In the world of change and innovation, we often celebrate disruptive breakthroughs — the new product, the elegant service, the streamlined process. But there is a parallel, constant, and far more existential conflict that drives more immediate innovation than any market force: the Innovation War between cyber defenders and adversaries. This conflict isn’t just a cat-and-mouse game; it is a Vicious Cycle of Creative Destruction where every defensive breakthrough creates a target for a new offensive tactic, and every successful hack mandates a fundamental reinvention of the defense at firms like F5 and CrowdStrike. As a human-centered change leader, I find this battleground crucial because its friction dictates the speed of digital progress and, more importantly, the erosion or restoration of citizen and customer trust.
We’ve moved past the era of simple financial hacks. Today’s sophisticated adversaries — nation-states, organized crime syndicates, and activist groups — target the supply chain of trust itself. Their strategies are now turbocharged by Generative AI, allowing for the automated creation of zero-day exploits and hyper-realistic phishing campaigns, fundamentally accelerating the attack lifecycle. This forces cybersecurity firms to innovate in response, focusing on achieving Active Cyber Resilience — the ability to not only withstand attacks but to learn, adapt, and operate continuously even while under fire. The human cost of failure — loss of privacy, psychological distress from disruption, and decreased public faith in institutions — is the real metric of this war.
The Three Phases of Cyber Innovation
The defensive innovation cycle, driven by adversary pressure, can be broken down into three phases:
1. The Breach as Discovery (The Hack): An adversary finds a zero-day vulnerability or exploits a systemic weakness. The hack itself is the ultimate proof-of-concept, revealing a blind spot that internal R&D teams failed to predict. This painful discovery is the genesis of new innovation.
2. The Race to Resilience (The Fix): Cybersecurity firms immediately dedicate immense resources — often leveraging AI and automation for rapid detection and response — to patch the vulnerability, not just technically, but systematically. This results in the rapid development of new threat intelligence, monitoring tools, and architectural changes.
3. The Shift in Paradigm (The Reinvention): Over time, repeated attacks exploiting similar vectors force a foundational change in design philosophy. The innovation becomes less about the patch and more about a new, more secure default state. We transition from building walls to implementing Zero Trust principles, treating every user and connection as potentially hostile.
“In cybersecurity, your adversaries are your involuntary R&D partners. They expose your weakness, forcing you to innovate beyond your comfort zone and into your next generation of defense.” — Frank Hersey
Case Study 1: F5 Networks and the Supply Chain of Trust
The Attack:
F5 Networks, whose BIG-IP products are central to application delivery and security for governments and major corporations globally, was breached by a suspected nation-state actor. The attackers reportedly stole proprietary BIG-IP source code and details on undisclosed security vulnerabilities that F5 was internally tracking.
The Innovation Mandate:
This was an attack on the supply chain of security itself. The theft provides adversaries with a blueprint for crafting highly tailored, future exploits that target F5’s massive client base. The innovation challenge for F5 and the entire industry shifts from simply patching products to fundamentally rethinking their Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). This demands a massive leap in threat intelligence integration, secure coding practices, and isolating development environments from corporate networks to prevent future compromise of the IP that protects the world.
The Broader Impact:
The F5 breach compels every organization to adopt an unprecedented level of vendor risk management. It drives innovation in how infrastructure is secured, shifting the paradigm from trusting the vendor’s product to verifying the vendor’s integrity and securing the entire delivery pipeline.
Case Study 2: Airport Public Address (PA) System Hacks
The Attack:
Hackers gained unauthorized access to the Public Address (PA) systems and Flight Information Display Screens (FIDS) at various airports (e.g., in Canada and the US). They used these systems to broadcast political and disruptive messages, causing passenger confusion, flight delays, and the immediate deployment of emergency protocols.
The Innovation Mandate:
These attacks were not financially motivated, but aimed at disruption and psychological impact — exploiting the human fear factor. The vulnerability often lay in a seemingly innocuous area: a cloud-based, third-party software provider for the PA system. The innovation mandate here is a change in architectural design philosophy. Security teams must discard the concept of “low-value” systems. They must implement micro-segmentation to isolate all operational technology (OT) and critical public-facing systems from the corporate network. Furthermore, it forces an innovation in physical-digital security convergence, requiring security protocols to manage and authenticate the content being pushed to public-facing devices, treating text-to-speech APIs with the same scrutiny as a financial transaction. The priority shifts to minimizing public and maximizing continuity.
The Broader Impact:
The PA system hack highlights the critical need for digital humility
. Every connected device, from the smart thermostat to the public announcement system, is an attack vector. The innovation is moving security from the data center floor to the terminal wall, reinforcing that the human-centered goal is continuity and maintaining public trust.
Conclusion: The Innovation Imperative
The war between hackers and cybersecurity firms is relentless, but it is ultimately a net positive for innovation, albeit a brutally expensive and high-stakes one. Each successful attack provides the industry with a blueprint for a more resilient, better-designed future.
For organizational leaders, the imperative is clear: stop viewing cybersecurity as a cost center and start treating it as the foundational innovation platform. Your investment in security dictates your speed and trust in the market. Adopt the mindset of Continuous Improvement and Adaptation. Leaders must mandate a Zero Trust roadmap and treat security talent as mission-critical R&D personnel. The speed and quality of your future products will depend not just on your R&D teams, but on how quickly your security teams can learn from the enemy’s last move. In the digital economy, cyber resilience is the ultimate competitive differentiator.
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Just as we got used to VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) futurists now claim “the world is BANI now.” BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) is much worse than VUCA and reflects “the fractured, unpredictable state of the modern world.”
Not to get too Gen X on the futurists who coined and are spreading this term but…shut up.
Is the world fractured and unpredictable? Yes.
Does it feel brittle? Are we more anxious than ever? Are things changing at exponential speed, requiring nonlinear responses? Does the world feel incomprehensible? Yes, to all.
