Category Archives: Innovation

Leveraging Storytelling for Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Some years back I was invited to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Over the years many of the world’s greatest minds have taken up residence there. It was where Einstein worked till his death in 1955. It is a place, for me at least, in which stories permeate from every corner and crevice.

There is a common room in the main building, Fuld Hall, where tea is served every afternoon and, if you know the stories, you can almost hear the din of legends arguing, cajoling and discussing pathbreaking ideas when you enter. That is the power of story. It can imbue even inanimate objects with meaning.

Look at great leaders throughout history, from General George Patton to Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs, and they all used the power of story to anchor an enterprise with a sense of mission and destiny. It was undoubtedly a big part of their success. We need to learn to tell better stories, if we are to give meaning to others and build faith in a common endeavor.

The Structure Of A Story

The first element of any story is its exposition, which is the world you build around the story and includes the setting, the characters and other background information. This often comes at the beginning of the story, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, elements of the setting or details about the characters are leaked out as the plot develops.

The most important aspect of any story is the tension or conflict to be resolved. That’s what keeps the audience’s interest. Will the hero survive? Does the boy end up with the girl? Will justice prevail? It is the uncertainty surrounding the tension that makes a story interesting. A preordained story is a bore.

Finally, the conflict needs to be resolved in some way that is satisfying. That doesn’t mean that the characters in the story end up happy—in fact, often it’s exactly the opposite—but if the main conflict is never resolved the audience will feel cheated. So however the story ends, with a lesson learned, a triumphant hero or a tragic loss, it has to resolve the conflict.

These are the essential elements of a story: exposition, conflict, and resolution. They don’t need to be told in order. In fact, master storytellers often put the conflict first, before we know much about the setting, and then let things develop over time. In a TV streaming environment writers have months or even years to resolve the tension, which allows for greater exploration and deeper storytelling.

Identifying A Meaningful Problem

The key to telling a good story is to identify a source of conflict that your audience cares about. That’s easier said than done. Just because a story is meaningful to you, doesn’t mean it will hit home for others. Yet just because a story doesn’t resonate immediately doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Even finding the right narrative is often trial and error even for the best storytellers.

Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, insists that “early on, all of our movies suck.” In Creativity Inc, he wrote that his company’s initial ideas are “ugly babies” that are “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” “Originality is fragile,” he continues. “Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.”

The reason new stories need protecting is that we experience them differently than our audience. They immediately make sense to us because they are ours. We often lose sight of the fact that others don’t share our particular context. Often, even a slight change in how we shape the details can make a big difference.

The only way to refine a story is by telling it, seeing which parts the audience reacts to and experimenting with different methods of delivery. That’s why big-time comedians spend time in small comedy clubs trying out new material. When I’m writing a book or working on a new conference talk, I always try out different versions in blog posts to see what resonates.

The bottom line is that just because a problem is meaningful to you doesn’t mean it’s meaningful to everyone else. It takes work to identify a story—or an aspect of a story—that connects.

Charting The Hero’s Journey

There are many ways to tell a story. But one of the most common is the hero’s journey. Which involves different variations of a departure, an initiation, and a return. Usually the hero is transformed by the journey in some way, but sometimes the hero transforms the world around him, for better or for worse.

For example, in the original Star Wars, we met Luke Skywalker as a restless boy on Tatooine. The hologram he unlocked in R2D2 kicked off his departure onto the journey, during which he was initiated in the ways of “The Force.” After Luke uses The Force to aim the shot that destroys the Death Star, he and his friends return to the rebel base to a hero’s welcome.

What makes the hero’s journey compelling is not so much the sequence of events, but how the characters are tested and revealed. David Mitchell, author of bestsellers like Cloud Atlas, points out that we find enigmatic characters, like Darth Vader, more interesting than one dimensional caricatures because they lack moral clarity.

It is the uncertainty about how the story will end that keeps the audience interested in it, which is why coming up with interesting tension is so important. It is also what opens up the possibility of leveraging a story into a strategic narrative.

Unlocking The Strategic Narrative

Stories have the power to unite us because their themes are universal. We can all relate to a hero, identify with their struggle and then revel in their triumph or, as is sometimes the case, learn a lesson from their tragedy. By telling a familiar story in an unfamiliar context, we can also gain insight and understanding into the hopes and fears of others.

The only problem with stories, as John Hagel has pointed out, is that they are self-contained—they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Narratives, like Darth Vader, are less clear cut. They are open ended and still to be determined. In other words, a narrative is a story that is still in progress and that we can still participate in and influence.

Narratives can become strategic when they give meaning to a mission. Southwest’s strategic narrative to be “THE low cost airline,” helped it rocket past the competition. Steve Jobs’ insistence on creating products that were “insanely great” helped make Apple the most valuable company on the planet. General Stanley McChrystal’s revelation that “to defeat a network you need to become a network,” turned things around for the US military in Iraq.

That’s what makes the art of storytelling so powerful and so important. When Shakespeare’s King Henry needed his soldiers to fight, he did not offer to raise their pay or threaten them with the stockade, but told a story to inspire them to go “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…”

In the final analysis, we live our lives not for external rewards, but for intrinsic meaning and we determine meaning through the stories we tell, the narratives we adopt and the missions to which we dedicate the best of our talents and energies.

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

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Inspiring Innovation

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How a fifty year old concert still has a lot to teach us about innovation

Inspiring Innovation

GUEST POST from John Bessant

24th January, 1975. Fifty years ago and a concert that shouldn’t have happened. Forget the Taylor Swift ‘Eras’ level of organization; this was a small performance in a relatively small concert hall in Cologne, Germany. The performer was tired after the long (600km) drive from Switzerland where he’d played his previous concert only a couple of days earlier. His energy level was low plus he had back pain from a nagging problem which sitting for hours in the old Renault 4 belonging to his record producer hadn’t helped. He was committed to the evening because it was a recording session; his company wanted a live concert and this seemed a good option.

The venue was impressive; the old Cologne Opera House, site of some of the greatest concerts in musical history going back centuries. But this time something had gone badly wrong with the planning — at least as far as the piano on which he was to play was concerned. On a stage normally associated with the finest instruments — Steinways, Bechsteins, Bosendorfers and the like — there had been a mix-up.

