Category Archives: Innovation

What’s Your Mindset?

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What's Your Mindset?

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

Your mindset has a powerful influence on how you think and behave—including how innovative you are. You have the power to shift your mindset to become more innovative. However, to do that effectively you need to know what your mindset is now, and it’s mostly subconscious.

I’m going to show you how to measure your mindset, by surfacing some of those hidden assumptions. To do this, you’ll need some way to jot down four numbers and make a simple calculation.

You may have heard about the work of Stanford University Professor Carol Dweck and her distinction between a growth and a fixed mindset, which is what I’m having you measure. It’s what Dweck calls your Theory of Intelligence.

For each of four statements, I’d like you to write down a number between 1 and 6. One indicating that you strongly disagree with that statement, and six that you strongly agree, with increments in-between.

  1. Strongly Disagree
  2. Disagree
  3. Slightly Disagree
  4. Slightly Agree
  5. Agree
  6. Strongly Agree

Ready?

  1. __ The first statement is: Our intelligence is something about each of us that we can’t change very much. Give that number between 1 and 6, depending on how strongly you agree or disagree with that statement.
  2. __ The next statement is: We can learn new things but we can’t really change how intelligent we are. Give that a number from one to six.
  3. __ The next statement is: No matter how much intelligence a person has, they can always change it quite a bit. Give that a number 1-6
  4. __ And the final statement is: I can always change how intelligent I am. Give that a number.

To score your results, add your first and second answers together to give yourself an “A” value, and add your third and fourth answers together to give yourself a “B” value.

If your A value is the larger of the two, that indicates that you favor what Dweck calls a fixed mindset—that you believe intelligence is largely fixed and unchanging.

If your B value is larger, you favor a growth mindset—defining intelligence as something you can change and grow.

The larger the difference between those two numbers, the stronger your preference.

In her research, Dweck has found this simple distinction has all sorts of ripple effects especially on how students perform. Students with a fixed mindset, may be quite smart, but they’re afraid to challenge themselves and try new things because if that reveals any intellectual deficits, they don’t believe they can do anything about it. Students with a growth mindset believe they can get smarter by working at it, giving them a strong motivation to work hard, learn and overcome setbacks. They tend to become the high performers.

You may never have given much thought to your personal theory of intelligence, but you almost certainly have one and it’s one of many hidden assumptions that make up your mindset. Dweck has found that those hidden assumptions impact your beliefs, behavior, motivation, competitiveness and ethics. Other researchers have found that mindset even impacts how your body functions.

Your mindset also impacts how innovative you are, and that can be measured too. Instead of the growth vs. fixed distinction, measuring your innovativeness involves a range of other tradeoffs. Things that impact how imaginative you are, how willing you are to take risks, how you make observations and how open you are to new insights and ideas.

A growth mindset makes you more willing to accept and push through failure, being ready to learn and discover. An Innovator Mindset is about how you go about doing that. How you can systematically find solutions and make improvements—including improving yourself. Being able to adapt and learn and make discoveries has many benefits in all aspects of your personal and professional life.

If you’d like to measure your innovativeness, across twelve dimensions, and receive detailed personalized feedback on how to improve it, go to Innovator Mindset where you’ll find links to take the Innovator Mindset assessment, or enroll in Mindset Trek elearning—which includes the assessment—to get in depth mindset training.

Here is a video version of this post:

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023Drum 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 October’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. A New Innovation Sphere — by Pete Foley
  2. Thinking Like a Futurist — by Ayelet Baron
  3. Crossing the Possibility Space — by Dennis Stauffer
  4. Twelve Digital Disruptions of Your Sales Cycle — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. How to Fix Corporate Transformation Failure — by Greg Satell
  6. The Biggest Customer Service Opportunity — by Shep Hyken
  7. Do You Prize Novelty or Certainty? — by Mike Shipulski
  8. What Pundits Always Get Wrong About the Future — by Greg Satell
  9. The Biggest Challenge for Innovation is Organizational Inertia — by Stefan Lindegaard
  10. What Company Do You See in the Mirror? — by Mike Shipulski