Naming a problem is the first step in solving it. The second step is falling in love with the problem so that we become laser focused on solving it. BANI does the first but fails at the second. It wallows in the problem without proposing a path forward. And as the sign says, “Ain’t nobody got time for this.”
(Re)Introducing the Cynefin Framework
The Cynefin framework recognizes that leadership and problem-solving must be contextual to be effective. Using the Welsh word for “habitat,” the framework is a tool to understand and name the context of a situation and identify the approaches best suited for managing or solving the situation.
It’s grounded in the idea that every context – situation, challenge, problem, opportunity – exists somewhere on a spectrum between Ordered and Unordered. At the Ordered end of the spectrum, cause and affect are obvious and immediate and the path forward is based on objective, immutable facts. Unordered contexts, however, have no obvious or immediate relationship between cause and effect and moving forward requires people to recognize patterns as they emerge.
Both VUCA and BANI point out the obvious – we’re spending more time on the Unordered end of the spectrum than ever. Unlike the acronyms, Cynefin helps leaders decide and act.
Five Contexts, Five Ways Forward
The Cynefin framework identifies five contexts, each with its own best practices for making decisions and progress.
On the Ordered end of the spectrum:
Simple contexts are characterized by stability and obvious and undisputed right answers. Here, patterns repeat, and events are consistent. This is where leaders rely on best practices to inform decisions and delegation, and direct communication to move their teams forward.
Complicated contexts have many possible right answers and the relationship between cause and effect isn’t known but can be discovered. Here, leaders need to rely on diverse expertise and be particularly attuned to conflicting advice and novel ideas to avoid making decisions based on outdated experience.
On the Unordered end of the spectrum:
Complex contexts are filled with unknown unknowns, many competing ideas, and unpredictable cause and effects. The most effective leadership approach in this context is one that is deeply uncomfortable for most leaders but familiar to innovators – letting patterns emerge. Using small-scale experiments and high levels of collaboration, diversity, and dissent, leaders can accelerate pattern-recognition and place smart bets.
Chaos are contexts fraught with tension. There are no right answers or clear cause and effect. There are too many decisions to make and not enough time. Here, leaders often freeze or make big bold decisions. Neither is wise. Instead, leaders need to think like emergency responders and rapidly response to re-establish order where possible to bring the situation into a Complex state, rather than trying to solve everything at once.
The final context is Disorder. Here leaders argue, multiple perspectives fight for dominance, and the organization is divided into fractions. Resolution requires breaking the context down into smaller parts that fit one of the four previous contexts and addressing them accordingly.
The Only Way Out is Through
Our VUCA/BANI world isn’t going to get any simpler or easier. And fighting it, freezing, or fleeing isn’t going to solve anything. Organizations need leaders with the courage to move forward and the wisdom and flexibility to do so in a way that is contextually appropriate. Cynefin is their map.
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You are Jim Farley at Ford, with Tesla banging at the door. You are Bob Iger at Disney with Netflix pounding on the gates. You are Pat Gelsinger at Intel with Nvidia invading your turf. You are virtually every CEO in retail with Amazon Prime wreaking havoc on your customer base. So, what are you supposed to do now?
The answer I give in Zone to Win is that you have to activate the Transformation Zone. This is true, but it is a bit like saying, you have to climb a mountain. It begs the question, How?
There are five key questions executives facing potential disruption must ask:
1. When?
If you go too soon, your investors will lose patience with you and desert the ship. If you go too late, your customers will realize you’re never really going to get there, so they too, reluctantly, will depart. Basically, everybody gets that a transformation takes more than one year, and no one will give you three, so by default, when the window of opportunity to catch the next wave looks like it will close within the next two years, that’s when you want to pull the ripcord.
2. What does transformation really mean?
It means you are going to break your established financial performance covenants with your investors and drastically reduce your normal investment in your established product lines in order to throw your full weight behind launching yourself into the emerging fray. The biggest mistake executives can make at this point is to play down the severity of these actions. Believe me, they are going to show, if not this quarter, then soon, and when they do, if you have not prepared the way, your entire ecosystem of investors, partners, customers, and employees are going to feel betrayed.
3. What can you say to mitigate the consequences?
Simply put, tell the truth. The category is being disrupted. If we are to serve our customers, we need to transition our business to the new technology. This is our number one priority, we have clear milestones to measure our progress, and we plan to share this information in our earnings calls. In the meantime, we continue to support our core business and to work with our customers and partners to address their current needs as well as their future roadmaps.
4. What is the immediate goal?
The immediate goal is to neutralize the threat by getting “good enough, fast enough.” It is not to leapfrog the disruptor. It is not to break any new ground. Rather, it is simply to get included in the category as a fast follower, and by so doing to secure the continuing support of the customer base and partner ecosystem. The good news here is that customers and partners do not want to switch vendors if they can avoid it. If you show you are making decent progress against your stated milestones, most will give you the benefit of the doubt. Once you have gotten your next-generation offerings to a credible state, you can assess your opportunities to differentiate long-term—but not before.
5. In what ways do we act differently?
This is laid out in detail in the chapter on the Transformation Zone in Zone to Win. The main thing is that supporting the transformation effort is the number one priority for everyone in the enterprise every day until you have reached and passed the tipping point. Anyone who is resisting or retarding the effort needs to be counseled to change or asked to leave. That said, most people will still spend most of their time doing what they were doing before. It is just that if anyone on the transformation initiative asks anyone else for help, the person asked should do everything they can to provide that help ASAP. Executive staff meetings make the transformation initiative the number one item on the agenda for the duration of the initiative, the goal being at each session to assess current progress, remove any roadblocks, and do whatever possible to further accelerate the effort.