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The instrument which had been requested was a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial but unfortunately the backstage staff had misinterpreted this and instead wheeled out a much smaller Bosendorfer baby grand, one normally only used for backstage warm ups. This wasn’t in the best of condition; its sound was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass, the pedals didn’t work properly and the machine was badly in need of tuning.

The organizers desperately tried to secure a replacement instrument but were told that even if one could be found transporting it across town in the middle of the rainstorm which had started outside would risk damaging it. Instead a piano tuner set to work to try and minimize the problems of the smaller instrument with several heroic hours of attention.

Not surprisingly our performer’s first reaction on arriving and discovering this was to climb back in his car and drive away. There are limits, especially when what you really want is a long soak and perhaps a couple of painkillers washed down with a cheering drink. But Vera Brandes, the 18 year old woman who had organized the concert pleaded with him; she’d put everything she could into the event and managed to sell it out. But her would-be career as an impresario might be cut short before she started if he didn’t perform; the audience faced disappointment, she faced ruin if the concert didn’t happen. As she put it ’ ….if you don’t play tonight I’m going to be truly f***ed!…’ Dramatic perhaps but it touched a nerve and he agreed to go back into the hall and see whether they could salvage anything.

The concert was scheduled as a late night event, beginning after an earlier opera performance had finished. With the piano tuner working away even as he warmed up his hands the young pianist tried to get his mind in gear. The performance was to be in his signature style — a series of improvisations. So his mind needed to be able to rise above the challenges and somehow create space for, well, creating. At 11.30pm — with a loyal audience of 1300 people in their seats and patiently waiting for the auditorium bell to ring to signal the start of the show. He took his cue from this, echoing the bell’s notes as the first bars of his improvisation.

And so began a performance which has become a legend — and, thanks to the fact that it doubled as a recording session, one which was captured for others to enjoy. It still entrances fifty years later. The Köln Concert is arguably Keith Jarrett’s most famous work and probably the one which best demonstrates his enormous talent for improvisation. Despite — or perhaps because of — the conditions being so unfavorable he spun a web of genius, soaring from one rippling idea to the next with hardly a pause in between. His first piece lasted 26 minutes; after the briefest of pauses he began the second which went on for 48 minutes.

At the end of the show there was silence followed by rapturous applause. Something magical had happened and is still remembered, fifty years and four million copies on. Winner of multiple awards it is still the best-selling solo piano album of all time.

And it has a lot to offer as an object lesson in the art of innovation. First it’s useful to remind ourselves that innovation isn’t always about having plenty of resources. In these straitened times there’s a lot of concern that this will drive out innovation but, as Jarrett demonstrated, sometimes creativity loves constraints. From the most unpropitious of circumstances he was able to create something radically different.

Music Innovation

The old phrase ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ has often been used to describe the entrepreneurial skill of effectuation — and that was certainly a characteristic of this concert. Faced with the challenges imposed by the instrument he used various techniques like rolling left-hand figures to augment the weak bass while he concentrated his playing in the middle of the keyboard.

He was forced to jump the tracks and follow a different line to the ‘normal’ — getting out of the box. He isn’t alone; we have many examples where crisis and constraint have been powerful agents in forcing new directions. Think of the revolution in manufacturing which the ‘lean thinking’ movement brought about, one which spread to services and then the public sector. It was an approach born on the heavily constrained factory floors of post-war Japan. Faced with shortages of expensive raw materials, a lack of equipment, money and skilled labor they were forced to find new ways of working. And they evolved a suite of process innovations which changed the world.

Or our more recent experience with Covid-19 where the crisis conditions forced new approaches and forged new ways of solving the problems posed by the pandemic, not least in protective equipment and vaccine development.

This is, sadly, the kind of context in which humanitarian agencies operate all the time, trying to mitigate suffering and improve conditions under severe constraints. Importantly solutions developed in this space not only represent impressive examples of ‘frugal’ innovation but often signpost new trajectories for wider application. Developing the capabilities for working in crisis conditions as the norm builds powerful entrepreneurial capabilities which can be redeployed in other situations. Just as cold water swimming is now associated with wider health benefits so the shock of having to work under different conditions may be an important strategic aid.

Interestingly there is growing research interest in the idea of ‘forced crisis’ as a source of creativity. Artists have tried to force their work in new directions by introducing constraints. Record producer Brian Eno is famous for his use of a deck of cards — his ‘oblique strategies’ — which effectively randomizes roles and behaviors in a recording studio, forcing just the kind of crisis which confronted Keith Jarrett. And the results are similar; some great work by artists like David Bowie or U2 owes a lot to this technique. Lars von Trier, the film director, used a similar approach in his film appropriately titled ‘The five obstructions’ which documents the challenges he posed fellow film maker Jurgen Leth in order to try and force new creative pathways.

There’s more than a little of another skill we associate with entrepreneurs — bricolage. The ability to make something out of what is available, not wishing for what isn’t. And creatively combining it to make something new. Once again we have plenty of reference points. For example:

Dr Willem Kolff, the ‘father of dialysis’, was a Dutch physician who constructed the first dialyzer in 1943 in the occupied city of Groningen. Because materials were so scarce during the war, Kolff had to improvise and this resulted in the first dialyzer being made from sausage skins, orange juice cans, and old washing machine parts.

GE’s simple ECG machine (the MAC 400) was originally developed for use in rural India but has become widely successful in other markets because of its simplicity and low cost. It was developed in 18 months for a 60% lower product cost yet offers most of the key functions needed by healthcare professionals. It cost $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG machine, and reduced the cost of an ECG to just $1 (50 rupees) per patient. Newer versions have reduced this further to just 10 rupees per scan.

A key part this ‘frugal’ approach was the re-use of ideas and technology developed elsewhere, combined with adapting off-the-shelf parts. For example, the machine’s printer is an adaptation of one used in bus terminal kiosks across India.

A third aspect of the concert is important; taking risks and learning by doing. Prototyping on the fly. Jarrett’s style is classic improvisation, picking an idea and then running with it. In stand-up comedy and theater workshop improvisation it’s the ‘yes and…’ moment, not pausing to critique but rather trying stuff out to see where it might take you, moving on when it isn’t working. But where it does seem to resonate building on that, climbing inside, refining and developing.

