precious moment in time to develop your path forwards and develop an ecosystem focus and an ecosystem focus and a human-centric, future-fit focus.

To embrace, enact and embody a set of 21st-century superpowers for leaders and teams and reshape your innovative learning systems by developing the action confidence to adopt an ecosystem, whole person, and a whole perspective that contributes to the good of the whole.

Join our next free “Making Innovation a Habit” masterclass to re-engage 2022!

Our 90-minute masterclass and creative conversation will help you develop your post-Covid-19 re-engagement strategy. It’s on Thursday, 10th February at 6.30 pm Sydney and Melbourne, 8.30 pm Auckland, 3.30 pm Singapore, 11.30 am Abu Dhabi and 8.30 am Berlin. Find out more.

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Re-Thinking for a New Era

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Re-Thinking for a New Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last blog, we proposed, rather than living in a world where everyone hates to fail, why not adopt a rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern, and experience failure as an opportunity for change, unlearning, and re-thinking? Adopting this approach supports your human-centricity and enables you to become future-fit through developing your set of 21st-century superpowers in the face of the acute disruption of COVID-19. This is reinforced by Adam Grant, in his book “Think Again” (the power of not knowing what you don’t know) where he states that we are living in a time vital for re-thinking to help us become adaptive and agile and develop our future fitness to thrive in a disruptive, uncertain world.

Critical Art of Re-Thinking

The critical art of re-thinking involves being actively open-minded, hearted, and willed:

To learning, and possibly re-learning how to effectively question your own beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits;
Through connection, association, detachment, and discernment to these qualities in other people’s minds and hearts;
And to then put our “mental pliability” and “emotional agility” to the test by creating the time and space for re-thinking with a new “set of goggles” and revising our views based on what we learn.

This potentially benefits everyone because it allows us to upgrade and update our points of view and expand our understanding of the world, we are all living in today and build our future fitness.

It also positions us for change innovation and excellence in the way we transform our approach to work and share our wisdom in life.

Making time and space for re-thinking

The vital role of unlearning

Embracing human-centricity and a future-fit focus involves unlearning and letting go of many of our old beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits embedded in our habitual feeling and thinking systems.

Being able to discern which of these are now incomplete, ineffective, and irrelevant as we adapt, and serve people, teams, and organisations to survive, grow, and develop future fitness to thrive in the post-Covid-19 world.

Unlearning is not about forgetting, it’s about paying deep attention and developing the awareness to see, and safely and courageously step outside of our old thinking systems, mental models, biases, and paradigms.

Being intellectually humble

Being intellectually humble involves “knowing what we don’t know” and being inquisitive and curious enough to explore new discoveries, and pay deep attention, and be consciously aware of the rich and valuable rewards to be found in the “unknown”.

Most of us are unconsciously motivated to move away from change and learning as a result of “blindness” to our learning or survival anxieties (Schein), and the need to cover up our “learning incompetence” (when people pretend to know things they don’t).

The willingness to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed and embrace intellectual humility helps us see things clearly and moves us towards overcoming our blind spots and weaknesses.

Re-Thinking in a Disconnected and Disruptive Era

Thinking, fast and slow

Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” describes the “machinery of … thought,” dividing the brain into two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which “respectively produce fast and slow thinking.”

For our purposes, at ImagineNation™, in our group, leadership, and team coaching programs, these can also be thought of as intuitive and deliberate thought.

Introducing System 3 thinking

My colleague, Peter Webb (www.peterjwebb.com), has added to this work by researching and validating a System 3 which he describes as considerative, which is complementary to our approach to thinking differently at ImagineNation™.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. it is intuitive, quick, and emotional.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. It is deliberative in that is rational and calculated.
System 3 thinking is more considerative, thoughtful, and consequential in that it enables you to focus on what really matters, discern what makes common sense, make small decisions and take small actions to find out what works best, be compassionate, regulate your emotions and develop a tolerance for divergent values.

You can explore more these three thinking systems, and initiate your own re-thinking process by contacting Peter at https://www.peterjwebb.com/

Initiating Your Re-Thinking Strategy

Developing a habit of reflective practices

Our innovation coaching, leading, and teaming learning programs involve developing a regular reflective practice –which according to Turner, Lucas & Whitaker, in the learning and coaching context is:

“the ability to step away from your work and identity patterns, habits, strengths, and limitations in your work, and/within the system you work in.”