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

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

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 three years:

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AI and Human Creativity Solving Complex Problems Together

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AI and Human Creativity Solving Complex Problems Together

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

A recent McKinsey Leading Off – Essentials for leaders and those they lead email newsletter, referred to an article “The organization of the future: Enabled by gen AI, driven by people” which stated that digitization, automation, and AI will reshape whole industries and every enterprise. The article elaborated further by saying that, in terms of magnitude, the challenge is akin to coping with the large-scale shift from agricultural work to manufacturing that occurred in the early 20th century in North America and Europe, and more recently in China. This shift was powered by the defining trait of our species, our human creativity, which is at the heart of all creative problem-solving endeavors, where innovation is the engine of growth, no matter, what the context.

Moving into Unchartered Job and Skills Territory

We don’t yet know what exact technological, or soft skills, new occupations, or jobs will be required in this fast-moving transformation, or how we might further advance generative AI, digitization, and automation.

We also don’t know how AI will impact the need for humans to tap even more into the defining trait of our species, our human creativity. To enable us to become more imaginative, curious, and creative in the way we solve some of the world’s greatest challenges and most complex and pressing problems, and transform them into innovative solutions.

We can be proactive by asking these two generative questions:

  • What if the true potential of AI lies in embracing its ability to augment human creativity and aid innovation, especially in enhancing creative problem solving, at all levels of civil society, instead of avoiding it? (Ideascale)
  • How might we develop AI as a creative thinking partner to effect profound change, and create innovative solutions that help us build a more equitable and sustainable planet for all humanity? (Hal Gregersen)

Because our human creativity is at the heart of creative problem-solving, and innovation is the engine of growth, competitiveness, and profound and positive change.

Developing a Co-Creative Thinking Partnership

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review “AI Can Help You Ask Better Questions – and Solve Bigger Problems” by Hal Gregersen and Nicola Morini Bianzino, they state:

“Artificial intelligence may be superhuman in some ways, but it also has considerable weaknesses. For starters, the technology is fundamentally backward-looking, trained on yesterday’s data – and the future might not look anything like the past. What’s more, inaccurate or otherwise flawed training data (for instance, data skewed by inherent biases) produces poor outcomes.”

The authors say that dealing with this issue requires people to manage this limitation if they are going to treat AI as a creative-thinking partner in solving complex problems, that enable people to live healthy and happy lives and to co-create an equitable and sustainable planet.

We can achieve this by focusing on specific areas where the human brain and machines might possibly complement one another to co-create the systemic changes the world badly needs through creative problem-solving.

  • A double-edged sword

This perspective is further complimented by a recent Boston Consulting Group article  “How people can create-and destroy value- with generative AI” where they found that the adoption of generative AI is, in fact, a double-edged sword.

In an experiment, participants using GPT-4 for creative product innovation outperformed the control group (those who completed the task without using GPT-4) by 40%. But for business problem solving, using GPT-4 resulted in performance that was 23% lower than that of the control group.

“Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, current GenAI models tend to do better on the first type of task; it is easier for LLMs to come up with creative, novel, or useful ideas based on the vast amounts of data on which they have been trained. Where there’s more room for error is when LLMs are asked to weigh nuanced qualitative and quantitative data to answer a complex question. Given this shortcoming, we as researchers knew that GPT-4 was likely to mislead participants if they relied completely on the tool, and not also on their own judgment, to arrive at the solution to the business problem-solving task (this task had a “right” answer)”.

  • Taking the path of least resistance

In McKinsey’s Top Ten Reports This Quarter blog, seven out of the ten articles relate specifically to generative AI: technology trends, state of AI, future of work, future of AI, the new AI playbook, questions to ask about AI and healthcare and AI.

As it is the most dominant topic across the board globally, if we are not both vigilant and intentional, a myopic focus on this one significant technology will take us all down the path of least resistance – where our energy will move to where it is easiest to go.  Rather than being like a river, which takes the path of least resistance to its surrounding terrain, and not by taking a strategic and systemic perspective, we will always go, and end up, where we have always gone.

