Category Archives: education

Tracking the ROI of Internal Learning Programs

Knowledge Transfer Value

Tracking the ROI of Internal Learning Programs

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato
LAST UPDATED: January 8, 2026 at 11:55AM

In our modern society, the competitive landscape is defined not by access to information, but by the ability to effectively internalize, transfer, and apply it. We are awash in data, but starved for wisdom. As a champion of Human-Centered Innovation™, I consistently highlight that innovation is change with impact. Yet, too many organizations treat internal learning and development (L&D) as a cost center, an optional extra, or worse — a checkbox activity rather than a strategic imperative for value creation.The true measure of an organization’s agility and innovation capacity lies in its Knowledge Transfer Value (KTV). This goes beyond mere training hours; it’s about the measurable return on investment (ROI) from transforming individual insights into collective capabilities. Without a robust KTV framework, companies fall into the Efficiency Trap, focusing on the number of courses completed rather than the tangible business outcomes achieved. This is a critical failure of strategic intent, allowing the Corporate Antibody to reject vital new skills.

In an era where the shelf life of skills is rapidly diminishing, and agentic AI tools are shifting the nature of work, understanding and optimizing KTV is paramount to sustainable growth.

“The most valuable asset in any organization doesn’t appear on a balance sheet: it’s the untransferred knowledge locked in the heads of your people. Innovation is not just about creating new ideas; it’s about making sure valuable ideas don’t die in a silo. You can’t lead change if you can’t share knowledge.” — Braden Kelley

From Learning Hours to Business Impact

Traditionally, L&D metrics have focused on inputs (budget spent, hours trained, courses offered) and immediate reactions (satisfaction surveys). While these have their place, they tell us little about whether the learning actually changed behavior, improved performance, or contributed to strategic goals. This is the difference between learning activity and learning value.

Tracking KTV requires a fundamental shift in mindset, linking learning initiatives directly to measurable business outcomes. This means identifying the “useful seeds of invention” within employee expertise and planting them throughout the organization. It’s about recognizing that every problem solved by an individual could be a lesson learned by a team, and every team insight could become an organizational capability.

Consider the three domains of Outcome-Driven Change: Cognitive (thinking), Affective (feeling), and Conative (doing). Effective KTV measures how learning programs influence all three, leading to tangible improvements in how employees think about challenges, feel motivated to contribute, and ultimately, what they do to drive results.

Case Study 1: Accelerating Digital Transformation at a Global Bank

The Challenge: A large, traditional banking institution was struggling to digitally transform. Its vast workforce had pockets of advanced digital expertise, but this knowledge wasn’t spreading, leading to slow adoption of new technologies and methodologies.

The KTV Innovation: Instead of mandatory online courses, they launched a “Digital Champions” program. High-performing digital natives were incentivized to become internal coaches and mentors. Their success was measured not by training hours, but by the measurable improvement in the digital literacy scores of their mentees and the reduced error rates in projects they influenced.

The Impact: This peer-to-peer knowledge transfer, explicitly tied to individual performance reviews and team-level KPIs, significantly boosted the bank’s digital fluency. Within 18 months, new digital product launch cycles were cut by 30%, directly attributable to improved internal capabilities. The KTV was clear: faster innovation cycles, lower operational risk, and higher employee engagement.

Case Study 2: Reducing Customer Churn in a SaaS Startup

The Challenge: A rapidly scaling SaaS company faced increasing customer churn. The customer success team had tribal knowledge about preventing churn, but it was inconsistent, leading to varied customer experiences.

The KTV Innovation: They implemented a “Best Practice Playbook” system. When a customer success manager (CSM) successfully prevented a high-risk churn, they were required to document their approach in a structured, searchable playbook. An AI agent then analyzed these playbooks, identifying common patterns and creating “smart alerts” for other CSMs facing similar situations.

The Impact: The KTV was tracked through a direct correlation: for every 10 playbooks added, customer churn decreased by 0.5%. The AI-augmented knowledge transfer transformed individual successes into a scalable, collective capability, significantly improving customer retention and, ultimately, recurring revenue.

Leading Companies and Startups to Watch in 2026

The future of KTV is being shaped by platforms that bridge learning with demonstrable outcomes. Companies like Degreed and EdCast are evolving beyond mere learning experience platforms (LXPs) to become “skills intelligence” hubs, directly linking course completion to skill development and project assignments. Gong and Chorus.ai, traditionally focused on sales enablement, are extending their AI-driven conversation intelligence to automatically extract and codify best practices from internal meetings. Watch for startups like Sana Labs and Arist which are leveraging agentic AI to personalize learning pathways and measure real-world application, making knowledge transfer not just efficient, but highly impactful and measurable.