We’d call it ‘pivoting’ in today’s agile innovation speak — but it’s the essence of Jarrett’s approach. It’s the opposite of planned music or playing the notes as written; this is emergence, using sensitivity, feedback, amplification of weak signals and half-sensed hints of the direction to go in.

Another theme illuminated by the concert experience it that of re-framing. Crisis as a word comes originally from the Greek where it means ‘turning point’. In Chinese the concept is represented by two characters place3d next to each other, one meaning ‘threat’ and the other ‘opportunity’. In other words a crisis poses a problem but also invites new perspectives which can create opportunity from it.

Only Jarrett knows what caused him to decide to play the concert — contractual commitments, the fact that the equipment was already set up? Or loyalty to his friend and chauffeur Manfred Eicher of ECM records? Or the desperate pleas of young Vera Brandes? Or perhaps the intrinsic challenge of somehow pulling off the impossible?

Whatever it was the decision forced a re-framing of the disaster to an opportunity. And, as the evening progressed the crowd sensed that they were experiencing something very different and special, watching a new creative pathway being forged.

Collaborative Innovation

But it’s not just the ability to re-frame, nor the courage to risk and experiment which is behind the success of that evening. For Keith Jarrett it wasn’t just crisis forcing his hand — or rather hands — dancing across the key board. He was able to explore and experiment because of an underlying technical capability, the result of years of practice and a honing of the capabilities which allowed him to improvise. He had to deploy them in new ways, to reconfigure for a particularly challenging circumstance but he was able to built on well-rehearsed behavioral routines.

In an organizational context this matches closely to what David Teece and colleagues call ‘dynamic capability’, something they described as the ‘…..ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external resources/competences to address and shape rapidly changing business environments….’. It’s not a reflex response or a plug ‘n’ play solution to new circumstances but instead a learned and rehearsed set of behavioral routines.

So if you’re looking for a new source of innovation inspiration away from the gadgetry of CES or the juggernaut of AI then maybe you could do a lot worse than have a listen (or listen again) to the Köln concert. Fifty years on it’s still got a lot to offer.

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Image credits: Dall-E via Chat-GPT

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

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

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

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

Innovation is Dead. Now What? — by Robyn Bolton
When Best Practices Become Old Practices — by Mike Shipulski
3 Keys to Improving Leadership Skills — by David Burkus
Audacious – How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World — Exclusive Interview with Mark Schaefer
Which Go to Market Playbook Should You Choose? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Turns Out the Tin Foil Hat People Were Right — by Braden Kelley
Are You a Leader? — by Mike Shipulski
Time to Stop These Ten Bad Customer Experience Habits — by Shep Hyken
Beyond the AI Customer Experience Hype — by Shep Hyken
A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife — by Greg Satell

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

A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams — by Stefan Lindegaard
Lean is the Enemy of Learning — by Robyn Bolton
Is it Time to ReLearn to Work? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Why CIOs Should Co-Lead Customer Experience — by Howard Tiersky
There is Nothing Without Trust — by Mike Shipulski

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

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

Have something to contribute?

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

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

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Getting Buy-In for Change Now That Innovation is Dead

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Getting Buy-In for Change Now That Innovation is Dead

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation is undergoing a metamorphosis, and while it may seem like the current goo-stage is the hard part (it’s certainly not easy!), our greatest challenge is still ahead. Because while we may emerge as beautiful butterflies, we still need to get buy-in for change from a colony of skeptical caterpillars who’ve grown weary of transformation talk.

The Old Playbook Is Dead, Too

Picture this: A butterfly lands, armed with PowerPoint slides about “The Future of Leaf-Eating” and projections showing “10x Nectar Collection Potential.” The caterpillars stare blankly, having seen this show before.

The old approach – big presentations, executive sponsorship, and promises of massive returns within 24 months – isn’t just ineffective. It’s harmful. Each failed transformation makes the next one harder, turning your caterpillars more cynical and more determined to cling to their leaves.

The Secret Most Change Experts Miss

Butterflies don’t convince caterpillars to transform by showing off their wings. They create conditions where transformation feels possible, necessary, and safe. Your job isn’t to sell the end state – it’s to help others see their own potential for change.

Here’s how:

Start With the Hungriest Caterpillars

Find those who feel the limitations of their current state most acutely. They’re not satisfied with their current leaf, and they’re curious about what lies beyond. These early adopters become your first chrysalis cohort.

Make it About Their Problems, Not Your Vision

Instead of talking about transformation, focus on specific pain points. “Wouldn’t it be easier to reach that juicy leaf if you could fly?” is more compelling than “Flying represents a paradigm shift in leaf acquisition strategy.”

Build a Network of Proof

Every successful mini-transformation creates evidence that change is possible. When one caterpillar successfully navigates their chrysalis phase, others pay attention. Let your transformed allies tell their stories.

Set Realistic Expectations

Metamorphosis takes time and isn’t always pretty. Be honest about the goo phase – that messy middle where things fall apart before they come together. This builds trust and prepares people for the real journey, not the sanitized version.

Where to Start

Identify your first chrysalis cohort – the people already feeling the limits of their current state
Focus on solving immediate problems that showcase the benefits of change
Document and share small victories, letting others tell their transformation stories
Create realistic timelines that acknowledge both quick wins and longer-term metamorphosis

What’s your experience? Have you successfully guided a transformation without relying on buzzwords and fancy presentations? Drop your stories in the comments.

After all, we’re all just caterpillars and butterflies helping each other find our wings.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results

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Exclusive Interview with Robyn Bolton

Innovation doesn’t happen without the right kind of leadership, it’s not all about the lightbulb moment or the idea that results. Innovation begins with an insight and it is effective leadership that helps pay off my definition of innovation:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” — Braden Kelley

It is no easy task to identify an insight worth investing in or to organize and lead a team to successfully pick the right idea out of a sea of possibilities, to develop it, to understand its potential advantages versus the alternatives it must displace, and to align the organization in the ways necessary to overcome any idea’s fatal flaw and shepherd it to successful launch and possibly even market development if the market for the solution does not already exist.