Conclusion
The net of all of the above is transformation is a bit like major surgery. There is a known playbook, and if you follow it, there is every reason to expect a successful outcome. But woe to anyone who gets distracted along the way or who gives up in discouragement halfway through. There is no halfway house with transformations—you’re either a caterpillar or a butterfly, there’s nothing salvageable in between.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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It’s time for your company’s All-Hands meeting. Your CEO stands on stage and announces ambitious innovation goals, talking passionately about the importance of long-term thinking and breakthrough results. Everyone nods enthusiastically, applauds politely, and returns to their desks to focus on hitting this quarter’s numbers. After all, that’s what their bonuses depend on.
Kate Dixon, compensation expert and founder of Dixon Consulting, has watched this contradiction play out across Fortune 500 companies, B Corps, and startups. Her insight cuts to the heart of why so many innovation initiatives fail: we’re asking people to think long-term while paying them to deliver short-term.
In our conversation, Kate revealed why most companies are inadvertently sabotaging their own innovation efforts through their compensation structures—and what the smartest organizations are doing differently.
Robyn Bolton: Kate, when I first heard you say, “compensation is the expression of a company’s culture,” it blew my mind. What do you mean by that?
Kate Dixon: If you want to understand what an organization values, look at how they pay their people: Who gets paid more? Who gets paid less? Who gets bigger bonuses? Who moves up in the organization and who doesn’t? Who gets long-term incentives?
The answers to these questions, and a million others, express the culture of the organization. How we reward people’s performance, either directly or indirectly, establishes and reinforces cultural norms. Compensation is usually the biggest, if not the biggest, expenses that a company has so they’re very thoughtful and deliberate about how it is used. Which is why it tells you what the company actually does value.
RB: What’s the biggest mistake companies make when trying to incentivize innovation?
KD: Let’s start by what companies are good at when it comes to compensations and incentives. They’re really good about base pay, because that’s the biggest part of pay for most people in an organization. Then they spend the next amount of time and effort trying to figure out the annual bonus structure. After that comes other benefits, like long term incentives, assuming they don’t fall by the wayside.
As you know, innovation can take a long time to payout, so long-term incentives are key to encouraging that kind of investment. Stock options and restricted shares are probably the most common long-term incentives but cash bonuses, phantom stock, and ESOP shares in employee-owned companies are also considered long term incentives.
Large companies are pretty good using some equity as an incentive, but they tie it t long term revenue goals, not innovation. As you often remind us, “innovation is a means to the end, which is growth,” so tying incentives to growth isn’t bad but I believe that we can do better. Tying incentives to the growth goals and how they’re achieved will go a long way towards driving innovation.
RB: I’ve worked in and with big companies and I’ve noticed that while they say, “innovation is everyone’s job,” the people who get long-term incentives are typically senior execs. What gives?
Long-term incentives are definitely underutilized, below the executive level, and maybe below the director level. Assuming that most companies’ innovation efforts aren’t moonshots that take decades to realize, it makes a ton of sense to use long-term incentives throughout the organization and its ecosystem. However, when this idea is proposed, people often pushback because “it’s too complex” for folks lower in the organization, “they wouldn’t understand.” or “they won’t appreciate it”. That stance is both arrogant and untrue. I’ve consistently seen that when you explain long-term incentives to people, they do get it, it does motivate them, and the company does see results.
RB: Are there any examples of organizations that are getting this right?
We’re seeing a lot more innovative and interesting risk-taking behaviors in companies that are not primarily focused on profit.
Our B Corp clients are doing some crazy, cool stuff. We have an employee-owned company that is a consulting firm, but they had an idea for a software product. They launched it and now it’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of their business.
Family-owned or public companies that have a single giganto shareholder are also hotbeds of long-term thinking and, therefore, innovation. They don’t have that same quarter to quarter pressure that drives a relentless focus on what’s happening right now and allows people to focus on the future.
What’s the most important thing leaders need to understand about compensation and innovation?
If you’re serious about innovation, you should be incentivizing people all over the organization. If you want innovation to be a more regular piece of the culture so you get better results, you’ve got to look at long term incentives. Yes, you should reward people for revenue and short-term goals. But you also need to consider what else is a precursor to our innovation. What else is makes the conditions for innovating better for people, and reward that, too.
Kate’s insight reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of most companies’ innovation struggles: you can’t build long-term value with short-term thinking, especially when your compensation system rewards only the latter.
What does your company’s approach to compensation say about its culture and values?
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In the high-stakes world of defense and security, the innovation conversation is often hijacked by the pursuit of the most complex, esoteric, and expensive technology — hypersonic weapons, next-generation stealth fighters, and pure AI command structures. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that this obsession with technological complexity is a critical strategic mistake. The future of military innovation isn’t a matter of choosing between analog or digital; it’s about mastering Hybrid Resilience — the symbiotic deployment of low-cost, human-centric, and commercially available technologies that create disproportionate impact. The best solutions are often not the most advanced, but the ones that are simplest to deploy, easiest to maintain, and most effective at leveraging the human element at the edge of the conflict.
The true measure of innovation effectiveness is not its unit cost, but its cost-per-impact ratio. When simplicity meets massive scale, the result is a disruptive force that can overwhelm even the most sophisticated, closed-loop military industrial complexes. This shift is already defining modern conflict, forcing traditional defense giants to rethink how they invest and innovate.
The New Equation: Low-Cost Digital and The Power of Speed
The most devastating innovations often come with the smallest price tags, leveraging the widespread accessibility of digital tools and talent. The goal is to maximize chaos and damage while minimizing investment.