  • Living our lives forwards

According to the Boston Consulting Group article:

“The primary locus of human-driven value creation lies not in enhancing generative AI where it is already great, but in focusing on tasks beyond the frontier of the technology’s core competencies.”

This means that a whole lot of other variables need to be at play, and a newly emerging set of human skills, especially in creative problem solving, need to be developed to maximize the most value from generative AI, to generate the most imaginative, novel and value adding landing strips of the future.

Creative Problem Solving

In my previous blog posts “Imagination versus Knowledge” and “Why Successful Innovators Are Curious Like Cats” we shared that we are in the midst of a “Sputnik Moment” where we have the opportunity to advance our human creativity.

This human creativity is inside all of us, it involves the process of bringing something new into being, that is original, surprising useful, or desirable, in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, in ways they appreciate and cherish.

  • Taking a both/and approach

Our human creativity will be paralysed, if we focus our attention and intention only on the technology, and on the financial gains or potential profits we will get from it, and if we exclude the possibilities of a co-creative thinking partnership with the technology.

To deeply engage people in true creative problem solving – and involving them in impacting positively on our crucial relationships and connectedness, with one another and with the natural world, and the planet.

  • A marriage between creatives, technologists, and humanities

In a recent Fast Company video presentation, “Innovating Imagination: How Airbnb Is Using AI to Foster Creativity” Brian Chesky CEO of Airbnb, states that we need to consider and focus our attention and intention on discovering what is good for people.

To develop a “marriage between creatives, technologists, and the humanities” that brings the human out and doesn’t let technology overtake our human element.

Developing Creative Problem-Solving Skills

At ImagineNation, we teach, mentor, and coach clients in creative problem-solving, through developing their Generative Discovery skills.

This involves developing an open and active mind and heart, by becoming flexible, adaptive, and playful in the ways we engage and focus our human creativity in the four stages of creative problem-solving.

Including sensing, perceiving, and enabling people to deeply listen, inquire, question, and debate from the edges of temporarily hidden or emerging fields of the future.

To know how to emerge, diverge, and converge creative insights, collective breakthroughs, an ideation process, and cognitive and emotional agility shifts to:

  • Deepen our attending, observing, and discerning capabilities to consciously connect with, explore, and discover possibilities that create tension and cognitive dissonance to disrupt and challenge the status quo, and other conventional thinking and feeling processes.
  • Create cracks, openings, and creative thresholds by asking generative questions to push the boundaries, and challenge assumptions and mental and emotional models to pull people towards evoking, provoking, and generating boldly creative ideas.
  • Unleash possibilities, and opportunities for creative problem solving to contribute towards generating innovative solutions to complex problems, and pressing challenges, that may not have been previously imagined.

Experimenting with the generative discovery skill set enables us to juggle multiple theories, models, and strategies to create and plan in an emergent, and non-linear way through creative problem-solving.

As stated by Hal Gregersen:

“Partnering with the technology in this way can help people ask smarter questions, making them better problem solvers and breakthrough innovators.”

Succeeding in the Age of AI

We know that Generative AI will change much of what we do and how we do it, in ways that we cannot yet anticipate.

Success in the age of AI will largely depend on our ability to learn and change faster than we ever have before, in ways that preserve our well-being, connectedness, imagination, curiosity, human creativity, and our collective humanity through partnering with generative AI in the creative problem-solving process.

Find Out More About Our Work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, which can be customised as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Find out more about our products and tools.

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LEGO Knows Why Companies Don’t Innovate

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LEGO Knows Why Companies Don't Innovate

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Lego’s Latest Effort to Avoid Oil-Based Plastic Hits Brick Wall” – WSJ

“Lego axes plans to make bricks from recycled bottles” – BBC

“Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback” – The Financial Times

Recently, LEGO found itself doing the Walk of Atonement (see video below) after announcing to The Financial Times that it was scrapping plans to make bricks from recycled bottles, and media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Fast Company to WIRED were more than happy to play the Shame Nun.