Conclusion: Knowledge as a Renewable Resource

In 2026, organizations that master KTV will treat knowledge not as a finite resource, but as a renewable one. They will foster cultures where sharing, learning, and applying insights are not just encouraged, but strategically incentivized and rigorously measured. This is the essence of Human-Centered Innovation™ – empowering people to grow, collaborate, and collectively drive meaningful impact.

If you’re looking for an innovation speaker to help your organization quantify the value of its intellectual capital and build a culture of continuous learning, the answer is to unlock the true potential of your people, transforming knowledge into undeniable business value.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the biggest barrier to effective Knowledge Transfer Value (KTV)?

The primary barrier is often cultural: a lack of incentives for sharing, fear of losing individual competitive advantage, or simply insufficient time allocated for knowledge documentation and peer-to-peer transfer. Organizations must actively dismantle these “Corporate Antibody” responses.

2. How can AI help in tracking KTV?

AI can analyze communication patterns, identify knowledge silos, recommend relevant learning content, and even summarize best practices from recorded interactions. By connecting these activities to performance metrics, AI provides clearer insights into the actual impact of knowledge transfer.

3. Is KTV only relevant for technical skills?

Absolutely not. While technical skills are important, KTV is equally critical for soft skills, leadership capabilities, and organizational processes. Transferring effective communication strategies or leadership styles can have a profound, measurable impact on team cohesion and overall business outcomes.

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

Image credits: Unsplash

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Why Unlearning is More Critical Than Continuous Learning

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LAST UPDATED: November 30, 2025 at 7:32PM

Why Unlearning is More Critical Than Continuous Learning

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the age of exponential change, organizations are suffocated not by a lack of information, but by an abundance of obsolete information. Every firm champions Continuous Learning — the idea that employees must constantly acquire new skills. Yet, few acknowledge that the space in our cognitive and organizational structures is finite. New knowledge cannot take root if the old, comfortable certainties are still occupying the ground.

This is where the Skill of Unlearning becomes paramount. Unlearning is not about forgetting; it’s about choosing to discard the relevance of previously successful mental models and organizational processes that are no longer fit for the current context. It is the conscious, human-centered decision to create cognitive capacity for the new, disruptive ideas necessary for survival.

Unlearning is a strategic necessity. If you cannot unlearn the operating principles of the last decade, you will apply last decade’s solutions to this decade’s problems, and you will fail not from a lack of effort, but from a failure of release.

The Unlearning Imperative: Removing the Ruts of Success

The biggest blocker to unlearning is often past success. When a strategy or process works brilliantly for ten years, it hardens into dogma. This dogma creates three primary barriers that must be addressed through human-centered change:

1. The Organizational Identity Barrier

Many firms derive their identity from their history (“We are the best analog camera manufacturer,” or “We are the best provider of physical media”). When the market shifts, employees struggle to let go of the core competency that defined their professional value. Unlearning requires redefining the organizational mission from what we produce to what problem we solve for the customer, regardless of the technology.

2. The Procedural Rigidity Barrier

The “way we’ve always done things” acts as concrete, resisting new methodologies (e.g., trying to implement Agile development using a rigid waterfall budgeting process). Unlearning requires disrupting the processes that reward the old behavior. You can’t learn radical new product development if the budget cycle punishes every failed experiment. The process itself must be unlearned.

3. The Cognitive Comfort Barrier

For individuals, unlearning is emotionally taxing. It means admitting that a skill they spent decades mastering is now worth less than a skill they don’t yet possess. Leaders must create Psychological Safety where employees are allowed to be temporarily incompetent as they transition to the new model. The fear of looking foolish is the number one killer of unlearning.

Case Study 1: The Insurance Giant and the Digital Channel Shift

Challenge: Dominance of an Obsolete Sales Channel

A large, established insurance company (“LegacyInsure”) dominated its market through a massive, highly successful network of local, commissioned agents. When digital-native competitors offered instantaneous online quotes and sign-ups, LegacyInsure lagged. The problem wasn’t a lack of digital investment; it was the cultural inability of its regional managers to unlearn the value structure of the agent-led model.

The Unlearning Intervention: Mandatory Dual Operating Models

The leadership knew forcing a sudden shift would alienate key personnel. Instead, they mandated a Dual Operating Model for three years, creating a separate, digitally-focused division with zero dependence on the agent network. Critically, regional managers were assigned metrics that rewarded both the old and the new model, forcing them to:

Unlearn the assumption that high-touch contact was required for every sale.
Learn to value data from self-service customers (Learning).