Innovation of course requires leadership, but do the same leadership principles apply to successfully leading innovation?

Today we will explore this question, along with many others surrounding culture, obstacles, process, strategy, and other aspects of innovation success with our special guest.

Unlocking Innovation for Leaders

I had the opportunity recently to interview Robyn Bolton, who works with senior executives at medium and large companies who are committed to using innovation to confidently and consistently drive revenue growth. She works with companies in various industries, including industrial goods, healthcare, consumer goods, and education under her consulting firm MileZero. She is also a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in the Master of Design Innovation program. Prior to founding MileZero, Robyn served as a Partner at Innosight, the innovation and growth strategy consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, worked as a consultant and project leader for The Boston Consulting Group in both Boston and Copenhagen Denmark, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Below is the text of my interview with Robyn and a preview of the kinds of insights you’ll find in Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results presented in a Q&A format:

1. Why do so many companies struggle to innovate?

Companies struggle because they think innovation is an idea problem. It’s not. It’s a leadership problem. What I mean by that is executives who excel at running the core business are often asked to innovate (create new things) while they operate (run the existing business). Naturally, these executives rely on the very instincts and behaviors that made them successful – making quick decisions based on data and experience, striving to rapidly eliminate risk, and repeatedly and consistently delivering results. The problem is that these behaviors doom innovation efforts. They demand detailed financial forecasts when no data exists, expect quick returns on long-term investments, and try to eliminate risk from an inherently uncertain process. Success requires leaders who recognize that innovation is the opposite of operations and are willing to do the opposite of what made them successful operators.

2. Why is it so hard for innovation labs to last more than a couple of years?

Innovation labs struggle because organizations treat them like startups but expect them to operate and produce results like the core business. Executives launch labs with promises of freedom and flexibility but quickly start demanding predictable results and quick returns. By the start of the second year, executives are anxious for tangible financial results, especially as economic pressures mount, core business results slip, or a new executive arrives questioning innovation investments. Without a plan to demonstrate measurable progress in Year 2, deliver tangible results in Year 3, and a leader willing to advocate for innovation and the organizational clout to stave off skeptics, labs are easy targets for cost-cutting.

3. What does it take to build a solid foundation for innovation?

A solid innovation foundation requires a holistic approach, what I call the ABCs: Architecture, Behavior, and Culture. Architecture includes the strategies, structures, and processes that guide how work gets done. Behavior – specifically leadership behavior – turns words into actions and demonstrates what the organization truly values and believes about innovation. Culture establishes, expands, and sustains an environment where creativity and experimentation can thrive. But behavior is the most critical element because without leaders modeling the right behaviors, the best architectures fail and cultures crumble.

4. What is it that makes innovation almost the opposite of operations?

Operations exist in what Rita McGrath describes as a high-knowledge, low-assumption environment where leaders can predict outcomes based on past experience. Innovation occurs in low-knowledge, high-assumption environments where no one knows what will work, and past experiences are more likely to be misleading than helpful. Operational excellence comes from eliminating variation and risk. Innovation requires embracing uncertainty and learning from failure. The mindsets and behaviors that make someone a great operator – decisiveness, risk elimination, decisions based on quantitative historical data – hinder innovation success.

5. What would your advice be to an innovation professional on how to prevent innovation zombie projects from emerging?

Zombies exist because managers are reluctant to kill projects because that may mean that they were wrong. Instead, they put the projects on pause or delay work until the next round of funding. The key to preventing zombie projects is recognizing and communicating that the decision to start wasn’t wrong. It was based on the information available at the time. New information is now available, resulting in a different understanding of the situation and, therefore, a different decision. This learning process becomes infinitely easier when you have a (relatively) objective and (completely) transparent decision-making tool outlining clear criteria for what makes an innovation attractive and worth pursuing – what I call an “innovation playground.” This framework defines what’s “in play” (attractive), “in bounds” (worth discussing), and “out of bounds” (not worth pursuing) across multiple dimensions like strategic fit, customer benefit, and required capabilities. Of course, this tool is only as useful as the people who use it, so leaders need the courage to make and stick to hard decisions about stopping projects that don’t meet the criteria.

6. Which is more important for innovation success? Leadership, strategy or culture?

Leadership behavior is the foundation for everything else. I’ve worked with companies that have brilliant strategies or are famous for their innovation cultures but are unable to get results from their innovation investments because their leaders don’t demonstrate the right behaviors – embracing uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete information, treating failure as learning. That’s why the “B” in the ABCs of Innovation (Behavior) comes first. Executives must recognize that their instincts and behaviors need to change before they can become successful innovation leaders.

7. Is there any such thing as a perfect innovation process? If not, what are the key components for any innovation process?

There is no perfect process. Innovation isn’t baking, where following a precise recipe guarantees success. However, there are essential components that every innovation process needs: diagnosing the real problem to solve, designing multiple potential solutions, developing and testing assumptions, de-risking through experimentation, and delivering value. The order of these steps matters, but everything else – the specific activities, tools, metrics, and timelines – can and should be adapted to your organization’s needs and culture.

8. What makes one innovation culture more successful than another?

Successful innovation cultures share three characteristics: First, they’re authentic to the organization rather than copied from another company. Second, they recognize that operators and innovators are equally important and valuable to the organization and work hard to strike the right balance between protecting innovation teams and connecting them to the core business. Third, and most importantly, they’re actively demonstrated through leadership behaviors, not just written on posters or mentioned in town halls.

9. Innovation labs/teams/groups often have a different culture from the rest of the organization. Is it possible to spread the culture out of the lab and infect the rest of the organization? How?

Yes, but it requires patience and intentionality. Start by sharing stories that make innovation relatable and relevant to everyone. If you can’t answer “What’s In It for Me” for each person in the organization, you can’t expect them to change their focus or behavior. When people express interest, invite them into your team’s traditions and events. Don’t force participation – remember that not everyone wants to or needs to be an innovator. Most importantly, teach and support those who are interested in innovation while celebrating the operators who keep the core business running. Culture spreads through pull, not push.