Pause-retreat-reflect cycle to catalyse re-thinking

At ImagineNation™ to initiate the re-thinking process, through partnering with clients to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed through our “pause-retreat-reflect-reboot” cycle.

To support the development of the new habit, we include:

A personal reflection practice involves initiating or continuing a mindfulness activity.
A set of regular reflection activities which include different sets of reflective and generative questions.
Journaling processes, incorporating the CCS Cards for play and critical reflection for our clients to experiment with.

This involves practicing a set of regular retreat and reflection activities involving safely and intentionally enabling people to deeply listen and question and paradoxically dance across the 3 thinking systems simultaneously.

Enhancing your own and your team’s capability to do this will transform your approach to work, harness people’s collective intelligence to share their wisdom in life with the world, and develop future fitness to master challenges and solve problems as they arise.

Shifting to re-thinking

Interrupt their habitual “do-feel-think” cycles (doing stuff that may not deliver the results you want, feeling the awful emotions that result from mistakes, imperfection, and failure, then thinking what to do about it).
Create “stop signals” to affect a pause, long enough to stop doing stuff and become present to the range of emotions to calm down their nervous system.
Connect, associate with and acknowledge how they might be feeling at this unique and specific moment in time.
Pay deep attention to observing their operating thought patterns, with detachment and discernment.
Intentionally choose a desired future state or outcome.
Consider the impact of their feelings and thoughts on the results they are getting.
Deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful visceral and feeling states that compels (pulls) and mobilise them to achieve the desired future state or outcome.
Finally, deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful thought and feeling patterns to choose the most intelligent actions to take to achieve the desired future state or outcome.

The result is usually the development of a re-thinking process that has evolved from “do-think-feel” to “feel-think-do” (connecting to a desirable outcome, feeling present, thinking about the most intelligent thoughts and actions to embody and enact to get there, saving both time and money on wasted activities, avoiding mistakes and failures, to get to their desired future state.)

A Final Word on the Benefits of Re-Thinking

Taking just a moment to pause-retreat-reflect catalyses our rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern and creates opportunities for change, unlearning, and re-thinking. It is also a vital ingredient towards developing peoples’ future fitness.

Enabling us to appreciate the value of tuning into ourselves and into others, to leverage our emotional and mental muscles, towards actively creating the space for evoking and provoking different options and creative choices. Which better enable and empower us to re-think about being, thinking, and acting differently in a new age, impacted by the technologies created by accelerated digitization.

We can then perform at higher levels, achieve our desired outcomes and goals, interact, lead and team more effectively and develop functional and highly valued collaborative relationships with others, as well as with stakeholders and customers.

To leverage the current turning point, and develop our 21st-century superpowers, to co-create a more equitable, resilient, sustainable, human-centric, and future-fit environment, within an ever-changing landscape.

Join Our Next Free “Making Innovation a Habit” Masterclass to Re-Engage 2022!

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Change Management Frameworks – Which is Right for Your Organization?

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Change Management Frameworks - Which is Right for Your Organization?

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the fast-paced environment of today’s business world, organizations must continuously adapt to survive and thrive. Selecting the right change management framework can make the difference between success and failure when launching initiatives. As a thought leader in human-centered change and innovation, I am excited to guide you in choosing the framework that’s best for your organization.

The Importance of Change Management Frameworks

Change management frameworks provide a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. They help minimize resistance, ensure effective communication, and enhance engagement and adoption of new initiatives.

Popular Change Management Frameworks

Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model: A comprehensive approach that outlines eight critical steps to implement change successfully.
Lewin’s Change Management Model: A three-stage approach of Unfreezing, Changing, and Refreezing.
McKinsey 7-S Framework: Incorporates a holistic view of organizational change by examining seven interdependent elements.
Bridges Transition Model: Focuses on the psychological transition of individuals to adopt change.
Braden Kelley’s Change Planning Toolkit: A unique, visual set of tools designed to accelerate adoption, lower risks, and deliver change faster. His human-centered change approach with more than 70 tools for practitioners is a great way to get your change or transformation initiative off to the right start.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Framework

Organizations should consider the scale of change, the organization’s culture, leadership, and readiness, and how individuals in the organization typically react to change. Each framework offers unique strengths, and aligning these with your organization’s needs will result in a smoother transformation journey.