The Human-Centered Lesson:

By separating the models, the company created a safe space for the new to grow without being suffocated by the old, profitable dogma. The regional managers who embraced the unlearning process transitioned into roles overseeing both digital and agent channels, becoming change champions. Those who couldn’t unlearn their previous success were gently transitioned out over time. The company unlearned its channel dependency and survived the digital wave.

Case Study 2: The Software Company and the Product Pivot

Challenge: Sticking to a Feature Set That No Longer Solved the Core Problem

A B2B software firm (“FeatureSoft”) built its reputation on a product with deep, complex, and highly customizable features. However, the market had shifted to favoring simple, intuitive, cloud-based solutions (the SaaS Revolution). FeatureSoft’s engineers were resistant to the pivot; their professional identity was tied to building complexity.

The Unlearning Intervention: The ‘Kill Your Darling’ Mandate

The CEO issued a direct mandate to unlearn complexity. They created an internal innovation challenge: “Build the simplest possible version of our product that delivers 80% of the customer’s value in a pure SaaS model, using only 20% of the original codebase.” The prize was funding for the team to become the new core product unit.

Engineers were forced to unlearn the value of complexity and mastery of the legacy code.
They had to learn the value of abstraction and minimal viable product (MVP).

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The challenge transformed the culture. By making the act of simplifying the primary goal, the company inverted the value hierarchy. The engineers, highly intelligent and competitive, embraced the new challenge. They successfully unlearned the need for feature depth and focused on solving the core user problem elegantly, facilitating a market-saving pivot that would have been blocked by the cognitive inertia of its legacy code experts.

Mastering the Unlearning Skill

Unlearning is an active, not passive, process. It requires leadership to institutionalize rituals that challenge the status status quo:

The Pre-Mortem: Before launching any major project, assume the project failed spectacularly two years in. Discuss what old assumption was responsible for that failure.
The Stop Budget: Allocate a percentage of budget not to R&D, but to identifying and stopping obsolete projects, processes, and products. Reward the teams that successfully kill their own initiatives and free up resources.
Reverse Mentoring: Mandate senior leaders be mentored by new, entry-level employees specifically on their lack of knowledge — their fresh, unburdened perspective on customer friction.

Focusing on continuous learning fills the organizational tank; mastering unlearning ensures the tank can be properly emptied and refilled. This is the ultimate skill of human-centered change.

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. The measure of organizational intelligence is the ability to unlearn.”

Frequently Asked Questions About the Skill of Unlearning

1. What is the fundamental difference between Unlearning and Forgetting?

Unlearning is not about forgetting information; it is the conscious, deliberate act of discarding the relevance or applicability of a previously successful mental model, process, or assumption. It’s creating space for new knowledge, while forgetting is a passive failure of memory.

2. Why is past success the biggest barrier to Unlearning?

Past success creates dogma. When a process works for a long time, it becomes an entrenched part of the organizational identity and reward system, leading to procedural and cognitive rigidity. This comfort and certainty actively resist any new information that contradicts the profitable “way we’ve always done things.”

3. What is the “Stop Budget” and why is it important for Unlearning?

A Stop Budget allocates funds specifically to identifying and terminating obsolete projects, processes, or products. It’s important because it institutionalizes the reward structure for unlearning, shifting the focus from simply starting new things to actively clearing the internal roadblocks created by the old, allowing resources and attention to be intentionally freed up.

Your first step toward mastering Unlearning: Hold an “Assumption Audit” meeting for your next major project. Before discussing the solution, have everyone write down three ‘truths’ they hold about the market or the customer based on the last five years of success. Then, for 15 minutes, debate why each of those ‘truths’ might be completely false today.

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on Society

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The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on Society

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

As technology advances, so too does the potential of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has already had a tremendous impact on our lives, from controlling our home appliances to driving our cars, and the possibilities are only expanding. As AI continues to evolve, it will have a profound and far-reaching impact on our future society.

1. AI and the Job Market

One of the major impacts of AI will be on the job market. Automation is already taking over many manual labor jobs, and AI will continue to increase the number of jobs that can be automated. This could result in major economic disruption, as traditional jobs are replaced by AI-driven ones. At the same time, AI will create new job opportunities, such as AI engineers, data scientists and software developers.

2. AI and Healthcare

Another impact of AI will be on healthcare. AI has already revolutionized healthcare, and it will continue to do so in the future. AI-driven technologies such as machine learning and deep learning can be used to diagnose diseases more accurately and quickly, enabling better patient care. AI can also be used to analyze large datasets to identify new treatments and therapies, allowing for more personalized care.