10. One of the most dangerous moments for any promising innovation project is the transfer of out of the lab and into an operational unit of the main organization to scale it. How can organizations do better at scaling up innovation experiments into equal members of the organization’s solution catalog?

The valley of death is real! The key to crossing it is to view it as a relay rather than just chucking something across the chasm. Historically, executives have been afraid of distracting core business teams with uncertain projects so they wait until launch to involve the people who will ultimately own the innovation. While this still occurs, I’m starting to see companies over-correct and bring operators into the process at the very start, including them in activities and decisions when the team is still operating in a highly ambiguous and uncertain space. Success requires meeting in the middle. When innovation teams know more than they don’t know, that’s when collaboration between innovation and operational teams starts. From that point through launch, innovators and operators should work hand-in-hand to understand and navigate uncertainty while adapting their plans, processes and metrics to ensure market success without losing the critical insights that sparked the innovation. Most importantly, Senior leaders must stay engaged, understanding and supporting the additional time and resources needed during the transition period.

11. Anything you wish I’d asked?

I wish you’d asked, “What does innovation leadership success really look like?” Because while revenue and survival rates are measures of success, I believe that the real measure is the lives you change. Given that only 0.002% of incubated ideas generate meaningful revenue, and 90% of innovation labs shut down within three years, there’s no guarantee that your work will become a wild, world-changing success. That doesn’t mean that you failed. For me and so many of the successful leaders with whom I’ve worked, success is also giving someone the courage to challenge the status quo because they see you doing it. It’s inspiring someone to take risks when you break the rules thoughtfully and responsibly. If you’ve helped even one person discover their potential as an innovator or creative problem-solver, you’ve succeeded.

Conclusion

Thank you for the great conversation Robyn!

I hope everyone has enjoyed this peek into the mind of the woman behind the insightful new title Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas Into Tangible Results!

Image credits: MileZero (Robyn Bolton)

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Your Innovation Team Doesn’t Have to be Dead

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Your Innovation Team Doesn't Have to be Dead

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

When times get tough, the first things most companies cut are the “luxuries.” That includes their innovation teams. But as companies dismantle their labs, teams, and other structures, a crucial question emerges: Who’s working on growth?

Cutting innovation teams doesn’t just cut a branch off the org chart, it eliminates capabilities that are fundamental to sustaining and growing a business and culture.

So why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Here’s a scenario that might sound familiar: Your innovation team created something brilliant. The prototype works, early users love it, and the business case is solid. But six months later, its gathering dust because no one in the core business knew how to – or wanted to – take it forward.

This isn’t a failure of innovation. It’s a failure of integration.

Wait, I thought integrating innovation with the core business was bad

The traditional innovation team structure – a separate unit with its own space, processes, and culture – solved one problem but created another.

As innovation teams were given the freedom to think differently, they were also given shiny, new, fun, and amenity filled spaces cordoned off from everyone else. Meanwhile, “everyone else” was stuck in their usual offices and doing the usual things that keep the business running and, apparently, fund the innovation team’s luxe life.

The resulting Us vs. Them mentality fueled resentment that made it easy for “everyone else” to stonewall the innovation team’s efforts by pointing out flaws, uncertainties, and risks.

To be fair, they weren’t doing this to be mean – they were protecting the business. The innovators, meanwhile, grew frustrated, sought help from higher-ups who were happy to help until times got tough and cuts had to be made.

So, one team should work on both innovation and the core business?

Just like we need multiple words to describe the what and why of innovation, we need different operating models that embed innovation capabilities across the organization while protecting the space for them to flourish.

Here’s what it looks like:

For Core Improvements: Let your operational teams lead. They know the problems best, but give them innovation tools and methods. Think of it as equipping your existing workforce with new superpowers, not replacing them with superheroes.
For Adjacent Expansions: Create hybrid teams that mix operational experience with innovation expertise. When expanding into new markets or launching new products, you need both the innovative mindset and the operational know-how. Neither alone is sufficient.
For Radical Reinvention: You still need dedicated teams – but not isolated ones. Their job is to create offerings that reinvent the company and the culture that enables everyone to be part of the reinvention. Establish bridges that connect them with business units and enforce quarterly meetings to share progress, insights, and tools.

This isn’t theory.

Companies like Amazon have been doing this for years with their “working backwards” innovation process that’s used by all teams, not just a special innovation unit. When I worked at P&G, the brand teams worked on core improvements, the New Business Development teams (where I worked) physically sat next to the brand teams and worked on Adjacent expansion, and the radical reinvention teams were co-located with R&D at the technical centers.

Put it into practice

Here’s where to start:

Map your innovation portfolio to understand what types of innovation you need to hit your goals
Match your team structures to your innovation types
Start embedding innovation capabilities across the organization
Create clear paths for innovations to move from idea to implementation

The transition isn’t easy. It requires rethinking roles and reimagining how innovation happens in your organization. But the alternative – watching your innovation investments evaporate because they can’t cross the bridge back to the core business – is far more painful.

What’s your experience? Drop your stories and strategies in the comments. Let’s figure this out together.

Image credit: Pexels

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Ten Reasons Every B2B Company Needs an Evangelist

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by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The importance of evangelists in organizations around the world is often misunderstood or underestimated, and too few organizations have made the incredibly rewarding investment into one or more of the valuable types of evangelists – who are particularly valuable in B2B organizations for reasons I hope will be obvious by the end. Let’s set the stage.

An evangelist in a B2B company is a passionate advocate for a brand, product, service or innovation. Their role involves spreading the word about the company’s offerings, building relationships, and inspiring others to become customers or supporters. They are often seen as the face of the company, engaging with the community, attending events, and creating content to promote the brand. So, without further delay, let’s look at the top ten reasons every B2B company needs an evangelist:

Increased Brand Awareness: Evangelists help spread the word about the brand, reaching new audiences and increasing visibility.
Improved Reputation: Having passionate advocates can enhance the company’s reputation and build trust with potential customers.
Higher Customer Loyalty: Evangelists are often the most loyal customers, and their enthusiasm can inspire others to stay loyal as well.
Cost-Effective Marketing: Evangelists can provide valuable marketing support without the high costs associated with traditional advertising.
Enhanced Customer Relationships: Evangelists build strong relationships with customers, providing personalized support and fostering a sense of community.
Increased Sales: By promoting the brand and its products, evangelists can drive sales and generate leads.
Valuable Feedback: Evangelists often provide insightful feedback on products and services, helping the company improve and innovate.
Thought Leadership: Evangelists can position the company as a thought leader in the industry, sharing expertise and insights.
Employee Morale: Having a dedicated evangelist can boost employee morale by showcasing the company’s strengths and successes.
Competitive Advantage: A strong evangelist can differentiate the company from competitors, highlighting unique selling points and creating a loyal customer base.