And it wasn’t just media outlets ringing the Shame Bell:

  • “In the future, they should not make these kinds of announcements (prototype made from recyclable plastic) until they actually do it,” Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics
  • “They are not going to survive as an organization if they don’t find a solution,” Paolo Taticchi, corporate sustainability expert at University College London.
  • “Lego undoubtedly had good intentions, but if you’re going to to (sic) announce a major environmental initiative like this—one that affects the core of your company—good intentions aren’t enough. And in this instance, it can even undermine progress.” Jesus Diaz, creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, writing forFast Company

As a LEGO lover, I am not unbiased, but WOW, the amount of hypocritical, self-righteous judgment is astounding!  All these publications and pundits espouse the need for innovation, yet when a company falls even the tiniest bit short of aspirations, it’s just SHAME (clang) SHAME (clang) SHAME.

A LEGO Atlantis 8073 Manta Warrior (i.e., tiny) bit of context

In 1946, LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen purchased Denmark’s first plastic injection molding machine.  Today, 95% of the company’s 4,400 different bricks are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a plastic that requires 4.4 pounds of oil to produce 2.2 pounds of brick.  Admittedly, it’s not a great ratio, and it gets worse.  The material isn’t biodegradable or easily recyclable, so when the 3% of bricks not handed down to the next generation end up in a landfill, they’ll break down into highly polluting microplastics.

With this context, it’s easy to understand why LEGO’s 2018 announcement that it will move to all non-plastic or recycled materials by 2030 and reduce its carbon emissions by 37% (from 2019’s 1.2 million tons) by 2032 was such big news.

Three years later, in 2021, LEGO announced that its prototype bricks made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles offered a promising alternative to its oil-based plastic bricks. 

But last Monday, after two years of testing, the company shared that what was promising as a prototype isn’t possible at scale because the process required to produce PET-based bricks actually increases carbon emissions.

SHAME!

A LEGO Art World Map (i.e. massive) amount of praise for LEGO

LEGO is doing everything that innovation theorists, consultants, and practitioners recommend:

  • Setting a clear vision and measurable goals so that people know what the priorities are (reduce carbon emissions), why they’re important (“playing our part in building a sustainable future and creating a better world for our children to inherit”), and the magnitude of change required
  • Defining what is on and off the table in terms of innovation, specifically that they are not willing to compromise the quality, durability, or “clutch power” of bricks to improve sustainability
  • Developing a portfolio of bets that includes new materials for products and packaging, new services to keep bricks out of landfills and in kids’ hands, new building and production processes, and active partnerships with suppliers to reduce their climate footprint
  • Prototyping and learning before committing to scale because what is possible at a prototype level is different than what’s possible at pilot, which is different from what’s possible at scale.
  • Focusing on the big picture and the long-term by not going for the near-term myopic win of declaring “we’re making bricks from more sustainable materials” and instead deciding “not to progress” with something that, when taken as a whole process, moves the company further away from its 2032 goal.

Just one minifig’s opinion

If we want companies to innovate (and we do), shaming them for falling short of perfection is the absolute wrong way to do it.

Is it disappointing that something that seemed promising didn’t work out?  Of course.  But it’s just one of many avenues and experiments being pursued.  This project ended, but the pursuit of the goal hasn’t.

Is 2 years a long time to figure out that you can’t scale a prototype and still meet your goals?  Maybe.  But, then again, it took P&G 10 years to figure out how to develop and scale a perforation that improved one-handed toilet paper tearing.

Should LEGO have kept all its efforts and success a secret until everything was perfect and ready to launch?  Absolutely not.  Sharing its goals and priorities, experiments and results, learnings and decisions shows employees, partners, and other companies what it means to innovate and lead.

Is LEGO perfect? No.

Is it trying to be better? Yes.