Case Study 1: Kotter’s 8-Step Model in a Financial Services Firm

Background

A mid-sized financial services firm, FutureFinance, needed to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) system to improve client interactions and streamline processes.

Challenges

The organization’s disparate departments often worked in silos, causing inefficiencies and resistance to centralized solutions. Additionally, employees were skeptical about the time and effort needed to transition to a new system.

Implementation

FutureFinance adopted Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model. They began by creating a sense of urgency around the inefficiencies and lost opportunities due to the current disjointed approach. A guiding coalition was formed with top executives and influential department heads. A clear vision and strategy for the CRM implementation were developed and communicated throughout the firm. Short-term wins were identified, such as improving specific client processes, to demonstrate benefits early in the transition.

Outcome

Within twelve months, FutureFinance saw a significant improvement in customer satisfaction scores and a reduction in process duplication. By celebrating early wins and embedding new practices into the culture, the firm successfully completed the transition and achieved better cross-department collaboration.

Case Study 2: ADKAR Model in a Tech Startup

Background

A tech startup, Let’s Innovate, aimed to implement a new project management software to enhance efficiency and collaboration across its distributed teams.

Challenges

The company faced resistance as team members were comfortable with their existing processes, and there was limited buy-in for the new software tool.

Implementation

Let’s Innovate selected the ADKAR Model focusing on individual change to tackle these challenges. The process began with workshops to raise awareness and highlight the benefits of the new software (Awareness & Desire). Training sessions were organized to build the necessary skills (Knowledge & Ability), followed by regular feedback loops and performance incentives to reinforce the adoption (Reinforcement).

Outcome

The shift was remarkably successful, leading to an increase in project completion rates by 30% within six months, along with enhanced team collaboration and satisfaction.

Conclusion

Choosing the right change management framework requires understanding your organization’s unique challenges and needs. Whether it’s the structured approach of Kotter’s 8-Step Model or the individual-focused ADKAR Model, the key is to align the approach with the organizational context for maximum impact. Embrace change as an ongoing journey, with each stage offering valuable insights for future growth and transformation. And remember, it all starts with a strong change planning effort upfront and Braden Kelley’s Change Planning Toolkit™ is the best way to make that happen.

SPECIAL BONUS: The very best change planners use a visual, collaborative approach to create their deliverables. A methodology and tools like those in Change Planning Toolkit™ can empower anyone to become great change planners themselves.

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Digital Era Replaced by an Age of Molecular Innovation

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Digital Era Replaced by an Age of Molecular Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

It’s become strangely fashionable for digerati to mourn the death of innovation. “There’s nothing new,” has become a common refrain for which they blame venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and other digerati they consider to be less enlightened than themselves. They yearn for a lost age when things were better and more innovative.

What they fail to recognize is that the digital era is ending. After more than 50 years of exponential growth, the technology has matured and advancement has naturally slowed. While it is true that there are worrying signs that things in Silicon Valley have gone seriously awry and those excesses need to be curtailed, there’s more to the story.

The fact is that we’re on the brink of a new era of innovation and, while digital technology will be an enabling factor, it will no longer be center stage. The future will not be written in the digital language of ones and zeroes, but in that of atoms, molecules, genes and proteins. We do not lack potential or possibility, what we need is more imagination and wonder.

The End Of Moore’s Law

In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore published a remarkably prescient paper which predicted that computing power would double about every two years. This idea, known as Moore’s Law , has driven the digital revolution for a half century. It’s what’s empowered us to shrink computers from huge machines to tiny, but powerful, devices we carry in our pockets.

Yet there are limits for everything. The simple truth is that atoms are only so small and the speed of light is only so fast. That puts a limit on how many transistors we can cram onto a silicon wafer and how fast electrons can zip around the logic gates we set up for them. At this point, Moore’s Law is effectively over.

That doesn’t mean that advancement will stop altogether. There are other ways to speed up computing. The problem is that they all come with tradeoffs. New architectures, such as quantum and neuromorphic computing, for instance, require new programming languages, new logical approaches and very different algorithmic strategies than we’re used to.