3. AI and Education

AI will also have an impact on education. AI-driven technologies can be used to develop more personalized learning experiences, allowing students to learn at their own pace and in their own way. AI can also be used to create virtual classrooms, where students can interact with teachers and other students from around the world.

4. AI and Security & Privacy

Finally, AI will have a major impact on our security and privacy. AI-driven technologies such as facial recognition and voice recognition are already being used to increase security, and this trend is likely to continue. At the same time, however, AI can be used to track our online activities and personal information, raising important questions about our right to privacy.

Conclusion

Overall, AI will have a major impact on our society in the future. It will have a major impact on the job market, healthcare, education, and our security and privacy. It is important to be aware of the potential implications of AI, and to ensure that its development is done in a responsible and ethical manner.

Bottom line: Futurology and prescience are not fortune telling. Skilled futurologists and 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

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Empowering Every Resident with Tools for Change and Innovation

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Empowering Every Resident with Tools for Change What if you could empower every citizen with tools that will help your city, state or country innovate and change faster than the competition for a penny a person?

Well, now it’s possible…

A revolution is beginning, and the smart cities, states, countries, and even organizations, are arming themselves with the tools they need to win…

The Change Planning Toolkit™ has been designed to create a more visual, collaborative and agile method for getting everyone literally all on the same page for change. The Change Planning Toolkit™’s collection of tools, frameworks, and worksheets and the approach outlined in the book Charting Change operate together in a spirit built upon the standards created by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) and the interactive approaches that the Lean Canvas and Business Model Canvas have made comfortable for people.

ACMP Standard Visualization

The Change Planning Toolkit™ is anchored in the best practices of organizational change and project management. At its center is the Change Planning Canvas™, a powerful tool that will help you beat the 70% change failure rate by enabling you to quickly visualize, plan, and execute projects and change initiatives alike. The more than fifty (50) tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ will help you deliver projects and change efforts on time, while simultaneously accelerating implementation and adoption.

Change Planning Wall

If the benefits are not clear, be sure and get your 10 Free Change Planning Tools and you’ll get a better sense of the power of the Change Planning Toolkit™ (it is visual after all) and check out the additional benefits in the image below:

Change Planning Toolkit Benefits

The Change Planning Toolkit™ is breaking away from the business model where people traditionally license intellectual property in the innovation and management information space by the named user, where fees for example are:

1. Gartner — $20,000-30,000 per year for a single user
2. Forrester — ~$20,000 per year for a single user
3. BeingFirst — $975 per year for a single user
4. ProSci — $350-400 per download (for a single user) or $4,000+ per user for training
5. MarketingProfs.com — $279 per year for a single user
6. Skillsoft — $150 per year for business skills training for a single user

… or you can hire a top consultant to do some knowledge transfer to your organization for $400-$1,000 per hour (or more).

Change Planning Toolkit Valuable Tools

Now, what is Change Planning Toolkit™ offering that is different?

First, the Change Planning Toolkit™ provides an integrated system of tools far more powerful and far more capable of increasing organizational agility than any other.

Second, the Change Planning Toolkit™ is now available using two business model variations not usually offered in the intellectual property space, which include:

1. Access for Every Employee (aka the Site License option)

Access for EVERY employee in your organization, priced at a very affordable $2/yr per employee plus a $299.99 annual fee
Includes access to a QuickStart Guide to get you up and running quickly
Includes access to POSTER SIZE versions of key tools, including the Change Planning Canvas™ and Visual Project Charter™
SPECIAL OFFER – The next three (3) firms to purchase a full-day training session (which includes train-the-trainer) will receive a free* Change Planning Toolkit™ site license

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Book a Training Session and get a free* site license
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2. Access for Every Resident (aka the City/State/Country License option)

Access for EVERY resident of your city, state, or country. Priced at a very affordable $0.01/yr per resident ($1,000/yr minimum)
Yes, that is right. Cities, states and countries are all eligible for a license that makes these tools available to all residents for just a PENNY per year per resident!
SPECIAL OFFER #1 – Purchase a city, state, or country license worth more than $25,000 and get up to 50 people trained to use the toolkit and how to train others to use it (training fees waived for one session, expenses still to be reimbursed)
SPECIAL OFFER #2 – Purchase a city, state, or country license worth more than $100,000 and get up to 200 people trained to use the toolkit and how to train others to use it (training fees waived for four (4) sessions in up to two (2) locations with two adjacent days per location, expenses still to be reimbursed)
SPECIAL OFFER #3 – Purchase a city, state, or country license worth more than $1,000,000 and get up to 1,000 people trained to use the toolkit and how to train others to use it (training fees waived for twenty (20) sessions in up to ten (10) locations with two adjacent days per location, expenses still to be reimbursed)

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CONTACT ME to get access for all of your residents
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Some educational institutions may be able to apply for grants from the government to cover the cost of the license and training as part of their efforts to raise the skills of their local residents. Central Wyoming College is an example of an educational institution that won a Federal grant to do just that. It’s possible.