Operation Spiderweb: Asymmetric Genius Deep Behind Enemy Lines
The coordinated drone attacks known as “Operation Spiderweb” perfectly illustrate the principle of low-cost, high-impact hybrid warfare. This was not a cyberattack, but an ingenious physical and digital operation in which Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) successfully smuggled over 100 small, commercially available FPV (First-Person View) drones into Russia, hidden inside wooden structures on trucks. The drones were then launched deep inside Russian territory, far beyond the reach of conventional long-range weapons, striking strategic bomber aircraft at five different airbases, including one in Eastern Siberia — a distance of over 4,000 km from Ukraine. With a relatively small financial investment in commercial drone technology and a logistics chain that leveraged analog disguise and stealth, Ukraine inflicted an estimated sizable financial damage — potentially billions of dollars — on critical, irreplaceable Russian military assets. This was a triumph of human-centered strategic planning over centralized, predictable defense.
This principle of scale and rapid deployability is also seen in the physical domain. The threat posed by drone swarms that China can fit in a single shipping container is precisely that they are cheap, numerous, and rapidly deployable. This innovation isn’t about the individual drone’s complexity, but the simplicity of its collective deployment. The containerized system makes the deployment highly mobile and scalable, transforming a single cargo vessel or truck into an instant, overwhelming air force.
The Return of Analog: Simplicity for Survivability
While the digital world provides scale, the analog world provides resilience. True innovation anticipates technological failure, deliberately integrating low-tech, human-proof solutions for survivability.
Take, for example, the concept of drones connected with physical connection (optical fiber cables). In an era of intense electronic warfare and GPS denial, a drone linked by a physical fiber-optic cable is uncorruptible by jamming. The drone’s data link, command, and control remain secure, offering an unassailable digital tether in a highly contested electromagnetic environment. This is an elegant, human-centered solution that embraces an “old” technology (the cable) to solve a cutting-edge digital problem (signal jamming). Similarly, in drone defense, the most effective tool for neutralizing small, hostile drones is often not a multi-million-dollar missile system, but a net gun. These net guns in drone defense are a low-tech, high-effectiveness solution that causes zero collateral damage, is easily trainable, and is vastly cheaper than the target itself. They are the ultimate embodiment of human ingenuity solving a technical problem with strategic simplicity.
The Chevy ISV: Commercial Off-the-Shelf Agility
The Chevy ISV (Infantry Squad Vehicle) is a prime example of human-centered innovation prioritizing Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions. Instead of spending decades and billions designing a bespoke vehicle, the U.S. military adapted a proven, commercially available chassis (the Chevy Colorado ZR2) to meet the requirements for rapid, light infantry mobility. This approach is superior because COTS is faster to acquire, cheaper to maintain (parts are globally accessible), and inherently easier for a soldier to operate and troubleshoot. The ISV prioritizes the soldier’s speed, autonomy, and operational simplicity over hyper-specialized military complexity. It’s innovation through rapid procurement and smart adaptation.
The Human-Augmented Future: Decentralized Command
The most cutting-edge military innovation is the marriage of AI and decentralized human judgment. The future warfighter isn’t a passive recipient of intelligence; they are an AI-augmented decision-maker. For instance, programs inspired by DARPA’s vision for adaptive, decentralized command structures use AI to process the vast amounts of sensor data (the digital part) but distribute the processed intelligence to small, autonomous human teams (the analog part) who make rapid, contextual decisions without needing approval from a centralized HQ. This human-in-the-loop architecture values the ethical judgment, local context, and adaptability that only a human can provide, allowing for innovation and mission execution at the tactical edge.
The Innovation Ecosystem: Disruptors on the Front Line
The speed of defense innovation is now being set by agile, often venture-backed startups, not just traditional primes. Companies like Anduril are aggressively driving hardware/software integration and autonomous systems with a focus on COTS and rapid deployment. Palantir continues to innovate on the data side, making complex intelligence accessible and actionable for human commanders. In the specialized drone space, companies are constantly emerging with highly specialized, affordable solutions that utilize commercial components and open-source principles to achieve specialized military effects. These disruptors are forcing the entire defense industry to adopt a “fail-fast” mentality, shortening development cycles from decades to months by prioritizing iterative, human-centered feedback and scalable digital infrastructure.
Conclusion: The Strategy of Strategic Simplicity
The future of military innovation belongs to those who embrace strategic simplicity. It is an innovation landscape where a low-cost digital intrusion can be more damaging than a high-cost missile, where resilience is built with fiber-optic cable, and where the most effective vehicle is a clever adaptation of a commercial pickup truck. Leaders must shift their focus from what money can buy to what human ingenuity can create. By prioritizing Hybrid Resilience — the thoughtful integration of analog durability, digital scale, and, most importantly, human-centered design — we ensure that tomorrow’s forces are not only technologically advanced but also adaptable, sustainable, and capable of facing any challenge with ingenuity and strategic simplicity.
Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.
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At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?
But enough delay, here are September’s ten most popular innovation posts:
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Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.
P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:
What is your obligation to improve the health of our planet?
For the CEO – Look around. Look at Europe. Look at China’s plans. Look at the startups. I know you want to achieve your growth objectives, but if you don’t take seriously the race toward cleaner products and services, you’ll go out of business. You can see this as a problem or an opportunity. Bury your head or put on your track shoes and run! It’s your choice.
Look at the oceans. Look at the landfills. Look at the rise in global temperatures. Just look. This isn’t about ROI, this is about survival. Growth objectives aside, no one will buy things when they are struggling to survive in an uncertain future. Your same old dirty products won’t cut it anymore. So, what are you going to do?
For an example of a path forward, look to the companies in the oil business. Their recipe is clear. They’ve got to use their large but ever-diminishing profits to buy themselves into technologies and industries that will ultimately eat their core business. Though the timing is uncertain, it’s certain that improvements in cleaner technologies will demand they make the change.
Whatever you do, don’t wait. You don’t have much time. Cleaner technologies are getting better every day. It’s time to start.
For Marketing – Look at the upstarts. Look at the powerful companies in adjacent markets who will soon be your direct competitors. Look at your stodgy, unprofitable competitors who are now sufficiently desperate to try anything. Their next marketing push will be built on the bedrock of an improved planet. They’ll be almost as good as you in the traditional areas of productivity and quality and they’ll blow your doors off with their meaner and greener products. Customers will choose green over brown. And they’ll look for real improvements that make the planet smile. The time for green-washing is past. That trick is out of gas.