So for the next decade or two we’re likely to see a heterogeneous computing environment emerge, in which we combine different architectures for different tasks. For example, we will be augmenting traditional AI systems with techniques like quantum machine learning. It is not only possible, but fairly likely, that these types of combinations will result in an exponential increase in capability.

A Biological Revolution

Moore’s Law has become essentially shorthand for exponential improvement in any field. Anytime we see a continuous doubling of efficiency, we call it “the Moore’s Law of ‘X.’’ Yet since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, advancement in genetic sequencing has far outpaced what has happened in the digital arena.

What is possibly an even bigger development occurred in 2012, when Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues discovered how CRISPR could revolutionize gene editing. Now, suddenly, the work of genetic engineers that would have taken weeks could be done in hours, at a fraction of the cost, with much greater accuracy and the new era of synthetic biology had begun.

The most obvious consequence of this new era is the Covid-19 vaccine, which was designed in a matter of mere days instead of what’s traditionally taken years. The mRNA technology used to create two of the vaccines also holds promise for cancer treatment and CRISPR-based approaches have been applied to cure sickle cell and other diseases.

Yet as impressive as the medical achievements are, they make up only a fraction of the innovation that synthetic biology is making possible. Scientists are working on programming microorganisms to create new carbon-neutral biofuels and biodegradable plastics. It may very well revolutionize agriculture and help feed the world.

The truth is that the biological revolution is basically where computers were at in the 1970s or 80s and we are just beginning to understand the potential. We can expect progress to accelerate for decades to come.

The Infinite World Of Atoms

Anyone who has regularly read the business press over the past 20 years or so would naturally conclude that we live in a digital economy. Certainly, tech firms dominate any list of the world’s most valuable companies. Yet take a closer look and you will find that information and communication as a sector only makes up for 6% of GDP in advanced countries.

The truth is that we still live very much in a world of atoms and we spend most of our money on what we eat, wear, ride and live in. Any real improvement in our well-being depends on our ability to shape atoms to our liking. As noted above, reprogramming genetic material in cells to make things for us is one way we can do that, but not the only one.

In fact, there is a revolution in materials science underway. Much like in genomics, scientists are learning how to use computers to understand materials on a fundamental level and figure out how we can design them a lot better. In fact, in some cases researchers are able to discover new materials hundreds of times more efficiently than before.

Unlike digital or biological technologies this is largely a quiet revolution with very little publicity. Make no mistake, however, our newfound ability to create advanced materials will transform our ability to create and build everything from vastly more efficient solar panels to lighter, stronger and more environmentally friendly building materials.

The Next Big Thing Always Starts Out Looking Like Nothing At All

The origins of digital computing can be traced back at least a century, to the rise and fall of logical positivism, Turing’s “machine,” the invention of the transistor, the integrated circuit and the emergence of the first modern PC at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. Yet there wasn’t a measurable impact from computing until the mid-1990s.

We tend to assume that we’ll notice when something important is afoot, but that’s rarely the case. The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. It doesn’t appear fully bloomed, but usually incubates for years—and often decades—by scientists quietly working in labs and by specialists debating at obscure conferences.

So, yes, after 50 years the digital revolution has run out of steam, but that shouldn’t blind us to the incredible opportunities that are before us. After all, a year ago very few people had heard of mRNA vaccines, but that didn’t make them any less powerful or important. There is no shortage of nascent technologies that can have just as big of an impact.

The simple fact is that innovation is not, and never has been, about what kind of apps show up on our smartphone screens. The value of a technology is not measured in how a Silicon Valley CEO can dazzle an audience on stage, but in our capacity to solve meaningful problems and, as long as there are meaningful problems to solve, innovation will live on.

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

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Digital Transformation Roadmap

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An Actionable Guide to Planning and Executing Your Transformation Strategy

Digital Transformation Roadmap

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are faced with the critical challenge of adapting to the demands of a digital economy. The key to successful digital transformation lies in developing a comprehensive roadmap that outlines a clear strategy for leveraging technology to drive business growth and innovation.

Creating a digital transformation roadmap requires a strategic approach that encompasses a thorough assessment of organizational goals, current capabilities, and technology infrastructure. By developing a roadmap that is both comprehensive and actionable, businesses can effectively navigate the complexities of digital transformation and achieve sustainable success in the digital age.