Isn’t that what we want?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Innovativeness = Effectiveness

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Innovativeness = Effectiveness

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

What makes you effective? Is it your knowledge and experience? Is it your commitment? Is it perhaps luck sometimes? Simply put: Being effective is about making what you want to happen, happen. It’s about shaping the world around you to fit your hopes and dreams, and aspirations. About creating your desired future. That means something needs to change, or why bother, right? And when something needs to change, what you’re really doing is a form of innovation.

Your innovativeness and your effectiveness are closely intertwined. Becoming more innovative makes you more effective and therefore more successful. Both personal attributes are enhanced as you become more creative, imaginative, resourceful and observant. As you become more skilled at managing the inevitable changes we all confront, you’re better positioned to find—and lead—your way through them.

Innovation and effectiveness both demand that you’re able to somehow account for the realities you face, while at the same time shifting those realities. This world is a dynamic place, it’s always fluid and evolving. You need to align with those changes, even as you attempt to make changes.

Whether you’re launching a new product or venture, trying to advance your career, or maybe start—or repair—a personal relationship, your challenge is not to just go do what needs to be done. It’s to figure out what needs to be done, to get to where you want to be. In other words, effectiveness and innovativeness are complementary. To be effective, you need to be innovative, and the more innovative you are, the more effective you’re likely to be.

Here is a video version of this post:

The Innovator Mindset YouTube channel brings you weekly tips, tricks and insights into how to be more creative, innovative, resourceful imaginative and open–all the things that innovation requires, and that you need to be effective.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Discomfort Caused by a Diversity of Perspective

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The Discomfort Caused by a Diversity of Perspective

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When your organization doesn’t want to hear your truth because it contradicts a decision they’ve already made, that’s a sign of trouble. It’s a sign they’re going to do what they’re going to and they don’t care all that much about you. But, what if they’re wrong? And what if your perspective could snatch victory from the flames of an impending train wreck? As someone who cares about the company and thinks it would benefit from hearing what you have to say, what do you do?

When you have a culture that makes it clear it’s not okay to share divergent perspectives, you have a big problem.

In domains of high uncertainty, increasing the diversity of perspective is the single most important thing we can do to see things more clearly. In these situations, what matters is the diversity of culture, of heritage, of education, of upbringing, and of experiences. What matters is the diversity of perspective; what matters is the level of divergence among the collective opinions, and what matters most is listening and validating all that diversity.

If you have the diversity of culture, heritage, education, and experience, congratulations. But, if you’re not willing to listen to what that diversity has to say, you’re better off not having it. It’s far less expensive if you don’t have it and far fewer people will be angry when you don’t listen to them. But, there’s a downside – you’ll go out of business sooner.

When you have a perspective that’s different than the Collective’s, share it. And when there are negative consequences for sharing it, accept them. And, rinse and repeat until you get promoted or fired.

Image credit: Unsplash

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The Comforter Cold War of 2006

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(or How Assumptions Stifle Innovation)

The Comforter Cold War of 2006

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the room were two single beds, each with a fluffy white comforter folded neatly on top.

“Yeah, this is not gonna work.”

I had just entered my one-bedroom corporate apartment in Copenhagen, and while everything else was pleasantly light and spacious, there was no way I would spend the next six months sleeping in a single bed.

So, I set down my suitcases and immediately pushed the two beds together, using the two nightstands to secure them. The two comforters would work since there was just one of me, and I made a mental note to request a king-sized comforter from the desk when I left for work in the morning.

Thus began the great Comforter Cold War of 2006/2007.

Every few days, I would request a king-sized comforter for my jerry-rigged king-sized bed.  I would return to find one queen-sized comforter.  The luxury of a larger comforter would diminish the disappointment of not getting an appropriately sized one, and I would bask in the warmth of fully covered sleep.  For one night. The next day, I would return to my room only to find that the two single comforters had returned.

This went on for nine months.

I shared this story of passive-aggressive housekeeping at my going away party with my colleagues. Midway through the story, I noticed the absolutely baffled looks on their faces.

“What?”

“Why did you want one comforter?”

“Because I have one bed.  A comforter should cover the bed.”

“Why?  A bed doesn’t need a comforter.  A person does.  You just need a comforter to cover you.”