You need to help customers with new jobs to be done. They care about their environment. They care about their carbon footprint. They care about clean water. And they care about recycling and reuse. It’s real. They care. Now it’s up to you to help them make progress in these areas. It will be a tough road to convince your company that things need to change, but that’s why you’re in Marketing.
You’re already behind. It’s time to start. And it’s up to you to lead the charge.
For Manufacturing – Look at your Value Stream Maps (VSMs). Assign a carbon footprint to each link in the chain. And do the same with water consumption. Assess each process step for carbon and water and rank them worst to best. For the worst, run carbon kaizens and improve the carbon footprint. And run water kaizens for the thirstiest processes.
And look again at your VSMs, and look more broadly. Look back into the supply chain, rank for carbon and water and improve the ones that need the treatment. And teach your suppliers how to do it. And look forward into your distribution channels and improve or eliminate the worst actors. And then propose to Marketing that you teach your customers how to use VSMs to clean up their act. And challenge Engineering to change the design to eliminate the remaining bad actors.
You’ve made good progress with your value streams. Now it’s time to help others make the progress that must be made. As subject matter experts, it’s your time to shine. And, please, start now.
For Engineering – Look at your products. Look at how they’re used. Look at how they’re delivered. Look at how they’re made. Look at how they’re recycled. Sure, your products provide good functionality, but throughout their life cycle they also create carbon dioxide and consume water. And you’re the only ones that can design out the environmental impact.
Learn how to do a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Learn which elements of the product create the largest problems. For all the parts that make up the product, sort them worst to best to prioritize the design work. It’s time for radical part count reduction. Try to design out half the parts. It’s possible. And the payoff is staggering. What’s the carbon footprint of a part that was designed out of the product?
Or, to make a more radical improvement, consider an Innovation Burst Event (IBE) to make a fundamental change in the way your products/services impact the environment. With this approach, your innovation work, by definition, will make the planet smile.
It’s time to be open-minded. Ask Manufacturing for the worst processes (including supply chain and distribution) and try to design them out. Design out the part, or change the material, or change the design to enable a friendlier process. Manufacturing can only improve a bad process, but you can design them out altogether. There’s power in that, but with power comes responsibility.
And it’s time for you to take responsibility.
For Everyone in Industry – Regardless of your company, your country or your political affiliation, we can all agree that all our lives get better as the health of our planet improves. And everyone can agree that cleaner air is better. And everyone can agree it’s the same for our water – cleaner is better. And that’s a whole lot of agreement.
As industry leaders, I challenge you to build on that common ground. As industry leaders, I challenge you to improve our planet one product at a time and one process at a time. And as industry leaders, I challenge you to help each other. There’s no competitive disadvantage when you help a company outside your industry. And there’s no shame in learning from companies outside your industry. And it’s good for the planet and profits. There’s nothing in the away. It’s time to start.
As an industry leader, if you want to make a difference in the health of our planet, drop a comment.
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But without a way to resolve the fear, time-pressure, and complexity, the project would stay stuck with little change of progressing to success.
Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset
It’s a truism in the field of innovation that you must fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Falling in love with the problem ensures that you remain focused on creating value and agnostic about the solution.
While this sounds great and logically makes sense, most struggle to do it. As a result, it takes incredible strength and leadership to wrestle with the problem long enough to find a solution.
Uncertainty requires the same strength and leadership because the only way out of it is through it. And, research shows, the process of getting through it, turns it into an asset.
Embrace It: Start by acknowledging the uncertainty and that things will change, go wrong, and maybe even fail. Then stay open to surprise and unpredictability, delving into the unknown “by being playful, explorative, and purposefully engaging in ventures with indeterminate outcome.”
Fix It: Especially when dealing with Unknowable Uncertainty, which occurs when more info supports several different meanings rather than pointing to one conclusion, teams that succeed make provisional decisions to “fix” an uncertain dimension so they can move forward while also documenting the rationale for the fix, setting a date to revisit it, and criteria for changing it.
Ignore It: It’s impossible to embrace every uncertainty at once and unwise to fix too many uncertainties at the same time. As a result, some uncertainties, you just need to ignore. Successful teams adopt “strategic ignorance” “not primarily for purposes of avoiding responsibility [but to] allow postponing decisions until better ideas emerge during the collaborative process.
This practice is iterative, often leading to new knowledge, re-examined fixes, and fresh uncertainties. It sounds overwhelming but the teams that are explicit and intentional about what they’re embracing, fixing, and ignoring are not only more likely to be successful, but they also tend to move faster.
Put It Into Practice
Let’s return to NatureComp, a pharmaceutical company developing natural treatments for heart disease.
Throughout the drug development process, they oscillated between addressing What, Who, How, and Where Uncertainties. They did that by changing whether they embraced, fixed, or ignored each type of uncertainty at a given point:
As you can see, they embraced only one type of uncertainty to ensure focus and rapid progress. To avoid the fear of making mistakes, they fixed uncertainties throughout the process and returned to them as more information came available, either changing or reaffirming the fix. Ignoring uncertainties helped relieve feelings of being overwhelmed because the team had a plan and timeframe for when they would shift from ignoring to embracing or fixing.
Uncertainty is Dynamic – You Need to Be Dynamic, Too
You’ll never eliminate uncertainty. It’s too dynamic to every fully resolve. But by dynamically embracing, fixing, and ignore it in all its dimensions, you can accelerate your path to success.
Image credit: Pexels
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When life doesn’t so much give you lemons as hurl them at you from a great height with the intent of inflicting significant damage on you it’s sometimes a moment for big change. It can force you to jump the tracks, find ways around the problem, re-frame the world.