Case Study Example 1: Coca-Cola

One of the most iconic brands in the world, Coca-Cola has successfully embraced digital transformation to drive business growth and enhance customer engagement. By focusing on leveraging technology to create personalized experiences for customers, Coca-Cola has been able to stay ahead of the competition and maintain its leadership position in the market.

To support its digital transformation efforts, Coca-Cola developed a comprehensive roadmap that included investing in cutting-edge technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to better understand customer preferences and deliver targeted marketing campaigns. By leveraging data analytics and automation tools, Coca-Cola has been able to streamline its operations and improve efficiency, while also enhancing the overall customer experience.

Case Study Example 2: Amazon

As one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Amazon has set the standard for digital transformation in the retail industry. By continuously innovating and adapting to changing consumer preferences, Amazon has been able to stay at the forefront of digital innovation and drive significant growth in its business.

Amazon’s digital transformation roadmap is centered around leveraging technology to enhance the customer experience and drive operational efficiency. By investing in cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence, Amazon has been able to streamline its operations, optimize its supply chain, and deliver personalized recommendations to customers. As a result, Amazon has been able to create a seamless shopping experience that has helped to drive customer loyalty and increase sales.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is a complex and challenging process that requires careful planning and execution. By developing a comprehensive roadmap that outlines a clear strategy for leveraging technology to drive business growth and innovation, businesses can effectively navigate the complexities of digital transformation and achieve sustainable success in the digital age. By following the examples set by companies like Coca-Cola and Amazon, businesses can learn valuable insights on how to successfully plan and execute their digital transformation strategy.

Image credit: Pexels

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Teaching to Win the 4th Industrial Revolution

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Teaching to Win the 4th Industrial Revolution

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The Coronapocalypse is forcing us to rethink who, how and what we teach. Regardless of how we do it, college students don’t learn much and the teacher experience is eroding.

Many not for profits are directing their efforts to provide equitable access to public education. However, putting more students in a broken, dysfunctional system won’t yield the outcomes and impact we want. Instead, the very structure and process of education will need to change if we are to provide students with the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies they need for jobs that have yet to be created.

What’s more, unless we address the gender social and cultural stereotypes, the 4IR could make gender inequity worse, not better.

Companies like Infosys still hire lots of engineers. But today, Ravi Kumar, the Infosys president, is not looking just for “problem solvers,’’ he says, but “problem-finders,’’ people with diverse interests — art, literature, science, anthropology — who can identify things that people want before people even know they want them.

If for nothing else than the future of your children, take 12 minutes to watch this:

If you agree, then thriving in the 4th industrial revolution will require nothing short of restructuring public education at all levels, not just k-12. Even doctors will need to change how they educate their young. How many things can you do with a paperclip?

One goal should be to create entrepreneurial schools and universities, and by that I don’t mean teaching children how to start businesses. Instead, creating the entrepreneurial mindset is about the pursuit of opportunity with scarce resources with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of innovation. Creating a successful business in but one of many ways to do that.

Here are 10 different ways to encourage youth entrepreneurship. The same techniques might apply to graduate students as well.

Other learning objectives and curriculum themes are emerging:

Encouraging private, public and academic collaboration to define market based competencies
Teaching horizontally, not vertically, in limiting smokestack domains
Developing soft skills that are in high demand
Experience cultural competence, diversity and inclusion
Alternative pathways for teacher training and development
Job searching techniques that are state of the art
Mandatory experiential learning opportunities
Developing and testing alternative intelligence measures
Replacing memorization with creative problem solving, problem seeking and divergent thinking.
Hiring for creativity and finding and supporting educational reform champions
Like sick care, recognizing and addressing the socioeconomic determinants of academic failure, like housing, illness, disability and nutrition.
Rehabilitating the brand image of teachers
Teaching STEAMpathIE and rethink STEM as BMETALS
Preparing students for the jobs of the future that have not yet been created.
Teach them how to work in and manage virtual international teams.

Here’s another short list:

public speaking
writing well
storytelling (see 1-2)
critical thinking (not cynicism)
good manners
active listening (hear with your eyes)
networking (trust and giving)
good customer service
how to sell
to fight against entitlement

Curriculum redesign for medical students and residents will need to include:

Data literacy
Interprofessional bioentrepreneurship
Digital health policies and practice
Care coordination between the medical team and the patient care circle
Cost-effectiveness analysis
The pharmaceutical value chain and drug pricing
Customer service
Ethics and professionalism
Personal financial literacy and planning
Nutrition

Here is how automation will affect economies around the world.