And these licenses are available for both the:

Change Planning Toolkit™
Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ (coming soon)

Become a Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ Patron

The Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ will be coming soon, and you can become a Patron by helping to fund its completion through a site license or a city/state/country license and as a reward get instant access to the POSTER SIZE version of The Experiment Canvas™ and the many other tools I’ve already completed. You’ll then of course get access to the rest of the toolkit as I complete it. You’ll get this instant access at a permanent 50% discount off the normal $2/yr per employee or $0.01/yr per resident, meaning your cost will be a paltry $1/yr per employee or $0.005/yr per resident for the lifetime of the license.

SPECIAL BUNDLE DISCOUNT:

— Get instant access for both the Change Planning Toolkit™ and the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ (coming soon) for all of your residents for a low bundle price of $0.014/yr per resident ($1,000/yr minimum) – that’s less than a penny-and-a-half per resident (a full 60% discount off the second license).

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CONTACT ME to get a jump on the competition
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Empower Your Residents and Employees to Cope with the Accelerating Pace of Change

So don’t wait, act today and get access for all of your employees or all of your residents to these powerful, intuitive and beautifully visual and collaborative tools that will help increase the speed of innovation and change in your organizations to cope with the accelerating pace of change in the world all around us. Countries all around the world are fighting to be the destination of choice of aspiring entrepreneurs and bold innovators and to rise in comparative rankings like the:

World’s 50 Most Innovative Countries (license cost based on population)

Switzerland ($84,541)
Sweden ($99,206)
Netherlands ($170,328)
United States ($3,264,740)
United Kingdom ($655,111)
Denmark ($57,118)
Singapore ($57,845)
Finland ($55,413)
Germany ($806,361)
Ireland ($47,492)

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State of California ($392,500)
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South Korea ($507,050)
Luxembourg ($5,841)
Iceland ($3,343)
Japan ($1,260,452)
France ($649,387)
Hong Kong ($74,019)
Israel ($83,232)
Canada ($366,261)
Norway ($53,308)
Austria ($85,924)

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State of Texas ($278,625)
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New Zealand ($46,049)
China ($13,882,327)
Australia ($246,417)
Czech Republic ($105,551)
Estonia ($13,058)
Malta ($4,205)
Belgium ($114,438)
Spain ($460,701)
Italy ($597,980)
Cyprus ($11,876)

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New York City ($85,504)
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Portugal ($102,648)
Slovenia ($20,713)
Latvia ($19,446)
Slovakia ($54,322)
UAE ($93,976)
Bulgaria ($70,453)
Malaysia ($311,642)
Poland ($385,636)
Hungary ($97,879)
Lithuania ($28,306)

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Chicago ($27,205)
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Croatia ($42,098)
Romania ($192,375)
Turkey ($804,175)
Greece ($108,929)
Russia ($1,433,750)
Chile ($183,135)
Vietnam ($954,146)
Montenegro ($6,263)
Qatar ($23,381)
Ukraine ($444,051)

Are you happy with your country’s position on the World’s 50 Most Innovative Countries list?

Are you happy with your company’s level of organizational agility or level of innovation success?

Is your organization or country keeping up with the accelerating pace of change?

If not, then you need these tools. And if you are satisfied with your competitive position, then you need these tools to maintain your current position…

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CONTACT ME to get access for all of your residents or employees
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Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Help Support Gender Equity on May 10th

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Help Support Gender Equity on May 10th

I am excited to announce on behalf of Innovation Excellence friend Tiffany Shlain that 50/50 Day is less than a month away and we can’t wait for this global conversation about gender equality! For those of you who haven’t signed up yet to host an event at your company, school, organization, or home, there’s still time. Watch a 2 minute trailer and sign up here.

About 50/50

50/50 gives the 10,000 year history of women + power — from setbacks and uprisings, to the bigger context of where we are today. Using her signature, cinematic-thought-essay style, Emmy-nominated filmmaker & founder of The Webby Awards Tiffany Shlain brings us on an electric ride to explore, where are we really on the greater arc of history of women and power? And what’s it going to take to get to a 50/50 world — not just to 50/50 in politics and board rooms, but to truly shift the gender balance to be better for everyone?