Finding an Evangelist to Hire

If your B2B company doesn’t already have at least one evangelist (see the five types at the bottom), there is no better time than the present to make that first hire, or to hire additional types of evangelists to maximize your success. There is nothing wrong with hiring an evangelist from outside, especially when you don’t want to pull existing employees out of roles they’re already excelling at or when an external hire brings higher levels of skill than the internal resources you think might be best suited to such a role. Here is how to get started with that next hire:

Identify Key Traits: Look for candidates who are passionate, knowledgeable, authentic, influential, and committed. These traits are essential for an effective evangelist.
Leverage Networks: Utilize professional networks like LinkedIn, industry events, and conferences to find potential evangelists. Look for individuals who are already advocating for similar products or services.
Engage with Communities: Participate in online communities, forums, and social media groups related to your industry. Engage with active members who demonstrate a genuine interest in your field.
Job Listings: Post job listings on relevant job boards and websites, clearly outlining the role and its importance. Highlight the impact the evangelist will have on the company’s growth.
Referrals: Encourage your employees and industry contacts to refer potential candidates. Referrals often lead to finding passionate and dedicated individuals.

Cultivating an Evangelist from Within

If you don’t feel comfortable hiring an evangelist from outside, either with or without some level of rotational exposure to all of the different parts of organization, or if you know you have some really skilled and passionate internal resources you think are ready to step into a new role, that’s fine too.

Identify Potential Evangelists: Look for employees who are already passionate about your brand and products. These individuals often go above and beyond in their roles and are enthusiastic about sharing their experiences.
Provide Training and Resources: Offer training programs to help employees develop their evangelism skills. Provide resources such as marketing materials, product information, and access to industry events.
Create a Supportive Environment: Foster a culture of evangelism within your company. Encourage employees to share their ideas and experiences, and recognize their efforts publicly.
Offer Incentives: Provide incentives for employees who actively promote the brand. This could include bonuses, recognition programs, or opportunities for career advancement. (Editor’s Note: Sorry CoPilot I’m not sure I agree with this one)
Engage with Employees: Regularly engage with employees to understand their needs and motivations. Create opportunities for them to share their feedback and ideas.

Whether you hire your evangelists internally or externally it is important to think through how to best introduce and integrate them into every part of the organization relevant to the type of evangelism role they are filling. At this point you might be wondering how there might be more than one type of evangelist, so let’s look at briefly and if you follow the link you’ll learn more details about each.

Here are Five Types of Evangelists to Consider Hiring

In my previous article Rise of the Evangelist I defined five different types of evangelists that organizations may already have, or may want to hire, including:

Chief Evangelist
Brand Evangelists
Product Evangelists
Service Evangelists
Innovation Evangelists

This specialization occurs when the evangelism an organization needs become too big for one evangelist to handle. At that point, a Chief Evangelist creates the evangelism strategy and manages the execution across the team of brand, innovation, and other evangelism focus areas.

I dive more into the role and considerations for companies on how An Innovation Evangelist Can Increase Your Reputation and Innovation Velocity.

What Are You Waiting For?

Evangelism isn’t just a marketing activity. Evangelists are incredibly important to enhancing not just the customer experience, but the employee and partner experiences as well. Not everyone may have main character energy but almost everyone still appreciates main character level credit, and this can be incredibly impactful for all three main constituencies – customers, employees and partners. Tell those stories, translate that value and make the investment into an evangelist today!

Content Authenticity Statement: Some of the lists and paragraphs in the article were created with the help of Microsoft CoPilot, but there are also some paragraphs created by me along with content from some of my previous articles.

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Stop Doubling Down on Bad Ideas

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Stop Doubling Down On Bad Ideas

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to lead a number of organizations and each one involved a series of steep learning curves. Even the most successful operations do some things poorly, so managing an enterprise involves constant improvement. You always want to figure out where you can do things better.

One way to do that is to identify other organizations that do something well and adopt best practices. Copying what others do won’t make you world class, but it will get you started on the right road. Over time, you can learn which practices are a good fit for your organization and which are not. As you progress, you can begin to develop your own capabilities.

What you don’t want to do is to take bad ideas that have failed try and force them through, yet it happens all the time. Business pundits and consultants don’t stop selling zombie ideas just because they don’t work and people don’t stop getting taken in by slick sales jobs. We need to be much more discerning about the ideas we adopt. Here are some to watch out for.

The War On Talent

When some McKinsey consultants came up with the idea of a war for talent in 1998, it made a lot of sense. In a knowledge economy, your people are your greatest resource. Creating a culture of excellence, rewarding top employees and pruning out the laggards just seemed like such an obvious formula for success that few questioned it.

However, even early on some began to see flaws. Just a few years after McKinsey launched the concept, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer explained how study after study refuted the “War for Talent” hypothesis. He found that firms who followed the “talent war mind set” ended up actually undermining their people and overemphasizing recruiting from outside.

Even worse, McKinsey’s approach often creates a corrosive culture. By valuing individual accomplishment over teamwork, leaders set up a competitive dynamic that discourages collaboration while sabotaging the knowledge transfer that promotes learning new skills and improves performance. In a New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell explained how that kind of competitive dynamic contributed to Enron’s downfall.

The truth is that you don’t need the best people, you need the best teams and that requires a very different approach. Fostering collaboration requires an environment of psychological safety, not a series of performance review cage matches. Talent isn’t something you attract and bid for, it is something you build.

The Cult Of Disruption

It’s become fashionable to say that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). The term first arose in the aftermath of the Cold War, when a relatively stable conflict between two global superpowers fragmented into a multipolar multiethnic clash of civilizations. Today, however, it has become so firmly entrenched in the business lexicon that nobody even thinks to question it. Change has become gospel.