Here are some recommendations to Promote digital education and workforce development

“As AI applications accelerate across many sectors, it is vital that we reimagine our educational institutions for a world where AI will be ubiquitous and students need a different kind of training than they currently receive. Right now, many students do not receive instruction in the kinds of skills that will be needed in an AI-dominated landscape. For example, there currently are shortages of data scientists, computer scientists, engineers, coders, and platform developers. These are skills that are in short supply; unless our educational system generates more people with these capabilities, it will limit AI development.”

Our economy and standard of living hinges on meeting these wicked challenges. But, like medicine, government and other risk-averse and sclerotic industries, the resistance to change will be substantial. Only bottom-up pressure led by creative, courageous innovators who teach what they practice, in collaboration with non-profits and government agencies, will remove the obstacles in our path. Many of those obstacles are in the classroom next door or the corner office or the halls of government.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Building a Better Change Communication Plan

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ACMP Standard Visualization

by Braden Kelley

In the ACMP Standard for Change Management the second phase is to “Formulate the Change Management Strategy” and its first step is to “Develop the Communication Strategy.”

The quality of your communication strategy and its execution is one of the most important determinants of success for your change or transformation initiative. But let’s be honest, most of us studied something other than communications in our university education and as a result don’t know the keys to successful communications. Because we have all learned how to write and speak in high school we make the mistake of thinking that we are expert communicators, but we’re not – at least without work and a conscious focus on the key principles of effective communications.

The most important of these is to know your audience and to speak to them as individuals. When it comes to change, there are many different motivations for people to choose change.

When crafting your communication strategy for your change or transformation initiative it is incredibly important for people to refer to the best practices of marketing communications. Chief among these is the recognition of the importance of segmenting your audience so you can send relevant communications to the different segments of your audience.

One of the best ways to segment your audience for change communications is to leverage The Eight Change Mindsets:

1. Mover ’n’ Shaker

give these people the chance to be first

2. Thrill Seeker

these people like to try new things and experiment

3. Mission-Driven

these people need reasons to believe

4. Action-Oriented

these people just want to know what needs to be done

5. Expert-Minded

teach these people how to do it, and they will seek mastery

6. Reward-Hungry

these people want recognition for adopting the change

7. Team Player

these people are happy to help if you show them why the change will be helpful

8. Teacher

show these people how to get others to choose change

You can download The Eight Change Mindsets as a PDF from Slideshare here:

Leveraging The Eight Change Mindsets in your change communication strategy will enable you to focus on creating the messaging, symbols and artifacts that will help each mindset choose change.

But many change managers either aren’t familiar with the basic principles of marketing communications or choose to take shortcuts and treat the entire organization as a single audience and craft a single set of communications. This is a mistake.

It’s actually a bit ironic because ProSci’s ADKAR methodology is clearly a re-purposing of marketing’s AIDA view of customer progressions:

Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action

As a quick refresher, ADKAR as a comparison is:

Awareness of the Need for Change
Desire to Support the Change
Knowledge of How to Change
Ability to Demonstrate Skills & Behaviors
Reinforcement to Make the Change Stick

If you really want to build a better change communication plan, then crash these two things together:

The Eight Change Mindsets for the segmentation of your audience
ADKAR for the creation of a communications sequence

Download the PDF of The Eight Change Mindsets above or go here to get the infographic if that’s easier for you.

If you need a little more guidance or just want to save time, then I’ve added a worksheet to v13 of the Change Planning Toolkit that I introduced in my latest book Charting Change.

The “Eight Change Mindsets Communication Strategy” worksheet is but one of the 70+ tools and frameworks that you’ll get when you purchase an annual license or a lifetime license of the Change Planning Toolkit developed as part of the Human-Centered Change methodology.

I’ve designed it as an 11″x17″ work mat to use with sticky notes. But this tool, and the others in the Change Planning Toolkit, can also be provided as 35″x56″ posters to licensees on an as needed basis. In addition, these tools are also designed to be used with virtual collaboration tools like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark, Microsoft Whiteboard and others.

So, start building a better change communication strategy today!

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