50/50 premiered on Oct 27, 2016 simultaneously live at #TEDWomen and 275 TEDx’s globally, online on @Refinery29 and on TV on Comcast’s Watchable. It is the most viewed long form film Refinery29 has released with over 4 million views to date. It will now be the centerpiece film for a global conversation set for May 10th about what it’s going to take to get to a more gender balanced world called 50/50 Day.

Please Join Me in Supporting 50/50 Day on May 10, 2017

We’re also very excited to share the above image, which is the poster that will be included in the free discussion kits provided to participants. The kits, currently at the printer (!), include this poster as well as a deck of 44 discussion cards that go deeper into each of those circles for all age groups and all different types of environments. Organizers only have a finite number of kits, so be sure to sign up to host your event soon.

Click Here to Learn More and Sign Up for 50/50 Day

And if you just can’t wait to until May 10th to see the full movie, then here it is below, just for you:

Let’s support our mothers, sisters, and daughters in their fight for gender equality and as a result help create the conditions for maximum innovation!

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Ten Reasons to Hire an Innovation Keynote Speaker

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Innovation Keynote Speakers are often misunderstood, maligned, and underutilized.

We have all been to many conferences, and heard many good (and bad) keynote and session speakers with a variety of styles (all of which are perfectly acceptable), including:

1. The Motivator

Say this public speaking style and most people will envision Bill Clinton, Tony Robbins, Steve Ballmer or someone like that. Notice that not all three examples are people you think of as full of boundless energy, that can be incredibly motivating. The motivator tries to connect on an emotional level with the audience and dial up the inspiration.

2. The Academic

This speaking style is nearly, but not completely synonymous with college professors and others in the “teaching” business. My personal style straddles between The Academic and The Storyteller. The Academic focuses on bringing compelling content and connecting with the intellect of the audience, bringing them tools and concepts that done well, are easy to grasp and use.

3. The Storyteller

The Storyteller makes a strong use of similes, metaphors, and stories to get their points across. Bill Clinton straddles the line between The Motivator and The Storyteller. Storytellers try to connect on an emotional level and along with The Academic, tend to dive deeper into their points than The Motivator or The Standup comedian. Personally I love good stories and funny pictures and so my personal T-shaped speaking style embraces bits of The Storyteller and The Standup Comedian as well.

4. The Standup Comedian

The Standup Comedian aims to keep the audience laughing, using humor to underscore and to make their points. Other than comedy writers or standup comedians, few speakers will rely on this as their primary style, but many will drift into this style from time to time.

As you might expect, all of these styles are perfectly valid as long as the content is solid and valuable, but the energy of The Motivator entices a lot of people and as you can imagine, this group does the most to both help and hurt people’s perceived value of keynote speakers. Sometimes The Motivator inspires people to action, and other times they are the equivalent of cotton candy, firing people up with weak content that they can’t do anything with.

So, if with public speaking, like other communication vehicles, content is king and all speaking styles are valid, then you need to find the right content, the right speaker, and have the right reasons for employing one.

With that in mind, let’s look at the…

Top 10 Reasons to Hire an Innovation Keynote Speaker

To begin an honest dialog around the role of innovation in your organization’s future

To help build/reinforce your common language of innovation

To bring in fresh ideas to inspire fresh insights

To bring additional perspectives to existing innovation conversations

To lay the groundwork for building an innovation infrastructure

To help reduce the fear of innovation in your organization

To reinforce your commitment to innovation publicly to your employees

To increase the energy for innovation in your company

To inject fresh life into an existing innovation program

To combine with an innovation workshop to build new innovation capabilities

Click the image to download as a PDF:

This is of course, not a comprehensive list of the reasons that companies around the world find value in periodically bringing in an innovation keynote speaker to dialog with their employees. Some companies choose to achieve some of these objectives via the innovation keynote, and others by sponsoring innovation training programs, or by retaining an innovation thought leader in an advisory capacity to provide the same kind of external perspectives, input, insights, and diversity of thought.

So, whether you are a new innovation leader seeking guidance on how to get off on the right foot, or an experienced Chief Innovation Officer, VP of Innovation, or Innovation Director, I encourage you to consider having myself or another innovation keynote speaker or workshop leader as a guest from time to time. I know you’ll find value in it!

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Five Reasons to Invest in the Change Planning Toolkit™

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2017 promises to be a year of unprecedented change. As a result, it will be imperative for managers to empower themselves with the tools that will help effectively lead the change initiatives that will be required to cope with political and economic turmoil and threats from digital entrants intent on disrupting the industry your company may now lead (or aspire to lead). Are you sure you’re ready to lead the change efforts your organization will need to survive in 2017 and beyond?