[extended silence while we try to process each other’s points]

“So, does that mean that in Denmark, if a couple sleeps together, they each have their own comforter?”

“Yes, of course!  Why would we share?  Each person has their own temperature preferences, and there’s no worry about someone stealing your covers.”

My mind.  Was.  Blown.

This made so much sense. A comforter covers a person, so the 1:1 ratio of comforter to people is far more logical than a 1:1 ratio of comforter to bed (and often a 1:2 ratio of comforter to people).  Seriously, how many relationships would be saved by simply having separate comforters?

Yet, for nine months, it made more sense to me to battle for a comforter size that apparently doesn’t exist in the country without ever asking why I couldn’t get what I was so clearly and reasonably (in my mind) requesting.

I assumed the apartment building didn’t have king-sized comforters or only enough for the actual king-sized beds.  I assumed housekeeping was on automatic pilot, not realizing they were replacing a queen-sized comforter with two single ones.  I assumed that communication amongst the staff was poor, so my request wasn’t being shared.  I assumed a lot.

But I never assumed that I was wrong and that the root of the problem was a cultural difference so deeply ingrained and subtle that it never occurred to anyone to question it.

Question your assumptions.

Assumptions are a shortcut to understanding our world.  Based on culture, experiences, and even stereotypes, we make assumptions about what came before, who we’re interacting with, what’s happening now, and what will happen next.

Most of the time, we’re right (or at least more right than wrong), so we keep making assumptions. It’s also why, when our assumptions are wrong, we tend to question everything but our assumptions.

And that kills innovation because it limits our curiosity and imagination, our perception of what’s possible, and our willingness to engage with and learn from others.

We all cling to assumptions that lead to Cold Wars. 

What’s yours?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Top Ten Reasons Your Next Innovation Speaker Should Be Braden Kelley

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Top Ten Reasons Your Next Innovation Speaker Should Be Braden Kelley

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

If you’re looking for an innovation speaker who can captivate your audience and inspire them to think differently, look no further than Braden Kelley. With his wealth of knowledge and experience in the field of innovation, he’s the perfect choice to help you and your team uncover new ideas and drive meaningful change. I’ve had the privilege of being trained and inspired by Braden Kelley, and so I thought I would share with you the top ten reasons to hire him as your next innovation speaker:

1. Expertise: Braden is a renowned innovation expert, having advised countless organizations on how to embrace innovation and stay ahead of the competition. His deep understanding of the subject makes him a valuable resource for any audience.

2. Engaging Storytelling: Mr. Kelley is a natural storyteller who knows how to captivate an audience. He weaves personal anecdotes and real-world examples into his talks to make his message relatable and impactful.

3. Customized Content: Braden takes the time to understand your organization’s specific needs and challenges, tailoring his content to address them directly. This ensures that his presentations resonate with your team and provide actionable insights.

4. Action-Oriented Approach: MisterInnovation goes beyond theory and focuses on providing practical strategies and tactics that participants can immediately implement. He empowers individuals and teams to take action and start innovating right away.

5. Interactive Presentations: Braden’s talks are highly interactive, with plenty of opportunities for audience participation. Through thought-provoking exercises and group discussions, he encourages attendees to actively engage with the content and collaborate with their peers.

6. Provocative Thinking: Mr. Kelley challenges conventional ways of thinking and encourages participants to step outside their comfort zones. By provoking new perspectives and questioning the status quo, he helps spark innovation within your organization.

7. Adaptability: Braden’s flexible speaking style allows him to adjust his delivery based on the needs of the audience. Whether you have a small team or a large conference, he has the expertise to deliver a memorable and impactful presentation.

8. Diverse Industry Experience: MisterInnovation has worked with organizations across various industries, including healthcare, technology, finance, and consumer goods. His broad experience allows him to draw relevant insights for any audience, regardless of the sector.

9. Thought Leadership: Braden is a recognized thought leader in the field of innovation, contributing regularly to prominent publications and speaking at prestigious industry events. By hiring him as your speaker, you’re gaining access to cutting-edge knowledge and the latest industry trends.