Innovation history is full of examples. Take the case of Django Reinhardt, a successful musician in the 1920s whose career was nearly brought to a sudden end in 1928 when his caravan caught fire leaving him with life-threatening burns over half of his body. Including damaging two fingers of his left hand with all that implied for his ever being able to play guitar again. His response was to evolve a completely new style using his remaining fingers and creating the distinctive approach which made his name as one of the founders of ‘gypsy jazz’.
The pianist Keith Jarrett had a similar challenge to his ability to play though fortunately less physically direct. Contracted to give a late night concert in Cologne’s opera house he arrived to find a mix-up meant that the piano on which he was to play was an out of tune and malfunctioning rehearsal machine. With some frantic and unfinished attempts by a tuner to bring it into line Jarrett embarked on a journey of improvisation, adapting to the limitations of the instrument to create what has become a legendary (and thankfully recorded) performance.
It’s not a new phenomenon. One of history’s great innovators was, arguably, pushed to reframe his world and think differently about it as the result of what he later termed ‘ a happy accident’. Not quite the description most of us might use to capture falling ill with smallpox and losing the use of a leg which eventually has to be amputated. But that’s where the huge innovation legacy of Josiah Wedgwood began.
Born in 1730 in Burslem, Staffordshire, clay — or at least traces of it — was in his blood. He and his relatives had been turning pots for four generations and he’d learned the trade the hard way. Whatever needed doing — putting his shoulder to the big wheel with the horses that drove the smaller potters wheel on which shapes were formed, stacking for firing and then unloading from the kiln, fetching, carrying, packing and shipping.
But his career as a master potter was sadly cut short by an attack of smallpox when he was eleven years old which weakened his knee to the point where he could not work the potter’s kick wheel on which the trade depended. Formally apprenticed to his older brother his bad leg meant that he was unable to perform such laborious tasks as throwing pottery clay. Instead he began to spend much of his enforced sitting time reading and experimenting, trying out new ideas and recipes and painstakingly recording the results in his notebooks. It forced him to look at the whole process from a different angle, and reframing it threw up powerful — and valuable — insights.
Because pottery was about to become big business. From a pretty early date we’ve made use of clay to make functional utensils like plates and cups; relics found in Xianren province in China are close to 20,000 years old. But ceramics have also been a long-standing part of history as a visual pleasure, formed and decorated in exquisite ways using complex materials and techniques. The trouble is that only the very wealthy could afford the workmanship and materials needed to create the fine porcelain that was so prized in the early 18th century.
The future would belong to the innovators. Of whom his brother was not one….
In 1749, his apprenticeship ended. The family fortunes had improved somewhat thanks to his ideas but his brother was not convinced of the value of innovation and refused to take Josiah in as a partner. So he left the family business and in 1752, he formed a partnership with John Harrison (of clockmaking fame) and Thomas Alders. This was a short-lived association, as Wedgwood and Harrison clashed over manufacturing ideas. From too little to too much innovation under one roof….
His next move, in 1754, was more productive, a meeting of minds since his new partner Thomas Whieldon, a successful potter who also “loved to experiment”. Whieldon was interested in Josiah’s approach, not least because there was an urgent need to improve the quality of his lead-glazed creamware while keeping costs competitive. As Wedgwood noted, “…these considerations induced me to try for some more solid improvement, as well in the Body, as the Glazes, the Colours, & the Forms, of the articles of our manufacture….”
He started keeping his ‘Experiment Book’ at this time, containing details of his work and carefully listing measurements and ingredients, using a coded system that only he could understand. Over the next years it swelled to contain the details of thousands of experiments, many of them failures but crucially providing a roadmap for future innovation directions.
In 1759, Josiah parted company from Whieldon and set up on his own, leasing the Ivy House pottery in Burslem, Staffordshire, from one of his uncles. Business grew and he opened a second works in the town. But in 1762 returning trouble with his leg forced him to spend several weeks in bed; as it turned out another candidate for ‘happy accident’ status. Because it was while he was bed-bound in the city of Liverpool that a friend introduced him to Thomas Bentley who eventually became his business partner.
Innovation is rarely a solo act; in most cases it is the convergence of different skills, experience and insight which can help build something new. Think Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak, Gates and Allen. And it was certainly true of Wedgwood and Bentley; he brought a deep understanding of the trading side of the pottery business together with a classical education and a rich network of contacts to the party. He understood the ways in which ceramic fashions were changing and how the technical skills of Wedgwood could help play in such a market.
Over the next years they not only made a wide range of tableware but also speciality wares for retailers, dairies, sanitary suppliers (including tiles for indoor bathrooms and sewers all over England), and the home. But beyond the functional Bentley also saw a growing demand for artefacts inspired by the classical Greek, Roman and Etruscan styles and the company began making cameos, vases, jugs, and plaques decorated with such themes. Just like the Meissen company in Germany had begun to work with artists and designers so Wedgwood and Bentley began to draw on Bentley’s contacts to supply the artwork and give a distinctive style to their products.
Josiah Wedgwood didn’t like porcelain. Or rather he did, from an aesthetic point of view. Its white purity, translucent thin strength, the wonderful shapes it could be fashioned into, all of these triggered his potter’s admiration as the high point of the craft.
His objection to porcelain was entirely economic. This was a time when the big prize was not selling expensive ceramics to wealthy aristocrats but somehow giving the same experience of fine pottery plates, cups, saucers, pots and jugs to the growing middle class. The Industrial Revolution was changing the economic as well as the social structure of Britain; there was now a potential mass market and an appetite for new goods — all manufacturers like Wedgwood had to do was create good quality products to satisfy it. He understood this and worked hard to bring to simpler earthenware and stoneware the distinctive features, fine designs and tactile quality of porcelain.
This ceramic offered a cheaper alternative to porcelain production, which by this time was being made by a number of manufactories at Bow in London, Plymouth and Bristol who had mastered the art of porcelain production at huge financial cost to themselves and their customers.