If you see the world in turmoil, the only sensible strategy is to constantly change and adapt. Perhaps just as importantly, in a corporate setting you need to be seen as changing and adapting. In this environment, managers have significant incentives to launch multiple initiatives aimed at transforming every aspect of the enterprise.

Yet do businesses really face a VUCA environment? The evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. A Brookings report showed that business has become less dynamic, with less churn among industry leaders and fewer new entrants. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found decreased competitive environments. A report from the IMF also suggests that these trends have worsened during the pandemic.

Make no mistake, all of the happy talk about change has a real cost. A study undertaken by PwC found that 65% of executives surveyed complained about change fatigue, and only about half felt their organization could deliver change successfully. 44% said that they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it found that most people have come to view new transformation initiatives suspiciously, taking a “wait and see” attitude undermining the momentum and leading to a”boomerang effect” in which early progress is reversed when leadership moves on to focus other priorities. In other words, we’re basically talking change to death.

Marching On Washington

The March on Washington remains one of the most iconic moments in American history. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech continues to inspire people around the world. The events of that day surely contributed to the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and made the world a better place.

So it’s no wonder that it seems like every time someone has an idea for change they plan a march. Yet the most salient aspect of over 100 years of marches on Washington is that none, except that one in 1963, have really accomplished much. In fact the very first one, in support of women’s suffrage in 1913, was a full blown disaster.

It’s not just social revolutionaries that make this mistake. Corporate change advocates have their own version of marching on Washington. They set up a big kickoff event to “create a sense of urgency” around change and use stark language like “innovate or die” and “burning platform” to make change seem inevitable.

The problem is that if a change is important and has real potential to impact what people believe and what they do, there will always be those who will hate it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Creating a lot of noise at the beginning of an initiative, before any real progress has been made, just gives your opposition a head start in their efforts to kill it off.

Closing The Knowing-Doing Gap

Business today moves fast. So we like simple statements that speak to larger truths. It always seems that if we can find a simple rule of thumb—or maybe 3 to 5 bullet points for the really big picture stuff—managing a business would be much easier. Whenever a decision needs to be made, we could simply refer to the rule and go on with our day.

Unfortunately, that often leads to cartoonish slogans rather than genuine managerial wisdom. Catchy ideas like “the war for talent,” “a VUCA world” and “creating a sense of urgency around change” end up taking the place of thorough analysis and good sense. When that happens, we’re in big trouble.

The problem is, as Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, “no course of action can be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Rules often appear to make sense on the surface, but when we try to apply them in the real world we run into trouble. We live in a complex universe and oversimplifying it leads us astray.

We need to stop worshiping the cult of ideas and start focusing on the problems we need to solve. The truth is that the real world is a confusing place. We have little choice but to walk the earth, pick things up along the way and make the best judgments we can. The decisions we make are highly situational and defy hard and fast rules. There is no algorithm for life. You have to actually live it, see what happens and learn from your mistakes.

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

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Motivate Innovation with These Three Frames

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Motivate Innovation with These Three Frames

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

You want to innovate, to drive change in your organization. New products, new processes, new markets, new technologies, new ways of working together.

People in any organization have a tendency to resist change. This is for many reasons including fear of the unknown, fear about how it might impact their role or their empire, or their job security, and the natural tendency that people get comfortable with and attached to the way things are.

More often than not, change requires buy-in from others in your organization, and you will need to be able to communicate a strong reason to change. It’s important to identify the outcome you are seeking, of course. Let’s say you want to improve customer satisfaction. Great! In order for people to really be ready to change, they have to see that outcome as important. Ideally, as essential. If we want people to focus on getting from Point A to Point B, we need to help them understand why that change is so important that it overcomes their natural resistance. Just improving the share price or reducing turnover might not be enough to get someone to be willing to embrace what they may perceive as the personal pain of change.

The question is, “Why is making this change absolutely essential?” Of course, there are an unlimited number of reasons, but in our experience they fall into three primary strategies. The individual details are going to vary situationally, but these are the three basic strategies for igniting that burning platform for change.

If you’ve driven change before or been part of an organization going through change, most likely the change was communicated using one of these three frames. We present them here to make you aware of these three diverse approaches and to give you the opportunity before you communicate your next change to step back and decide deliberately which frame you will choose because each one had its own power and its own drawbacks. Let’s introduce the three frames, and then we’ll explain them. The three frames are number one, we suck. Number two, constant improvement. Number three, environmental change. Let’s review these.

1. The “We Suck” Frame

Let’s start with we suck. That’s a fun one. A company is at the bottom of its industry in sales or share price or both. Customer satisfaction scores are through the floor. The new product which will change the game in the marketplace is three years late. Who am I talking about? Doesn’t matter. When things are bleak, sometimes it seems necessary to just tell the truth and admit that the results you’re getting are bad, unacceptable, and must change. Holding up an honest mirror and pointing out the reality of the situation can create a strong motivation for some kind of change. As I said, everyone wants to get out of a situation where they’re failing. It’s highly motivating to get away from suckiness. It doesn’t have to be the entire company that’s going down the tubes like in my example. It might just be one capability, one product, one process, one geography.

If the facts are on your side, using the frame that, “We have to improve customer satisfaction because right now our customers hate us,” will probably get people’s attention. Often, the pain of failure is enough to overcome resistance to change. The problem with the we suck approach, however, is not hard to guess. It can be highly demotivating, even depressing. It can drive people away from your company. It can be hard to get excited about change when building on a belief that we suck. If we suck so much, how will we be able to improve? How will we make this change successful?

In order for the we suck frame not to backfire, you have to combine it with a strong hope of victory. The team needs to have faith that they can correct the situation. A few tactics. First, highlight the problem in a measurable way and set clear goals. “Our satisfaction scores are at a 6 and they should be at least an 8.” That gives people a clear sense of where the line of victory is. Second, if things used to be better and then they got worse, be sure to highlight that. It creates hope that the organization is capable of better.