10. Lasting Impact: Ultimately, Mr. Kelley’s goal is to leave a lasting impact on your organization. By challenging the status quo and pushing boundaries, he inspires teams to embrace innovation on an ongoing basis, driving continuous improvement and growth.

Braden Kelley is much more than just your average innovation speaker. With his expertise, engaging style, and thought leadership, he can help your organization unlock its full innovative potential. So, if you’re looking to inspire your team and drive meaningful change, consider hiring Braden Kelley as your next innovation speaker.

Click here to download his speaker sheet, or for testimonials, sample videos, etc. click here.

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How A Networked Culture Drives Experian’s Innovation

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How A Networked Culture Drives Experian's Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, the bestselling memoir of the his historic turnaround at IBM, Lou Gerstner wrote, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—It is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”

There has been endless discussion about whether change should be driven from the top-down or the bottom-up, but that is, for the most part, a red herring. True transformation tends to move side-to-side, driven through horizontal connections among peers. The best way to create change in an organization is to empower it.

That’s why the data giant Experian invested years networking its organization and found that it paid off when it mattered most. While traditional hierarchies waste valuable time and effort pushing orders down the chain of command, networked organizations can adapt to changing market conditions with far more agility. Transformation begins with a networked culture.

An Innovation Culture Is A Collaborative Culture

One of the most common questions I get asked by senior managers is “How can we find more innovative people?” I know the type they have in mind. Someone energetic and dynamic, full of ideas and able to present them powerfully. It seems like everybody these days is looking for an early version of Steve Jobs. Yet the truth is that an innovative culture is a collaborative culture.

When Justin Hastings arrived at Experian North America as Chief Human Resources Officer, he saw it as his job to support and empower the culture. “Essentially, we run a talent business,” he told me. “My job is to not only supply, maintain and retain that talent, but to make sure those people are are motivated and see real meaning and value in their work.”

“Culture is front and center, just incredibly important to us,” he continued. “It’s the enabler of business performance. Our company is all about driving the innovation that drives value for customers. A big part of what makes that possible is that we work hard to make everybody here feel included, that the company’s success is their success.”

However, Hastings warns that building a culture takes a lot more than just some pleasant platitudes in an employee handbook, nice speeches by the CEO and company events. “You can’t just build a culture from the top down. To be authentic, you have to build your culture organically, through informal networks,” he explains.

The Strength of Weak Ties and Boundary Spanners

In the early 1970s, sociologist Mark Granovetter began researching how professional, technical and managerial workers found jobs in the Boston area. He was somewhat surprised to find that they often found work someone they knew, but not a close contact, like a friend or family member, but someone more removed, like a friend of a friend or a distant cousin. He called this principle the ‘Strength of Weak Ties’.

Further analysis shows why it works. Those who are closest to us know pretty much the same things we do, because they frequent similar places and do similar things. So if we want to gain access to new information, we need to broaden our scope and connect with people further out on the social spectrum.

Hastings noticed this principle at work in Experian’s volunteer efforts. For example, many employees participate in its “Le Tour de Experian” bike rides to benefit charity. They do it to do some good and have some fun, but Hastings saw that the bike riders were also building strong bonds across organizational boundaries and these bonds were resulting in professional collaborations that created value for Experian and its customers.

Network scientists call people like the collaborating bike riders boundary spanners, because although they form strong bonds with each other, they essentially play the role of “weak ties” in Granovetter’s research. They perform a crucial function by linking disparate parts of the organization and helping knowledge and information to circulate.

Hastings figured that he could accelerate the formation of boundary spanners throughout Experian by giving employees the opportunity to organize around things they care about. Experian clubs, like the biking group, are focused on interests, while Employee Resource Groups focus on identity, like Latino heritage, gay pride or military service.

Using Networks To Empower Transformation

When Barry Libenson first arrived at Experian as Global CIO in 2015, he devoted the first few months to getting a sense what its customers wanted. It quickly became clear that what they coveted most was real-time access to data. If he could provide that by shifting Experian’s technology infrastructure to the cloud, it could be an enormous opportunity.