His favourite motto was ‘Everything yields to experiment..’. And so he continued the laboratory work, aiming to move pottery from a “rude uncultivated craft” into a field of applied science. And it was through this process that he made his first major achievement, the “invention of a green glaze,” recorded after six months of unsuccessful trial and error as experiment number seven. It proved to be popular and helped establish a reputation for innovation, something which he followed up with in the development of a better form of ‘creamware’. Creamware — a cream-coloured earthenware — had become popular as an economic alternative to porcelain but it had significant limitations. Through his experimental approach Wedgwood transformed it into a high-quality ceramic that was very versatile in that it could be thrown on a wheel, turned on a lathe, or cast.
He began receiving orders from the highest-ranking people and in 1765, received an invitation from St James’s Palace, London, for a ‘complete set of tea things…. ‘with a gold ground & raised flowers upon it in green….’. The invitation came from Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III and it took the form of a competitive tender; fortunately Wedgwood’s hard work in the laboratory paid off. He won the competition and the contract; more importantly he’d been canny enough to include other samples of his wares in his delivery and they attracted further interest. The Queen was so pleased that in 1766 she gave him what must rank as one of the first ‘celebrity endorsements’, issuing a royal warrant with the wording: ‘To this manufacturer the Queen is pleased to give her name and patronage, commanding it to be called Queensware, and honouring the inventor by appointing him Her Majesty’s Potter’.
Wedgwood was nothing if not quick on the uptake and soon the title ‘Potter to Her Majesty’, was being added to invoices and orders while ‘Queensware’ featured prominently in newspaper advertisements for his products. As with the Meissen porcelain business in Germany the importance of a brand identity became apparent. It was not customary for Staffordshire potters to put their name or mark on their wares but Josiah began stamping the base of his products as a mark of authenticity and quality.
His marketing wasn’t confined to influencers and advertising; he pioneered many innovative approaches to reaching and serving his growing market including offering free delivery from his factory to London and free replacement of items broken in transit. He opened shops and showrooms in fashionable cities like Bath as well as in the capital. And he pioneered a ‘two-tiered’ approach, selling first to the aristocracy at premium prices and then using the cachet which their adoption gave to promote sales at lower prices to aspirational middle class buyers.
In 1764, he had received his first order from abroad and built on that success. By 1769 he declared his aim was to become “Vase Maker General to the Universe”. He might not have exported off planet but did a pretty good job in terrestrial terms — by 1784, he was exporting nearly 80% of his total produce. By 1790, he had sold his wares in every city in Europe.
Image: AI generated via Google Imagen
Perhaps the project which best underlines his grasp of the competitive edge which a combination of technical competence, great design and sophisticated marketing skills can offer is the famous ‘Frog service’ commission which came from Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in 1773. This called for a huge dinner and dessert service (944 pieces) for use at the Chesme Palace near St. Petersburg. It was located on marshy ground and had once been called ‘La Grenouillerie’ because of the large frog population. Catherine wanted to use this frog motif on every item of the service and for it to contain 1222 topographically correct hand painted views of British landscapes! Significantly she also wanted it to be made not of traditional porcelain, but in Wedgwood’s Queensware.
Wedgwood undertook this huge commission and delivered, even though it took over 30 artists and two years to complete. It was never a commercial success; the cost of final delivery was £2612 against a commission price of £2290 (£503,280 and £439,680 in today’s terms). But it more than made up the shortfall in reputation and marketing; the service was first displayed in London before delivery and attracted huge crowds, powerfully demonstrating that Wedgwood’s earthenware and stoneware could rival the best porcelain in the world.
When the service in its 22 crates finally arrived in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1774 it was displayed in the palace as a spectacle for visitors. The majority of it has survived and is now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
But Wedgwood wasn’t only working on the marketing side; from his early days as an apprentice he’d looked for ways to improve production operations, focusing not just on single problem areas but looking at the manufacturing system as a whole.
He was an early adopter of steam power, something which significantly reduced transportation costs since it mean that mills for grinding and preparing materials for manufacturing could now be located on the same site. It also mechanized the processes of throwing and turning pots, previously driven by foot or hand wheels. But it was less in his adoption of new machinery than in his approach to production organization that he had the biggest impact. He was fascinated by the ideas of Adam Smith around the concept of division of labour, focusing on specialisation rather than having a single person carry out all the tasks in a series of operations. Mixing clay, throwing, firing and decorating were all separated into distinct operations and staffed by people trained in those areas, supported by specialised equipment. The result was a massive improvement in productivity and the approach enabled the volume production needed to meet the demands of a growing mass market.
Significantly Wedgwood also recognised the need to manage the major changes this would bring to working lives — not least the elimination of the old apprentice and journeyman system. In 1769, he opened a new factory complex, named ‘Etruria’ in a nod to the ancient Etruscans whose civilization had inspired many of his best-selling designs. It was a planned community designed to house his workshops, showrooms, and his workers and their families — far cry from the ‘cottage industry’ in which he had grown up. It gave him practical advantages such as co-location of key activities reducing time and transportation costs but it also represented an early attempt to create a different working environment. He passed some of the benefits of the (significantly) higher productivity at the factory by paying higher wages and he experimented with ways of improving the working environment, providing clothing, washing facilities, and even an early form of air conditioning.
Etruria was strategically located next to the newly-constructed Trent and Mersey canal, a venture which he had campaigned hard for and which was to help significantly in managing the wider logistics and distribution challenges of the growing business. These weren’t small; in mid 1700s the pottery industry was sourcing its clays and other materials from the south west in Devon and Dorset which meant shipping them to ports like Liverpool or Chester and then transporting them slowly along an antiquated road system down to Staffordshire. Wedgwood’s efforts to promote better roads and particularly the cutting of a 94 mile canal linking Liverpool with the Potteries paid off; despite a long planning battle with Parliament the canal was opened in 1777 and with it the chance to reduce inbound logistics costs and open up better distribution to his increasingly global market.