Before we move forward assuming that we’re equipped to succeed, let’s look backwards and ask the following questions:

1. How many of you tried to change something in your organization in 2016 and failed?

— Or had more trouble implementing the change than you would have liked?

2. How many of you ran a project that proved more difficult to execute than you expected?

Admit it. No matter how well the change initiatives or projects you lead in 2016 may have gone, they could have gone even better. As leaders we do the best with the knowledge, skills, abilities, and tools we have available to deliver the desired results. But, as we acquire new tools, or new knowledge, skills and abilities, we do even better.

2016 is almost over and as we continue to invest less of our time on executing 2016 projects and change initiatives and invest more time into planning our 2017 change efforts, this is the perfect time to acquire some new tools and master the new knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to use them to help us achieve more in 2017.

For change leaders and project managers, the Change Planning Toolkit™ represents one of the most powerful new toolboxes to learn how to master for 2017 and beyond.

The Change Planning Toolkit™ is introduced in my latest book Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan and designed to make the change planning process more visual and more collaborative in order to surface the hidden land mines as early as possible so they can be worked through, and to make the plan and progress against it more transparent as the project or change initiative progresses. And given that every project changes something, every project is a large or small change initiative!

There are many reasons the Change Planning Toolkit™ is worth far more than the small cost to acquire an individual education license for the toolkit to learn about the tools and how to use them. And organizations that empower their people with the tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ will not only become more agile than the competition, but will also benefit in the five following ways:

Beat the 70% Change Failure Rate

Quickly Visualize, Plan and Execute

Deliver Projects and Change Efforts on Time

Accelerate Implementation and Adoption

Get Lots of Valuable, Powerful Tools for a Few $$$

There are licensing options for every situation.

Change practitioners and independent consultants can get an individual educational license to get comfortable with the tools in a 11″x17″ format. Upgrading to a site license will get you access to the poster size versions of key tools. Consulting firms and organizations of 100+ employees will find site licenses less expensive.

Site licenses are very affordable, starting at $2/year per employee and up, after the payment of a small license setup fee. Consulting firms will be able to use the tools to increase their revenue with clients, and companies will increase the speed and success of their change initiatives.

Independent consultants, consulting firms, and educational institutions can sign up as resellers and earn a 10% commission on all subsequent license sales.

The Bronze version of the Change Planning Toolkit™ is available now, and the Gold version will become available in the near future.

Public and private train the trainer sessions are available upon request.

Or you can kick off your next organizational change effort in style using the Change Planning Toolkit™ with me as the facilitator and start getting a jump on your competition.

Click here to purchase an individual commercial license for one year

Click here to purchase a lifetime commercial license

Contact me to purchase a site license, to host a training session, or to book a facilitation

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What April Fool’s Day Teaches Us About Innovation

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What April Fool's Day Teaches Us About Innovation

April Fool’s Day was this week. Did anyone have a good prank played on them or come across a good corporate April Fool’s?

My favorite this year was from my alma mater, the University of Oregon. Go Ducks!

We try to think a little differently at the University of Oregon and specialize in helping the world run a little faster (and more comfortably), and with some of Nike’s founder behind the football team, why shouldn’t they have the world’s most advanced field, say, an LED field?

Watch the video:

The best corporate April Fool’s Day pranks are the ones that are believable and almost seem feasible.

What does this tell us as innovation professionals?

The insight is that the best corporate April Fool’s Day pranks find a resonance point, a place where the outlandish intersects with what people are ready for, what they may actually desire, and what they believe should be possible soon.

Consider asking your innovation teams to design their own April Fool’s Day prank and see where it takes you.

Ask yourself questions like these about their designs:

What must be true for this to be possible?
What stands in the way of this being possible?
What would it take to remove the barriers that are preventing this from being possible?
Are our customers truly ready for this?
What would it take to prepare them for it?
What capabilities do we need to build to prepare for this eventuality?
Is this idea more feasible in a different context? (i.e. basketball courts instead of football fields)
Etc.

One final thought…

Is there any reason why the field shown in the University of Oregon LED field video couldn’t become a reality?

Why couldn’t it be built out of some of kind of fiber optic material that maintained both the sports performance characteristics and the multi-color transmission capabilities?

Would it be easy to design such a thing? No. But it seems possible, and that’s where innovation begins…

Keep innovating!

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Confessions of a Business Artist

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Confessions of a Business Artist

I am an artist.

There, I’ve said it. This statement may confuse some people who know me, and come as a shock to others.

Braden, what do you mean you’re an artist? You’ve got an MBA from London Business School, you’ve led change programs for global organizations, helped companies build their innovation capabilities and cultures, are an expert in digital transformation, and you can’t even draw a straight line without a ruler. What makes you think you’re an artist?