A third tactic, highlight the areas the organization is doing well as part of the message. If we’re doing great in four out of five areas, but we suck in the fifth area, be sure to make that point. Not just to be positive, to give sugar with the medicine, but to put the problem in context. “We’re a high-quality organization. We excel in many areas, but in this one respect, we aren’t operating at our own standard.” The key is to show the gap, but also to create confidence that it can be solved.

A fourth tactic, highlight recent changes in circumstance that can also increase confidence. Especially if the problem has existed for a long time. It’s easy for people to feel it’s unsolvable, so make sure part of the message conveys what is change that makes it solvable now? Whether it’s new leadership, a new technology, increased budget, or something else.

2. The “Constant Improvement” Frame

The second frame is constant improvement, an alternative to the we suck frame. This frame emphasizes the need to constantly strive to be better as a value in and of itself. It says, “We’re already at X level, but we can do more. We can drive even more value for our customers. We can lower our costs even more.” This is, of course, a much more positive message than the we suck frame. It doesn’t really on any admission that the current state is any form of failure. However, in order to be motivating, it relies on a certain alignment with the values of your audience.

In some corporate cultures, the value of constant improvement is embodied into the psyche. Places like Apple and Amazon hire people who love to constantly improve, but if your organization does not have this value in its DNA, it’s tough to create it overnight. The downside of the constant improvement frame, therefore, is that it might not be sufficiently powerful in many cultures. People might think, “Yeah, it’s nice to improve, but I kind of like my organization the way it is now.” If the change is not seen as a must, just a nice to have, and if it requires some pain or a scary change, people might not be sufficiently motivated. They’ll tend to embrace small-scale change that doesn’t upset the apple cart, but may still have significant resistance to significant change.

3. The “Environmental Change” Frame

The third and last frame is environmental change. This is my personal favorite frame. The environmental frame says, “Something major in our business environment has changed and we must respond and change in order to survive or thrive. Our customers have all gone mobile. Competitive pricing has dropped our price in half. The population is aging. The Asian market is opening up.” What’s great about this frame is that it excuses the past. We can say, “Hey, what we did in the past was great for the circumstances that existed then, but now we need to change to what will work now and in the future.” In this frame, we don’t suck, we’re just becoming a bit out-of-date and need to adjust to the external change, but the changes are truly a must. Not just to meet the standard of constant improvement as in frame two, but in order to survive. This sort of example is, of course, where the phrase “burning platform” comes from. Your house is all of a sudden on fire. The environment has changed. You have to move.

As I mentioned, I like this third one the best since it can be a positive message and still have urgency, but it may at first appear that this really only relevant in certain circumstances. Those where there really has obviously been a significant environmental change, but you can really leverage this frame or, in fact, any of these frames in almost any situation. The key to using this frame is to do one or both of two things. Either find an environmental change that you can focus on to justify the change, and usually there is almost always some form of environmental change or forecasted change that you can use to create change based on an environmental frame, or create an environmental change.

For example, a new boss coming in can be an environmental change. The new boss has new expectations. We as a department need to deliver in a different way than we have before. There are many other ways to create environmental change. A new brand promise, a new performance management protocol, even a new goal or initiative that the company has that must be met.

Here at FROM, we work with clients all the time to make change successful and part of the work we do is about developing the frame for and communication about the change. I can assure you that there are lots of ways to apply creativity, to utilize the best frame in just about any circumstance with all your digital innovation, for change, for innovation.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pexels

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We Need a New Language for Change

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We Need a New Language for Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

If innovation (the term) is dead and we will continue to engage in innovation (the activity), how do we talk about creating meaningful change without falling back on meaningless buzzwords? The answer isn’t finding a single replacement word – it’s building a new innovation language that actually describes what we’re trying to achieve. Think of it as upgrading from a crayon to a full set of oil paints – suddenly you can create much more nuanced pictures of progress.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All

We’ve spent decades trying to cram every type of progress, change, and improvement into the word “innovation.” It’s like trying to describe all forms of movement with just the word “moving.” Sure, you’re moving but without the specificity of words like walking, running, jumping, bounding, and dancing, you don’t know what or how you’re moving or why.

That’s why using “innovation” to describe everything different from today doesn’t work.

Use More Precise Language for What and How

Before we throw everything out, let’s keep what actually works: Innovation means “something new that creates value.” That last bit is crucial – it’s what separates meaningful change from just doing new stuff for novelty’s sake. (Looking at you, QR code on toothpaste tutorials.)

But, just like “dancing” is a specific form of movement, we need more precise language to describe what the new value-creating thing is that we’re doing:

Core IMPROVEMENTS: Making existing things better. It’s the unglamorous but essential work of continuous refinement. Think better batteries, faster processors, smoother processes.
Adjacent EXPANSIONS: Venturing into new territory – new customers, new offerings, new revenue models, OR new processes. It’s like a restaurant adding delivery service: same food, new way of reaching customers.
Radical REINVENTION: Going all in, changing multiple dimensions at once. Think Netflix killing its own DVD business to stream content they now produce themselves. (And yes, that sound you hear is Blockbuster crying in the corner.)

Adopt More Sophisticated Words to Describe Why

Innovation collapsed because innovation became an end in and of itself. Companies invested in it to get good PR, check a shareholder box, or entertain employees with events.

We forgot that innovation is a means to an end and, as a result, got lazy about specifying what the expected end is. We need to get back to setting these expectations with words that are both clear and inspiring

Growth means ongoing evolution
Transformation means fundamental system change (not just putting QR codes on things)
Invention means creating something new without regard to its immediate usefulness
Problem Solving means finding, creating, and implementing practical solutions
Value Creation means demonstrating measurable and meaningful impact

Why This Matters

This isn’t just semantic nitpicking. Using more precise language sets better expectations, helps people choose the most appropriate tools, and enables you to measure success accurately. It’s the difference between saying “I want to move more during the day” and “I want to build enough endurance to run a 5K by June.”

What’s Next?

As we emerge from innovation’s chrysalis, maybe what we’re becoming isn’t simpler – it’s more sophisticated. And maybe that’s exactly what we need to move forward.

Drop a comment: What words do you use to describe different types of change and innovation in your organization? How do you differentiate between what you’re doing and why you’re doing it?

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