Growing a business often carries with it the risk that cash flow gets out of balance but this wasn’t the case with Wedgwood. His early family history gave him an abiding sense of the need to control costs, once complaining that his sales were at an all-time high, yet profits were minimal. He studied cost structures and came to value economies of scale, trying to avoid producing one-off vases ‘at least till we are got into a more methodicall way of making the same sorts over again’.
And he brought a scientific approach to his work, carefully recording the results of his experiments to build a clearer understanding of how to move manufacturing from a haphazard trial and error process to one which allowed for reproduceable control. In 1783 he was awarded a patent for a pyrometer designed to measure the extreme temperatures within a kiln, helping tame the chaotic and unpredictable firing process. For this he was recognised by being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining his scientific friends and colleagues like Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton. Although named as a key achievement the award really testified to over thirty years of systematic research and development.
Wedgwood wasn’t one to rest on his laurels; in 1774 built on his success with creamware with another major innovation –Jasperware. This was a new material, laboriously developed to offer a new approach to pottery making and it led to a material that was unglazed and had a distinctive matte, or “biscuit,” finish. He experimented with many different colours including green, lilac, yellow, black, and white (the Victoria and Albert museum in London has several display trays showing the different samples). But the distinctive light blue colour which caught the imagination and which survives to this day in thousands of artist’s palettes and children’s colouring books was Wedgwood blue.
Jasperware’s development built on Bentley’s observation of the growing interest in ancient cultural artefacts from Greek, Roman and Etruscan civilizations. Wealthier people were beginning to undertake the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe and bringing back souvenirs such as Roman cameos; Jasperware provided the perfect medium for making such products available in England. Pieces would be ornamented with scenes and reliefs not simply painted on but applied as a separate layer of clay before firing; it gave Wedgwood products a distinctive trademark to further bolster their brand.
In keeping with Wedgwood’s philosophy the Jasperware product and process continuously evolved. For example early specimens used cobalt to colour the entire body by mixing it in with the clay; this was extremely expensive and so later development used a dipping process in which a thin layer of coloured slip — watery clay — was applied just before firing.
This continuous improvement of the Jasperware concept led to perhaps Wedgwood’s last and what he considered his ‘great work’ — the five year journey towards creating a replica of the ancient Roman Portland Vase. The original was a masterpiece of cameo glass from the 1st century BC and considered one of the greatest works of antiquity. No-one knew how it had been made; the secret of its creation had been lost for over 1700 years. It was less a commercial venture (though once again it had powerful reputational benefits) but instead was the ultimate challenge of his technical skills.
To achieve this, he conducted thousands of experiments over nearly five years to perfect the blue-black colour and the delicate, low-relief figures in his signature Jasperware. He relied on his pyrometer to control the firings and worked with renowned sculptor John Flaxman to create the intricate white reliefs. The project had many challenges, including blistering and cracking. But his persistence paid off. The first successful copies of the vase were released in 1790 and proved to be so accurate that when the original was accidentally shattered at the British Museum, Wedgwood’s Jasperware copy was used to help piece it back together.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Wedgwood’s health had never been great; he’d finally had his leg amputated in 1768 and by 1770 his sight was beginning to fail him. When Bentley died in 1780 he stepped back from the marketing side and focused his remaining attention on the factory and his laboratory. But in 1794 he fell ill again and died in 1795, aged 64.
Was it worth it? He’d started by inheriting £20 from his father, and when he died he left one of the finest industrial concerns in England with a personal worth of £500,000 (around £50 million today). When he began his business the big names in Staffordshire pottery were those of manufacturers like Josiah Spode and Thomas Minton; it didn’t take long before the name of Wedgwood and Bentley was up there with them, their company arguably the best-known pottery in the western world.
In doing so he helped create an industry which continues to produce beautiful artefacts for widespread use around the world. And one which has grown in value; the ceramic tableware market size was worth $12.4bn in 2024 and is forecast to reach $22bn in the next ten years.
He left the business to his sons and they continued through several generations to maintain the reputation for quality and innovation. The company remained independent until 1987, when it merged with Waterford Crystal, then with Royal Doulton. In July 2015, it was acquired by a Finnish consumer goods company who have retained the brand and still produce ‘prestige’ wares such as hand-painted and limited edition objects. Jasperware is still made by a small team of skilled workers at the Barlaston factory, while the rest of the company’s output is produced in Indonesia.
So in a sense Josiah is still vase making to the universe….
Building a learning organization goes beyond adopting new methods or tools. At its core, it’s about fostering a culture where continuous growth, adaptability, and shared learning are prioritized at every level.
Creating this culture requires a top-down commitment led by leadership and management teams who embody a growth mindset, promote psychological safety, and actively engage in building a learning-focused environment.
Without this dedication, organizations miss a crucial opportunity to develop the capabilities essential for innovation and future-readiness.
Why is this important? Well, in today’s unpredictable and rapidly evolving landscape, a learning organization isn’t just a “nice-to-have” – it’s an imperative. While a company may excel in current operations, failing to invest in learning and adaptability poses significant risks to long-term success. Can any organization truly afford to ignore the need to shape its future?
Three Key Pillars
The foundation of a strong learning organization rests on three pillars:
A growth mindset,
psychological safety,
and an unwavering commitment to fostering a culture of learning.
Leaders must first embody these values to inspire the entire organization to follow. It starts with self-reflection: How can leaders upgrade their mindset, skills, and tools to champion this change? How can they be supported in making it happen?
Only when leaders truly commit to this journey can we build a resilient organization where people and teams possess the adaptability, skills, and mindset needed to innovate, grow, and thrive.
Image Credit: Stefan Lindegaard
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Drum roll please…