Yet it could also be an enormous problem. “There was a lot of concern that we were going to disrupt our own business and that we would lose control of our data,” Libenson told me. “For years, Experian’s business model had been based on a traditional architecture. There were also security concerns.” To make matters worse, research by McKinsey indicates that roughly 75% of transformational initiatives fail.

So instead of trying to force change through, Libenson sought to empower it. Much like Hastings did with Clubs and Employees Resource Groups, he identified people within the organization that were already enthusiastic about the shift to cloud technology and made sure they were trained to implement it. Those early apostles could then help convert others.

Libenson also saw how Experian’s networked culture helped smooth the way. “Digital transformation is somewhat of a misnomer. You’re not really transforming the technology, but more importantly, the people who use it. Having a networked culture means that you can spread enthusiasm about transformation—as well as the expertise to implement it—much faster and with far less resistance than you could otherwise,” he says.

The Journey Continues

As I explain in Cascades, all too often an initial success gives way to inertia, backsliding and eventually, failure. The truth is, it’s not enough to just drive change, you also need to learn how to survive victory. You do that by focusing on culture and values, rather than on any one particular objective, so that you are constantly preparing for the next challenge.

These days, Experian is highly focused on leveraging artificial intelligence which, much like the shift to the cloud, is both a great opportunity and a potential problem. AI has the potential to vastly improve things like credit scores, but the algorithms can’t be a “black box.” To be effective, they must be auditable and explainable.

Experian’s Datalabs unit is hard at work creating more transparent AI algorithms, and making progress, but the technology will only be valuable if Datalabs scientists can work effectively with professionals from other divisions of the company. So Eric Haller, who leads Datalabs, set up a series of seminars to connect with the rest of the company.

“To implement this technology requires a certain amount of sophistication that is relatively rare,” he told me. “So not only were we putting information out there, through the connections we made we were also able to identify expertise throughout our company we were not aware of. Those new relationships have already opened up new possibilities for collaboration.”

What’s interesting and salient about how the network culture was built at Experian is how it all seems so mundane. Many firms have clubs, employee groups and volunteer efforts. Seminars aren’t particularly unusual, either. Yet it’s not any one program or platform, but how those initiatives are optimized to widen and deepen informal bonds across the organization, that makes the difference.

The truth is that, today, competitiveness is no longer determined by the sum of all efficiencies within a business, but the sum of all connections.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Mastering Your Innovation Mindset

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Mastering Your Innovation Mindset

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

Mindset is quite a remarkable thing. It can be an invisible hindrance, or a tremendous asset when you know how to manage it. Mindset is your often subconscious beliefs about how the world works. It’s your mental frame, your personal paradigm. It has a huge impact on your ability to innovate and drive effective change.

It may have never occurred to you that when you observe something, what you see and experience is just as much in your head as it is out there. Your brain just gives you its best interpretation—using some innate processing, and based on those often-unconscious assumptions and beliefs that make up your mindset. To a great degree, you shape—or your brain shapes—what you experience.

It can be a little disturbing to realize that your brain is deciding for you what you believe is real—and not warning you about it. For a vivid illustration of just how much influence your mindset can have over you, watch this brief video.

But here’s the good news: you can learn to consciously shape your mindset, to reshape how your brain subconsciously processes what you experience.

As you discover your own unconscious assumptions, you reveal choices you didn’t know you had. You can then shape a mindset that gives you greater control, self-awareness and personal effectiveness. You can become more creative, imaginative, resourceful, open and observant–more innovative.

Innovation tools and change management strategies are important, but your mindset determines how effectively you apply those tools and strategies. It’s your default way of thinking and engaging. The key to your effectiveness is getting in front of your mindset. You need to be intentional about the beliefs you want to have, so you’re able to control your mindset, rather than letting it control you.

That’s how you become someone who creates exceptional value in your life and makes the world better—by innovating yourself.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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