Well, okay, that may all be true, but there are lots of different kinds of artists. I may not be a painter, a sculptor, a musician, an illustrator, or even a singer, but I am an artist, a business artist.

What is a business artist you ask?

A business artist sees through complexity to what matters most. A business artist loves working with PowerPoint and telling stories, often through keynote speeches and training facilitation, or through writing. A business artist loves to share, often doing so for the greater good, sometimes to their own financial detriment, in an effort to accelerate the knowledge, learning, and creating new capabilities in others. A business artist is a builder, often creating new businesses, new web sites, and new thinking. A business artist is comfortable stepping into a number of different business contexts and bringing a different energy and a different approach to creating solutions to complex requirements. Part of the reason a business artist can do this is because a business artist values their intuitive skills just as much as they value their intellectual skills, and may also consciously invest in getting in touch with higher levels of intuitive capabilities, enabling them to excel in roles that involve a great deal of what might be termed ‘organizational psychology’.

A business artist often appears to be a jack of all trades, sometimes bordering on what was portrayed in the television show The Pretender, and can be an incredibly powerful addition to any team tackling a big challenge, but a business artist’s incredible ability to contribute to the success of an organization is often discounted by the traditional recruiting processes of most human resource organizations because of its emphasis on skill matching and experience, skewing hiring in favor of someone with a lot of experience at being mediocre at a certain skillset over someone with limited experience but greater capability. A business artist often appears to be ahead of the curve, often to their own detriment, arriving too early to the party by grasping where organizations need to go before the rest of the organization is willing to accept the new reality. This is a real problem for business artists.

Now is the time for a change. Given human’s increasing access to knowledge, and the shorter time now required to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills required to perform a task, people who are comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, and capable of learning quickly are incredibly valuable to organizations as continual change becomes the new normal. Because experience is increasingly detrimental to success instead of a long-lived asset, given the accelerating pace of innovation and change, we need business artists now more than ever.

So how do we create more business artists?

Unfortunately our public schools are far too focused on indoctrination than education, on repetition over discovery. Our educational system specializes in creating trivia masters and kids that hate school, instead of building a new generation of creative problem solvers that love to learn and explore new approaches instead of defending status conferred based on mastery of current truths (which may be tomorrow’s fallacies). We are far too obsessed with STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) when we should be focused on STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Music). Music is creative math after all. My daughter’s school has a limited music program and NO ART. How is this possible?

To create more business artists we need to shift our focus towards art, creative problem solving and demonstrated learning, and away from memorization, metrics, and repetition. Can we do this?

Can we create an environment where the status quo is seen not as a source of power through current mastery and instead towards a system where improvements to the status quo are seen as the new source of power?

Organizations that want to survive will do so. Countries that want to stay at the top of the economic pyramid will do so. So what kind of country do you want to live in? What kind of company do you want to be part of?

Do you have the courage to join me as a business artist or to help create a new generation of them?

Image credit: blogs.nd.edu

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

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Using Boredom to Help Students Learn

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Bored Game Teacher What do you get when you take the technology away from a group of 10 and 11 year olds and ask them to be creative with a handful of household objects?

Well, Thomas Fraser, a teacher at Crestwood Elementary School in Edmonton, Canada, troubled by the short attention spans of today’s youngsters endeavored to find out by creating what he calls the Bored Game, which involves giving students a handful of common household objects with the only instruction being to do something interesting with them.

The reaction at first from his group of always on youngsters were perplexed looks of how can I create something without an iPad, smartphone or a computer?

Then they started to get into it, and were sad when they didn’t get to play the Bored Game.

CTV recorded an interview about the Bored Game that you can watch here:

(sorry, video is no longer available)

My favorite part of the story is that they’re finding that the performance of the children in a range of subjects is increasing as the children have this periodic time to play and engage their creative problem solving skills.

So, maybe we need less technology in the classroom if we want to teach kids how to learn?

In my opinion, we focus too much on teaching kids to repeat activities, facts, and figures, focusing and what they’re able to memorize and regurgitate and not enough on actually teaching kids creative problem solving and how to learn. We don’t need a new generation of trivia experts, we need a new generation of problem solvers that can help repair the world.

We’ve all heard the saying “If you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, if you teach a man to finish he’ll never go hungry.”

If you want your child to be more successful, you have to do the same thing…

“Good teachers teach kids how to do well on the test, great teachers teach kids how to learn so they do well in life.”

For more, I encourage you to check out the Edmonton Journal Article (link expired)

Image credit: Edmonton Journal

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